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“We are absolutely going to frack!” DeSantis protested.
Tonight, at approximately seven feet above sea level, the five leading Republican presidential candidates not named Trump assembled in a performing arts center in Miami to once again go through the motions of pretending this is a normal election cycle.
If you happened to be doing something else with your finite mortal hours on Wednesday evening, though, you didn’t miss much. Entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy made every effort to maintain his status as the group’s enfant terrible with obnoxious barbs that didn’t even spare the moderators; Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina managed to use a Bible verse to talk about the economy; and former Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey reminded the American people that, yes, he is still here.
The debate finally gained a bit of a pulse, however, during a brief rematch between Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida and former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley over DeSantis’ fracking record. During the previous debate in September (yes, Wednesday’s was the third Republican debate so far), Haley had blasted DeSantis for being “against fracking” and “against drilling.” DeSantis protested — although a fact check showed Haley kind of had a point, seeing as the governor signed an executive order telling his state officials to “take necessary actions to adamantly oppose” fracking and offshore drilling on his second day in office.
On Wednesday, Haley started in again. “It cracks me up that Ron continues to do this: He has opposed fracking, he’s opposed drilling,” she said. Then she went for the jugular: “He was praised by the Sierra Club,” she slammed. “You’re trying to make up for it and act like you weren’t a liberal when it comes to the environment — but you are, you always have been. Just own it if that’s the case, but don’t keep saying you’re something that you’re not.”
wow, get a load of environmentalist Ron DeSantis scoring points on Nikki Haley pic.twitter.com/mhiEp1nn06
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) November 9, 2023
DeSantis protested the use of the E-word (not to mention the L-word) was unfair. “We are absolutely going to frack,” he insisted, though you could see a flicker of his old green moderateness when he added, “I don’t think it’s a good idea to drill in the Florida Everglades and I know most Floridians agree with me.” The end of his sentence was drowned out, however, by Haley saying loudly into her mic, “YOU BANNED FRACKING.”
As was the case the last time around, Haley and DeSantis’ back-and-forth just goes to show “the [Republican] Party’s utter confusion about how to handle environmental issues,” as Heatmap’s Robinson Meyer has written. On the one hand, the conversation around environmental protections and the green transition has advanced to the point that even the GOP debates can’t ignore climate change (or, at least not entirely); Trump himself will allow that hybrid cars are “pretty good” during his rants about electric vehicles. On the other hand, smearing DeSantis as a “liberal environmentalist” who allegedly hates fracking is still perceived to be damaging enough in a Republican primary that Haley used her limited minutes in front of the approximately 17 American viewers who tuned in on Wednesday night to try, once more, to get it to stick.
Only time will tell if such a barb can harm DeSantis (who, for his part, continually insists he welcomes barbs, as well as arrows, hits, and presumably other assorted forms of torment). Then again, the whole thing might be moot. In the next century, the waves of Biscayne Bay could very well be lapping at the stage where, once upon a time, five Republican presidential hopefuls had futilely name-called, hand-wrung, and heel-shamed. Time might tell — but who has time?
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CEO Mark Zuckerberg confirmed the company’s expanding ambitions in a Threads post on Monday.
Meta is going big to power its ever-expanding artificial intelligence ambitions. It’s not just spending hundreds of millions of dollars luring engineers and executives from other top AI labs (including reportedly hundreds of millions of dollars for one engineer alone), but also investing hundreds of billions of dollars for data centers at the multi-gigawatt scale.
“Meta is on track to be the first lab to bring a 1GW+ supercluster online,” Meta founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg wrote on the company’s Threads platform Monday, confirming a recent report by the semiconductor and artificial intelligence research service Semianalysis that
That first gigawatt-level project, Semianalysis wrote, will be a data center in New Albany, Ohio, called Prometheus, due to be online in 2026, Ashley Settle, a Meta spokesperson, confirmed to me. Ohio — and New Albany specifically — is the home of several large data center projects, including an existing Meta facility.
At the end of last year, Zuckerberg said that a datacenter project in Northeast Louisiana, now publicly known as Hyperion, would take 2 gigawatts of electricity; in his post on Monday, he said it could eventually be as large as 5 gigawatts. To get a sense of the scale we’re talking about, a new, large nuclear reactor has about a gigawatt of capacity, while a newly built natural gas plant could supply only around 500 megawatts.
As one could perhaps infer from the fact that their size is quoted in gigawatts instead of square feet or number of GPUs, whether or not these data centers get built comes down to the ability to power them.
Citing information from the natural gas company Williams, Semianalysis reported that Meta “went full Elon mode” for the New Albany datacenter, i.e. is installed its own natural gas infrastructure. Specifically, Williams is building two 200-megawatt facilities, according to the gas developer and Semianalysis, for the Ohio project. (Williams did not immediately respond to a Heatmap request for comment.)
Does this mean Meta is violating its commitments to reach net zero? While the data center buildout may make those goals more difficult to achieve, Meta is still investing in new renewables even as it’s also bringing new gas online. Late last month, the company announced that it was procuring almost 800 new megawatts of renewables from projects to be built by Invenergy, including over 400 megawatts of solar in Ohio, roughly matching the on-site generation from the Prometheus project.
But there’s more to a data center’s climate footprint than what a big tech company does — or does not — build on site.
The Louisiana project, Hyperion, will also be served by new natural gas and renewables added to the grid. Entergy, the local utility, has proposed 1.5 gigawatts of natural gas generation near the Meta site and over 2 gigawatts of new natural gas in total, with another plant in the southern part of the state to help balance the addition of significant new load. In December, when the data center was announced, Meta said that it planned to “bring at least 1,500 megawatts of new renewable energy to the grid.” Entergy did not immediately respond to a Heatmap request for comment on its plans for the Hyperion project.
“Meta Superintelligence Labs will have industry-leading levels of compute and by far the greatest compute per researcher. I'm looking forward to working with the top researchers to advance the frontier!” Zuckerberg wrote.
“I believe the tariff on copper — we’re going to make it 50%.”
President Trump announced Tuesday during a cabinet meeting that he plans to impose a hefty tax on U.S. copper imports.
“I believe the tariff on copper — we’re going to make it 50%,” he told reporters.
Copper traders and producers have anticipated tariffs on copper since Trump announced in February that his administration would investigate the national security implications of copper imports, calling the metal an “essential material for national security, economic strength, and industrial resilience.”
Trump has already imposed tariffs for similarly strategically and economically important metals such as steel and aluminum. The process for imposing these tariffs under section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962 involves a finding by the Secretary of Commerce that the product being tariffed is essential to national security, and thus that the United States should be able to supply it on its own.
Copper has been referred to as the “metal of electrification” because of its centrality to a broad array of electrical technologies, including transmission lines, batteries, and electric motors. Electric vehicles contain around 180 pounds of copper on average. “Copper, scrap copper, and copper’s derivative products play a vital role in defense applications, infrastructure, and emerging technologies, including clean energy, electric vehicles, and advanced electronics,” the White House said in February.
Copper prices had risen around 25% this year through Monday. Prices for copper futures jumped by as much as 17% after the tariff announcement and are currently trading at around $5.50 a pound.
The tariffs, when implemented, could provide renewed impetus to expand copper mining in the United States. But tariffs can happen in a matter of months. A copper mine takes years to open — and that’s if investors decide to put the money toward the project in the first place. Congress took a swipe at the electric vehicle market in the U.S. last week, extinguishing subsidies for both consumers and manufacturers as part of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. That will undoubtedly shrink domestic demand for EV inputs like copper, which could make investors nervous about sinking years and dollars into new or expanded copper mines.
Even if the Trump administration succeeds in its efforts to accelerate permitting for and construction of new copper mines, the copper will need to be smelted and refined before it can be used, and China dominates the copper smelting and refining industry.
The U.S. produced just over 1.1 million tons of copper in 2023, with 850,000 tons being mined from ore and the balance recycled from scrap, according to United States Geological Survey data. It imported almost 900,000 tons.
With the prospect of tariffs driving up prices for domestically mined ore, the immediate beneficiaries are those who already have mines. Shares in Freeport-McMoRan, which operates seven copper mines in Arizona and New Mexico, were up over 4.5% in afternoon trading Tuesday.
“We had enough assurance that the president was going to deal with them.”
A member of the House Freedom Caucus said Wednesday that he voted to advance President Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” after receiving assurances that Trump would “deal” with the Inflation Reduction Act’s clean energy tax credits – raising the specter that Trump could try to go further than the megabill to stop usage of the credits.
Representative Ralph Norman, a Republican of North Carolina, said that while IRA tax credits were once a sticking point for him, after meeting with Trump “we had enough assurance that the president was going to deal with them in his own way,” he told Eric Garcia, the Washington bureau chief of The Independent. Norman specifically cited tax credits for wind and solar energy projects, which the Senate version would phase out more slowly than House Republicans had wanted.
It’s not entirely clear what the president could do to unilaterally “deal with” tax credits already codified into law. Norman declined to answer direct questions from reporters about whether GOP holdouts like himself were seeking an executive order on the matter. But another Republican holdout on the bill, Representative Chip Roy of Texas, told reporters Wednesday that his vote was also conditional on blocking IRA “subsidies.”
“If the subsidies will flow, we’re not gonna be able to get there. If the subsidies are not gonna flow, then there might be a path," he said, according to Jake Sherman of Punchbowl News.
As of publication, Roy has still not voted on the rule that would allow the bill to proceed to the floor — one of only eight Republicans yet to formally weigh in. House Speaker Mike Johnson says he’ll, “keep the vote open for as long as it takes,” as President Trump aims to sign the giant tax package by the July 4th holiday. Norman voted to let the bill proceed to debate, and will reportedly now vote yes on it too.
Earlier Wednesday, Norman said he was “getting a handle on” whether his various misgivings could be handled by Trump via executive orders or through promises of future legislation. According to CNN, the congressman later said, “We got clarification on what’s going to be enforced. We got clarification on how the IRAs were going to be dealt with. We got clarification on the tax cuts — and still we’ll be meeting tomorrow on the specifics of it.”
Neither Norman nor Roy’s press offices responded to a request for comment.