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Just a few years ago, the subject was basically taboo.
Katherine Ricke, a University of California at San Diego sustainability professor, turned to face the roomful of attentive scientists at the American Geophysical Union a few weeks ago. In any other year, she would have been about to break one of climate science’s biggest taboos.
“Geoscientists know very well at this point that solar geoengineering is not a very good substitute for emissions reductions,” she said. “The question that comes next, then, is, Is solar geoengineering a complement to mitigation?”
The answer, she then argued, was yes. While cutting greenhouse gas emissions might bring down the planet’s temperature in the long term, she said, it would not do so immediately. But spraying sulfate aerosols into the stratosphere was pretty cheap, and it could quickly help relieve the planet’s fever. “Solar geoengineering has a rapid but temporary effect on global temperatures, while the effect of emissions reduction is deferred but persistent,” she said.
Ricke went on to ask whether the economics of solar geoengineering made sense — and about its risks. Would it deprive other important efforts of research funding? Probably not. Could it encourage the public to procrastinate on cutting emissions? Maybe yes.
Yet perhaps the presentation’s biggest surprise — for people who have long thought about the issue — was that nobody in the audience of normal climate scientists gasped. Nobody shooed Ricke out of the room or told her that her talk didn’t belong in a session devoted to achieving net zero — that is, to climate mitigation, to reducing carbon pollution, not blotting out its effects.
To get a sense of what American climate scientists are talking about, you can do a lot worse than attending the annual fall meeting of the AGU, where more than 20,000 scientists come to network, present new research, and gossip about their superiors. This year, AGU was held in the cavernous Moscone Center in San Francisco. The arrival of tens of thousands of people immediately broke the city’s post-pandemic downtown; Starbucks ran out of breakfast sandwiches and every restaurant within a quarter mile of the conference site was jammed before the 8:30 a.m. sessions.
AGU is almost always held, for some nonsensical reason, at roughly the same time as the annual United Nations climate conference, and the two events have a lot in common: They are bazaars, free-for-alls, half salon and half trade show, and each way too big for any one person to see. Yet by keen attention to sounds and signals, one can detect a vibe at both events. The vibe of this year’s AGU was clear: Geoengineering is here to stay.
This sincere interest in geoengineering and climate modification represents a broader shift in climate science from observation to intervention. It also represents a huge change for a field that used to regard any interference with the climate system — short of cutting greenhouse gas emissions — as verboten. “There is a growing realization that [solar radiation management] is not a taboo anymore,” Dan Visioni, a Cornell climate professor, told me. “There was a growing interest from NASA, NOAA, the national labs, that wasn’t there a year ago.”
At the highest level, this acceptance of geoengineering shows that scientists have seriously begun to imagine what will happen if humanity blows its goal of cutting greenhouse gas emissions.
Why the sudden embrace of geoengineering? Part of it is that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has become increasingly insistent that carbon removal is crucial — and opened the door to other once-taboo ideas.
But another part is that climate disasters seem to get bigger and bigger every year, and humanity seems to be growing more and more alarmed about them, yet no country plans to cut emissions fast enough to relieve global warming’s near-term dangers. 2023 was the warmest year in modern human history, but the Paris Agreement’s temperature goals remain far off. “It was always pretty clear that the kind of emissions reduction to stay below 1.5 [degrees Celsius] was never going to happen in any realistic scenario, but there was always a conviction that just by saying it was physically possible, it was going to inspire people into some kind of action,” Visioni said. “2023 has shown this to not be the case.”
Perhaps one more reason is that, for better or worse, geoengineering is already happening. Economists have long argued that stratospheric aerosol injection is so cheap that someone will eventually try to do it. Then, last year, Luke Iseman, a 39-year-old former employee of the startup incubator Y Combinator, claimed to have conducted rogue experiments in western Mexico delivering reflective sulfur molecules to the atmosphere using weather balloons. It’s unclear whether this “move fast and break things”-styled effort actually reflected any meaningful sunlight back into space. What it did do was awaken the Mexican government to a regulatory arbitrage. It responded by banning solar geoengineering.
Yet more serious attempts have been made at bringing geoengineering into the mainstream. In September, the Overshoot Commission, a panel of current and former world leaders — including an influential Chinese adviser and a former Canadian prime minister — recommended that the world begin to seriously study solar geoengineering. And Congress recently mandated that the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy study the technique — although the office’s resulting report also suggested that scientists are still treading carefully around it. Its hilariously curt title: “Congressionally-Mandated Report on Solar Radiation Modification.”
“The way that broader climate intervention has started to move into the mainstream has been kind of astounding,” said Shuchi Talati, a University of Pennsylvania scholar and former Energy Department official. “If you look at AGU of four or five years ago, if there was one [solar radiation management] panel, that was novel,” she told me. But this year, there were more panels and side conversations than ever. “You can feel it in the air that there was more interest.”
Ricke’s was far from the only geoengineering presentation in San Francisco this year. In a packed lunchtime session, Lisa Graumlich, AGU’s president, led a town hall about the organization’s draft proposal on how to research climate intervention ethically. “Are we attempting to play God? Do we have the right to do this? What risks are we willing to accept? Or … do we have the right not to?” Cynthia Scharf, a former UN adviser who helped lead a Carnegie Foundation project on how the world could possibly govern geoengineering, told the room by video conference. The crowd wasn’t exactly rewarded for attending: After every panelist had finished going through their introductions, the audience only had time to ask two questions.
Across the hall, more than 60 people were talking about a different kind of climate intervention. For years, scientists have known that the stability of a few glaciers in West Antarctica could mean the difference between quasi-manageable amounts of sea-level rise this century and a rapid, catastrophic surge. So small groups of glaciologists have now started to ask whether those specific glaciers — such as Thwaites, which holds a quadrillion gallons of water and is larger than Florida — could be engineered or modified somehow to slow their collapse.
Perhaps a berm could be built on the seafloor, in front of each of the glaciers, in order to prevent warm water from eroding them. Or maybe holes could be drilled into the glaciers, allowing the warmth of their subsurface to be vented to the surface. Glacial scientists have already met twice this year — at the University of Chicago and later Stanford — to begin hashing out the idea.
Another approach — using ships to spray ocean water into the atmosphere, thereby brightening clouds and reflecting more sunlight into space — was also the subject of several events. One scholar, Chih-Chieh Jack Chen, showed research suggesting that brightening the clouds over just 5% of the ocean surface could cool the planet enough to meet the world’s temperature targets — but that the climatic ripple effects of doing so might simultaneously raise temperatures in Southeast Asia by even more than what global warming would do alone. Others presented work showing that cloud brightening might accidentally shut down the planet’s westerly trade winds — or even silence the Pacific Ocean’s El Niño oscillation.
Then there were the carbon removal people, who arrived by the tens and who seemed to have graduated to a less controversial (and possibly more remunerative) plane than geoengineering. Most scientists seem to have accepted that carbon dioxide removal, or CDR, will need to happen to at least some degree. “CDR is a given. People don’t even consider it to be geoengineering any more, which is what the CDR people have always wanted,” Visioni told me. A new Department of Energy report, released during the conference, argues that by 2050, the United States might be able to suck 1 billion tons of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere for a mere $130 billion a year, creating 440,000 jobs. In other scenarios — and not only those sponsored by the federal government — America seems likely to become the keystone of the global carbon removal industry, its vast geological capacity and fossil-fuel expertise giving it a competitive advantage.
In anticipation, venture capital and public-sector cash has surged into carbon removal, creating a corps of CDR startups with one foot in the geosciences and the other in Silicon Valley. Their employees were at AGU too, mingling in full force. “It was interesting how much industry was there — researchers at companies, even heads of companies,” Talati told me. “I’ve never really experienced that at AGU.” Employees from Lithos, Heirloom, Carbon Direct, Stripe, and Additional Ventures all registered for the conference; in what might be an AGU first, scientists and technologists sipped cappuccinos and nibbled pastries during an early-morning confab at the Salesforce Tower, a few blocks from the official conference site. “AGU is not the place where you would have expected to find these kinds of people, even just for CDR, so it’s interesting that they’re there,” Visioni said.
The whole thing presented both a stark contrast and an inescapable mirror to COP28, where oil lobbyists roamed the grounds. Some environmental old-timers grumble that the UN climate conference has transformed from a diplomatic meeting into a trade show. But maybe there is now so much money and interest and public attention directed at the climate problem that any major gathering about it will take on shades of the commercial. There are lots of rich people with huge amounts of money who want to help do something about climate change. At the same time, the United States government is looking like less and less of a long-term reliable partner on climate research. Sooner or later, someone is going to try to do more serious geoengineering than releasing a few balloons in Mexico. Scientists have started preparing for that day. Is that smart? I don’t know. But it seems like a better strategy than feigned ignorance about where we’re headed.
Editor’s note: This story originally misidentified the name of the person who conducted geoengineering experiments in Mexico. We regret the error.
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On the third anniversary of the signing of the Inflation Reduction Act, Heatmap contributor Advait Arun mourns what’s been lost — but more importantly, charts a path toward what comes next.
Today, the Inflation Reduction Act would have turned three years old — if it hadn’t been buried alive in a big, beautiful grave. While the IRA was a hodgepodge of programs salvaged from President Biden’s far more ambitious Build Back Better agenda, it still represented the biggest climate investment in U.S. history. It catalyzed over $360 billion in energy and manufacturing investments and was expected to drive the installation of over 155 gigawatts of new solar and wind energy by 2030. And now Republicans have taken a sledgehammer to its achievements.
The timing could not be worse — not just for the climate, but also for the energy systems that we rely on. At a moment when the energy sector requires $1.4 trillion worth of upgrades by 2030 just to keep up with rising energy demand and increasingly erratic weather, Republicans have instead delivered a one-two punch of tariffs and tax hikes, sabotaging the industrial base required to deliver those investments and raising the retirement age of our power generation fleet.
All over the country (Texas and California maybe exempted), our aging electricity system is putting in its two-weeks notice. Staring down the barrel of precipitous demand growth, the country’s regulated utilities have requested over $29 billion in rate increases, concentrated across the West and South. The Department of Energy ordered the delayed retirement of coal plants and oil generators to manage this summer’s demand peaks. Meanwhile, capacity market prices on two of the country’s largest grids, PJM and MISO, have reached record highs ― a cry for new supply that is now increasingly unlikely to materialize quickly or cheaply. Two months ago, an unplanned nuclear reactor outage on a congested part of Louisiana’s energy grid plunged 100,000 people in and around New Orleans into a blackout. That meant no working AC or refrigerators across large swaths of the city during a sweltering Memorial Day weekend.
All of this amounts to an opening for Democrats to shift public opinion decisively in favor of renewed climate action. Moving forward, lawmakers cannot ignore our infirm fossil-fired energy system, which stands to thwart their ability to deliver affordability, employment, health, and resilience to their constituents. Despite our recent losses, we still need an energy policy ― a climate policy.
What should the Democrats’ second attempt at a clean investment program look like? Having delivered the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the Inflation Reduction Act, laws that committed the state to the realization of a particular energy future, Democrats are well-positioned to build on their successes, and even to engage Republicans who remain interested in supporting innovative technologies, decarbonizing industry, and protecting public lands.
Where they cannot meet Republicans halfway, Democrats should double their ambitions. They must continue to embrace the power of federal investment to shape markets and achieve policy goals. But they must also learn from the shortcomings of their previous legislative outings and substantively change how the federal government invests in the first place. The way forward for Democrats starts with mapping out exactly how far they didn’t go, and ends with going there.
IRA and BIL were paradigm-shifting attempts at market-shaping. They laid the groundwork for the deployment of promising clean firm energy technologies such as next-generation geothermal and nuclear energy, as well as for necessary grid and supply chain upgrades, such as long-distance transmission corridors and critical minerals processing.
IRA and BIL were not, however, a comprehensive climate policy. They created cost-share programs for infrastructure resilience but neglected to buttress municipal bond markets, which states and local governments can use to make longer-term investments in climate resilience and adaptation. They penalized methane emissions but organized no comprehensive or compulsory managed phaseout of fossil fuel infrastructure. They failed to advance or adequately finance a coordinated deployment strategy for any key energy sector. And they shed the transformative vision of Biden’s Build Back Better agenda, which sought to stabilize the cost of living for Americans in the meantime — a tactical retreat that, in retrospect, looks ill-advised given voters’ current worries about affordability.
I am aware that criticizing BIL and IRA on these grounds amounts to judging them for goals they didn’t attempt to achieve. Judging them by the goals they did attempt to achieve, however, reveals that they only ever worked incompletely. Taken together, BIL and IRA expanded the energy tax credit system, created powerful programs for piloting and deploying innovative energy technologies, and seeded an ecosystem of regional financing institutions devoted to more equitably distributing the benefits of decarbonization. But the energy tax credits were never expansive enough; the programs intended to motivate investments into deeper decarbonization were not flexible enough to drive the mass uptake of emerging technologies; and efforts to decarbonize disadvantaged communities lacked a coherent strategy and ran headlong into local capacity constraints.
Speeding up the energy transition and building new infrastructure at scale requires endowing federal and state agencies with adequate appropriations, access to liquidity, and crystal-clear, wide-ranging mandates, as well as empowering them in statute with considerable flexibility as to the financial products and strategies they deploy to achieve those mandates.
Although imperfect, the IRA’s tax credits scored some significant wins that should undoubtedly inform future policy. The law took an existing system of technology-specific subsidies that had been on the books in some form since 1978 and made them technology-neutral, allowing developers of nearly any zero-emissions energy technology to access tax relief. It expanded the credits to domestic manufacturers of certain low- and zero-carbon technologies. It created a tax credit transfer market, allowing developers with limited tax liability to sell their credits for cash on an open market to any tax-liable buyer, rather than engage in expensive and complex “tax equity” transactions with a few large banks. It made certain credits directly accessible to tax-exempt entities, significantly broadening the pool of potential users. And most of these credits remained entirely uncapped ― a “bottomless mimosa” for developers that spurred over $321 billion in clean energy and manufacturing investments and supported more than 2,000 new facilities across the country.
To be sure, the IRA did not level the playing field perfectly across developers or across technologies. Developers of energy transmission, grid transformers, and electric rail were shut out of the credits. Tax-exempt public and nonprofit developers ― entities as large as the New York Power Authority and as small as local churches ― could not monetize depreciation or participate in the transfer market. And some credits remained capped, forcing developers to apply and cross their fingers. But as early as 2023, Goldman Sachs argued that even with these inadequacies ― which have easy legislative and statutory fixes ― the IRA would still have spurred over $3 trillion in investment by 2033.
The GOP has gutted much of this system, shortcomings and all, and replaced it with a tangle of red tape. The energy tax credits are once again technology-specific ― solar and wind developers have a few months left to start a project and claim the credits as written, though what it means to start a project got more complex just yesterday. But even the “clean firm” energy technologies that can still claim credits until 2032, such as nuclear and geothermal, may not be safe under new “foreign entity of concern” rules, which condition credits on developers’ ability to limit their reliance on Chinese suppliers and investment, requiring them to map out their supply chains at an unprecedented level of detail.
Democrats seeking to restore and build upon this plank of the IRA have their work cut out for them. The developers and manufacturers of any technology that contributes to zero-emissions energy production should be able to access and monetize federal support regardless of their tax status and free from the rigmarole and uncertainties imposed by competitive application procedures. Goldman Sachs’ $3 trillion estimate is now the lower bound of what’s possible — for instance, a tax credit for transmission investments suggested as part of Build Back Better but excluded from the IRA could have catalyzed over $15 billion in investment and supported the economics of all other energy projects. To the degree that the tax credits can help build industrial capacity and institutional support for decarbonization, future policymaking should maximize their remit and their distribution.
Tax credits alone, however, are hardly a skeleton key to decarbonization. Being disbursed only once a project is complete, tax credits do not substitute for the kinds of upfront financial support that project developers — especially developers of emerging technologies — require to complete their projects in the first place. Private investors have been comfortable with solar, batteries, and onshore wind because these projects can be completed, claim their tax credits, and earn revenues on the grid on a mostly predictable timetable. But new nuclear reactors, geothermal, hydrogen, green steel, and carbon capture are unfamiliar investments, have uncertain development pathways and return profiles, and thus remain un-bankable to investors.
This is why BIL and IRA created powerful programs worth tens of billions of dollars to finance the deployment of emerging clean technologies and break this vicious cycle of uncertainty. The Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations, or OCED, and the Loan Programs Office, or LPO, in particular, were empowered to support, at scale, the testing and commercialization of these emerging technologies as well as conversions of whole electricity grids.
OCED, with over $27 billion in appropriations, set up hubs for hydrogen and carbon capture projects across the country, and funded a suite of advanced steel and iron decarbonization projects. Endowed by BIL and IRA with over $15 billion in total credit subsidy and well over $300 billion in total loan authority, LPO made ambitious investments across a host of innovative technology categories, including ― but certainly not limited to ― energy storage, sustainable aviation fuels, virtual power plants, EV charging, and bioenergy. At the end of 2024, the LPO had over 200 loan applicants in its queue.
By rescinding OCED’s unobligated funding, ambiguously rewriting LPO’s lending authorities (while rescinding most of its unobligated credit subsidy), and pulling the plug on billions of dollars worth of conditional commitments, the GOP has stopped years of progress in its tracks. In the meantime, LPO has shed considerable staff while the administration has prevented it from making any new commitments. The combination of the “foreign entity of concern” rules constraining tax credit eligibility and this shuttering of federal financing opportunities could seriously throttle the development and commercialization of nuclear energy in particular, the darling du jour of Republicans’ energy strategy.
If these offices were once the engines of decarbonization, they needed a stronger spark plug. The LPO, in particular, has a special authority to finance state government-backed, non-innovative clean energy projects, such as regional battery manufacturing clusters or a state power developer’s renewables portfolio, but has never used it. And while OCED and LPO can provide developers with some degree of upfront support, LPO cannot easily provide construction loans, cannot derisk project cash flows to provide security to investors, and cannot mandate offtake. These deficiencies prevent ambitious borrowers with unproven technologies from scaling up: they scare off private lenders in the infrastructure sector, many of which are skittish about construction risk, require project developers to demonstrate three to five years of stable cash flows, have a low tolerance for market price uncertainty, and have shareholders who demand a certain level of returns.
The DOE can bridge this “valley of death” by using its broader market-shaping authorities to take a more aggressive “dealership” role in these sectors, providing stable offtake for developers through upfront purchasing while becoming a reliable source of supply to downstream customers (like an actual car dealership or a grocery store). The DOE has in fact already used this approach to provide demand-side support to its now-endangered hydrogen hubs through OCED.
These kinds of public dealership arrangements are not unique or path-breaking: The Federal Reserve’s backstop of the municipal bond market in 2020, nonprofit investor Climate United’s planned EV trucking purchase-and-lease program in California, and even the Department of Defense’s recent MP Materials deal are all examples of public entities addressing a mismatch in the supply of and demand for a critical good and, in doing so, shaping markets toward public ends.
For all that BIL and IRA built avenues for developing and deploying energy technologies, they were also full of programs aimed at distributing the fruits of decarbonization equitably. Both the energy community bonus credits, a provision in the IRA that increased the value of the energy tax credits for projects in poorer, higher-unemployment, and energy facility-adjacent communities, and President Biden’s Justice40 initiative, which directed 40% of federal spending toward poorer and more rural communities, exemplified the administration’s “place-based” approach to industrial policy and economic development. The Biden administration heavily encouraged disadvantaged communities, local governments, schools, nonprofits, and tribal nations to develop their own clean energy projects — aided by the IRA’s direct pay mechanism, which allowed tax-exempt entities to access subsidies — by drawing on the various local decarbonization programs in BIL and IRA.
The Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, perhaps the most important of these programs, exemplifies the promises and pitfalls of the administration’s approach to “place-based” industrial policy. Managed by the Environmental Protection Agency, GGRF provided $27 billion to disadvantaged communities for the financing of rooftop solar, zero-emissions transport, and net-zero housing. That pot was split into three thematic buckets ― $7 billion to the Solar for All program, specifically for rooftop solar development; $14 billion to the National Clean Investment Fund, for supporting clean energy project finance more broadly in disadvantaged communities; and $6 billion more to local and regional technical assistance providers. Each program then subdivided its appropriations further. Solar for All went to 60 recipients across the country via a competitive application. The National Clean Investment Fund’s $14 billion was split among three awardees, each a coalition of various financial institutions designed to lend to energy projects, such as green banks, impact investors, and nonprofits ― and each of those recipient coalitions planned to subdivide much of its funds still further, first among coalition partners and then to subordinate local and state partners.
That dizzying program structure was meant to endow local communities with the ability to finance their own projects. And by including so many nonprofit institutions, GGRF could make significant inroads into Republican states, whose officials might otherwise reject federal funding.
But there was not much coordination between partners and subawardees around how best to deploy those funds. And what seemed like a firehose of financing often reached local recipients as a trickle of pre-development and technical assistance grants. Demanding that local organizations build their own capacity to plan, finance, and develop projects (or hire expensive external consultants to do so) ― with limited and one-time funds, no less ― is duplicative and inefficient, and it defeats GGRF’s own stated goal of mobilizing private capital through building standardized markets for decarbonization, thereby slowing down the pace of emissions reductions. The program’s complexity also left it vulnerable to EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin’s efforts to hound the program in court and freeze its funding.
Pandemic-era proposals for a National Investment Authority, as well as legislative proposals for a national green bank ― predecessors to the GGRF ― differ sharply from this status quo, instead highlighting how public finance can benefit from economies of scale. Larger financial institutions tasked with deploying clean energy projects can more easily prepare portfolios of projects for co-investors, engage with utilities, raise debt on municipal bond markets, and build a bench of trustworthy private developers to contract for projects. If they are publicly administered, these institutions can also take more risk, undercut private lenders, support more developers, engage with local communities to meet their needs, and use revenues from higher-return projects to derisk lower-return projects that might be necessary to build to achieve their resilience and affordability goals.
Should policymakers get a second shot at building a national green bank system, they should not try to recreate GGRF’s fractal approach to energy finance. Rather, policymakers must ensure that financing sits in the hands of public agencies that already have the authorities and expert staff to be ambitious market-shapers: bond banks, state-led energy finance authorities, and public developers. The good news is that state-level green banks empowered with state funding and a political mandate are already exercising their capacities to shape markets and support disadvantaged communities directly: the New York Power Authority, the Minnesota Climate Innovation Finance Authority, the Connecticut Green Bank, and the Greater Arizona Development Authority, to name a few, are all taking it upon themselves to raise debt and contract with developers to undertake ambitious energy and infrastructure investment programs.
But Democrats should be clear-eyed about the consequences of this reorientation: It means rejecting the prevailing wisdom that local nonprofits should necessarily coordinate local project development. Local groups can be extremely effective advocates for communities’ needs ― but in contrast to public investment agencies, their capacity to finance and implement solutions is simply not great enough.
This analysis of IRA and BIL leaves out more parts of the laws than it includes ― to take just one example, the BIL’s $5 billion National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure charging station program. But the story is similar: Ambitious as it seemed, NEVI money could only flow when state governments set up implementation offices and had their spending plans approved by federal officials. Most states, which had not prepared for any of this, took years to build the requisite capacity ― just in time for the Trump administration to try and snatch away the funding (though it recently admitted defeat in that project). In fairness to state governments, the EV charging sector is incredibly new. But even this program highlights how IRA and BIL lacked the capacity to be implemented as quickly and efficiently as their supporters hoped.
Going above and beyond BIL and IRA to deliver an energy policy that stabilizes Americans’ cost of living while driving an energy transition away from fossil fuels and toward the technologies of the future ― Democrats should embrace this challenge. But they should also be aware that climate ambition runs headlong into the same institutional problems facing American democracy at large. The Senate filibuster prevents either party from comprehensively redesigning the federal government, its institutions, and its regulations to serve Americans more quickly and more efficiently. That leaves both parties reliant on budget reconciliation ― to our detriment. The head-spinning design of GGRF was itself an artifact of the reconciliation process, which prevented Congress from creating a single green bank institution or giving it a specific mandate; its awardee organizations and coalitions certainly did not ask for the program structure they got.
There’s a lot more that budget reconciliation will never solve: the century-old American utility system, the regulatory thicket of U.S. electricity markets, or the land use and permitting rules that constrain project development and grid interconnection. And things could get worse: Trump-appointed judges and Supreme Court justices who reject federal agencies’ and state governments’ attempts to regulate fossil fuel infrastructure have placed the legal system itself at odds with responsible energy system management. The courts may no longer be able to block clawbacks and recissions of legally obligated federal spending. Democrats, like clean energy developers, do not fight on a level playing field.
While Democrats are out of federal power, they should practice ambitious climate policymaking at the state level. States already have considerable ability to raise finance and build capacity for ambitious infrastructure projects ― and they might have to quickly, considering the drain of federal capacity that might support them. By developing their own public programs for transmission finance, utility-scale battery procurement, virtual power plants, and clean firm energy pilots, Democratic state governments can ensure that the ecosystem of clean energy developers created by BIL and IRA does not disappear for lack of demand — and in doing so, these states would help stabilize the cost of clean energy project development.
Finally, Democrats should not forget that climate remains a cost of living issue. In a city like New Orleans, rocked by the recent nuclear outage, residents spend, on average, over 19% of their incomes on their energy bills, over three times the DOE’s threshold to be considered an energy-burdened community. Their bills already include adders for climate adaptation and disaster preparedness ― yet, for all they spend, they still face blackouts, and their costs will only increase as their grid continues to deteriorate. Here, climate policy is not about combating Chinese supply chain dominance, or even about delivering an American industrial renaissance. It’s about keeping the lights on, keeping bills low, keeping the air clean, and keeping residents safe from disaster.
It turns out that voters all over the country still care about these goals. A majority of likely voters in the next election think climate change will have a direct impact on their or their family’s finances. This constituency is still in play — and given sharply deteriorating macroeconomic conditions, soon-to-spike electricity prices, and the ever-increasing threat of climate disaster, these cost-of-living-focused voters could be far more vocal, relevant, and hungry for change than a coalition built on vague sabre-rattling against China.
In 2022, Democrats made a valiant first attempt to transform the state itself. Perhaps it was inadequate, perhaps it was impossible to do more at the time, but that’s no reason not to think seriously about the kind of policymaking, institutional, and financial interventions that would be called for should they get a second shot at realizing that goal. The rollback of the IRA only reveals how much Democrats left on the table three years ago ― and how much farther a real climate policy could go.
Renewables developers may yet be able to start construction before the One Big Beautiful Bill deadlines hit.
The Trump administration issued new rules for the wind and solar tax credits on Friday, closing the loop on a question that has been giving developers anxiety since the One Big Beautiful Bill Act passed in early July.
For decades, developers have been able to lock in tax credit eligibility by establishing that they have officially started construction on a project in one of two ways. They could complete “physical work of a significant nature,” such as excavating the project site or installing foundational equipment, or they could simply spend 5% of the total project budget, for instance by purchasing key components and putting them in a warehouse. After that, they had at least four years to start shipping power to the grid before stricter work requirements kicked in.
Shortly after signing the OBBBA, however, Trump issued an executive order directing the Treasury Department to revise its definition of the “beginning of construction” of a wind or solar project. Under the new law, this definition can make or break a project. OBBBA established new deadlines for wind and solar development, allowing projects that start construction before the end of this year to qualify for the tax credits as they currently stand. But projects that start construction between January 1 and July 4 of 2026 will have to follow stringent new rules limiting the use of materials with ties to China in order to qualify.
The start construction date also affects how long a developer has to complete a project and still qualify for credits. Projects that start before July 4 of next year have at least four years, while those that start after must meet an impossibly short timeline of being up and running in just a year and a half, by the end of 2027.
Some worried the new guidance would narrow that four year timeframe or affect project eligibility retroactively. Neither happened. The only major change the Treasury department made to the existing guidance was to get rid of the 5% safe harbor provision. While this is not nothing, and will certainly disqualify some projects that might otherwise have been able to claim the credits, it is nowhere near as calamitous for renewables as it could have been.
Projects can still establish they have started construction by completing “physical work of a significant nature,” and the definition of physical work still includes off-site work, such as the manufacturing of equipment. That means it’s still possible for a company to simply place an order for a custom piece of equipment, like a transformer, to establish their start date — as long as they have a binding contract in place and can demonstrate that the physical production of the equipment is underway.
The new guidance also contains a carve-out that allows solar projects that are less than 1.5 megawatts to use the 5% rule, which will help rooftop solar and smaller community-scale installations.
Trump’s executive order came after a reported deal he made with House Freedom Caucus Republicans who wanted to axe the tax credits altogether. The order directed the Treasury to prevent “the artificial acceleration or manipulation of eligibility” and restrict “the use of broad safe harbors unless a substantial portion of a subject facility has been built.”
Treasury’s relative restraint, then, comes as something of a relief. “It’s not good, it’s not helpful, but from my perspective, the guidance could have been a lot worse,” David Burton, a partner at Norton Rose Fulbright who specializes in energy tax credits, told me. “Utility-scale solar and wind developers should be able to plan around this and not be that harmed.”
That doesn’t mean clean energy groups are happy about the changes, though. “At a time when we need energy abundance, these rules create new federal red tape,” Heather O’Neill, president and CEO of the industry group Advanced Energy United, said in a statement. “These rules will make it more difficult and expensive to build and finance critical energy projects in the U.S.”
The changes don’t go into effect until September 2, so for the next two weeks, all projects can still utilize the 5% safe harbor.
Even though the rules are not the death-blow for projects that some anticipated, there’s still one big unknown that could squeeze development further: The Treasury department has yet to put out guidance related to the new foreign sourcing rules created by the OBBB. One of the big fears there is that companies will have to prove their lack of ties to China so far up their supply chains that compliance becomes impossible.
We probably won’t be left wondering for long, though. Trump’s executive order asked for those rules within 45 days, putting the due date on Monday.
On the worsening transformer shortage, China’s patent boom, and New York’s nuclear embrace
Current conditions: Tropical Storm Erin is still intensifying as it approaches the Caribbean • Rare August rainstorms are deluging the Pacific Northwest with a month’s worth of precipitation in 24 hours, threatening floods • Hong Kong has issued its highest-level “black” rainstorm warning multiple times this month as Tropical Storm Podul lashes southern China.
President Donald Trump’s order to keep large fossil-fueled power stations scheduled to retire between now and 2028 operating indefinitely will cost ratepayers across the United States $3.1 billion per year, according to new research from the consultancy Grid Strategies on behalf of four large environmental groups. If the Department of Energy expands the order to cover all 54 fossil fuel plants slated for closure in the next three years, the price tag for Americans whose rates fund the subsidies to keep the stations running would rise to $6 billion per year.
The problem may only grow. The agency’s existing mandates “perversely incentivize plant owners to claim they plan to retire so they can receive a ratepayer subsidy to remain open,” the report points out.
With electricity consumption hitting new records in the U.S., demand for transformers is surging. The years-long supply shortage for power and distribution transformers is now set to hit a deficit below demand of 30% and 10%, respectively, in 2025, according to a new report from the energy consultancy Wood Mackenzie. Complicating matters further for manufacturers scrambling to ramp up supply, Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act is throwing clean-energy projects into jeopardy and sending mixed signals to factories on what kinds of transformers to produce. At the same time, tariffs are raising the price of materials needed to make more transformers.
“The U.S. transformer market stands at a critical juncture, with supply constraints threatening to undermine the nation's energy transition and grid reliability goals,” Ben Boucher, a senior supply chain analyst at Wood Mackenzie, said in a statement. “The convergence of accelerating electricity demand, aging infrastructure and supply chain vulnerabilities has created constraints that will persist well into the 2030s.”
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A worker in a Chinese electric vehicle factory. Kevin Frayer/Getty Images
For years, China was known for ripping off the West’s technology and patenting cheaper but more easily manufactured copies. Not anymore. China applied for twice as many high-quality clean energy patents as the U.S. in 2022, according to a New York Times analysis of the most recently available public data. The European Patent Office, which supplied data to the Times, defines a “high quality” patent as one that has been filed in two or more countries, indicating that the company or individual involved has a strong competitive interest in protecting its idea.
The growth in China’s intellectual property ambitions is a sign that Beijing’s strategic push to ramp up academic research and industrial innovation is maturing. “It is the opposite of an accident,” said Jenny Wong Leung, an analyst and data scientist at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, which created a database of global research on technologies that are critical to nations’ economic and military security, including clean energy.
In June, New York Governor Kathy Hochul directed the New York Power Authority, the nation’s second-largest government-owned utility after the federal Tennessee Valley Authority, to support the construction of the state’s first new nuclear plant since the 1980s. Albany has plenty to sort out between now and the 15-year deadline for completing the project, including selecting a site, picking from one of the many new reactor designs, and finding a private partner. But one thing isn’t a problem, at least for now: Public support.
New Siena polling I covered in my Substack newsletter yesterday shows that 49% of registered voters in New York support the effort, with just 26% opposed. Both sides of the political spectrum are largely in lockstep, with Republican support outpacing that of Democrats by a margin of 55% to 49%. That’s lucky for Hochul, who will need support from the more politically conservative upper reaches of the state where the facility is likely to be built. For more on the technical and political considerations in play, here’s Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin on the plan.
It seems like everyone is abandoning their net zero goals. But not insurer Aviva. The company’s chief executive, Amanda Blanc, said the British giant remained committed to its carbon-cutting goals in the U.S. and the United Kingdom, The Guardian reported. With rising profits propelling shares in the company to their highest level since the 2008 financial crisis, Blanc said, “extreme weather conditions, climate change, and the impact that that has on our insurance business that actually insures properties” meant Aviva needed to “remain committed to our ambition.”
The red-headed wood pigeon once seemed on the verge of extinction. The population, endemic to Japan’s Ogasawara Islands, fell to below 80 individuals in the 2000s. But once its main predator, the feral cat, was removed, the bird made a remarkable comeback. A team of researchers at Kyoto University set out to find out why the expected problems from inbreeding never occurred. Per a press release: “Their results revealed that the frequency of highly deleterious mutations in the red-headed wood pigeon was lower than in the more widespread Japanese wood pigeon. This suggests that, rather than hindering it, the pigeon's success was likely rooted in its long-term persistence in a small population size prior to human impact.”