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A single moment at the second Republican debate revealed the party’s utter confusion about how to handle environmental issues.
It came in the second hour, in a testy back-and-forth between Nikki Haley, the former UN ambassador and South Carolina governor, and Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida.
Haley said that at the United Nations, she learned that “energy security is national security.”
“We need a president that understands we have to partner with our producers and make sure that we have their backs,” she said.
Then she homed in on DeSantis: “Ron is against fracking, he's against drilling. He always talks about what happens on day one. But you better watch out because what happens on day two is when you're in trouble. Day Two in Florida, you banned fracking, you banned offshore drilling, and you took green subsidies that you didn’t need to take,” she said.
DeSantis ignored the attack at first. “I just did a plan in West Texas for American energy dominance,” he said. At that event, he promised, with no small amount of foolishness, to get gas back down below $2 a gallon, something that is not in a president’s ability.
“We’re going to choose Midland over Moscow,” he said Wednesday night, referencing a Texas city known for its oil industry. “We’re going to choose the Marcelus over the Mullah, and we’re going to choose the Bakken over Beijing, and we’re going to lower your gas prices.”
When Haley kept up the attack, DeSantis claimed that Florida voters — not him — ultimately passed a constitutional amendment banning fracking.
But in fact, Haley is right. Running for governor in 2018, DeSantis pledged to ban fracking on “Day One” of his term. He also promised to stop offshore oil drilling, which the Trump administration was then considering for Florida’s Atlantic coast. “With Florida’s geological makeup of limestone and shallow water sources, fracking presents a danger to our state that is not acceptable,” his gubernatorial campaign website said.
Voters backed him — and, in the same election, rejected offshore drilling. In 2018, Floridians voted in favor of a referendum that made two changes to the state constitution: It banned offshore drilling in state waters and vaping in indoor work places. (Ah, Florida.)
But fracking remained unbanned. So on the second day of his administration, DeSantis signed an executive order telling state officials to “take necessary actions to adamantly oppose” fracking and offshore drilling.
These moves didn’t come in a vacuum. During his first term, DeSantis repeatedly cast himself as an environmental moderate, seeking to differentiate himself from his immediate predecessor, Rick Scott. During his 2022 reelection, DeSantis continued to promise to ban fracking in the state.
For her part, Haley has long sought to open up more drilling in her state. As governor in 2012, she joined South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham in calling for an expansion of offshore drilling off the coast of South Carolina.
Those plans never took. And after Trump appointed Haley to the UN in 2017, she was replaced by her lieutenant governor Henry McMaster, who was far less interested in offshore drilling.
Of course, this sparring match proceeded without any recognition of global warming. Earlier this week, the International Energy Association said that if the world cuts its oil and gas demand enough to meet the 1.5 degree goal, then it will not need significant new fossil-fuel reserves.
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“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.
The state’s senior senator, Thom Tillis, has been vocal about the need to maintain clean energy tax credits.
The majority of voters in North Carolina want Congress to leave the Inflation Reduction Act well enough alone, a new poll from Data for Progress finds.
The survey, which asked North Carolina voters specifically about the clean energy and climate provisions in the bill, presented respondents with a choice between two statements: “The IRA should be repealed by Congress” and “The IRA should be kept in place by Congress.” (“Don’t know” was also an option.)
The responses from voters broke down predictably along party lines, with 71% of Democrats preferring to keep the IRA in place compared to just 31% of Republicans, with half of independent voters in favor of keeping the climate law. Overall, half of North Carolina voters surveyed wanted the IRA to stick around, compared to 37% who’d rather see it go — a significant spread for a state that, prior to the passage of the climate law, was home to little in the way of clean energy development.
But North Carolina now has a lot to lose with the potential repeal of the Inflation Reduction Act, as my colleague Emily Pontecorvo has pointed out. The IRA brought more than 17,000 jobs to the state, per Climate Power, along with $20 billion in investment spread out over 34 clean energy projects. Electric vehicle and charging manufacturers in particular have flocked to the state, with Toyota investing $13.9 billion in its Liberty EV battery manufacturing facility, which opened this past April.
North Carolina Senator Thom Tillis was one of the four co-authors of a letter sent to Majority Leader John Thune in April advocating for the preservation of the law. Together, they wrote that gutting the IRA’s tax credits “would create uncertainty, jeopardizing capital allocation, long-term project planning, and job creation in the energy sector and across our broader economy.” It seems that the majority of North Carolina voters are aligned with their senator — which is lucky for him, as he’s up for reelection in 2026.