You’re out of free articles.
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
Sign In or Create an Account.
By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy
Welcome to Heatmap
Thank you for registering with Heatmap. Climate change is one of the greatest challenges of our lives, a force reshaping our economy, our politics, and our culture. We hope to be your trusted, friendly, and insightful guide to that transformation. Please enjoy your free articles. You can check your profile here .
subscribe to get Unlimited access
Offer for a Heatmap News Unlimited Access subscription; please note that your subscription will renew automatically unless you cancel prior to renewal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period. We will let you know in advance of any price changes. Taxes may apply. Offer terms are subject to change.
Subscribe to get unlimited Access
Hey, you are out of free articles but you are only a few clicks away from full access. Subscribe below and take advantage of our introductory offer.
subscribe to get Unlimited access
Offer for a Heatmap News Unlimited Access subscription; please note that your subscription will renew automatically unless you cancel prior to renewal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period. We will let you know in advance of any price changes. Taxes may apply. Offer terms are subject to change.
Create Your Account
Please Enter Your Password
Forgot your password?
Please enter the email address you use for your account so we can send you a link to reset your password:
And other adventures with Mike Johnson
It is perhaps less surprising who the House elected as its new speaker than the fact that they managed to actually elect someone at all. After 22 days, 14 failed candidates, and in mounting desperation and embarrassment, Republicans finally rallied — unanimously! — around Mike Johnson, a northern Louisiana lawmaker who’s been described as “obscure” and “largely unknown” even by his home-state newspaper.
Given that Johnson is the least experienced speaker in 140 years, that obscurity is understandable. With only four terms in the House under his belt, he doesn’t have much of a track record for the media to highlight in their scramble to publish Wednesday afternoon explainers. Generally, the impression has been that he is both “mild-mannered” enough for the moderates put off by the antics of Jim Jordan and far enough to the right to be palatable to the MAGA wing that ousted his predecessor, Kevin McCarthy. Johnson is “known for combining his hard-line views with a gentle style,” says The New York Times, while The Washington Post notes his opposition to abortion, LGBT rights, aid for Ukraine, and the certification of the 2020 election results.
But go a little further back and things get odder. In 2014, Johnson worked free of charge as a lawyer for Ken Ham — “one of the world’s most notorious purveyors of pseudoscience,” according to Salon:
Ham and his tax-deductible organization Answers in Genesis have earned a fortune peddling new earth creationism, a belief that the entire universe is only 6,000 years old and that all of science — evolution, geology, archeology, physics, astronomy, among others — is informed by a deceptive God, a God who tempted humankind by planting observable, verifiable evidence — things like fossils and distant stars — in order to test our loyalty …
While creationism and climate denialism don’t necessarily overlap, Answers for Genesis extensively addresses climate change as being a “myth,” calling environmentalism a “false religion.” Ham has written, “We don’t need to fear that man will destroy the planet, as God wouldn’t let that happen anyway.”
Ham runs a Creation Museum in Kentucky, and sometime around 2014, he decided he wanted to expand it into “an enormous Noah’s Ark theme park,” Salon goes on:
There was just one problem, though: He couldn’t possibly raise enough money to build his park. So, he turned to the government for incentives … [But] there was this one tiny issue called the Establishment Clause, and believe it or not, it’s still against the law for the government to fork over a bunch of money to pay you to convert people to your religion, even if you’re throwing in a lazy river and a roller coaster at no additional charge.
Johnson, in his position as chief counsel of Freedom Guard, a religious liberty interest group, disagreed with this interpretation of the Establishment Clause, however, going as far as to write op-eds for Answers in Genesis that were published alongside Ham’s waxings on the sins of climate activism. Johnson eventually helped to sue the state of Kentucky for refusing to use government funds to build the Noah’s Ark theme park; Answers in Genesis won, and the park was built partially using tax incentives. Later, Ham would also sue his insurance company over, of all things, rain damage to the park’s replica ark.
some select photos from the ark encounter that speaker-designate mike johnson worked for -- one claiming there was dinosaurs on the ark; another claiming there were 1,400 animal "kinds" on it; and finally, a panel claiming that young earth creationism is biblically solid https://t.co/2KJBU2G0LB pic.twitter.com/zRdICcmfJd
— hannah gais (@hannahgais) October 25, 2023
Johnson, you’ll be shocked to learn, is also not a believer in the scientific consensus on human-driven climate change. As a lawmaker from an oil state, the fossil fuel industry makes up Johnson’s biggest campaign donors, E&E News points out. Johnson, meanwhile, has voiced standard-issue doubts about the whole climate change thing, musing that “driv[ing] SUVs” isn’t the problem and that statistically impossible weather patterns are due to “natural cycles over the span of the Earth’s history.” He has a 2% lifetime rating from the League of Conservation Voters.
Still, even within more climate-skeptical circles, Johnson remains a bit of a question mark. When one “long-time [oil] industry official” was asked by Politico for an impression of the would-be speaker ahead of the final vote, the reply came, “Don’t know him too well, but glad they are hopefully getting someone into the job.” Another “long-time energy lobbyist” was similarly strapped when it came to offering any specific impressions, Politico’s Ben Lefebvre reports: At the very least, Johnson is “an [Louisiana State University] alumnus,” the lobbyist figured, “so that has to be good for the energy industry.”
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
The lost federal grants represent about half the organization’s budget.
The Interstate Renewable Energy Council, a decades-old nonprofit that provides technical expertise to cities across the country building out renewable clean energy projects, issued a dramatic plea for private donations in order to stay afloat after it says federal funding was suddenly slashed by the Trump administration.
IREC’s executive director Chris Nichols said in an email to all of the organization’s supporters that it has “already been forced to lay off many of our high-performing staff members” after millions of federal dollars to three of its programs were eliminated in the Trump administration’s shutdown-related funding cuts last week. Nichols said the administration nixed the funding simply because the nonprofit’s corporation was registered in New York, and without regard for IREC’s work with countless cities and towns in Republican-led states. (Look no further than this map of local governments who receive the program’s zero-cost solar siting policy assistance to see just how politically diverse the recipients are.)
“Urgent: IREC Needs You Now,” begins Nichols’ email, which was also posted to the organization’s website in full. “I need to be blunt: IREC, our mission, and the clean energy progress we lead is under assault.”
In an interview this afternoon, Nichols told me the DOE funding added up to at least $8 million and was set to be doled out over multiple years. She said the organization laid off eight employees — roughly a third of the organization’s small staff of fewer than two-dozen people — because the money lost for this year represented about half of IREC’s budget. She said this came after the organization also lost more than $4 million in competitive grant funding for apprenticeship training from the Labor Department because the work “didn’t align with the administration’s priorities.”
Nichols said the renewable energy sector was losing the crucial “glue” that holds a lot of the energy transition together in the funding cuts. “I’m worried about the next generation,” she told me. “Electricity is going to be the new housing [shortage].”
IREC has been a leading resource for the entire solar and transmission industry since 1982, providing training assistance and independent analysis of the sector’s performance, and develops stuff like model interconnection standards and best practices for permitting energy storage deployment best practices. The organization boasts having worked on developing renewable energy and training local workforces in more than 35 states. In 2021, it absorbed another nonprofit, The Solar Foundation, which has put together the widely used annual Solar Jobs Census since 2010.
In other words, this isn’t something new facing a potentially fatal funding crisis — this is the sort of bedrock institutional know-how that will take a long time to rebuild should it disappear.
To be sure, IREC’s work has received some private financing — as demonstrated by its solar-centric sponsorships page — but it has also relied on funding from Energy Department grants, some of which were identified by congressional Democrats as included in DOE’s slash spree last week. In addition, IREC has previously received funding from the Labor Department and National Labs, the status of which is now unclear.
It would have delivered a gargantuan 6.2 gigawatts of power.
The Bureau of Land Management says the largest solar project in Nevada has been canceled amidst the Trump administration’s federal permitting freeze.
Esmeralda 7 was supposed to produce a gargantuan 6.2 gigawatts of power – equal to nearly all the power supplied to southern Nevada by the state’s primary public utility. It would do so with a sprawling web of solar panels and batteries across the western Nevada desert. Backed by NextEra Energy, Invenergy, ConnectGen and other renewables developers, the project was moving forward at a relatively smooth pace under the Biden administration, albeit with significant concerns raised by environmentalists about its impacts on wildlife and fauna. And Esmeralda 7 even received a rare procedural win in the early days of the Trump administration when the Bureau of Land Management released the draft environmental impact statement for the project.
When Esmeralda 7’s environmental review was released, BLM said the record of decision would arrive in July. But that never happened. Instead, Donald Trump issued an executive order directing the Departments of the Treasury and the Interior to review their treatment of wind and solar, part of a deal with conservative hardliners in Congress to pass his tax megabill — the same bill that also effectively repealed the Inflation Reduction Act’s renewable electricity tax credits. This led to a series of subsequent orders by Interior Secretary Doug Burgum that effectively froze all federal permitting decisions for solar energy.
Flash forward to today, when BLM quietly updated its website for Esmeralda 7 permitting to explicitly say the project’s status is “cancelled.” Normally when the agency says this, it means developers pulled the plug.
I’ve reached out to some of the companies behind Esmeralda 7. A NextEra spokesperson provided me a statement from the company after this story’s publication saying it is “in the early stage of development” with its portion of the Esmeralda 7 mega-project, and the company is “committed to pursuing our project’s comprehensive environmental analysis by working closely with the Bureau of Land Management.”
This article was updated after publication to include a statement from NextEra.
A judge has lifted the administration’s stop-work order against Revolution Wind.
A federal court has lifted the Trump administration’s order to halt construction on the Revolution Wind farm off the coast of New England. The decision marks the renewables industry’s first major legal victory against a federal war on offshore wind.
The Interior Department ordered Orsted — the Danish company developing Revolution Wind — to halt construction of Revolution Wind on August 22, asserting in a one-page letter that it was “seeking to address concerns related to the protection of national security interests of the United States and prevention of interference with reasonable uses of the exclusive economic zone, the high seas, and the territorial seas.”
In a two-page ruling issued Monday, U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth found that Orsted would presumably win its legal challenge against the stop work order, and that the company is “likely to suffer irreparable harm in the absence of an injunction,” which led him to lift the dictate from the Trump administration.
Orsted previously claimed in legal filings that delays from the stop work order could put the entire project in jeopardy by pushing its timeline beyond the terms of existing power purchase agreements, and that the company installing cable for the project only had a few months left to work on Revolution Wind before it had to move onto other client obligations through mid-2028. The company has also argued that the Trump administration is deliberately mischaracterizing discussions between the federal government and the company that took place before the project was fully approved.
It’s still unclear at this moment whether the Trump administration will appeal the decision. We’re still waiting on the outcome of a separate legal challenge brought by Democrat-controlled states against Trump’s anti-wind Day One executive order.