The U.S. Department of Agriculture announced late Tuesday it will release previously authorized grant funds to farmers and small rural business owners to build renewable energy projects—but only if they rewrite applications to comply with President Donald Trump’s energy priorities.
The move has left some farmers perplexed—and doubtful that they’ll ever get the grant money they were promised, given the Trump administration’s emphasis on fossil fuels and hostility toward renewable energy. Some of the roughly 6,000 grant applicants have already completed the solar, wind or other energy projects and are awaiting promised repayment from the government.
While the exploitation of Canada’s natural resources and economic control exerted by the U.S. are well known, the subtler ways America maintains its grip, through cultural influence, economic pressure, and the poaching of talent, reveal a deeper, systemic colonization. The United States has systematically prevented Canada from developing industrial independence, ensuring it remains a supplier of raw materials rather than a competitor on the global stage. The economic imbalance has been in place for decades, yet many Canadians falsely believe that Donald Trump was the catalyst for U.S. exploitation.
If the only things certain in life are death and taxes, you might say corporate lobbyists spend much of their time trying to avoid at least one of the two. Few industries understand this better than oil and gas, which has benefited for at least a century from some tax rules that save them billions of dollars in payments annually.
The world’s nations have agreed to phase out fossil fuel subsidies globally. The Biden administration pledged to axe them domestically. Still, they persist.
Now, with Republicans in Congress and the Trump administration determined to enact $4.5 trillion in tax cuts and desperately looking for revenue and spending cuts to pay for them, some environmental advocacy groups are highlighting the tax benefits that flow to one of the world’s most profitable industries, which the Biden administration estimated at $110 billion over the decade ending in 2034.
The oil and gas industry, meanwhile, is playing both offense and defense, trying to maintain the benefits it has while working to enact at least one new one, which would shield some oil companies from a tax enacted as part of the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022.
One of the biggest sources of new revenue from the IRA was a corporate alternative minimum tax, which was meant to prevent companies that reported large profits to investors from using loopholes to pay little to no taxes.
The minimum tax applies to all industries. For oil and gas, it has hit some of the large independent drillers in particular (as opposed to the “integrated” majors like ExxonMobil and Chevron). The money involved is significant: According to a new analysis by United to End Polluter Handouts, a coalition of environmental and progressive groups, at least three companies—EOG Resources, APA Corp. and Ovintiv—reported paying nearly $200 million collectively to the Treasury under the minimum tax since it was enacted in 2022.
U.S. Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.) has introduced a bill that would change the calculus by allowing oil companies to deduct some of their largest expenses against the minimum tax.
Lankford’s bill is included as a priority in the policy blueprint of the American Exploration & Production Council, which represents large independent oil and gas companies.
Lukas Shankar-Ross, an author of the new minimum-tax analysis and deputy director of the climate and energy justice program at Friends of the Earth, pointed out that the Lankford bill would either deepen deficits or force more cuts to programs like Medicaid or other assistance for low-income Americans.
“I think it is as shameful a thing for me to imagine as is possible now,” Shankar-Ross said.
The oil and gas sector is the top industry contributor to Lankford’s campaigns in recent years, giving more than $546,000 since 2019, according to OpenSecrets.
A spokesperson for Lankford said, “Promoting American energy independence is a reversal of the Biden Administration’s policies. Strong domestic energy production makes us less reliant on adversaries, and empowering oil and gas producers makes the United States stronger. Nobody is looking at cutting Medicaid benefits in order to pay for tax cuts, but fraud, waste, and abuse in the program should be examined.”
When it comes to the largest oil and gas companies, however, their focus might be elsewhere. When the American Petroleum Institute issued its five-point policy roadmap for the Trump administration and Congress in November, it highlighted a need to maintain what it called “crucial international tax provisions.”
Just one of those provisions, the so-called dual capacity taxpayer rule, is expected to save oil and gas companies $71.5 billion over a decade, according to Biden administration estimates.
Broadly speaking, federal tax law allows corporations to credit taxes they pay to foreign governments on overseas income against their U.S. tax bills, to avoid being taxed twice. The dual capacity taxpayer rule allows oil companies wide latitude in defining what exactly constitutes a tax payment, with the result being that they can count royalties and other payments as taxes, said Zorka Milin, policy director at the Financial Accountability & Corporate Transparency Coalition, which works to combat harmful impacts of illicit finance.
In fact, in some cases U.S. oil and gas companies might pay more in taxes and other payments to foreign governments than they do to the United States.
Exxon paid billions in overseas royalties alone in 2023, including $1.8 billion to the United Arab Emirates, $1 billion to the Canadian province Alberta and $761 million to Nigeria. Chevron paid about $2 billion in royalties to foreign governments.
Milin said it is unclear how much of these royalty payments Exxon, Chevron and other oil companies might have claimed as credits against their U.S. taxes, but it could run into the billions of dollars annually.
“They make huge payments to governments around the world, including to some in some pretty shady places, and what is adding insult to injury is a lot of those payments are used to offset payments they pay here in the U.S.,” Milin said. “That’s one way in which our tax code is subsidizing these companies to go abroad and drill, baby, drill, but not domestically.”
Exxon, Chevron and the American Petroleum Institute did not respond to requests for comment.
Alex Muresianu, a senior policy analyst at the Tax Foundation, which supports pro-growth tax policies, said many of the oil industry-specific tax rules do not qualify as subsidies. Several of the rules, such as one that allows oil companies to deduct their drilling costs upfront, rather than over a well’s productive life, put the industry on an equal footing with other sectors, he argued. Oil companies often have high costs upfront that generate returns over many years, which can put them at a tax disadvantage with other industries, Muresianu said.
When it comes to royalties, these payments to mineral owners are generally tax deductible. But the dual capacity taxpayer rule offers a far better deal by turning them into a credit, an important distinction. Say Company A earned $100 million in profits, paid $5 million in royalties and paid the full 21 percent corporate income tax. Taking the royalty payments as a credit rather than a deduction would save it nearly $4 million. (Remember, U.S. tax laws are complex, so limitations might apply.)
Milin argued that Congress ought to look at the foreign tax breaks, especially as they are searching for more revenue, because these benefits effectively subsidize oil companies to drill overseas.
“When we have a more explicitly America First international economic policy on trade, on other issues, I think they are likely to look at the ways in which the tax code as it stands is inconsistent with that,” Milin said.
Jackson Voss loves his alma mater, Louisiana State University. He appreciates that his undergraduate education was paid for by a program dreamed up by an oil magnate and that he received additional scholarships from ExxonMobil and Shell.
But the socially conscious Louisiana native was also aware of what the support of those companies seemed to buy — silence.
Voss, who graduated from LSU in Baton Rouge 11 years ago with a degree in political science, says when he attended school there, he didn’t hear discussions of how climate change made Hurricane Katrina worse; why petrochemical plants along the Mississippi River sickened residents of the mostly Black communities around those facilities; or about the devastating and permanent impact of the BP oil spill that happened during Voss’ time at LSU.
Voss, now director of climate policy for the New Orleans-based consumer advocacy group, the Alliance for Affordable Energy, says he didn’t hear climate change or “Cancer Alley” openly discussed until he went to the University of Michigan, 1,100 miles away, for graduate school.
“It was not a place that was really discussing these issues in the way that should have been discussed at the time,” he said of LSU, where oil wells dotted the campus at least into the 1970s. Any such discussions weren’t taken seriously, he said, and even fellow students were often defensive of the industry.
“The discussions that did happen had to focus on, kind of finding a way to talk about climate without talking about climate,” Voss said, “and it was especially important not to talk about the role that oil and gas played in worsening climate change.”
Louisiana State University graduate Jackson Voss attended the Baton Rouge-based school as an undergraduate about a decade ago.
Pam Radtke / Floodlight
Whether through funding of research projects, the creation of new academic programs focused on energy or, more subtly, through support of everything from opera to football, the oil and gas industry has been shaping discourse at LSU — and universities around the world — for decades.
LSU administrators insist they have safeguards against undue influence by fossil fuel companies, which have given tens of millions of dollars to the university in just the past three years. But a joint investigation by Floodlight, WWNO/WRKF and the Louisiana Illuminator found the funding allows the industry to place a thumb on the scale of what gets studied at the state’s flagship university — and what is left out.
Research by Floodlight shows between 2010 and 2020, petrochemical companies gave LSU at least $44 million through their charitable foundations, making it one of the top recipients of fossil fuel funding among U.S. universities, based on research from the nonprofit Data for Progress.
LSU received more from petrochemical companies than the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard and Texas A&M — and 20 times more than Voss’s other alma mater, the University of Michigan. The Data for Progress research showed over that decade, the 27 schools they examined received almost $700 million total.
Increasingly, researchers are questioning the longstanding ties between fossil fuels and universities at a time when scientists and governments across the globe overwhelmingly agree that sharply reducing the use of fossil fuels and increasing reliance on renewable energy are crucial to stalling or reversing climate change.
Last year, a joint report from Congress found “the oil and gas industry cultivates partnerships with academic institutions as a way to influence climate research.” And a first-of-its-kind study released by researchers last year found the fossil fuel industry’s approach is similar to how the tobacco, pharmaceutical and other industries co-opted academics.
“It’s a situation exactly parallel to public health research being funded by the tobacco industry. It’s a conflict of interest — the size of an oil tanker,” said Geoffrey Supran, associate professor of environmental science and policy who studies fossil fuel disinformation at the University of Miami and is director of its Climate Accountability Lab. He says LSU and other schools like it have become “an echo chamber for pro-fossil-fuel narratives.”
LSU and its president, William Tate IV, have doubled down on the university’s ties with the fossil fuel industry in recent years, despite its shrinking importance to the Louisiana economy. Since 2020, Tate has solicited and received more than $30 million from fossil fuel companies, including a record $27.5 million from Shell.
During LSU’s Giving Day campaign on Wednesday, Shell plopped down another $1.5 million for LSU libraries and the College of Science.
“It’s time for a partnership in significant fashion to link the work at LSU in our energy areas, including alternative energy, and creating ways to keep that industry vibrant here in this state and for our country,” Tate told reporters in 2022, about a year after he was named to head the school.
LSU insists there are firewalls in place to prevent oil and gas companies from unduly influencing research and study. But public records and interviews indicate that fossil fuel funding can have a subtle and even direct impact on research and critical discourse.
“Universities are at risk of being pawns in a climate propaganda scheme devised and implemented by fossil fuel interests for decades,” Supran said.
‘Tip of the iceberg’
It’s impossible to pin down how much money fossil fuel interests — or any industry — gives to universities such as LSU. Although it is a public institution, much of the money for scholarships, workforce development and buildings goes through LSU’s foundation — a nonprofit separate from the university. The foundation, in accordance with philanthropic standards, does not disclose its donors unless they agree to be identified.
In its research, Data for Progress used public announcements from universities and companies, along with tax filings from fossil fuel companies’ foundations, to determine how much the universities received from those companies.
“It’s most likely the tip of the iceberg,” said Jake Lowe, executive director of Campus Climate Network, which under its previous name, Fossil Free Research, worked with Data for Progress to create its 2023 report.
Louisiana State University President William Tate IV visits Shell’s facility in Convent, La., in 2023 to talk about his plan to focus on five areas at the university, including energy.
Louisiana State University
For example, the report includes millions of dollars the ExxonMobil Foundation gives for scholarships — but not the money going directly from the company to a school or its foundation.
“If the ExxonMobil corporation has a research contract with LSU, you’re not going to see that in the tax documents or annual reports,” Lowe said.
Floodlight, with the help of a Data for Progress researcher, used the same method to look at how much petrochemical money went to LSU. The analysis included examining public announcements from the companies and tax filings, called 990s, of the foundations for Shell, ExxonMobil, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, Entergy, Koch Inc., Southwest Electric Power Corp., Schlumberger (now known as SLB), Dow and Taylor Oil.
From 2010 to 2020, Taylor Oil’s foundation gave the most to LSU, almost $21 million.
The second highest amount was from ExxonMobil, which gave more than $10 million — the majority of which came from a matching gift program in which the company gave $3 for every dollar donated by an employee or retiree to a college or university.
Louisiana State University’s “Quad” is the heart of the campus and was named after ExxonMobil in 1999.
Piper Hutchinson / Louisiana Illuminator
But then, in 2022, Shell dwarfed the amount given over the previous decade with a single $27.5 million donation to LSU. The majority, $25 million, was for a new Institute for Energy Innovation to focus on “scholarship and solution delivery” on “hydrogen and carbon capture … the coast; and low-carbon fuels.”
Donations buy influence
LSU doesn’t hide that the institute’s mission was shaped in partnership with the industry. In the early days, a former Shell executive, Rhoman Hardy, served as the research center’s interim director. The company also has three of the institute’s seven board seats; industry groups hold another two.
Last year, the nonprofit New Orleans news outlet The Lens discovered LSU created a system: If a fossil fuel company gives $50,000 or more to the institute, it gets the right to participate in a specific research project, to use the intellectual property from that project and “robust review and discussion of the specific study and project output.”
For a $1.25 million donation, a company also receives “voting rights for selected institute activities, including research.” A contribution of $5 million or more earns a donor a seat on the institute’s board.
LSU president William Tate IV poses with LSU mascot Mike the Tiger.
Louisiana State University
When reached for comment about the institute, its donations and its potential influence, Shell responded, “We’re proud to partner with LSU to contribute to the growing compendium of peer-reviewed climate science and advance the effort to identify multiple pathways and build the ecosystems that can lead to more energy with fewer emissions.”
In 2023, ExxonMobil gave $2 million to LSU and became a “strategic” partner. With the donation, ExxonMobil will work with the institute to study batteries, solar power, carbon capture and “advanced” plastics recycling. ExxonMobil did not respond to a request for comment about the donation or about the money it has previously given to LSU.
At a Louisiana Board of Regents’ Energy Transition Research Symposium at LSU later that year, ExxonMobil gave a presentation on advanced plastics recycling, a controversial technology that opponents say amounts to greenwashing the problem of plastic waste by burning it rather than reusing it.
“It is clear based on the board and research focus areas of the new Institute for Energy Innovation that it is focused squarely on innovations using fossil fuels,” said Logan Atkinson Burke, Voss’ boss at the Alliance for Affordable Energy, an energy consumer advocacy group.
Environmentalists say technologies being studied by the institute, including carbon capture, hydrogen and low-carbon fuels, are “false solutions” that will do little to address the climate crisis.
‘Subconscious’ bias?
The institute’s current director, Brad Ives, and LSU’s vice president for research and economic development, Robert Twilley, say they have put safeguards in place to prevent industry influence.
And Twilley says this type of research — working hand in hand with industries on the ground — is core to the mission of LSU as a land grant university, a program Abraham Lincoln established in 1862 that used federal land sales to fund universities focused on practical subjects including architecture, engineering and agriculture.
“It’s how we as an institution manage it and the safeguards and being very conscious of our ethics, being very conscious of what projects we work on,” Twilley said.
He points to federal guidelines, the scientific method and peer review as some of the safeguards that keep the university’s research independent from industry influence. The institute sends its research proposals to an anonymous third-party panel of scientists to be ranked, Twilley says. Those rankings help decide what research it funds.
Louisiana State University’s Petroleum Engineering Research & Technology Transfer, or PERTT, Laboratory, is an industrial-scale facility for training and research on borehole technology. According to LSU, it is the only such facility in North America.
Louisiana State University
Ives says funders aren’t allowed contact with researchers either.
“What we’re doing is making sure that the researchers have total academic freedom to let the research take them where it goes,” Ives said. “We know we can sleep at night because we are not doing anything that’s wrong.”
But Supran, who once worked on projects funded by oil and gas, says it’s not always as simple as a researcher purposefully skewing results. Scientists are only human, making these relationships inherently fraught.
“We’re all subject to biases,” he said. “Things like reciprocation. You know that if I give you a pen, you have some small subconscious desire to reciprocate it in some sense down the line.”
For example, one study showed how reviews of the health effects of secondhand smoke funded by the tobacco industry were almost 90 times more likely to conclude that it was not harmful compared to reviews funded by other sources.
There’s evidence that the lines between funding and academic independence are sometimes blurred at LSU. Several influential reports and studies from LSU’s Center for Energy Studies have drawn scrutiny over the years for being misleading. In one case, a utility-funded report led to the dismantling of Louisiana’s successful rooftop solar program. In another, a report helped curb efforts to sue oil and gas companies for decades of environmental damage, claiming the lawsuits cost the state more than it would gain.
A more recent example was found in public records reviewed by WWNO, including a contract between the Center for Energy Studies and the Bracewell law firm, representing Gulf Coast Sequestration. That company wants to store millions of tons of carbon dioxide underground in southwest Louisiana. It asked the center to use the project as a case study for the economic impact of a carbon capture industry on the Gulf Coast.
Climate advocates Corinne Salter and Jill Tupitza, who started a group and podcast called Climate Pelicans, and Cheyenne Autin discuss divestment in fossil fuels in November 2023 at Louisiana State University’s Baton Rouge campus.
Tarun Kakarala / The Reveille
The contract suggests that some of the report’s conclusions were reached even before the study began. The researchers said they planned to “underscore the transformative nature of CCS (carbon capture and sequestration) on the Louisiana economy.”
LSU’s final report ultimately listed all of the financial reasons the Gulf Coast should welcome the projects like this one — while barely mentioning the economic risks, such as the cost and financial viability of carbon capture facilities.
WWNO showed the report to several researchers familiar with sponsored research. All of them shared concerns over the prescriptive nature of the research proposal or the terms of the contract itself.
LSU allows research sponsors to give feedback on drafts before they’re published. Sponsors are also allowed to stay anonymous — meaning, the public doesn’t know who funds the research.
“It gets a D grade and it’s not quite an F,” Supran said, noting that in this case, the funder was disclosed. “ The fact that this report just touts the economic benefits of this specific company funding the report — it kind of makes you wonder if it’s worth the paper it’s written on.”
The report’s authors declined to comment. Twilley defended the contract, saying its terms are standard throughout the university and that researchers are allowed to propose hypotheses.
The contract is not illegal nor does it constitute research misconduct such as using fake data or plagiarizing. But according to one elected official, reports like these, which carry the credibility of a university without the scrutiny of peer review, could influence public policy.
“The research plays a significant role in determining whether or not we’re on the right or wrong course,” said Davante Lewis, a public service commissioner in Louisiana. His commission regulates services in Louisiana including the electric utilities.
Lewis said he counts on such academic reports to provide a fair and comprehensive picture of an issue. But, as more industry money enters research, he said he was concerned, noting, “Oftentimes we have seen where money drives facts, not facts drive money.”
Burnishing their reputations
Besides funding LSU’s energy institute, oil and gas interests also pays for things everyone likes, such as health programs, tutoring and even halftime kicking contests with football fans.
Supran says he and other researchers have a working theory that while oil and gas companies pour big money into big research institutions such as MIT and Stanford to give them credibility, they spend money at regional universities in states including Louisiana and Texas to build a compliant population.
“It doesn’t take a genius to imagine that that money may be used to burnish the reputation locally of those companies and foster a vibrant recruitment pool,” Supran said.
Geoffrey Supran, an associate professor at the University of Miami, tells members of the U.S. Senate Budget Committee at a May 1, 2024 hearing that his research has found “widespread infiltration of fossil fuel interests into higher education.”
U.S. Senate Budget Committee
Voss says the oil and gas industry’s support of benefits for the state are “one of the few things that it actually has right.” On the flip side, he added, “I think it protects the industry from criticism, because it makes people feel like they’re a part of the community.”
But the heavy presence of oil and gas on campus can have a chilling effect on people and groups who don’t support those industries.
Jill Tupitza, now a marine scientist in California, was a graduate student at LSU when she and fellow graduate student Corinne Salterstarted Climate Pelicans, an advocacy organization that worked to get LSU to stop investing in fossil fuels.
When they started questioning the ties between LSU and fossil fuels, they were met with resistance.
“Immediately, doors were shut,” Tupitza said.
One administrator told her, “‘I can’t tell you what to do, I can’t punish you for going further. But I would strongly recommend that you stop asking questions about this,’” she recalled. “So that, obviously, that made us double down.”
The group led marches and a petition drive urging climate divestment. They started a podcast that explored topics including environmental justice and false climate solutions.
Tupitza said the LSU Foundation stonewalled the group’s requests for information about how much money it had invested in fossil fuels and refused requests to attend meetings about the foundation’s $700 million endowment. Later, the foundation told Tupitza that less than 4% of its holdings were invested in fossil fuels
And then, while Tupitza and fellow graduate students were writing “Divest from Fossil Fuels,” in pink chalk in front of the foundation building, they were arrested on graffiti charges.
Those charges were eventually dropped. School rules prohibit writing on the sidewalks with chalk, but it is not an arrestable offense. Tupitza described her arrest as “a huge scare tactic.”.
Supran says LSU isn’t unique in its hesitation to cut ties with the oil and gas industry.
“I think it’s fair to say that for the most part, there has not been careful deliberation about the costs and the benefits of these ties, but rather a head down, and aggressive, solicitation of as much funding as they can receive from anyone.”
Voss predicts that if conditions worsen in an industry known for its booms and busts, its support for LSU will disappear. And as climate change worsens, it will make it harder for businesses and people to stay in Louisiana, which is already near the top of U.S. states when it comes to population loss.
“In many ways, higher education is sitting upon a house of cards, and relying upon oil and gas is incredibly risky — as it always has been.”
Instead, he said, “I think that LSU could and should be a really critical voice in climate change and environmental justice in Louisiana. I do worry that in failing to do so and by being so heavily tied up in oil and gas interests, it actually puts the university in a worse position.”
This is Part 2 of a two-part investigative series exploring the relationship between the fossil fuel industry and Louisiana State University. This story was reported by a partnership with WWNO/WRKF, the Louisiana Illuminator and Floodlight.
In recent years, there has been a growing interest in Renewable Energy Communities (REC), legal entities that collectively manage energy, promoting economic, social, and environmental benefits for their community. This model of citizen management over an essential resource has been widely accepted — so could a similar principle be applied to money?
Ekhilur, a nonprofit citizen cooperative, is pioneering an innovative approach to strengthening the local economy. Instead of creating a new currency, it operates its own payment system — regulated by the Bank of Spain — to maximize the circulation of the existing euro within the community for as long as possible.
On a clear day overlooking the inner harbour of Prince Rupert, a northwest British Columbia town home to Canada’s third largest port, chances are you’ll see a spurt of water coming from the surface of the ocean.
“I’ve lived here my whole life and every once in a while, you might get a glimpse of a humpback, but there have been so many humpback whales lately in the harbour, I’ve never witnessed that in my life. It’s a sign that our waters are healthy and abundant,” says Arnie Nagy, a member of the Haida Nation.
Traditionally, Nagy is known as Tlaatsgaa Chiin Kiljuu, or Strong Salmon Voice, because of his years fighting to ensure the survival of the fishing industry and wild salmon on B.C.’s North Coast as a member of the United Fishermen and Allied Workers’ Union.
“I’ve lived here my whole life and every once in a while, you might get a glimpse of a humpback, but there have been so many humpback whales lately in the harbour, I’ve never witnessed that in my life. It’s a sign that our waters are healthy and abundant,” says Arnie Nagy, a member of the Haida Nation.
The world is grappling with an energy crisis — not one of scarcity, but one created by overwhelming demand. More energy-hungry data centers and AI algorithms are coming online. Developing countries are using more energy to support their people and industries. And as the world electrifies — replacing gas cars with electric vehicles, for instance — it will use ever more power. So the electrical grid doesn’t just need renewables (and batteries to store their energy) to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but also to meet growing demand.
A new analysis from the Paris-based International Energy Agency puts some hard numbers to the challenge, finding that in 2024, electricity consumption jumped by 4.3 percent worldwide, almost double the annual average over the last decade. Power use in buildings accounted for nearly 60 percent of the growth last year, with other drivers including the ballooning of energy-intensive industries and the electrification of transportation.
“What is certain is that electricity use is growing rapidly, pulling overall energy demand along with it to such an extent that it is enough to reverse years of declining energy consumption in advanced economies,” said Fatih Birol, the IEA’s executive director, in a press release announcing the findings. “The result is that demand for all major fuels and energy technologies increased in 2024, with renewables covering the largest share of the growth, followed by natural gas.”
The good news is that the installation of renewables like wind and solar hit a record in 2024 for the 22nd consecutive year, according to the analysis, while 33 percent more nuclear capacity came online compared to 2023. Renewables and nuclear power combined for 80 percent of the increase in worldwide electricity generation. Together, the two sources handled 40 percent of overall generation for the first time, which meant energy-related carbon dioxide emissions rose by just 0.8 percent last year, compared with 1.2 percent in 2023.
At the same time, the global economy grew by more than 3 percent in 2024. Carbon dioxide emissions, in other words, didn’t keep up with economic growth, so CO2 emissions and economic growth are increasingly “decoupled,” the report notes. Beneath the headline numbers, however, the story varies region to region. While countries like the U.S. can easily deploy more renewables to reduce their emissions and still maintain economic growth — renewables actually encourage that growth — in 2024 the bulk of the rise in emissions came from developing economies. “We can have more energy and less emissions — we need to have more energy and less emissions,” said R. Max Holmes, president and CEO of the Woodwell Climate Research Center, who wasn’t involved in the analysis. “There are encouraging signs in this report that that decoupling is starting to take place.”
Still, no matter the country, renewables aren’t growing fast enough to displace fossil fuels: Oil demand rose by 0.8 percent in 2024 and coal by 1 percent. Natural gas demand went up 2.7 percent, far above the annual growth rate of 1 percent between 2019 and 2023. That was thanks to the growth of heavy industries along with brutal heat waves, especially in China and India. The hotter the world gets, the more people switch on their air conditioners, creating demand that power plants have to meet by burning fossil fuels, leading to even more warming and more AC use.
Even so, the report reveals that the world is making some progress in weaning itself off fossil fuels. In 2024, EVs accounted for a fifth of all car sales around the world. In the U.S., sales of electric heat pumps — which move heat from outdoor air into a home — jumped 15 percent last year, and now outsell gas furnaces by 30 percent. All told, since 2019, the deployment of solar and wind energy, nuclear power, EVs, and heat pumps now prevents the release of 2.6 billion metric tons of CO2 each year. “That’s about half the U.S. economy’s worth of emissions, and that’s just five solutions in five years,” said Jonathan Foley, executive director of Project Drawdown, a Minnesota-based climate nonprofit that wasn’t involved in the report. “We’re still far behind. All the bad news is still true — climate change is still happening, it’s bad, it’s ugly, we’re not doing enough. But I’m seeing an inflection point here.” The big question in the U.S. is whether the new Trump administration, which has been aggressivelydismantlingclimateprogress in its first two months in office, can kneecap this shift to clean-energy. Experts say that there are fundamental market forces beyond the control of the federal government, namely that renewables are now cheaper to deploy than more fossil-fuel infrastructure. “The world is transitioning away from fossil fuels and toward renewable and non-greenhouse-gas-emitting energy sources, period,” Holmes said. “It is going to happen. What the Trump administration right now is doing can slow that transition, but it certainly can’t stop that transition.”
In the decade since the world pledged to combat climate change under the Paris Agreement, global energy systems have undergone a revolution. The United States experienced a sixfold increase in solar power, and wind power more than doubled. And there are now more than 40 million electric vehicles on roads worldwide.
But ending our dependence on fossil fuels and adopting this new, greener technology requires a whole lot of metal.
It takes lithium and cobalt to build the batteries that power electric vehicles and e-bikes, nickel and rare earth elements to construct solar panels and wind turbines, and copper to build the wires that move renewable energy from the sunny and windy places it’s generated to the cities and factories where it’s most needed.
The faster we move away from fossil fuels, the more desperately we will need these metals and other so-called critical minerals. In an ambitious energy transition, global demand for them will quadruple by 2040, according to the International Energy Agency. That means digging vast new open-pit mines, building powerful new refineries to distill raw ore, and opening new factories to manufacture batteries and turbines.
Just as the 20th century was defined by the geography of oil, the 21st century could be defined by the new geography of metal — in particular by snarled industrial supply lines that often flow from the developing world to the developed world and back again.
On his first day in office, U.S. President Donald Trump signed two separate executive orders that mentioned so-called critical minerals, saying the country was mining them at a pace “far too inadequate to meet our nation’s needs.” He has since tried to fast-track permitting for domestic mining projects, while at the same time looking abroad for more supply — including in Greenland, which he has said should be under U.S. control, and in Ukraine, where he has attempted to secure mineral access in exchange for protection against Russia.
Though Trump is taking every step he can to stymie the development of renewable energy, his fixation on these resources reflects an undeniable reality: The world’s growing need for critical minerals has huge implications for geopolitics, as well as climate and environmental policy.
Below, Grist demystifies critical minerals and the race to extract them. We outline the ways the world currently mines, refines, and deploys a few key metals that are essential for renewable energy and electric vehicles. Bringing order to the world’s mineral chaos will be no easy task, but the fight against climate change depends on getting it right.
The minerals
A renewable energy product, like an electric-vehicle battery or solar panel, contains dozens of minerals. Many of them aren’t difficult to find: Copper, for instance, which is a primary component in transmission wires, has been mass-produced around the world for more than 100 years. But many others needed for the technology are far more difficult to access, and governments and companies around the world are now rushing to shore up their supplies. Here’s the state of play for four of the minerals that are most critical to the energy transition: lithium, cobalt, and nickel, which are key components of energy-storing batteries, and rare earth elements, which help power wind turbines.
Hover over the gold circles below to see which minerals power modern society.
Magnetic rare earth elements — a class of elements that are essential components in electric motors — include neodymium, praseodymium, dysprosium, and terbium.
LITHIUM
Lithium is essential to clean technology because it can contain huge amounts of energy, making it the ideal basis for the batteries that juice up EVs and store the power produced by solar and wind. While the element is somewhat common around the world, it’s only economical to mine it in a few places where deposits are large and easy to access. Australia is by far the world’s largest producer of lithium, accounting for around 50 percent of global supply. In 2021, the nation’s massive Greenbushes mine produced around one-fifth of the world’s raw lithium. Miners have been digging it in former tin quarries on the country’s southwest coast since the 1980s, well before it was a keystone of the energy transition, when the metal was mostly used for nuclear technology and to make items like heat-resistant glass. The country now sees lithium as a key substitute for threatened exports like coal.
Bolivia, Argentina, and Chile, make up the so-called “Lithium Triangle.” These three South American countries produce a relatively small amount of the mineral now, but together they hold well over half of the world’s proven lithium reserves. Unlike the hard rock resources in Australia, the deposits in Bolivia sit in the massive Uyuni salt flat, an ecological marvel that is also home to the Aymara, an Indigenous people. The left-wing government of Evo Morales has vowed that the state will lead lithium production and redistribute the benefits — his plan is called “¡100 percent Estatal!” — but residents in Uyuni have protested the idea, saying they’re concerned about the environmental impacts of mining on the playa.
The United States’ ambitions to create its own lithium supply chain rest to a large extent on aremote desert in northern Nevada. The area, known as Thacker Pass, is home to one of the world’s largest known lithium deposits, estimated to contain more than 40 million recoverable tons of the metal. A company called Lithium Americas is now constructing what will be the nation’s largest lithium mine there. The project received support from both the Biden and first Trump administrations, as well as more than $600 million in financial commitments from General Motors, which has sole rights to the first mineral product from the mine. It too generated protests and lawsuits from Indigenous tribes as well as local ranchers — efforts that were ultimately unsuccessful.
COBALT
The Democratic Republic of the Congo, or DRC, dominates world production of cobalt, another critical ingredient of lithium-ion batteries. The DRC makes up 80 percent of global cobalt output, but China either owns or is a major stakeholder in the vast majority of the country’s mineral infrastructure, which has grown rapidly in recent years. Mining operations have forced thousands of people out of their homes, polluted the air with toxic cobalt dust, and dumped poisonous tailings into rivers and streams. The mines rely extensively on human trafficking and child labor, according to human rights groups.
A key dilemma is that no other country contains comparable reserves of cobalt. The DRC contains more than half of the world’s untapped land supply of the mineral, twice as much as Australia, which is next highest on the list. The other countries with known deposits, like Russia and Canada, only have enough proven supply to provide around one year of world cobalt production at current rates. Assuming that there are no major discoveries in other countries over the next few years, the path to a successful energy transition will likely run through the DRC.
International waters, however, are another thing. The Clarion-Clipperton Zone, a wide stretch of the Pacific Ocean between Hawaiʻi and Mexico, contains what are perhaps the world’s most robust reserves of cobalt. The region’s seabed, more than 10,000 feet below the surface, contains an estimated 50 million tons of cobalt, at least several times more than what can be found in the DRC. But even if the depth wasn’t a factor, dozens of countries have called for a ban on deep-sea mining, and members of the International Seabed Authority last year voted in a leader who was critical of the practice.
NICKEL
Nickel is the Swiss army knife of energy transition minerals: It’s used not only in EV batteries but also in solar panels, wind turbines, and even in the production of green hydrogen. Thankfully, supplies of the metal are far more distributed around the world than is the case for lithium and cobalt. All kinds of countries,from Russia to Australia to Brazil to Indonesia, boast huge nickel resources — and even some small island states like the French overseas territory of New Caledonia have gobs of the metal as well. Because nickel has long been used in stainless steel and other alloys, there are far more mature and production-ready mines than there are for cobalt.
Indonesia, the world’s fourth-most populous country, currently accounts for half of global nickel production. The country has been mining the metal since it was a Dutch colony at the turn of the 20th century. Here, as in other countries, the global nature of the supply chain has proven politically contentious: The country depends on China to refine its raw nickel ore and invest in its mining infrastructure. In an effort to reduce this dependence, Indonesia imposed a ban on the export of raw nickel ore in 2020, forcing producers to invest in smelting resources in the country.
Brazil is home to among the largest untapped nickel deposits in the world, but political turmoil has made the future of this resource uncertain. Much like the United States, the country has swung between left-wing and right-wing leaders with radically different environmental policies. The current president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, has positioned himself as a defender of the Amazon rainforest and an environmental champion, unlike his conservative predecessor — but he seems to be warming to the industrial giant Vale, which hopes to invest billions of dollars in expanded copper and nickel mining.
RARE EARTHS
So-called rare earth elements are essential for modern wind power. They are major components of the ultra-powerful and long-lasting magnets through which turbines generate energy. While the substances aren’t quite as rare as we thought when we gave them that name, well over half of global production is concentrated in China, which has a stranglehold over the rare earth supply chain. The country has been mining the elements for decades, including in massive open-pit mines in inland areas such as the autonomous region of Inner Mongolia. In Jiangxi province, which had a rare earth boom in the 1990s during the first tech boom, mining operations denuded forests and left behind contaminated wastewater pits.
China is far from the only country with a significant share of rare earth metals, but the other countries that have huge stores of the minerals have yet to extract much of them. Take Vietnam, for instance: The country has 22 million tons of rare earths underground, about 20 percent of the world’s known supply and enough to build millions of wind turbines, but it produced a relatively microscopic 600 tons in 2023 — the very same year it entered into an agreement with the U.S. to develop the sector. With corruption scandals implicating top executives at domestic mining authorities, Vietnam is not poised to emerge as a serious alternative to Chinese rare earth supply in the near future.
President Donald Trump appears to be serious about trying to seize Greenland from Denmark. The apparent aim of Trump’s recent diplomatic onslaught over the far northern territory is to secure a strategic military outpost in the Arctic, but the purchase would also have the added effect of giving the United States access to one of the world’s largest untapped reserves of rare earth metals. The European Union and China have also eyed these reserves.
Annual global mineral production
Today2050 (estimated)
Li
Lithium
180,000 metric tons
Rare Earths
72,000 metric tons
Co
Cobalt
230,000 metric tons
Ni
Nickel
3,600,000 metric tons
Because of inconsistencies in our datasets, a number of data sources were used for this series.
Data for current production of lithium, cobalt, and nickel comes from USGS Mineral Commodity Summaries 2024. All 2050 projections come from IEA 2024 Global Critical Minerals Outlook. This report only includes data on the small subset of magnetic rare earth elements used in clean energy: neodymium, praseodymium, dysprosium, and terbium. For this reason, data for current production of rare earth elements is sourced from IEA, and only includes those four magnetic rare earth elements.
The supply chain
The bare rock that miners scrape out of the earth in a place like Australia or Indonesia is just at the beginning of its useful life — and it’s a long way from helping to spin a wind turbine or start up an EV. Once a chunk of something like lithium ore leaves the ground, it must undergo a complex refining process to become an adequate conductor of electricity, and then it must travel to a factory where workers can integrate it into a battery pack. These refining and manufacturing processes almost never happen where miners pull the minerals out of the ground, which creates something like a global game of hot potato.
Minerals: Where are they now?
Annual ProductionReserves
Loading world map data…
Because of inconsistencies in our datasets, a number of data sources were used for this series.
Data for the map comes from USGS Mineral Commodity Summaries 2024. For proprietary reasons, current lithium production data was withheld from that dataset. Because of this, current U.S. lithium production came from The Energy Institute’s 2024 Statistical Review of World Energy. That U.S. figure (600 metric tons) was added to lithium’s global total.
REFINING
In their raw, rocky form, minerals like lithium and nickel are useless for the energy transition. In order to become component parts for EV batteries and wind turbines, these metals must be refined down to purer substances, often through energy-intensive smelting processes. This is the source of the world’s largest energy transition bottleneck: Virtually all mined metal, whether it comes out of the ground in Indonesia or Canada, must travel to China in order to be refined. The country controls 90 percent of the world’s rare earth refining capacity, around two-thirds of its lithium and cobalt refining capacity, and around a third of its nickel refining capacity.
Why is China such a refining behemoth? It’s simple: It has a massive head start. The Chinese state recognized early that critical minerals would be key to a future where fossil fuels were on the wane, and it has poured billions of dollars over the past few decades into the construction of new refineries, setting aside environmental concerns that led to the offshoring of some industrial plants from the United States. The country also invested in the upstream production of these minerals in other developing countries through its $1 trillion Belt and Road initiative, enabling it to achieve vertical integration through the supply chain for certain minerals.
As its foreign relations with China deteriorate, the United States has made halting attempts to build its own lithium refinery fleet, but it’s a slow grind. Thanks to the protectionist nature of U.S. climate policies — the Inflation Reduction Act restricts EV subsidies to cars made with battery material produced and refined in the United States — the entire U.S. energy transition is somewhat dependent on this halting progress. However, there are some large projects in the pipeline, such as Stardust Power, a 50,000-ton lithium refinery being built in Oklahoma. The state has also secured refinery projects for cobalt, nickel, and rare earth metals, but these projects require significant state and federal subsidies to get off the ground: Stardust is eligible for federal and state subsidies totalling around $257 million, almost a quarter of its $1 billion overall cost. Whether these subsidies will be enough for the U.S. to refine all the lithium it needs is very much an open question.
MANUFACTURING
The most promising effort to make the United States competitive in the minerals supply chain may not be a mine, or a refinery, or a factory — but a recycling plant. The startup Ascend Elements opened its first large facility for the recycling of lithium-ion batteries in Covington, Georgia, in 2023. Each year the facility crushes up battery packs containing the equivalent of the lithium in 70,000 spent EVs, and it uses a liquid solution to turn the ground-up dust into new cathode material. If the approach can scale up substantially, it could reduce U.S. reliance on the labyrinthine mining supply chain.
While refining is China’s biggest advantage, the country is also a major player in the manufacturing of batteries, cars, and wind turbines — the final destination industries for all the raw metals we’re mining around the world. Tariffs have prevented the country’s main car makes from going mainstream in the United States, but the affordable BYD (BuildYourDreams) brand now makes up around 15 percent of the global EV market — and just overtook Tesla as the world’s most popular electric car. On wind energy, the country is even more dominant: It produces 60 percent of the world’s wind turbines.
The fact that one of Tesla’s largest factories is located in Germany, thousands of miles away from lithium mines and lithium refineries, is a stark demonstration of a key irony in global development: Wealthy countries like the United States and Germany have done their best to retain well-compensated heavy manufacturing jobs, but they now rely on the developing world for the minerals that supply their manufacturing sectors.
In the main square of Peine, a village of low houses and dirt streets in Chile’s northern Atacama Desert, there is barely any movement. It’s midday and the sun beats down from a cloudless sky. At this hour, the streets remain largely empty. Every now and then, a truck interrupts the silence of its steep and cracked streets. But it’s not always this quiet. Although this small town has just over 300 residents, its population can quadruple after 6 p.m. when workers from across the country return from mining lithium — the mineral that has turned this remote village into a crucial link in the global energy transition.
Peine sits on the edge of the nearly 1,200-square-mile Atacama Salt Flat, or Salar de Atacama. Sitting beneath its surface, dissolved in underground saline waters called brine, is one of the largest, most concentrated reserves of lithium in the world.
The mineral is used in everything from air-conditioning, computers, ceramics, and mood-stabilizing medication to, most recently, electric vehicle batteries and renewable energy storage. As countries and industries around the globe race to adopt more climate-friendly technology, demand for lithium has spiked. The Atacama Salt Flat is an epicenter of this growth. The region contains an estimated 8.3 million tons of lithium and now supplies 30 percent of global demand annually. Chile has a national plan to increase production even more.
But this boom has reshaped the fragile Atacama ecosystem as well as the life of the 18 Indigenous settlements — which are home to the Lickanantay, or the Atacameño people — that surround the salt flat.
Trucks, heavy machinery, and pipelines now crisscross the desert landscape, transporting lithium-laden brine extracted from underground wells to a network of evaporation ponds. Under the blazing Atacama sun, water evaporates from the mixture, leaving behind piles of salt and lithium.
After evaporation, the lithium chloride from the Salar de Atacama is loaded on to trucks and carried across the desert, kicking up dust along the route to the Chilean coast. In the town of Antofagasta, the material is delivered to a chemical plant to be refined into lithium carbonate and lithium hydroxide. It is then bagged, sent 40 miles north to the Port of Angamos in Mejillones, and shipped off to destinations such as China, Korea, Japan, and the United States.
Peine — once a town of “peaceful and healthy living,” according to Sergio Cubillos, president of the community — has become a thoroughfare for contractors’ trucks and buses in the evening. Residents, newly concerned for their safety, have installed bars on their windows and gates around their patios. “There are truck thefts, and there’s drug and alcohol use. People tend to keep to themselves more,” Cubillos said. Black flags on the facades of some homes in Peine reflect the residents’ discontent.
In several communities surrounding the Atacama Salt Flat, black flags on building facades reflect residents’ discontent with the future of lithium extraction. Muriel Alarcon / Grist
According to the president of the Peine Community, Sergio Cubillos, this locality has become a transit route for trucks and contractor buses. In several communities surrounding the Atacama Salt Flat, black flags on building facades reflect residents’ discontent with the future of lithium extraction. Muriel Alarcon / Grist
According to the president of the Peine Community, Sergio Cubillos, this locality has become a transit route for trucks and contractor buses. Muriel Alarcon / Grist
Then there is the critical problem of water. Mining in northern Chile “uses volumes of water comparable to the flows of the Loa River,” the longest waterway in the country and the main water source for the region, said Christian Herrera, an expert in hydrogeology in arid areas at the Catholic University of the North in Chile. One recent study found that the Atacama region where lithium-rich brine is pumped is sinking at a rate of up to 0.8 inches per year. It is also where groundwater levels have decreased the most.
The surrounding towns have seen their already scarce drinking supplies decline as the lithium mines boom. Toconao, a community east of the salt flat, and some towns surrounding San Pedro de Atacama have reported experiencing water shortages. Every night, households in Peine have their water cut off to refill the tanks that supply the city.
Cubillos understands that lithium is essential for a world without fossil fuels, but he wants to see more regulation. “[I hope] the time never comes when someone says: ‘You know what? You’ll have to leave because there is no more water, no more land left,’” he said.
The Lickanantay have inhabited the world’s driest nonpolar desert for millennia. They lived as hunters, herders, and farmers. In Kunza, the native language of the Atacameños, the land, or Mother Earth, is called Patta Hoiri and water, puri.
Among the most common fauna of the desert are llamas, which coexist with the Lickanantay, or Atacameño people, who have inhabited the world’s driest nonpolar desert for millennia. Muriel Alarcon / Grist
The region also happens to be rich in minerals: Volcanic and magmatic activity millions of years ago deposited them, and the Atacama’s exceptionally arid climate preserved them. As one biologist put it, the Atacama Desert is a “geological photograph.”
Mining companies first flocked to the region in the early 20th century in search of copper. Soon, mining camps and entire towns rose up around extraction sites. The industry pumped money into the rural economy: Mining helped build the chapel of the San Roque Church in Peine, the local school, and a soccer field. It has also been a critical source of formal employment for residents.
But the recent demand for lithium has far outpaced the region’s previous extraction rates, leaving local residents grappling with the environmental and societal impact of a rapidly growing industry — with little oversight from the nation’s regulators.
The country of Chile owns the mining rights to the Atacama Salt Flat. The Chilean Economic Development Agency, or Corfo, manages the agreements and leases with private companies operating and producing lithium in the region: Albemarle and SQM, which has among its shareholders the Chinese company Tianqi Lithium and the Ponce Lerou family, the latter which has ties to former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. A new public-private partnership between SQM and Codelco, the state-owned copper company, will also operate in the Atacama Salt Flat from 2025 to 2060, with Codelco holding a 50 percent stake plus one share.
According to the Chilean Copper Commission, which is responsible for generating statistics and reports on mining in Chile, global lithium demand is expected to reach 3.8 million metric tons of lithium carbonate equivalent (a standardized measurement of lithium) by 2035 — up from just 310,000 metric tons in 2020. That represents a twelvefold jump.
In 2023, Chilean President Gabriel Boric introduced the National Lithium Strategy to tap into this surging market. The plan seeks to increase lithium production in the country by 70 percent by 2030 and to restore Chile as the world’s leading producer of the mineral, a position it held until 2017 when it was outpaced by Australia.
“No one denies that there has been so-called ‘development,’” said Cubillos, referring to how mining has long contributed to the local Atacama economy. “But the main complaint here is the lack of government support.”
Unlike Australia, where lithium is mined from hard rock using complex and costly chemicals, in Chile the process involves brine extraction, “aided by the exceptional arid and sunny climate,” explained Hugo Romero, an expert in geography and climatology at the University of Chile.
Mining trucks load lithium sulfate, as seen in Chile’s Atacama Salt Flat on July 29, 2024. Aguayo Araos / Anadolu via Getty Images
These conditions are what make the Atacama Salt Flat ideal for low-cost extraction, economically speaking, “because the inputs are almost entirely natural,” he said. But he cautions that the water extracted with the brine evaporates and is lost to the atmosphere, disrupting the socio-ecological and hydro-social balance of the area. Simply put, lithium mining “is drying out the desert,” said Mauricio Lorca, who researches lithium and its impact on Indigenous communities at the University of Talca.
Three decades ago, an influx of mining companies prompted local Indigenous leaders like Cubillos, to organize under the Council of Atacameño Peoples, or CPA in Spanish, representing the 18 communities surrounding the salt flat. The CPA has become the key negotiator with mining companies and employs legal advisers to defend its territory.
Some agreements, however, have sparked tensions. A decade ago, CPA signed an unprecedented cooperation, sustainability, and mutual benefit agreement, under which Albemarle committed to delivering 3.5 percent of its annual sales to the Atacameño people. While some believe the communities should economically benefit from the mining happening in the region, others “want to return to their previous, peaceful way of life,” Cubillos explained. Lorca, from the University of Talca, observes that “these transactional, albeit redistributive, relationships are transforming the interethnic relations of Indigenous communities into economic ones.”
Alexis Romero, a prominent figure and former president of the Council of Atacameño Peoples, has become a central figure in the debate. From the community of Solor, located in the northern part of the salt flat, he emphasized that the CPA has resolved “not to be partners or part of lithium production, to promote territorial unity, and to occupy every decision-making space concerning lithium” — though it has not dissuaded individuals from working in the mines.
Alexis Romero has become a prominent figure in the Council of Atacameño Peoples, an organization that defends the interests of the communities living around the Atacama Salt Flat. Council of Atacameño Peoples,
The CPA is also demanding guaranteed access to water. They are asking state entities, such as the Ministry of Science and the General Directorate of Water, which manages and regulates Chile’s water resources, for studies on the impact of the projected extraction on their land through 2060. As Romero put it, “Our ancestral ways of life are now at serious risk of disappearing precisely because of the lack of water.”
In 2017, the CPA convened environmental representatives from all 18 communities to form a volunteer group focused on studying water availability in the desert. By 2019, this group had formalized, trained field technicians, recruited Atacameños and non-Atacameño water experts, and transformed into the CPA’s environmental unit. “The dream [was] that the communities could have their own data to debate with companies and the state,” explained Francisco Mondaca, an environmental engineer from Toconao who leads the initiative.
For Mondaca, who as a child helped his grandmother plant crops in the Atacama, a fair and sustainable transition to clean energy must be responsible and respect the fragility of this environment. “Otherwise, the much heralded energy transition will mean the extermination of an ancient nature and culture,” he said.
“Not all of us are against mining, but we do want to know the state of health of our basin,” said Edwin Erazo, a pharmacist from the community of Cúcuter, who is part of the CPA’s environmental unit. “We don’t want to be a sacrifice zone.”
The CPA does not act alone in defending the salt flat and its waters; Atacameños activists have teamed up with researchers and scientists to advocate for the region’s cultural, environmental, and biological significance.
Back in the early 2000s, Sonia Ramos, a Lickanantay healer from Chuquicamata, watched as her community lost access to its water due to the construction of a reservoir that charged farmers unaffordable prices. Confronted with this crisis, she felt compelled to act.
“From that point on, I realized that without this kind of stance and critical thinking, the next generation could be forced to migrate,” said Ramos from her home in San Pedro de Atacama, outside of the salt flat. Over time, her resistance made her a national figure in water defense.
In 2009, she walked 978 miles — almost the equivalent of walking from New York to Miami — to Chile’s capital city, Santiago, demanding the permanent cancellation of permits for a geothermal plant operating at the El Tatio geysers. The site is the largest geyser field in the Southern Hemisphere, known for its steam columns and fumaroles, and holds Indigenous significance as a ceremonial site.
“I thought it would set an example for my people, but I was wrong,” she said. She hoped her actions and the movement she led would change her community’s priorities around natural resources. But soon after her march, the CPA signed its cost-sharing agreement with mining companies. “Our people have had no other opportunities. The state has never viewed our land through any lens other than extraction,” she explained. “Here, it’s the transnationals who govern.”
Sonia Ramos, a Lickanantay healer born in Chuquicamata, has risen as a defender of water in the Atacama Desert. Council of Atacameño Peoples,
She founded Ayllus sin Fronteras, an organization “uniting people in harmony between ancestral and non-ancestral ways” to preserve Atacameño cultural heritage and promote the idea that the Atacama Salt Flat is more than just a resource reserve — it is the grandfather heart (abuelo corazón) of Lickanantay culture. “It irrigates the entire greater Atacama with its underground rivers,” Ramos said. Her organization has put together various resistance strategies against natural resource extraction, ranging from summer schools and research projects with local and international universities that integrate science and ancestral knowledge to signature-collecting campaigns and public demonstrations.
Often invited to speak at forums, Ramos, whose father worked for the mining industry, has been connecting with researchers to study alternatives to natural resource extraction. “The desert holds great answers for humanity,” she said. “The groundwater holds the memory of all planetary processes.”
Her leadership has drawn researchers like Manuel Tironi, a sociologist at the Institute for Sustainable Development at the Catholic University of Chile, who has collaborated with Ramos on studies about how extractive industries disrupt the water balance and biodiversity, as well as the cultural and spiritual integrity of the Lickanantay world.
Ramos has also collaborated with Chilean biologist Cristina Dorador, an associate professor at the University of Antofagasta and principal researcher at the Center for Biotechnology and Bioengineering. Dorador’s research studies the biodiversity of Chile’s salt flats and their microbial richness. Her team’s recent findings warn that increased lithium extraction has led to declining flamingo populations, particularly among endemic species.
In 2020, during her participation in Chile’s Constitutional Convention, which aimed to draft a new constitution for the country, Dorador tried amending the draft constitution article that classifies salt flats as “mines” under Chilean law. “Salt flats aren’t mines; they’re ecosystems,” she said. While her edited text made it into the draft, the proposed new constitution was ultimately rejected by an overwhelming majority of the Chilean population.
Despite the setback, Dorador has continued to advocate for the region’s vital ecological role. “I knew it was urgent to study the salt flats, at least to preserve a record of what they once were,” she said. She eventually left her lab and switched full-time to fighting to preserve Chile’s salt flats.
Trucks drive alongside lithium mining pits in the Atacama Salt Flat, Chile, on July 29, 2024. Lucas Aguayo Araos / Anadolu via Getty Images
Mining continues to ramp up under Chile’s National Lithium Strategy, with companies exploring previously untouched parts of the Atacama and other salt flats in the country.
The SQM and Codelco partnership is promoting the “Salar Futuro” project, which commits to “building a governance model to foster a sustained relationship with the communities around the salt flat” and to implementing new extraction methods that achieve “a more efficient and sustainable production, that is, producing more lithium with less brine and no use of continental water.” In a statement for Grist, SQM and Codelco assured that among other things, this partnership “protects the local ecosystems of the salt flat and the surrounding communities.”
But even as the government has made funds available for studying these ecosystems, concerns remain about how mining expansion will impact the region. Dorador and her colleagues secured one of these grants and, over the next three years, will study the potential of salt flat microorganisms for everything from storing greenhouse gas emissions to benefiting human health, including as a source of antibiotics, anticancer compounds, and bacteria that break down plastics. “There’s almost no information about these basins; this is a chance to generate knowledge to appreciate ecosystems without exploiting them, as spaces for study,” she said.
In the past, Atacameños practiced the ritual of walking to the salt flat to gather flamingo eggs. The tradition, carried out collectively, provided food for families and facilitated trade with neighboring agricultural communities. To preserve the species, local customs dictated that some eggs should always be left in the nests. Flamingo feathers played a role in traditional ceremonies, including Talatur, a ritual still practiced today, “so that we don’t lose the water,” according to Cubillos. During the ceremony, participants clear irrigation channels and chant to the water in Kunza.
Today, this ecosystem has disappeared, the landscape is desiccated, and the flamingos no longer arrive.
The severe water shortage led Peine to file a lawsuit against Minera Escondida, a leading copper extraction company, in 2022. Later, the Consejo de Defensa del Estado, or State Defense Council — tasked in Chile with representing and safeguarding the public interest in environmental litigation — joined the case, adding Albemarle and the mining company Zaldívar. The companies were accused of continuously extracting water resources from the Monturaqui-Negrillar-Tilopozo Aquifer, a key source of groundwater in the Atacama Desert, vital for recharging ecosystems like Las Vegas de Tilopozo, a sacred space for the Atacameño people. A scientific study in which Mondaca’s environmental unit participated was presented as evidence in the lawsuit.
In December, the First Environmental Court of Antofagasta approved a settlement agreement between Peine, the State Defense Council, and the mining companies over responsibility for the environmental damage to the aquifer and Las Vegas de Tilopozo, which had profoundly affected the way of life and customs of the Indigenous community. Under the agreement, the mining companies must take measures to restore the aquifer and Las Vegas de Tilopozo, as well as compensate the residents of Peine for social, economic, and environmental damages.
“It’s not right for the world to benefit from these resources while we’re the ones paying the price,” Cubillos said. He added: “We want Peine to exist for future generations.”
Greenland’s massive cap of ice, containing enough fresh water to raise sea levels by 23 feet, is in serious trouble. Between 2002 and 2023, Greenland lost 270 billion tons of frozen water each year as winter snowfall failed to compensate for ever-fiercer summer temperatures. That’s a significant contributor of sea level rise globally, which is now at a quarter of an inch a year.
But underneath all that melting ice is something the whole world wants: the rare earth elements that make modern society — and the clean energy revolution — possible. That could soon turn Greenland, which has a population size similar to that of Casper, Wyoming, into a mining mecca.
Greenland’s dominant industry has long been fishing, but its government is now looking to diversify its economy. While the island has opened up a handful of mines, like for gold and rubies, its built and natural environment makes drilling a nightmare — freezing conditions on remote sites without railways or highways for access. The country’s rich reserves of rare earths and geopolitical conflict, however, are making the island look increasingly enticing to mining companies, Arctic conditions be damned.
Meltwater drips from glacier ice in Disco Bay, Greenland, revealing bare earth beneath. Science Photo Library / Getty Images
When President Donald Trump talks about the United States acquiring Greenland, it’s partly for its strategic trade and military location in the Arctic, but also for its mineral resources. According to one Greenland official, the island “possesses 39 of the 50 minerals that the United States has classified as critical to national security and economic stability.” While the island, an autonomous territory of Denmark, has made clear it is not for sale, its government is signaling it is open to business, particularly in the minerals sector. Earlier this month, Greenland’s elections saw the ascendance of the pro-business Demokraatit Party, which has promised to accelerate the development of the country’s minerals and other resources. At the same time, the party’s leadership is pushing back hard against Trump’s rhetoric.
Rare earth elements are fundamental to daily life: These words you are reading on a screen are made of the ones and zeroes of binary code. But they’re also made of rare earth elements, such as the terbium in LED screens, praseodymium in batteries, and neodymium in a phone’s vibration unit. Depending on where you live, the electricity powering this screen may have even come from the dysprosium in wind turbines.
These minerals helped build the modern world — and will be in increasing demand going forward. “They sit at the heart of pretty much every electric vehicle, cruise missile, advanced magnet,” said Adam Lajeunesse, a public policy expert at Canada’s St. Francis Xavier University. “All of these different minerals are absolutely required to build almost everything that we do in our high-tech environment.”
Greenland’s vanishing ice
Sea ice extent, 1979 vs 2023
Arctic sea route
1979
2023
To the increasing alarm of Western powers, China now has a stranglehold on the market for rare earth elements, responsible for 70 percent of production globally. As the renewables revolution unfolds, and as more EVs hit the road, the world will demand ever more of these metals: Between 2020 and 2022, the total value of rare earths used in the energy transition each year quadrupled. That is projected to go up another tenfold by 2035. According to the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre, by 2030, Greenland could provide nearly 10,000 tons of rare earth oxides to the global economy.
One way to meet that demand, and for the world to diversify control over the rare earths market and speed up clean energy adoption, is to mine in Greenland. (In other words, the way to avoid future ice melt may, ironically, mean capitalizing on the riches revealed by climate-driven ice loss.) On the land currently exposed along the island’s edges, mining companies are starting to drill, and the U.S. doesn’t want to be left out of the action.
But anyone gung-ho on immediately turning Greenland into a rare earths bonanza is in for a rude awakening. More so than elsewhere on the planet, mining the island is an extremely complicated, and lengthy, proposition — logistically, geopolitically, and economically. And most importantly for the people of Greenland, mining of any kind comes with inevitable environmental consequences, like pollution and disruptions to wildlife.
An aircraft carrying President Trump’s son, businessman Donald Trump Jr., arrives in Nuuk, Greenland, on January 7. Emil Stach / Ritzau Scanpix / AFP / Denmark OUT via Getty Images
The Trump administration’s aggressive language has spooked Indigenous Greenlanders in particular, who make up 90 percent of the population and have endured a long history of brutal colonization, from deadly waves of disease and displacement to forced sterilization. “It’s been a shock for Greenland,” said Aqqaluk Lynge, former president of the Inuit Circumpolar Council and co-founder of Greenland’s Inuit Ataqatigiit political party. “They are looking at us as people that you just can throw out.”
Lacking the resources to directly invest in mining for rare earths, the Greenland government is approving licenses for exploration. “We have all the critical minerals. Everyone wants them,” said Jørgen T. Hammeken-Holm, permanent secretary for mineral resources in the Greenland government. “The geology is so exciting, but there are a lot of ‘buts.’”
TThe funny thing about rare earth elements is that they’re not particularly rare. Planet Earth is loaded with them — only in an annoyingly distributed manner. Miners have to process a lot of rock to pluck out small amounts of praseodymium, neodymium, and the 15 other rare earth elements. That makes the minerals very difficult and dirty to mine and then refine: For every ton of rare earths dug up, 2,000 tons of toxic waste are generated.
China’s government cornered the market on rare earths by both subsidizing the industry and streamlining regulations. “If you can purchase something from a Chinese company which does not have the same labor regulations, human rights considerations, environmental considerations as you would in Australia or California, you’ll buy it more cheaply on the Chinese market,” Lajeunesse said. Many critical minerals that are mined elsewhere in the world still go back to China, because the country has spent decades building up its refining capacity.
The race is on
Count of active rare earth exploration licenses in Greenland by country
China has used the rare earths market as an economic and political weapon. In 2010, the so-called Rare Earths Trade Dispute broke out, when China refused to ship the minerals to Japan — a country famous for its manufacturing of technologies. (However, some researchers question whether this was a deliberate embargo or a Chinese effort to reduce rare earth exports generally.) More subtly, China can manipulate the market on rare earths by, say, increasing production to drive down prices. This makes it less economically feasible for other mining outfits to get into the game, given the cost and difficulty of extracting the minerals, solidifying China’s grip on rare earths.
“They control every stage — the mining of it, and then the intermediate processing, and then the more sophisticated final product processing,” said Heather Exner-Pirot, director of energy, natural resources, and environment at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, a think tank in Canada. “So they can intervene in the market at all these levels.”
This is a precarious monopoly for Western economies and governments to navigate. Military aircraft and drones use permanent magnets made of terbium and dysprosium. Medical imaging equipment also relies on rare earths, as do flatscreens and electric motors. It’s not just the energy transition that needs a steady supply of these minerals, but modern life itself.
Meltwater flows from the Russell Glacier near Kangerlussuaq, Greenland.
Juan Maria Coy Vergara / Getty Images
As a result, all eyes are turning toward Greenland’s rich deposits of rare earths. The island contains 18 percent of the global reserves for neodymium, praseodymium, dysprosium, and terbium, according to the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre. Even a decade ago, scientists reported that the island could meet a quarter of the global demand for rare earths.
TThe question is whether mining companies can overcome the headaches inherent in extracting rare earths from Greenland’s ice-free yet still frigid edges. An outfit would have to ship in all their equipment and build their own city at a remote mining site at considerable cost. On top of that, it would be difficult to actually hire enough workers from the island’s population of laborers, so a mining company may need to hire internationally and bring them in. Greenland has a population of 57,000, just 65 of whom were involved in mining as of 2020, so the requisite experience just isn’t there. “Labor laws are much more strict than they would be in a Chinese rare earth mine in Mongolia,” Lajeunesse said. “All of those things factor together to make Arctic development very expensive.”
Still, the geopolitical pressure from China’s domination of the rare earths market has opened Greenland to exploration. No one needs to wait for further deterioration of the island’s ice sheet to get to work, as there’s enough ice-free land along these edges to dig through. Around 40 mining companies have exploration, prospecting, and exploitation licenses in Greenland, with the majority of the firms based in Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom. “We can give you these minerals,” Hammeken-Holm said, “but you need to come to Greenland and do the exploration.”
One of those companies is Critical Metals Corp., which in September drilled 14 holes on the coast of southern Greenland, about 16 miles from the town of Qaqortoq. The New York-based company says it’s found one of the world’s highest concentrations of gallium, which isn’t technically a rare earth element but is still essential in the manufacturing of computer chips.
Dramatic change on and around the island, though, could make mining for rare earths even more complicated. While the loss of floating ice in the waters around the island makes it easier and safer for ships to navigate, more chunks of glaciers will drop into the ocean as the world warms, which could become especially hazardous for ships, à la the Titanic.
Even given the rapid loss of Greenland’s 650,000-square-mile ice sheet, though, it would take a long while to lose it all — it’s 1.4 miles thick on average. The Earth itself is also frozen in parts of the island, known as permafrost, which will thaw in the nearer term as temperatures rise. “That's going to give you certainly instability in terms of building access roads and such,” said Paul Bierman, a geologist at the University of Vermont and author of the book When the Ice Is Gone: What a Greenland Ice Core Reveals About Earth's Tumultuous History and Perilous Future. “The climate is changing, so I think it's going to be a very dynamic environment in which to extract minerals.”
Mining pollution, too, is a major concern: The accessible land along the island’s ice-free edges is also where humans live. As mining equipment and ships burn fossil fuels, they produce black carbon. When this settles on ice, it darkens the surface, which then absorbs more sunlight — think of how much hotter you get wearing a black shirt than a white shirt on a summer day. This could further accelerate the melting of Greenland’s precarious ice sheet. A 2022 study also found that three legacy mines in Greenland heavily polluted the local environment with metals, like lead and zinc, due to the lack of environmental studies and regulation prior to the 1970s. But it also found no significant pollution at mines established in the last 20 years.
A more immediate problem with mining is the potentially toxic dust generated by so much machinery, said Niels Henrik Hooge, a campaigner at NOAH, the Danish chapter of the environmental organization Friends of the Earth. “That's a concern, because all the mining projects are located in areas where people live, or potentially could live,” Hooge said. “Everything is a bit different in the Arctic, because the environment does not recover very quickly when polluted.”
The coast is clear
Greenland's active rare earth licenses
Rare earth element exploration license
Mineral deposit
Lynge says that a win-win for Greenlanders would be to support mining but insist that it’s run on hydropower instead of fossil fuels. The island has huge potential for hydropower, and indeed has been approving more projects and expanding another existing facility. Still, no amount of hydropower can negate the impact of mining on the landscape. “There's no sustainable mining in the world,” Lynge said. “The question is if we can do it a little bit better.”
Critical Metals Corp., for its part, says that it expects to produce minimal harmful products at its site. Like other mining projects in Greenland, it will need to pass an environmental review. “We expect to provide more updates about our plans to reduce our environmental footprint as we get closer to mining operations,” said Tony Sage, the company’s CEO and executive chairman, in a statement provided to Grist. “With that, we believe it is important to keep in mind that rare earth elements are critical materials for cleaner applications, which will help us build a greener planet in the future.”
Still, wherever there’s mining activity, there’s potential for spills. There’s also potential for a lot of noise: Ships in particular fill the ocean around Greenland with a din that can stress and disorient fishes and marine mammals, like narwhals, seals, and whales. For vocalizing species, it can disrupt their communication.
There’s a lot at stake here economically and politically, too: Fishing is Greenland’s predominant industry, accounting for 95 percent of the island’s exports. Rare earth mining, then, is the island’s play to diversify its economy, which could help it wean off the subsidies it gets from the Danish government. That, in turn, could help it win independence.
A geologist points to discoveries of rare minerals and precious metals on a survey map at the University of Greenland during on March 5. Odd Andersen / AFP via Getty Images
Thus far, the mining business has been a bit rocky in Greenland. In 2021, the government banned uranium mining, halting the development of a project by the Australian outfit Greenland Minerals, which would have also produced rare earths at the site. (Greenland Minerals did not respond to multiple requests to comment for this story.) The China-linked company is now suing the Greenland government for $11 billion — potentially spooking other would-be prospectors and the investors already worried about the profitability of mining for rare earths in the far north.
“When we talk to them, they understand the situation, and they're not afraid,” said Hammeken-Holm. He added that Greenland maintains a dialogue with mining outfits about the challenges, and prospects, of exploration. “It is difficult to get private finance for these projects, but we are not alone,” he said. “That's a worldwide situation.”
The growing demand and geopolitical fervor around rare earths may well make Greenland irresistible for mining companies, regardless of the logistical challenges. Hammeken-Holm says that a major discovery, like an especially rich deposit of a given rare earth element, might be the extra boost the country needs to transform itself into an indispensable provider of the critical minerals.
Both Exner-Pirot, of the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, and Lajeunesse, the public policy expert, say that Western powers might get to the point where they intervene aggressively in the market. Like China’s state-sponsored rare earths industry, the U.S., Canada, Australia, or the European Union — which entered into a strategic partnership with Greenland in 2023 to develop critical raw materials — might band together to guarantee a steady flow of the minerals that make modern militaries, consumerism, and the energy transition possible. Subsidies, for instance, would help make the industry more profitable — and palatable for investors. “You'd have to accept that you're purchasing and developing minerals for more than the market price,” Lajeunesse said. “But over the long term, it's about developing a security of supply.”
Already a land of rapid climatological change, Greenland could soon grow richer — and more powerful on the world stage. Ton by ton, its disappearing ice will reveal more of the mineral solutions to the world’s woes.
Solomon Kahoʻohalahala steadied himself on the double-hulled voyaging canoe called Hōkūleʻa as a 15-foot swell rose and the vessel took off under the midday sun. He had been paddling since dawn along the south shore of Molokaʻi, and his arms were tired. As the canoe reached the notoriously gusty channel between Molokaʻi and Oʻahu, the crew unfurled her sails. Suddenly Hōkūleʻa was racing, surfing waves that rose so high they blocked the view of Diamond Head Crater, a high volcanic cone on Oʻahu.
It was the summer of 1975, and Kahoʻohalahala was a 24-year-old Native Hawaiian man from the island of Lanaʻi who had grown up speaking English, learning about American history, and knowing little about his Indigenous language, culture, or political history. He was just learning about how Pacific peoples had navigated the ocean, guided by constellations, to find their islands. Hōkūleʻa was the first double-hulled voyaging canoe he had seen, a vessel built by Hawaiians eager to reconnect with knowledge that had been taken from them.
“This is how we got here,” Kahoʻohalahala thought as he gripped the rails of Hōkūleʻa that day and looked up at the sails. “I am part of these islands because I came on a canoe.”
As he inhaled the salty air and felt the immensity of the ocean stretching out around him, Kahoʻohalahala realized what it meant not just to be Hawaiian, but to be Indigenous to the Pacific, peoples whose lives and genealogies owe everything to the sea.
“That was a defining moment for me,” said Kahoʻohalahala, now 73.
Solomon Kahoʻohalahala holds a rope on Hōkūleʻa during a sail from Tahiti to Marquesas in 1987. The sail was called Hōkūleʻa’s “Voyage of Re-discovery.”Courtesy of Solomon Kahoʻohalahala
Solomon Kaho’ohalahala speaks during a launch event for the Greenpeace report “30×30: From Global Ocean Treaty to Protection at Sea,” aboard the Greenpeace ship Arctic Sunrise in Long Beach, California, in 2023. Patrick T. Fallon / AFP via Getty Images
Today, the ocean that Kahoʻohalahala and so many other Indigenous peoples crossed, cared for, and survived on is on track to be mined for polymetallic nodules — potato-sized nodes that contain critical minerals necessary to power cell phones, electric vehicles, renewable energy, and weapons. The nodules are full of cobalt, nickel, copper, and other minerals, and were formed millimeter by millimeter over millions of years. Some are tens of millions of years old. The process to collect those nodules, called deep-sea mining, has been described as “a $20 trillion opportunity.” More than 500,000 square miles of ocean globally have been approved for mining — an area nearly twice the size of Texas — although only a fraction of that area actually has mineral deposits.
Mining for polymetallic nodules will require lowering massive tractors the size of houses more than 2 miles down to the seafloor where the vast majority of species are unknown and have yet to be named by humans. There, the machines will scrape the seabed, dredging up both sediment and nodules, carrying the latter up to the surface while releasing plumes of silt into the sea. Animals that aren’t crushed when the machines suck them up will likely be killed by the changing temperatures and atmospheric pressure that their bodies aren’t designed to exist in. Lifting the nodules to the surface could create sediment plumes that plunge downward, blanketing and smothering corals, sponges, and other animals that can’t escape. Depending on the depth where the plumes are released, their metallic contents might get absorbed by tuna fish and other sea creatures, contaminating essential food sources.
“There’s going to be damage at a very large scale,” said Jeffrey Drazen, an oceanographer at the University of Hawaiʻi who has received funding from a deep-sea mining company to research the environmental impacts of the practice. “It’s a matter of how much.”
Types of deep-sea mining Amelia K. Bates / Grist
The United Nations body in charge of overseeing mineral extraction from the international seafloor, known as the International Seabed Authority, or ISA, is in the midst of a yearslong process of finalizing regulations to allow countries and companies to excavate the deep sea. If passed, the rules could allow groups to tear the crusts off undersea mountains, rip nodules from the seafloor, and cut into chimney-like hydrothermal vents in the deepest, darkest parts of the ocean. Beyond the environmental harms, there are concerns that the process will violate the rights of Indigenous peoples who hold complex views and beliefs about the ocean and depend on it for their cultural, spiritual, and physical well-being and survival.
The current international rules that govern the high seas and allow countries to claim sections of them for mining date back to the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, a treaty that manages what happens in areas of oceans deemed outside national jurisdictions.
“The law of the sea basically colonized [Pacific peoples’] ocean,” said Frank Murphy, a resident of French Polynesia who along with his wife, Teurumereariki Hinano Murphy, has advocated with Kahoʻohalahala against seabed mining. “The law of the sea allowed the global community to say we have rights over this ocean including these high seas.”
Teurumereariki Hinano Murphy said visiting the headquarters of the International Seabed Authority in Jamaica made her realize how little control Pacific peoples have over what happens in their ocean.
“I realized that the future of our ocean is decided there,” she said, “far away from our people and our community, and without us being aware of what these nations are deciding for their benefit.”
Polymetallic sea nodules collected from a deep-sea mining expedition in the Indian Ocean. Pallava Bagla / Corbis via Getty Images
Fifty years after his life-changing canoe voyage, Kahoʻohalahala is leading a group of Indigenous advocates, including the Murphys, to save the ocean from deep-sea mining. They are pushing the ISA to ensure that the regulations it finalizes explicitly state that any mining venture must obtain the free, prior, and informed consent of Indigenous peoples ahead of commencing any commercial operations. It’s among several proposals that he and other advocates are fighting for, including ensuring that Indigenous peoples — whose territories are made up of far more water than land — are permitted full participation in discussions and decisions about deep-sea mining.
And the clock is ticking. The ISA has been working on seabed mining regulations since 2014, and in 2021, the country of Nauru formally requested that the ISA adopt regulations to govern seabed mining by triggering a treaty provision, which sets a two-year deadline for the authority to do so. If it doesn’t, Nauru’s plan to mine in the Clarion Kipperton Zone, nodule-rich international waters south of Hawaiʻi, will be “provisionally approved.” The regulations haven’t been finalized, and Nauru hasn’t moved ahead yet with mining, but an application could be submitted as soon as this year. Norway’s Parliament last year voted to open an area of its seabed for mining licenses before ditching the plan after heavy criticism, but countries are still snapping up exploratory licenses from the ISA to mine in international waters — with China in the lead. Meanwhile, the vacuum of knowledge about the seafloor has prompted hundreds of scientists and dozens of countries to call for a moratorium on deep-sea mining until its potential environmental effects are better understood, including how the practice will impact fisheries that overlap with the underwater sites.
In the Pacific, Nauru isn’t the only country eyeing the new industry. Although many, such as Fiji and Palau, have called for a moratorium on mining, in Tonga and the Cook Islands Indigenous peoples are wrestling with the pressure to develop their economies and how doing so could irrevocably change their island homes that are already stressed by the effects of climate change.
“We’re experiencing this because we have already created an imbalance in our ecosystems, in our Earth, and now we are feeling the consequences of that,” Kahoʻohalahala said. “Do we continue to just move in that vein of continuous colonization, continuous extraction?”
Solomon Kahoʻohalahala speaks at the International Seabed Authority in Jamaica. He was invited to attend by Greenpeace and received the advocacy organization’s observer status. Courtesy of Solomon Kahoʻohalahala
The Kumulipo is the Hawaiian chant that describes the creation of the world: “At the time that turned the heat of the Earth, at the time when the heavens turned and changed, at the time when the light of the sun was subdued to cause light to break forth.”
The song describes the ocean as the source of all living things, starting with sea creatures in the darkness and ending with an extensive Hawaiian genealogy connecting the people to the sea.
“We’re ocean people,” Kahoʻohalahala said. “We are related to the ocean because we are the seafarers and we came by way of canoe to inhabit the largest ocean on earth.”
Other Pacific peoples have similar creation stories, and the sacredness of the ocean isn’t limited to the birth of life, it also has a major role in death: “That’s where the soul of our ancestors, when they leave this world, they go into the deep,” said Teurumereariki Hinano Murphy from French Polynesia, an advocate alongside Kahoʻohalahala at the International Seabed Authority. Cecilio Raiukiulipiy, a traditional navigator from the Federated States of Micronesia, said until the 1970s, when Western influence changed burial practices, all of his relatives were laid to rest at sea. “Deep-sea mining, that’s like you’re digging up the grave of my ancestors,” he said.
Yet despite this cultural tie to the ocean, some Pacific countries like Nauru and the Cook Islands are at the forefront of exploring the potential of deep-sea mining.
“The greatest risk we face is not the potential environmental impacts of mineral recovery but the risk of inaction,” Nauru’s president David Adeang said at the U.N. General Assembly last fall. “There is a risk of failing to seize the opportunity to transform to renewable energy and decarbonize our planet.”
In the Cook Islands, Prime Minister Mark Brown, who is Māori, has described the pursuit of seabed mining within the islands’ surrounding waters as part of the country’s “journey of sovereign independence” and compared it to how Cook Islanders first navigated across the ocean using their knowledge of constellations and waves to find and settle islands like Rarotonga.
“We discovered the islands hundreds of years ago that today we call home. We had a capability that nobody else had,” he told a television reporter last year. “Today we choose now to take a journey that’s not across our ocean, but down into the deep ocean.”
Brown just signed a new agreement with China in February regarding seabed minerals, with details yet to be released. But he has promised that mining won’t proceed if it’s environmentally harmful. “If the extraction method is going to damage the ocean, then we’re not going to go ahead with it,” he said.
Drazen, the oceanographer from the University of Hawaiʻi, said some degree of environmental harm is guaranteed — the question is just how much. At the bottom of the sea, the ground has barely been disrupted for millions of years, and populations of sea creatures could take decades to recover. Heavy equipment is expected to hit and kill sea creatures upon impact. Among other ecological impacts of deep-sea mining, Drazen has studied how the plumes of sediment that mining is expected to generate could affect sea life closer to the surface, and suggested that mining companies consider releasing the plumes at lower depths to minimize impacts on fisheries.
And while Brown refers to seabed mining as “harvesting,” a commonly used descriptor by proponents of the practice, Drazen doesn’t think that term is accurate. Harvesting implies that nodules are a renewable resource, which they aren’t, he said.
Kahoʻohalahala thinks the reality is no Pacific nation is truly independent of one another: Any decision the Cook Islands makes, that Tonga makes, will affect the same ocean that also belongs to Hawaiʻi, to Guam, to Fiji, to Papua New Guinea, and beyond.
“Drawing circles around our islands to identify where our authority is doesn’t fit with the way we manage our places. There are no such divisions in the ocean that separate our responsibility,” Kahoʻohalahala said. “The ocean knows no barriers. Our resources move across the entirety of the ocean.”
Solomon Kahoʻohalaha talks to reporters about his concerns over deep-sea mining at a press conference in Honolulu in December 2023.Anita Hofschneider / Grist
Dozens gather to protest deep-sea mining in Hawaiʻi in December 2023.Anita Hofschneider / Grist
In order for their sovereignty to be recognized internationally, Indigenous Pacific peoples had to adopt the nation-state structure created by imperial powers, conform to geographic boundaries carved by their colonizers, and enter a global economic order that prizes extractive industries. Pacific peoples were effectively told, “‘You have to look like us in order for us to recognize you,’” said Tarcisius Kabutaulaka, a political scientist at the University of Hawaiʻi from the Solomon Islands.
Establishing a nation-state might seem like liberation, but in other ways it was a reentry into a Western political and economic order defined by colonial powers. “States function in particular ways,” Kabutaulaka said. “They do not always function on behalf of Indigenous peoples.”
Many Pacific island nations achieved their current political statuses in the wave of decolonization that marked the early years of the United Nations. Back then, Western powers were shifting their imperial strategies away from expansive empires and toward specific strategic strongholds. In the decades since, island governments have sought to compete in the global economy as they watch their residents out-migrate for jobs, schools, and medical care they can’t get back home. But that’s often involved embracing foreign investors and industries that have left a litany of environmental and social problems in their wake.
“Independence is not decolonization,” Kabutaulaka said. “Inherently, the act of independence is an act of recolonizing.”
Nauru is an example: Under German rule, phosphate was discovered and mined on the island at the beginning of the 20th century. By the end of WWI, more than 600,000 tons of the mineral were taken and sold to make commercial fertilizer in other countries, with the Indigenous people of Nauru receiving far less than 1 percent of its value. The mining continued for another 50 years after ownership of the island was passed to Britain, New Zealand, and then Australia. After independence in 1968, the country continued phosphate mining. Now, 80 percent of its territory has been stripped, its dusty, rocky inland area is now uninhabitable and unable to be farmed.
Workers mine phosphate on Nauru in the late 1960s.
Bettmann / Getty Images
The country has since shifted to selling fishing rights and detaining refugees and asylum-seekers for Australia. One analysis for The Metals Company suggested mining could bring in $7.2 billion in royalties for both Nauru and the International Seabed Authority, with more than $30 billion in net revenue.
In the Cook Islands, deep-sea revenue could be “transformational,” Prime Minister Mark Brown told reporters last year. A 2019 study suggested that deep-sea mining could be a multibillion dollar industry within the Cook Islands alone, which is estimated to have the worldʻs largest collection of manganese nodules within its surrounding waters. The country is home to fewer than 17,000 people who earn a median annual income of just over $10,000 U.S. dollars.
That kind of revenue would be alluring to most, but not to Teina Rongo, the first Cook Islander to get a doctorate in marine biology. “When I went abroad to study, seeing what’s happening in other parts of the Pacific, I started realizing the value of this way of life and what it brings to us,” he said.
Teina Rongo is the first Cook Islander to receive a PhD in marine biology. He worries about his countryʻs push toward westernization and thinks the environment and community would be better served by maintaining traditional practices of fishing and farming. Courtesy of Teina Rongo
Rongo grew up Rongo grew up fishing, farming, and speaking his Māori language. But when he visited New Zealand, also known by the Māori name Aotearoa, and Hawaiʻi, he saw how easily Indigenous peoples can be marginalized in their own lands. It’s something he’s already seeing in his home in Rarotonga in the Cook Islands: More westernization has meant more reliance on unhealthy imported foods and more people getting sick and moving away to access medical care like dialysis. More development has meant the paving over of wetlands that once held taro fields, and more industrial fishing has led to fewer and fewer fish for local fishers.
Rongo sees his people’s choice as a binary one: There is no deep-sea mining that doesnʻt disturb the seafloor, or harm its inhabitants. And while many see the Cook Islands’ quest for more revenue as a given, Rongo isn’t one of them.
“We don’t need to go in the same colonial pathway,” he said. “My concern is that if mining becomes a revenue generator for us, it’s just going to push us quicker in that direction. … And then we are going to lose who we are.”
Last summer, he flew to Honolulu with the Cook Islands delegation to a Pacific cultural festival. He and his fellow delegates later learned their journey was partially sponsored by the deep-sea mining industry. Over lunch in a mall in Waikiki, with luxury shops and a Tesla showroom, Rongo looked up at the towering buildings and said it felt like a warning of what Rarotonga could become if his people continued on a path to become a “developed” nation.
Imogen Ingram, another Cook Islands resident who helped Kahoʻohalahala petition the ISA to safeguard Indigenous heritage, is skeptical that mining will be as lucrative for her islands as many hope. Mining that far down in the ocean requires millions in upfront costs to pay for engineers and equipment. Companies like Tesla are creating electric vehicle batteries with little to no cobalt. The prices of metals have been volatile, with copper rising but manganese falling recently.
Imogen Ingram from the Cook Islands said she’s fighting to defend the ocean from deep-sea mining. “It’s cared for us for generations, we should show the same respect,” she said. Courtesy of Imogen Ingram
Rashid Sumaila, a professor of ocean economics at the University of British Columbia, said deep-sea mining might lead to short-term profits for mining companies and some financial benefits for countries like the Cook Islands, but the long-term costs are significant in part because of the risks of environmental harm that could lead to expensive litigation. In 2019, a failed deep-sea mining venture in Papua New Guinea’s waters saddled the country’s government with a $120 million debt when the mining company it had invested in, Nautilus Minerals, went bankrupt. One of Nautilus’ former leading investors is now the CEO of The Metals Company.
Under international law, Indigenous peoples have the right to free, prior, and informed consent for all projects within their territories. Their approval needs to be given freely before practices begin, and the people need to be fully aware of an activity’s implications.
But even if her Indigenous-led government consents to deep-sea mining, Ingram worries about whether the information her people are receiving about the industry is accurate and whether the leaders’ perspectives truly reflect the views of the people. For years, mining companies have been supporting community events and lobbying the country’s leaders. Ingram hears a lot about what benefits the mining will bring, but she doesn’t think there’s enough discussion in her community about its risks.
“Free, prior, and informed — it’s the ‘informed’ part that we’re not getting,” she said.
The Metals Company workers disembark from a research vessel recently returned from the Clarion Clipperton Zone of the Pacific Ocean. During the 2021 voyage, soil, water, and wildlife samples were obtained from deep in the ocean as part of the research to see the effects mining will have on the environment. Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
On a recent day in February, Rongo held up a handful of soft, springy seaweed to 30 schoolchildren surrounding him on a beach in the Cook Islands. “Boodlea,” Rongo said, stating the seaweed’s scientific name and explaining it can be used for fertilizer. It’s part of his work leading a nonprofit helping connect Indigenous youth to traditional ecological knowledge before it’s lost.
“If our kids have no connection and relationship with their environment, they won’t value it,” Rongo said. “They’ll give it to anyone who comes here and wants to develop a mine or fish; they won’t care, they’ll just give it.”
He understands that some of his elders feel like they worked so hard to escape the hardships of traditional living and don’t want to go back, but he sees it as a climate solution: a way to lessen the insatiable consumerism and growth driving the climate crisis.
“If we live this life, we are actually adapting to climate change,” he said. “We live our simple life, we are doing our bit at the local level.”
Kahoʻohalahala feels the same. Since that first sail on Hōkūleʻa, he has traveled across Polynesia and to Micronesia and realized that the ocean unites far more than it divides Pacific peoples.
“In Oceania it took us a long time to understand that even though we’re colonized by different nations, we’re actually the same people and we have always been the same people,” he said. “All of us collectively as the people of Oceania, we have a connection to this ocean, which has inherent responsibility for its care.”
Rachel Reeves contributed reporting for this story.
Rows of dead batteries stretch across some 30 acres of high desert, organized in piles and boxes that are covered to shield them from the western Nevada sun. This vast field is where Redwood Materials stores the batteries it harvests from electric vehicles, laptops, toothbrushes, and the litany of other gadgets powered by lithium-ion technology. They now await recycling at what is the largest such facility in the country.
Redwood was founded in 2017 by former Tesla executive JB Straubel and says it processes about three-quarters of all lithium-ion batteries recycled in the United States. It is among a growing number of operations that shred the packs that power modern life into what is called “black mass,” then recoup upwards of 95 percent of the lithium, cobalt, nickel, and other minerals they contain. Every ounce they recover is an ounce that doesn’t need to be dug from the ground.
Redwood’s Tahoe Campus in northern Nevada Redwood Materials
Recycling could significantly reduce the need to extract virgin material, a process that is riddled with human rights and environmental concerns, such as the reliance on open pit mines in developing countries. Even beyond those worries, the Earth contains a finite source of minerals, and skyrocketing demand will squeeze supplies. The world currently extracts about 180,000 metric tons of lithium each year — and demand is expected to hit nearly 10 times that by 2050, as adoption of electric vehicles, battery storage, and other technology needed for a green transition surges. At those levels, there are only enough known reserves to last about 15 years. The projected runway for cobalt is even shorter.
Before hitting these theoretical limits, though, demand for the metals is likely to outstrip the world’s ability to economically and ethically mine them, said Beatrice Browning, an expert on battery recycling at Benchmark Mineral Intelligence, which tracks the industry. “Recycling is going to plug that gap,” she told Grist.
Given these trends, the most remarkable thing about Redwood isn’t that it exists, but that it didn’t exist sooner. As the United States belatedly embraces the economic, national security, and environmental benefits that domestic battery recycling offers, it is trying to claw back market share from counties like South Korea, Japan, and especially China, which has a decades-long head start. “There is this race in terms of EV recycling that people are trying to capitalize on,” said Brian Cunningham, program manager for battery research and development at the Department of Energy. “Everybody understands that, in the long term, developing these robust supply chains is going to be incredibly reliant on battery recycling.”
Straubel’s recycling journey began while he was still the chief technology officer at Tesla, which he co-founded with Elon Musk, and three others, in 2003. One of his roles was establishing the company’s first domestic battery manufacturing facility, Gigafactory Nevada. Material for Tesla’s batteries came from mines around the world, and Straubel understood that the trend would accelerate alongside demand for EVs, which has quintupled in number in the U.S. since 2020. He also knew that, in the years ahead, a growing number of electric vehicles would reach the end of their lives. According to consulting firm Circular Energy Storage, the world’s supply of retired batteries is expected to grow tenfold by 2030.
“[We] need to be planning ahead and really keeping an eye toward what that future looks like, to be ready to recycle every one of those batteries,” Straubel said in 2023. “The worst thing we could do is go to all this destruction and trouble to mine it, refine it, build the product and then throw it away.”
JB Straubel, then-Tesla Motors chief technical officer, speaks during a ribbon cutting for a new Supercharger station outside of the Tesla Factory on August 16, 2013 in Fremont, California.
Justin Sullivan / Getty Images
Last year, Redwood says it recycled 20 gigawatt-hours of lithium-ion batteries, or the equivalent of about a quarter-million EVs, generating $200 million in revenue. In addition to its headquarters in Carson City, Nevada, Redwood is building a campus in South Carolina. It isn’t alone in looking to expand. Ascend Elements, Cirba Solutions, Blue Whale Materials, and Li-Cycle are among a number of recyclers operating, or planning to operate, facilities in at least nine states across the country. More than 50 startups worldwide have attracted billions in investment in recent years. (Much of this outlay was driven by Biden-era legislation that Republicans are considering repealing, though it remains unclear just what such action might mean for spending already planned or underway.)
Despite the boom, the reuse revolution won’t come quickly.
Benchmark projects that recycled lithium and cobalt will account for a bit more than one-quarter of the global supply of those metals by 2040. A closed system in which battery manufacturers use only recycled material is considerably further off, because any increase in the number of old packs available to recycle will be outstripped by the need for new ones.
Global demand for EV batteries, for example, is growing by about 24 percent per year and won’t level off until sometime after 2040 — the point at which Benchmark’s forecast ends and growth is still forecast at 6 percent per year. The battery powering an EV can last well over a decade or more, so there will be a lag before the supply of recycled material catches up to demand.
Even today, the world’s recycling capacity outpaces the supply of batteries available to recycle, leaving everyone clambering to find more. That has meant waiting for EV batteries to reach the end of their lives, and attempting to recycle the small batteries in everyday gadgets that are often trashed. The dearth of material available for recycling is often attributed to the idea that only 5 percent of lithium batteries make it to companies like Redwood Materials. But the provenance of that number, cited everywhere from the Department of Energy and Ames National Laboratory to The New York Times and Grist, is murky.
“If you ever ask, ‘Where did that 5 percent number come from?’ no one can really track back to the data,” said Bryant Polzin, a process engineer at Argonne National Laboratory. Like other Department of Energy employees or affiliates quoted in this story, he spoke to Grist before President Trump was inaugurated. “I think it was just kind of a game of telephone.”
Argonne’s research pegs the recycling rate for all lithium-ion batteries originating in the U.S. at 54 percent — 10 percent domestically and 44 percent in China — though it notes that data reliability remains an issue. Even that number, though, falls considerably short of what’s possible: 99 percent of lead acid batteries, like those used to start cars, in the United States are recycled, according to the Battery Council International trade association.
Technicians operate automated recycling equipment at an electric vehicle power lithium battery recycling workshop in Hefei, Anhui province, China, in 2023.
CFOTO / Future Publishing via Getty Images
Redwood works with many automakers, including Toyota, BMW and Volkswagen, to gather EV batteries, and goes into the field to collect others from automotive repair shops, salvage yards, and the like. Policy tweaks could help recyclers acquire more. In California, for example, a state working group recommended more clearly delineating when various entities in the supply chain — from the battery supplier and auto manufacturer to a dismantler or refurbisher — are responsible for ensuring a battery is recovered, reused, or recycled. This, the report said, could reduce the risk of “stranded” resources.
So far, though, this seems to be a rare occurance. The much bigger hindrance to EV recycling in the U.S. is simply that there aren’t enough old batteries to meet the demand for new ones. As that waiting game unfolds, recycling those often discarded as household waste could help bridge the gap.
Small lithium-ion batteries power everything from phones and electric toothbrushes to toys. By Benchmark’s estimate, about 5 percent of virgin lithium is used in consumer devices, but when they die, many of them are squirreled away in a drawer or trashed.
“A lot of household stuff does get chucked in the waste, and they’re not getting recycled,” said Andy Latham, the founder of Salvage Wire, a consulting firm focused on automotive battery recycling. Beyond being wasteful, dropping old batteries in the trash can be dangerous; scores of garbage trucks in cities from New York to Oregon have caught fire in recent years due to improperly disposed e-waste.
Data on just how much lithium is simply thrown away or hoarded remains elusive. But Latham says, in the short-term, batteries in portable electronics are “probably just as much, if not more of a factor” as those in EVs when it comes to advancing recycling. Redwood Materials, for one, is hoovering up as many as it can. It works with nonprofits and others to funnel them to its Nevada campus and hopes to establish drop-off locations at big-box retailers, similar to can and bottle collection in some states.
“Collection is definitely the biggest challenge,” said Alexis Georgeson, Redwood Materials’ vice president of government relations and policy. “It’s really a problem of how you get consumers to clean out their junk drawers.”
How to get rid of your e-waste
Lithium-ion batteries can be found in laptops, phones, toothbrushes, Bluetooth speakers, and power tools, just to name a few things. But many people aren’t sure what to do with these gadgets once they die. Instead of tossing them in the trash, which can be dangerous, experts say to recycle them. Here’s how.
The nonprofit Call2Recycle operates some 16,000 sites nationwide where people can drop off their devices at no cost — at libraries, garbage dumps, and big box stores like Staples. The organization collected 5.4 million pounds of rechargeable batteries in 2023, and provides an online map to find a recycling location near you. Earth 911, Green Gadgets, and GreenCitizen also have locators.
Some cities offer curbside pickup, making recycling even easier. Call2Recycle, Electronic Recycling International, and others will take them by mail, usually for a fee. “Batteries sitting in a junk drawer or a box in the basement can accidentally cause a fire,”said Mia Roethlein, an environmental analyst at the Department of Environmental Conservation in Vermont, a national recycling leader. “Bring them to one of the free battery collection locations as soon as they are no longer usable.”
Until more people do that, recyclers count on a somewhat ironic source of material: Scraps from factories that make new batteries. One of Redwood’s primary feedstocks are the bits and pieces left over during the manufacturing process in places like Tesla’s Gigafactory, Georgeson said. Benchmark estimates that such leftovers represent about 84 percent of the material all battery recyclers use today.
The authors of the Argonne paper underscored how vital this material is: “If no scrap was available,” they wrote, “the development of the U.S. recycling industry might be significantly delayed.”
As more EVs hit the end of the road, consumer electronics are collected in greater numbers, and battery manufacturing yields less scrap as it grows more efficient, the composition of the material will adjust. New battery technologies could also have an impact, with emerging solid-state batteries, for example, expected to create more production waste in the short term but less in the long term. But few doubt recycling will be a thriving business that could help the country cut carbon emissions and decrease its dependency on places like China, Chile, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo for increasingly vital minerals. It’s a future that American policymakers are trying to shape, hasten, and prepare for.
Although under threat from President Donald Trump’s administration, both the Biden-era bipartisan infrastructure law and Inflation Reduction Act, or IRA, explicitly aim to bring battery manufacturing to the United States. They provided billions of dollars in grants and tax credits to incentivize building out domestic capacity (often in Republican congressional districts). The consumer-facing EV tax credit also requires that manufacturers source a minimum amount of both minerals and components locally. The government has been investing hundreds of millions of dollars in battery recycling as well, including Department of Energy support for everything from collection systems for small electronics to research into improving recycling technology.
“The work that we are funding is to really make those processes more efficient and economical,” said Jake Herb, technology development manager at the agency’s Vehicle Technologies Office. One success story is Ascend Elements, which Department of Energy funding helped grow from a Worcester Polytechnic Institute startup into a major player in the domestic industry. The department offered to loan Redwood Materials $2 billion to expand its factory, though the company declined the additional investment and says it has not accepted any federal funding. A robust domestic industry ensures that“we’re able to reclaim more materials [and] keep more of those materials domestic in the U.S,” Herb said.
Several challenges remain as the country sprints toward that goal.
One hurdle is figuring out when recycling is the best option. Argonne National Laboratory’s “battery material use hierarchy” puts recycling near the bottom of its list of possible outcomes. It’s better to find alternate uses for batteries, especially those from EVs, like refurbishing them for use in another car or directing them to less intensive applications, such as for energy storage.
“It would provide a much more economical solution to consumers,” said Vince Edivan, executive director of the Automotive Recyclers Association.
Still, this so-called “second life” market remains nascent in the U.S. Edivan says automakers could boost it by making it easier for salvage yards to assess a battery’s condition to determine whether it can be reused or should be recycled. They often consider that information proprietary, he said. “We’re shredding perfectly good batteries because we don’t know the state of health.”
It’s somewhat hazy who is supposed to regulate this rapidly growing industry. The Environmental Protection Agency considers lithium-ion batteries hazardous waste, which dictates how they should and shouldn’t be disposed of, but doesn’t directly address recycling. In 2021, Argonne signed on to help develop lithium recycling standards, though the status of that effort remains unclear. The task will likely fall to a patchwork of federal, state, and local authorities, which must keep the public both safe and confident in a process that will be critical to the country’s — and the climate’s — future.
Perhaps the biggest challenge to creating a full-cycle loop in the United States is that before any reclaimed material can be used in a battery, it must be refined into an intermediary product, such as cathode, which makes up approximately 40 percent of a battery’s value. “You can’t send lithium to a Gigafactory,” said Georgeson. “It is like sending sand to a computer factory.”
At the moment, no one is making cathode in the U.S. at scale — manufacturers are buying it from Asia. Redwood, Ascend Elements, and others are ramping up cathode facilities that should be online in the coming years (Panasonic plans to use Redwood cathode at its new battery plant in Kansas). But, for now, they are frequently selling their raw material abroad.
Georgeson sees federal policy as key to helping, or hindering, efforts to plug the cathode hole in the supply chain. One impediment has been a Treasury Department ruling that allows cathode sourced from allied countries to also qualify for the EV tax credit. That, she said, has pushed billions in business and investments to countries like South Korea instead of the United States.
It remains unclear exactly how the new administration will impact the industry, but President Trump could certainly upend it. If Congress rolls back the IRA’s investment and production tax credits, it could significantly handicap America’s burgeoning recycling buildout. On the other hand, tariffs, particularly aimed at China, could tip the economic scales toward American producers and recyclers by making imported batteries and their components more expensive.
Redwood, for one, is optimistic that its goal of onshoring both battery recycling and cathode production aligns with Trump’s goals of putting “America first.” Straubel has said that the Trump administration could do a lot to encourage a more robust domestic supply chain, including making the battery origin requirements of the EV tax credit more stringent — rather than scrapping the incentive entirely.
Getting the policy wrong, the company argues, will put the U.S. at the mercy of others in a future where battery recycling will only become more critical.
Blanca Begert contributed reporting to this story.
Scattered across the United States, hundreds of thousands of abandoned mines scar the earth, posing a safety hazard to passing hikers and a health risk to nearby communities. But cached inside piles of refuse and ponds of toxic waste, there are also elements as critical for the 21st-century economy as coal was for the industrial revolution. Now, an obscure federal government program known as the Earth Mapping Resources Initiative, or Earth MRI, is identifying the high-tech minerals concealed in these mines — as well as those hidden beneath the Earth’s surface.
Developed by the U.S. Geological Survey, or USGS, during the first Trump administration, Earth MRI aims to comprehensively map the nation’s underground deposits of “critical minerals” — an ever-growing list of elements and compounds considered vital for national security and the economy. In 2021, Earth MRI received a massive funding boost through the bipartisan infrastructure law, accelerating federal scientists’ efforts to figure out which parts of the country are rich in minerals used in clean energy technologies, semiconductors, and high-tech weaponry. While the Trump administration has moved aggressively to reverse most of former President Joe Biden’s climate policies, it appears to agree with the prior administration’s desire to locate — and, eventually, mine — more of these resources.
“This is a program that has survived both the Trump and Biden administrations,” Peter Cook, a critical minerals policy expert at The Breakthrough Institute, an environmental solutions research organization, told Grist. “They’re both definitely interested in critical minerals.”
An Earth MRI map showing data collected by the program. USGS
Minerals like lithium, graphite, and the group of 17 metallic elements known as rare earths are essential for a wide range of technologies, including those at the heart of the clean energy transition. The lithium-ion batteries that store renewable energy and power EVs can contain lithium, graphite, nickel, cobalt, manganese, and more. Electric vehicle motors and some wind turbine generators contain magnets that require the rare earth element neodymium, and often smaller amounts of dysprosium and terbium. Certain solar panels require gallium, germanium, indium, and tellurium. The clean energy sector’s appetite for these metals is expected to surge as the energy transition accelerates: A recent report by The Breakthrough Institute found that EVs alone may account for two-thirds of future national demand of many key minerals. At the same time, critical minerals are vital for high-tech military technologies, advanced semiconductors, and more.
Despite these diverse needs, U.S. output of many minerals is limited. A 2020 report by the Commerce Department found that of an initial list of 35 critical minerals, America’s supply of 31 of them came mostly or entirely from foreign sources. Production of many critical minerals is dominated by China, which is engaged in a trade war with the United States that has involved tariffs and export restrictions on several metals. For some particularly scarce metals like gallium, used in advanced semiconductors, the U.S. has no domestic production at all.
While Biden saw domestic mineral supply chains as a key pillar of a U.S. clean energy manufacturing economy, Donald Trump’s interest in critical minerals appears more related to their military uses and national security implications. That interest can be seen in everything from a foreign policy focused on mining deals to a domestic agenda that includes cutting bureaucratic red tape to fuel additional mineral extraction. While Earth MRI hasn’t garnered the same level of attention as, say, Trump’s desire to buy Greenland for its rare earth resources or bargain with Ukraine for its minerals in exchange for military aid, the existence of the program reflects a long-standing focus on shoring up U.S. mineral supplies.
The USGS established Earth MRI in 2019, following a Trump executive order that called on federal agencies to address vulnerabilities in the nation’s critical mineral supply chains. Initially, the program had a modest annual budget of about $11 million, which USGS scientists, in partnership with state geological surveys around the country, used to launch a national critical minerals mapping campaign that included a mix of airborne surveys and on-the-ground fieldwork. But the bipartisan infrastructure law, or BIL, allowed Earth MRI to kick into overdrive, with a $320 million funding boost spread over five years. In 2022, the program’s yearly budget jumped to $75 million, a level at which it will remain through 2026.
“We’re transforming the data landscape, and we’re transforming it in a big and consistent way through the sustained funding,” Earth MRI science coordinator Jamey Jones told Grist in an interview.
Earth MRI’s recent list of achievements is impressive.
When the BIL passed into law in late 2021, scientists had collected high-quality geophysical data across only about 10 percent of the United States; by late 2024, that figure had jumped to nearly 25 percent. In the past two years alone, Jones said, Earth MRI scientists have conducted airborne magnetic surveys — which measure variations in Earth’s magnetic field to detect different subsurface rock types and identify features like faults — across an area twice the size of Montana. Late last year, Earth MRI and NASA completed the world’s largest high-quality hyperspectral survey over California, Nevada, and Arizona. Hyperspectral surveys, which measure reflected sunlight outside the range of human vision, can be used in arid regions to produce detailed mineral maps of the Earth’s surface. This year and next, NASA and Earth MRI will expand the survey to include parts of Texas, New Mexico, Utah, Wyoming, and Oregon.
In addition to mapping minerals still in the ground, Earth MRI is taking a closer look at ones that have already been extracted. In 2023, the program’s scientists accelerated their efforts to explore the critical mineral content of mine waste located in tailings ponds and rock piles around the country. Mine waste is considered a potentially valuable source of many important metals and minerals, but they have never been systematically studied. Thanks to BIL funding, Jones says that the USGS recently completed the first-ever comprehensive national inventory of abandoned mine lands, which it anticipates publishing later this year. In partnership with state geological surveys, Earth MRI is now in the process of dispatching researchers to abandoned mine sites to collect samples of waste rock that can be analyzed in the lab to assess their critical mineral content. “Eventually, we hope to produce a national assessment of critical mineral resources in mine waste,” Jones said.
A helicopter carries an airborne electromagnetic induction sensor over parts of northeastern Wisconsin for a USGS study in January 2021. USGS / Wisconsin Dept. of Agricultural, Trade, and Consumer Protection; Wisconsin Dept. of Natural Resources / Wisconsin Geological and Natural History Survey
The data Earth MRI is collecting does not indicate which exact spots in the ground are the most attractive to mine. Rather, it supplies just enough information “to attract the private sector into an area” to conduct more detailed exploratory work, said Simon Jowitt, who directs the Nevada Bureau of Mines and Geology and is Earth MRI’s primary point of contact for the state. The effort involved in collecting this preliminary, or “pre-competitive,” data often has an outsized economic benefit, Jowitt says. Research in other countries shows that for every dollar governments spend on it, tens to hundreds of dollars are returned to the economy through private investment in exploration and mining.
“If we want to have more mineral exploration, more secure domestic supply chains of metals and minerals, then we need to have these data,” Jowitt added.
Mining proposals often attract intensepublicopposition, due to fears about damage to ecosystems and water supplies. But both Trump and Biden — as well as members of Congress on both sides of the aisle — appear to support more of it. While it’s still too early to say how much of an impact Earth MRI will have on domestic mining — it often takes a decade or more to permit or build a mine even after all the exploratory work is complete — there are signs that private industry is taking a keen interest in its data. For instance, Jones said an exploration company in Nevada told the agency that it has discovered new lithium deposits based on geochemical data Earth MRI released.
Even as Trump has sought to kneecap other federal agencies and projects, funding for Earth MRI never appeared to be in serious jeopardy. On his first day in office, Trump signed an executive order that called for “terminating the Green New Deal” by pausing the disbursement of all funds appropriated through the BIL and the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act — a move that multiple judges have found to be illegal. But the same order directed the interior secretary to “prioritize efforts to accelerate the ongoing, detailed geologic mapping of the United States, with a focus on locating previously unknown deposits of critical minerals.”
“I think it was pretty quickly recognized that the priorities [of the order] would outweigh the freeze,” Jones said. After a four-week pause, the Trump administration restored Earth MRI’s funding on February 18. And this month, Trump issued another executive order calling for agency heads to identify “as many sites as possible” on federal land that may be suitable for critical minerals mining and invoking the Defense Production Act to accelerate mineral development.
Slabs of lithium boron found beneath Esmeralda County, Nevada. Godofredo A. Vasquez/Houston Chronicle via Getty Images
While the mapping program is moving full steam ahead for now, it remains to be seen what will become of it once BIL funding sunsets after 2026. Barring an additional infusion of cash from Congress, Jones says the most likely scenario is that the program’s budget will return to its pre-2022 baseline of about $11 million a year — a roughly 75 percent cut.
Jowitt, the Nevada state geologist, says he’d “like to be optimistic” that Congress will authorize additional funds for Earth MRI so that scientists can continue to fill in the gaps in the nation’s geologic maps. But considering the Trump administration’s recent efforts to dramatically shrink federal spending, he isn’t sure what will happen.
One thing is clear: There will be more work left to do after the BIL coffers are emptied. By 2027, “we can tell you exactly how much [geological data] coverage will have increased in the country for all of our different techniques,” Jones said. “And none of those numbers add up to 100 percent. Our job will not be complete.”
Mining — whether for fossil fuels or, increasingly, the critical minerals in high demand today — has a long history of perpetuating violence against Indigenous people. Forcibly removing tribal communities to get to natural resources tied to their homelands has been the rule, not the exception, for centuries.
Today, more than half of the mineral deposits needed for a global energy transition — including lithium, cobalt, copper, and nickel to make things like batteries and solar panels — are found near or beneath Indigenous lands.
In 2007, the United Nations adopted a resolution called the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples that included the right to free, prior, and informed consent to the use of their lands, a concept known as FPIC. This principle protects Indigenous peoples from being forcibly relocated, provides suitable avenues for redress of past injustices, and gives tribes and communities the right to consent to — and the right to refuse — extractive industry projects like mining.
There’s a lot at stake: When followed, FPIC promises a process that gives Indigenous peoples a voice in how their homelands are used, as well as the right to say no to development altogether. And when it’s not, which is the vast majority of the time, tribal communities are further disenfranchised, facing violence and forced relocation as their sovereignty and rights are ignored.
There are an estimated 5,000 tribal communities around the world, encompassing roughly 476 million people across 90 countries, according to the U.N. Different tribes have different opinions on mining, but rarely is their legal right to refuse extraction projects recognized, even under the 2007 declaration.
Grist talked with five experts to better understand what free, prior, and informed consent should look like in this new era of mineral extraction. Their responses have been edited for length and clarity.
Kate Finn, Osage, founder and executive director of the Tallgrass Institute
Originally an attorney, Finn now works with tribal communities and those in the mining industry to better implement FPIC. The Tallgrass Institute provides training and resources about the importance of tribal sovereignty.
Through one of our close partnerships, the SIRGE Coalition, we published an FPIC guide for Indigenous leaders. The goal of this resource is to provide information for Indigenous leaders who want to start putting together their own protocols for FPIC. I get to see a lot of innovation in this way from my desk and in my role as leading a global nongovernmental organization. But I know Indigenous leaders are always looking for what others are doing and what is working and what isn’t, so our best hope is that this guide helps provide information to build knowledge.
With investors, we provide resources and tools that not only help them to understand the breadth and depth of Indigenous peoples’ expertise and knowledge, but also to implement rights-based engagements. This is exactly what we want with our Free, Prior and Informed Consent Due Diligence questionnaire. This tool helps investors parse all the ways and steps that lead to a better engagement with Indigenous peoples.
What is FPIC?
Free, prior, and informed consent, or FPIC, reflects Indigenous peoples’ right to give or withhold consent on anything that affects their lands or resources. FPIC is embedded in the U.N.’s Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, requiring the 147 countries that signed it to make laws that give it legal standing.
However, implementation is often left to corporations and government agencies, and there are major power imbalances and policies that can derail negotiations between tribes, governments, and investors.
How can I advocate for FPIC?
1) Indigenous peoples are protected groups with rights that protect land and its original inhabitants through documents like treaties. Familiarize yourself with those that affect your area, and advocate for tribal consent and self-determination.
2) Learn as much as you can about FPIC and talk directly to community leaders about developing a plan to have in place if a mining project is proposed on or near your land.
3) State and federal agencies have differing policies based on tribal consultation, so the burden of communication lies largely with tribes. Because tribes can create their own policies around FPIC, talk to community leaders about what that process looks like.
4) Learn the names of international, large-scale mining companies that might be operating in your area, such as Solaris Resources, Rio Tinto, Vale S.A., and Glencore.
5) When possible, build relationships with other communities protected by FPIC that have fought against mines around the world, so that you can learn from them and share strategies.
There is a lot of opportunity in this area. Shareholder engagement provides a pathway for Indigenous peoples to join collaboratively with allied investors to shift corporate behavior in a way that is aligned with Indigenous peoples’ priorities and self-determined goals. This can be a critical and necessary strategy when countries’ substandard policies allow corporations to operate with impacts to Indigenous peoples, whether operating in their own jurisdictions or internationally.
One powerful memory is a shareholder training we did with Indigenous youth at the U.N. Permanent Forum of Indigenous Peoples in 2024. We asked a room full of young people — all new to the idea of speaking to a shareholder or to the heads of a corporation — to craft a three-minute presentation that conveyed the priorities and concerns of their communities. The enthusiasm, readiness, eloquence, and precision that these young leaders brought to the exercise was breathtaking. It gave me delight and inspiration to witness future leadership in this field, and it opened my eyes to the potential for a generational approach to shareholder advocacy.
Richard Luarkie, Laguna of Pueblo, director of the Native American Mining and Energy Sovereignty Initiative
Luarkie works to give tribes interested in pursuing mining opportunities the power to leverage their resources while asserting themselves as sovereign nations.
In 1952, our tribe entered into mining uranium. I read back on some of those council minutes, and it was very interesting because the discussion was about: “How do we do this? How do we provide for our people in the best way that we can?” We went from a few hundred thousand dollars in our bank account in the early ’50s to having millions at the end of the ’50s. Leapfrog to the late ’80s, and when I started college my bachelor’s was paid for with a scholarship — mining paid for my education.
I see all this need for critical minerals. The U.S. Department of Interior manages 55 million acres of surface land for tribes, and 57 million acres of subsurface minerals for tribes. Yet we are the poorest people in the country.
We need to go from sovereignty to significance. That’s how nations behave. We need to be significant. I believe that energy — because of the vast amount that is on or near our tribal lands across the country — is going to catapult us to significance.
I think our role is going to be bringing those tribes that have an interest, or curiosity, to engage in discussions. It’s not going to be all 574 tribes in the U.S., but I bet you if we could get 10 that’s going to be pretty big. They are going to be multibillion-dollar tribes. Those are going to be your sovereigns.
Aaron Mintzes, senior policy counsel at Earthworks
Mintzes looks at federal hard rock mining policy to advocate for better protections for the environment and tribes.
There are sales pitches from mining companies saying, “We’ll give you a job, and we’ll buy you a school, and we’ll build some roads and provide some infrastructure.” I’m not denying those things happen. But there is a difference between earning consent from a community — because you’ve shaped the mine operation in the way that meets their needs and shares revenue and benefits — versus just saying, “I’m giving you a benefit, take it or leave it.”
Mining companies may put up money upfront for some kind of security or financial assurance for when they need to clean up after a mine closes. The Interior Department keeps those bonds, and they are supposed to be sufficient, but they rarely are in our experience. We can point to examples of so-called modern mines that have been permitted under current rules, with current bonding levels. The mine goes belly-up and is unable to pay to clean things up.
The bonds that are insufficient, I think of them as glorified dirt-moving bonding money to pay for the recontouring of a slope or planting some grass. The bonds you really need to care about are the “shit just hit the fan” bond: A climate change event we weren’t expecting. There is a flood or hurricane. Fires. A dam bursts. We need sufficient bonds for that. There are ways to do it, we just need governments to hold companies accountable.
Recently, the U.S. launched our nation’s first-ever fund for cleaning up abandoned hard rock mines — but there’s only $5 million that’s been appropriated for that every year since 2022. That’s not nearly enough. The total liabilities are about $50 billion.
Fermina Stevens, Western Shoshone, executive director of the Western Shoshone Defense Project
Stevens and the Western Shoshone Defense Project have fought against deceptive mining development for decades in Nevada by promoting tribal jurisdiction over lands granted by an 1863 treaty.
The Western Shoshone Defense Project has been up and going since the early ’90s, so we’re a little over 30 years in of trying to protect our treaty territory. We’ve been dealing with gold extraction, and just trying to bring light to the harm that it causes the land and water.
Recently, we’ve been working to understand lithium and the green energy transition. We do a lot of international work regarding our unceded treaty. The United Nations’ Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination did a 10-year review of our case and determined that our [the Western Shoshone’s] human rights were violated in the so-called taking of our land through gradual encroachment. Those violations are where we make our stance, but the United States has basically ignored all that.
Doing this work, we’ve come to the conclusion there are no laws that really protect the things that are important: land, air, water, sun. The laws are written to give corporations the go-ahead to do whatever they choose. Free, prior, and informed consent is something that we’ve been screaming. In my view, [the United States] thumbs its nose at international law.
Dov Korff-Korn, legal director at Sacred Defense Fund
The Sacred Defense Fund’s mission is to promote Indigenous sovereignty and fight for environmental justice for tribes.
It’s important to start with the U.N.’s Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and FPIC, because it shows that tribal nations in the U.S. are separate nations. Non-Native people have been colonized to think that that is untrue. We’re supposed to think of tribes like people practicing their culture, but not like they have legal or jurisdictional authority. We know they do. The [U.S.] Constitution says so. It’s been upheld numerous times, over 200 years of Supreme Court precedent that tribes have legal authority and jurisdiction over their lands.
But the question then becomes: What are tribal lands? Dispossession and colonization reduced tribal lands from vast areas of territory. About 90 percent of extraction is happening within 30 miles of reservations, and what these corporations do is they know exactly where tribal jurisdiction ends. So tribes have to look to other laws that don’t really regard tribal sovereignty on lands held or owned by a tribe, but pertain to cultural resources or artifacts, where then there’s a whole other realm of questions that come up.
Like in northern Nevada, where lithium and other heavy metals are needed for the renewable energy transition, the mines are being built adjacent to tribal lands. So even if they are going to impact the air and water, it’s very hard for tribes to step up when tribes are underresourced.
The devastation raises the question: Is the world better off just sticking with the status quo? With these factors, is renewable energy and clean technology any better than fossil fuels?
Whatever the answer, the comparison must account for the continued and additional coal, oil, and gas use that will happen in the absence of a mineral-powered energy transition. Not only does the status quo involve devastating greenhouse gas emissions that wreak havoc on the whole planet, but it also requires local ecological disruption in the form of fossil fuel extraction, which will continually expand as existing fuel deposits are depleted. Fracking and drilling for oil and gas can cause groundwater contamination, oil spills, and the uncontrolled release of planet-warming methane. And mining for coal, of course, is similarly destructive as other kinds of mining.
While “there’s a lot of room for improvement with metals mining,” said Julie Klinger, a mineral supply chains expert at the University of Delaware, “look at the devastation that fossil fuel extraction has brought.”
Indeed, the most mined resource today is coal, with around 8.7 billion tons produced in 2023 alone. We need fossil fuels in such large quantities precisely because they are fuels, continuously shoveled into power plants to generate energy. By contrast, solar panels and wind turbines require a fixed quantity of metals only during the construction phase — and once built, they can produce energy for several decades without additional inputs. Because of this, experts agree that the world will actually see a net decrease in energy-related mining if we replace fossil fuels with metals-powered technologies.
In 2023, a team of scientists and Deloitte consultants in the Netherlands projected future metal and coal demand under an ambitious scenario where humanity reaches net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. They found that, despite a more than sixfold increase in demand for energy-related metals — bringing the total up to just over 3 billion tons — total global ore extraction would decrease by a third because of the decline in coal mining.
Trucks carry material at an open-cast coal mine in Merthyr Tydfil, Wales, in 2023. Matthew Horwood / Getty Images
In any case, mining for energy transition minerals will likely only ever constitute a relatively small proportion of global mining activity. Mines cover less than 0.02 percent of Earth’s surface, but many of them are for iron and aluminum, which we need in ever-increasing quantities to build the world around us, regardless of where we get our energy. “That will dwarf anything that’s actually used for the energy transition,” said geologist Gawen Jenkin of the University of Leicester in the United Kingdom.
Most importantly, perhaps, while fossil fuels can only be burned once, many minerals can in principle be used many times over. The Netherlands study estimates that we could slash energy-related mining demand by an additional third in the 2050 net-zero scenario if we were to massively upscale recycling of EVs, wind turbines, and solar panels. The fundamental issue, said Raphael Deberdt, a socioeconomic mining expert at the Colorado School of Mines, is that our economic system incentivizes as much extraction as possible in order to fuel infinite consumption. But shifts to reduce resource consumption — think electric buses and trains rather than SUVs, and reusing old solar panels and EV batteries wherever possible, for instance — and a circular economy that makes the best use of every resource would do wonders to ease the burden of mining.
There are other actions we can take to further reduce the adverse effects of mineral mining. For example, engineers can substitute materials connected to labor or human rights abuses with ones that can be more responsibly sourced; Tesla, for instance, has begun to equip its electric vehicles with iron-phosphate batteries that are cheaper and don’t require cobalt or nickel, which have been linked to environmental and social damage in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Indonesia, respectively. This reflects a broader shift across auto industries — with manufacturers like Renault and Volkswagen reportedly following suit — while iron-phosphate batteries are also becoming increasingly popular for general electricity storage.
There are also many opportunities to extract minerals from the waste of existing mines that were originally built for different purposes. Research by mining and sustainability expert Tim Werner of the University of Melbourne has estimated that waste from a single Canadian zinc mine could supply several years’ worth of global demand for indium, which is used in solar cells, and there are already efforts to recover cobalt from old lead mines in Missouri. Nascent attempts to recover critical minerals from ocean water, plant life, and even asteroids have shown promise, though they are not developed enough to displace traditional methods.
In short, the mantra “reduce, reuse, recycle” — in precisely that order — retains its importance in an all-renewables world. The more of these changes we adopt, the more luxury we’ll have to choose where and how minerals are mined. “This transition needs to happen,” Werner said. “But we have to be really strategic, really smart, and really conscientious and responsible about where they’re coming from.”
Since ancient history, mining has been a dirty business. While we’ve developed new tools, chemicals, machines, and techniques, most of today’s mining still boils down to digging in the dirt. As the world ramps up production of the technologies it needs to move away from fossil fuels, this widespread disturbance of Earth and ecosystems will continue in the accelerating search for critical minerals like lithium, cobalt, nickel, and rare-earth elements.
But what if there were another way? Or, better yet, many other ways. After all, the minerals we need aren’t just buried underground. As the basic building blocks of much of the world’s matter, these elements have accumulated everywhere: in plant life, in the ocean, in our industrial waste, and even in rocks hurtling through outer space. While the ability to pull enough minerals from these sources to power the energy transition is still a long way off, scientists and entrepreneurs are hard at work trying to find out if each of these sources can compete with traditional mining methods. In the process, they’re also raising challenging questions about how far we’ll need to stretch human ingenuity to meet the challenge of the energy transition — and just how clean even the most advanced type of “mining” can ever be.
Mining our water
For more than a century, eccentric scientists have dreamed of wringing precious metals from the Earth’s most vast resource: its oceans. The seas contain millions to trillions of metric tons of gold, cobalt, and other elements, including 17,000 times more lithium than the world’s terrestrial reserves. Unlike more controversial forms of deep-sea mining that require dredging the ocean floor, these dissolved minerals can be extracted directly from the ocean water itself.
In the 1920s, German chemist Fritz Haber hatched a plan to extract gold from seawater in order to pay back Germany’s debt from World War I. But unlike Haber’s other groundbreaking science — he invented synthetic processes that more or less led the way to both modern agriculture and chemical warfare — this effort yielded no real fruit, even after years of research in secret labs on German ships. In the decades since, the United States, United Kingdom, and Japan have all studied seawater as a potential source of uranium, but none of these efforts yielded widespread success, either. The basic problem has always been that the ocean’s elements are dispersed so broadly that extracting them often costs more than the market value of the minerals.
Today, in the face of a looming critical mineral shortage, scientists are renewing their efforts to overcome this hurdle. They’ve turned to an unassuming source: algae. Scientists at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Sequim, Washington, are exploring the potential of a type of seaweed that can naturally concentrate minerals at levels thousands of times higher than the surrounding seawater.
For years, the lab had been studying algae — the broad class of photosynthetic organisms that include phytoplankton, seaweed, and kelp — for a completely different reason: as a potential source for renewable biofuels. The lab would grow algae in tanks, then extract all its organic compounds to use for fuel. This process left behind a concentrated powdery waste product, chock-full of all the remaining minerals that weren’t needed for the fuel. At first, researchers didn’t realize the potential of this overlooked byproduct. Scott Edmundson, a research scientist at the lab, recalls when he realized, “Oh, there’s a lot of minerals here that we really are undervaluing.”
As part of an Department of Energy experimental research program, they developed a system to pump seawater into onshore grow tanks full of a type of mineral-loving seaweed called Ulva. From there, they harvested and dried the seaweed, then processed it into the mineral-rich powder, which they dubbed “bio-ore.” This powder contains precious elements like nickel, cobalt, and rare earths at levels thousands of times higher than seawater. For example, concentrations of the rare earth element neodymium — an essential component in wind turbines — can be up to 479,000 times higher than the original seawater.
The dream of pulling gold or cobalt or many other critical minerals out of seawater is still far from being commercially feasible. But scientists like Edmundson — and others like Cornell University scientist Maha Haji, who has designed mineral filters that could be hung from abandoned oil rigs to pull cobalt from the Gulf of Mexico — think seawater mining has the potential to fundamentally reshape how the world sources its minerals.
“If you can make that work, and you can do it in a way that’s environmentally responsible, that has such high potential for providing the minerals we need in a sustainable, egalitarian way,” Edmundson said. “If you have access to the ocean, you have access to the minerals.”
— Jesse Nichols
Mining our weeds
Each spring, Albania’s mountainous roads are suddenly lined by striking yellow weeds with oblong leaves and tiny blossoms. A relative of broccoli, cabbage, and wild mustard, Odontarrhena chalcidicais expertly adapted to the rocky soils of this Balkan country, which are unsuitable for most other kinds of vegetation because of their high nickel content. O. chalcidica has developed the ability to not just survive in this environment, but to use its toxicity to its advantage: The plant draws nickel up from the soil and stores it in its leaves and stems, which botanists believe serves as a defense against predators and diseases.
But this defensive maneuver could also make this unremarkable-looking weed a critical tool for the clean energy transition. For years, scientists have known that plants like O. chalcidica, known as hyperaccumulators, can be harvested and burned to extract the nickel contained within their cells. This is called phytomining. Now, companies are starting to catch on, working to apply phytomining on a scale that could actually put a dent in global demand for nickel, which is used in solar panels, wind turbines, and the lithium-ion batteries that power electric vehicles.
One of these is Metalplant, a startup founded four years ago by three American and Albanian entrepreneurs. Metalplant worked with researchers at Albania’s Agricultural University of Tirana to transform O. chalcidicafrom a simple weed into a valuable crop. The company estimates that the plant can produce between 440 and 880 pounds of nickel per hectare in one growing season. Theoretically, that means the entire global nickel demand in 2020 could be met by growing O. chalcidicaon around 23,000 square miles, an area slightly smaller than West Virginia. Though Metalplant hasn’t yet revealed its buyers, the company harvested its second batch of O. chalcidicalast June, containing a few hundred pounds of precious nickel.
Eric Matzner, one of Metalplant’s three co-founders, doesn’t believe supplanting the entire global nickel supply chain is a realistic near-term goal. But he imagines that his company can provide a cleaner source of nickel — one that doesn’t cause the kind of deforestation, air and water pollution, and seizure of Indigenous lands seen in Indonesia, the world’s largest producer of the metal. Though traditional nickel mines currently have a cost advantage due to their sheer scale, Metalplant aims to become competitive by providing an additional service: carbon dioxide removal. The company is using a technique known as enhanced rock weathering, which involves spreading crushed rocks containing silicate minerals on O. chalcidica fields as they grow. This rock debris not only boosts yields by replenishing nickel in the soil, but it also reacts with carbon dioxide in the air to lock away the greenhouse gas as a solid, which later gets washed away by rain and ultimately deposited in the ocean.
The result, which the company calls “carbon negative” nickel, can be purchased by carmakers that aim to offset their own carbon emissions. In theory this could enable an electric vehicle to claim carbon neutrality for its entire life cycle. And it’s not just carmakers who are interested: Researchers at the University of Lorraine in Nancy, France, recently formed a partnership with steelmaker Aperam to use phytomined nickel in stainless steel production. In March of last year, the U.S. Department of Energy announced that it would fund research into phytomining, seeking to make the process more efficient and increase its scale — with the ultimate goal of boosting the domestic supply chain for nickel and reducing imports. (ARPA-E, the program that distributes the funding, has been targeted by the Trump administration, and its future role in supporting phytomining research is unclear.)
Companies like Metalplant have a long way to go before they can draw buyers away from established nickel producers in Indonesia. But Albania has a few other advantages: Its mountains are rich in olivine, a rock that’s ideal for ERW, and its numerous hydropower dams provide ample renewable energy needed to crush those rocks so they can be spread and sequester carbon dioxide. Albanian farmers are struggling with poor harvests and an exodus of young people to cities and abroad, which means they welcome the chance to explore new economic opportunities, according to Matzner. The way he sees it, “We’re literally growing money on trees.”
— Diana Kruzman
Mining our waste
Centuries of mining, drilling, and burning fossil fuels has left large swathes of Appalachia covered in a big, toxic mess. Billions of tons of coal ash — the hard residue left over from coal burnt by power plants — are buried or piled in the open air across the region, slowly poisoning the soil and water around them. Heavy metals leak from old mines into nearby creeks, turning the water bright orange as they oxidize. And much of the mineral-rich radioactive liquid that’s used to drill miles underground for fracked natural gas gets deposited into storage wells that can leak into the water tables around them.
These waste streams are so toxic in part because they contain metals and minerals from the coal seams and shale formations from which we draw our fossil fuels. In other words, in one of the many ironies of the climate crisis, fossil fuel extraction has unearthed large quantities of the very materials that could wean us off of carbon-intensive energy: minerals like lithium, cobalt, manganese, and nickel, which are essential for green infrastructure such as the batteries that store renewable energy.
Scientists have been researching the mineral mining potential of coal waste for decades. Newer research is now also exploring the possibility of pulling lithium from the wastewater produced by oil and gas extraction: A study from the National Energy Technology Laboratory this past May suggests that up to 40 percent of current domestic lithium demand could be sourced from fracking wastewater in the Marcellus Shale. (That quantity is still “strikingly small” relative to anticipated future demand for lithium, according to Sean O’Leary with the Ohio River Valley Institute.)
What’s unknown, however, is whether these minerals can ever be gathered cheaply enough to compete with mining them in more conventional ways. Extracting critical minerals from solid waste like coal ash is a pretty resource- and energy-intensive process: The burnt residue has to be crushed into powder and processed multiple times with acids and sodium hydroxide, and then dissolved into a liquid form to extract the desirable elements. (Processing acid mine drainage is less involved, and therefore less expensive, because it’s already a liquid.)
While a few private companies have partnered with universities to conduct pilot projects — such as Rare Earth Salts, Aqua Metals, and General Electric with Pennsylvania State University; Montana Resources with West Virginia University; and Element USA with the University of Texas, Austin — there are still major questions to answer about the technology’s market viability. In addition to uncertainty about cost competitiveness, is there enough supply to warrant investment in processing plants?
Sarma Pisupati, director of the Center for Critical Minerals at Pennsylvania State University, points out that every coal seam contains a distinct mix of minerals, and it’s difficult to determine the location and volume of a significant store of rare-earth minerals without direct sampling from a given site. “We need detailed analysis and estimates of reserves that we have in the ground before we can sink in millions and millions of dollars to build a plant,” he said.
We have some early ideas of what those reserves might look like. A 2024 study from the University of Texas estimates that there are 11 million tons of rare-earth elements in coal ash reserves around the country, but there’s huge variation in the types and concentration of those elements between, say, waste sites in Wyoming and Pennsylvania. Another report from the Department of Energy’s Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management notes that processing such a relatively small mass of these elements from thousands of tons of coal ash means that any commercial mineral extraction plant would have to find some other economic purpose — like turning the leftover, post-processing coal waste into fertilizer or concrete additives.
Alternatively, fossil fuel companies themselves could be incentivized to extract the in-demand minerals from their own waste. This is one reason why environmental groups are ambivalent on the promise of mineral extraction from fossil fuel waste, according to Rob Altenburg, senior director of climate and energy for the organization PennFuture, an environmental advocacy nonprofit in Pennsylvania. On one hand, an economic motivation to clean up and utilize fossil fuel waste could be a boon for ecosystems and communities dealing with legacy pollution.
“But when you are essentially giving [fossil fuel] companies another revenue stream, are you creating a net benefit for the environment by addressing this waste, or are you subsidizing something … that is then going to outcompete a cleaner alternative?” he said.
— Eve Andrews
Mining outer space
A big problem with finding the metals needed to power the energy transition is that the purest ores available in Earth’s crust have long been used up. The more we mine, the more we’re chasing lower-quality, harder-to-access reserves.
To bypass the increasing environmental cost associated with churning up our world to access the riches stored within, starry-eyed entrepreneurs and engineers have turned their gazes to the heavens. They’re hoping that primordial rocks left over from the formation of the solar system, drifting between the planets untouched for eons, could provide all the metals that humanity might need for centuries to come.
“Asteroid mining as a whole is the only solution that anybody has devised that is a holistic approach to cleaning up mining,” said Matt Gialich, founder and CEO of the California-based company AstroForge.
AstroForge and a small handful of competitors are proposing different ways to one day extract materials from an asteroid and return them to Earth. But the nascent industry has a long path ahead: To date, only three missions — none of which was undertaken by the private sector — have successfully visited asteroids near Earth and returned home with samples.
But in late February, AstroForge’s Odin spacecraft hitched a ride on a SpaceX Falcon 9 alongside other vehicles destined for the moon. If successful, Odin would be the first commercial deep-space mission in history, likely traversing hundreds of millions of miles before darting by its target asteroid to photograph it and confirm its metallic composition. (After launch, however, Odin appeared to be in a slow, uncontrolled tumble on its way to deep space, and Gialich and his team struggled to communicate with the spacecraft. As it drifts further into deep space, their chances of success diminish.)
Metallic asteroids are prime targets for off-world mining because of the high concentrations of valuable elements — particularly nickel, cobalt, iron, and platinum-group metals — they may contain. (Until a spacecraft successfully visits one of these bodies, we really only have estimates based on meteorites believed to have originated from similar asteroids.) At first, the space miners would focus on platinum and related metals because they are some of the most valuable on Earth: A ton of platinum costs over $30 million, whereas a ton of nickel sells for around $20,000. Gialich estimates that Astroforge’s future mining missions could return one ton of platinum each.
Eventually, once they have established their profitability and can shift to collecting the abundant iron, nickel, and cobalt that asteroids also contain, Gialich and others hope that a thriving asteroid mining industry could lead to a mining moratorium on Earth.
“I think if we are successful,” Gialich said, “this makes precious metal mining on the planet illegal.”
Before that happens, there are a lot of kinks to be worked out. Right now, under the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, no country can lay territorial claims to land on another world, whether that be the moon, an asteroid, or Mars. But emerging national laws have given companies and countries the license to extract materials and have a legal claim to anything they can physically take for themselves.
More importantly, perhaps, no one yet knows the best way to extract these metals. Some have suggested using special chemicals to dissolve the materials and filter out the desirable metals. Others have talked about using magnetic rakes to comb through the pulverized dust coating the asteroids to pull out the rocks and granules that contain platinum group metals. One recent paper even proposed using nuclear thermal rockets to melt the asteroids, then collecting the molten materials in crucibles and allowing evaporation to separate the metals.
Even if a workable method is devised and the raw cost-revenue calculations work out to make it a profitable industry, space mining raises deeper questions. The launches required to hurtle mining vessels into deep space would take tremendous amounts of fuel and further contribute to the space industry’s growing problems of polluting the upper atmosphere and damaging biodiversity. The mining itself, without proper regulations, may even create new streams of meteors that could endanger satellites providing crucial services to the people of Earth.
Despite its challenges, many in and around the field argue that their efforts will not only make the energy transition more sustainable, but that they will also be a necessary step for humanity to evolve beyond our earthly cradle. But is it worth expanding into the final frontier if we haven’t yet learned to tread lightly?
TThe world is on the brink of a new “gold rush.” Except this time, countries are rushing to control the minerals required for solar panels, wind turbines, and batteries. And instead of continuing to dig tunnels or pits, some scientists are looking to a promising — but challenging — source of minerals that has tormented researchers for decades: seawater.
The ocean holds far more than just water and salt. Pretty much every naturally occurring element on the periodic table can be found in seawater, from gold and silver to lithium, cobalt, and nickel.
The problem? For most of history, these metals have been out of reach, because they exist at levels so low that it’s kind of hard to even wrap your head around.
Source: Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute Grist
Imagine an olympic-sized swimming pool full of seawater. If you were to separate all the elements, you’d be left with about half a kilogram of lithium, 1.2 grams of nickel, 3 milligrams of cobalt, and similarly small amounts of other sought-after metals. While that might not seem like a lot, the world’s oceans contain about 534 trillion olympic-sized pools’ worth of water. So, while there might not be much, say, cobalt in that hypothetical pool of seawater, there’s a lot of cobalt in the actual seas. In fact, the ocean contains 46 times more cobalt than all of the world’s land reserves combined.
“When you multiply it by this vast volume of seawater on planet Earth — that’s a huge gold mine,” said Scott Edmundson, a research scientist at Pacific Northwest National Lab. “There’s a gold mine, literally right at our shoreline.”
For nearly a century, scientists have been trying to tap into the ocean’s mineral stores — perhaps none more infamous than the German chemist Fritz Haber. Haber started his career as an idealistic young scientist, determined to use chemistry to save the world from famine. At the turn of the 20th century, he invented a method to pull the key ingredient for fertilizer out of thin air — a technique that allowed farmers to grow enough food to save an estimated 3.5 billion lives from starvation. But when World War I broke out, Haber’s story took a dark turn. He retooled his fertilizer factories to make chemical weapons for the Germans instead.
German chemist Fritz Haber developed an innovative technique to pull the key ingredient for fertilizer out of thin air. Later, he infamously turned his attentions toward developing chemical weapons for Germany during World War I. After the war, Haber (third from left) experimented with pulling gold from seawater. Archives of the Max Planck Society, Berlin
After Germany lost the war, the country was in shambles, riddled with war debt. And Haber — now shunned by the scientific community — decided to turn his efforts toward saving his country’s economy. Haber knew that the oceans were filled with gold. And he hatched a plan to extract it. “The legend is that he had this chemistry lab on a transatlantic ocean liner going back and forth and doing seawater chemistry experiments,” Edmundson said. “And it worked — technically.”
Haber’s invention was able to put gold out of seawater. The problem was that it was super inefficient: It turned out that gold was 1,000 times less abundant than he’d expected. Meaning the gold he extracted wasn’t valuable even enough to cover the costs of operating his machinery.
While Haber’s seawater mining plan failed spectacularly, for many scientists, the dream of extracting minerals from the ocean lived on. For example, over the following decades, researchers in countries like the United States, United Kingdom, and Japan all looked into ways to harvest uranium from seawater. But none of those efforts led to widespread success.
And yet today, there’s a renewed interest in seawater, not for gold or uranium, but for the minerals needed for today’s energy transition. A team of scientists at the Pacific Northwest National Lab in Sequim, Washington, have a new plan to extract minerals from the sea, this time, using a billion-year-old living technology: seaweed.
A team of scientists at the Pacific Northwest National Lab in Sequim, Washington, are extracting minerals from the sea using seaweed. Grist
Seaweed is a type of algae — a huge class of photosynthetic organisms that primarily grow in the water. They range from microscopic phytoplankton all the way to giant kelp, which can grow a whopping 2 feet per day. And they all grow by absorbing light from the sun and sucking nutrients and minerals and dissolved CO2 directly out of the ocean.
Scientists at the Pacific Northwest National Lab had already been studying algae for decades as a potential way to make renewable biofuel. They’d grow different kinds of algae in the lab, and then they’d refine it, extracting out all the organic matter for fuel. Without that organic matter, they were left with a powder made of all the stuff that the algae had pulled out of the seawater — including minerals. Initially, that powder was seen as a waste product. But as demand for renewable energy started to take off, the lab realized that its “waste product” was full of the same minerals required for this renewable boom.
“That’s where we started looking at, ‘oh, there’s a lot of minerals here that we really are undervaluing,’” Edmundson said.
Scott Edmundson and his colleagues at the lab dove in, trying to figure out if they really could get usable minerals from this algae waste product. The first step was finding the right type of algae. They scoured Washington’s coasts, searching for the species that concentrated the most critical minerals. This led them to a fast-growing native seaweed called ulva.
“Ulva is one of my favorite seaweeds,” Edmundson said. “It’s definitely a rockstar of the seaweed world.”
Researchers at the lab built a system to pump seawater into their onshore lab. This allowed them to fine tune the temperature, lighting, and currents to create the perfect conditions for ulva to suck up minerals. The seaweed is so good at filtering out minerals that mineral levels can be up to a million of times higher than the original seawater.
“The seaweeds have this remarkable capacity to bring it up orders of magnitude,” Edmundson said. “So you’re getting into the realm of, now we can do something with it.”
Research scientist Scott Edmundson holds two small jars full of bio-ore collected from dried seaweed. Grist
Once the seaweed has been harvested and dried, researchers use a machine that heats and pressurizes it, turning all the organic matter into a liquid that they can use for things like biofuels. This process leaves behind that mineral-rich powder, which they call bio-ore.
On a recent visit to the lab, Edmundson showed me a small container of bio-ore, which resembled a colorless powder. “All the organics in the seaweed have been removed, and we’re just left with the minerals,” Edmundson said, holding the jar. He then picked up another jar filled with a clay-red colored powder. “Each seaweed has this different mineral composition,” he said. “This one you can see is much, much redder. So this one has much higher iron content.”
At this point, the bio-ore is concentrated enough for a mining processor to turn it into pure minerals for batteries or solar panels.
Beyond seaweed, scientists are looking at other ways to extract minerals from the ocean. Maha Haji, an assistant professor at Cornell’s Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, is working on a plan to hang big mineral filters off of decommissioned oil rigs. A few years ago, she looked into what would happen if all the retiring oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico were instead converted into seawater mineral extractors.
“With a little bit more research and development on the materials side, you could maybe extract over a quarter of the cobalt demand in the United States,” Haji said. “That’s a sizable amount of cobalt.”
While large-scale seawater mining is still a ways off, both scientists feel this technology has the potential to completely reshape mining as we know it. For most of history, precious minerals have been clustered in a handful of resource-rich hotspots. In those hotspots, people would do whatever it took to control those resources: They’d fight wars, destroy surrounding ecosystems, or violate human rights.
Seawater mining could change that. For starters, 77 percent of countries have access to a coastline. “It opens up a whole new world where pretty much any country with a coastline could harvest minerals for their own use,” Haji said. “It almost democratizes mining and mineral harvesting.”
For Edmundson, he sees seaweed as a way to turn mining into an environmentally positive activity, since the seaweed can filter out pollutants and combat ocean acidification.
“If you can make that work, and you can do it in a way that’s environmentally responsible, that has such high potential for providing the minerals we need in a sustainable kind of egalitarian way,” Edmundson said. “If you have access to the ocean, you have access to the minerals.”
Cities looking to eliminate fossil fuels in buildings have notched a decisive court victory. Last week, a federal judge dismissed a lawsuit brought by plumbing and building trade groups against a New York City ban on natural gas in new buildings. The decision is the first to explicitly disagree with a previous ruling that struck down Berkeley, California’s first-in-the-nation gas ban. That order, issued by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in 2023 and upheld again last year, prompted cities across the country to withdraw or delay laws modeled after the Berkeley ordinance.
While New York City’s law functions differently from Berkeley’s, legal experts say that this month’s decision provides strong legal footing for all types of local policies to phase out gas in buildings — and could encourage cities to once again take ambitious action.
“It’s a clear win in that regard, because the 9th Circuit decision has had a really chilling effect on local governments,” said Amy Turner, director of the Cities Climate Law Initiative at Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law. “Now there’s something else to point to, and a good reason for hope for local governments that may have back-burnered their building electrification plans to bring those to the forefront again.”
In 2021, New York City adopted Local Law 154, which sets an air emissions limit for indoor combustion of fuels within new buildings. Under the law, the burning of “any substance that emits 25 kilograms or more of carbon dioxide per million British thermal units of energy” is prohibited. That standard effectively bans gas-burning stoves, furnaces, and water heaters, and any other fossil-fuel powered appliances. Instead, real estate developers have to install electric appliances, like induction stoves and heat pumps. The policy went into effect in 2024 for buildings under seven stories, and will apply to taller buildings starting in 2027.
Berkeley’s law, on the other hand, banned the installation of gas piping in new construction. The first-of-its-kind policy was passed in 2019 and inspired nearly a hundred local governments across the country to introduce similar laws. But the ordinance quickly faced a lawsuit by the California Restaurant Association, which argued that gas stoves were essential for the food service industry. In April 2023, the 9th Circuit court ruled in favor of the restaurant industry, holding that federal energy efficiency standards preempted Berkeley’s policy. In January 2024, a petition by the city of Berkeley to rehear the case on the 9th Circuit was denied.
Berkeley’s law, which was struck down by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, banned the installation of gas piping in new construction. Robert Nickelsberg / Getty Images
Last year’s denial of a rehearing included a detailed dissent by eight of the 29 judges on the 9th Circuit, who argued that the court’s ruling had been decided “erroneously” and “urge[d] any future court” considering the same argument “not to repeat the panel opinion’s mistakes.” Writing a dissent at all is unusual for an action as procedural as denying a rehearing, Turner noted. “It was clearly drafted to give a road map to other courts to find differently than the 9th Circuit did.”
One year later, that’s exactly what happened. In the New York City lawsuit, building industry groups and a union whose members work on gas infrastructure used the same logic that prevailed in the Berkeley case, arguing that the city’s electrification law is preempted by energy efficiency standards under the federal Energy Policy Conservation Act of 1975, or EPCA. This law sets national efficiency standards for major household appliances like furnaces, stoves, and clothes dryers. Under the law, states and cities can’t set their own energy conservation standards that would contradict federal ones. The trade groups argued that EPCA should also preempt any local laws, like New York’s, that would prevent the use of fossil-fuel powered appliances that meet national standards.
“By design, the city set that level so low as to ban all gas and oil appliances,” the groups wrote in their complaint. “The city’s gas ban thus prohibits all fuel gas appliances, violating federal law” and “presents a significant threat for businesses in New York City that sell, install, and service gas plumbing and infrastructure.”
Berkeley’s gas ban lost a lawsuit filed by the California Restaurant Association, which argued that gas stoves were essential for the food service industry. Franco Origlia / Getty Images
Citing the 9th Circuit’s dissent, the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York dismissed those claims. The plaintiffs’ argument broadens the scope of EPCA beyond reasonable bounds, District Judge Ronnie Abrams wrote in the court’s opinion. Regulating fuel use within certain buildings is standard practice in states and cities, she noted: New York City, for example, has banned the indoor use of kerosene space heaters for decades. “Were plaintiffs correct about the scope of EPCA, these vital safety regulations would likewise be preempted — an absurd result that the court must avoid,” Abrams wrote.
The decision could help reassure some states and cities that withdrew electrification plans after the Berkeley case, said Dror Ladin, a senior attorney at Earthjustice, a nonprofit that submitted an amicus brief on behalf of local environmental groups in the lawsuit. “This ruling demonstrates that there’s absolutely no reason to interpret the Berkeley decision so broadly,” he said. The argument brought forth by trade groups “is one that would bar a whole host of health and safety regulations, and alter the power of cities and states in a way that we’ve never seen in this country.”
By agreeing with the 9th Circuit dissent’s interpretation of EPCA, last week’s decision bolsters all types of electrification policies, including the one in New York City and those modeled after Berkeley, Turner noted. “This decision we’ve just gotten from the Southern District is more broadly protective,” she said. “Even if the air emissions route is not right for a city for whatever reason, other variations of a building electrification requirement or incentive could pass muster.”
Judges in those cases will inevitably refer to the Berkeley decision and last week’s ruling by the Southern District of New York, said Ladin — and he hopes they’ll give more weight to the latter. “Berkeley is not a well-reasoned decision, and this judge saw right through it, and I think many other judges will see through it too.”
The Trump administration insists that renewables are making energy more expensive and that more fossil-fueled power will reduce utility bills. But those claims are false — and if congressional Republicans succeed in repealing key tax credits supporting the growth of clean energy, Americans will suffer the consequences in higher electric bills.
So finds a report released Thursday by think tank Energy Innovation warning lawmakers of the costs of repealing the clean-energy tax credits created by the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, the Biden administration’s signature climate law.
The fate of those tax credits remains highly uncertain. Some Republican lawmakers have voiced support for keeping them in place, but others have criticized the incentives, which could channel hundreds of billions of dollars to solar and wind power, batteries, electric vehicles, and other carbon-free technologies over the next decade. President Donald Trump has also vowed to repeal the IRA.
Key members of the Trump administration have disparaged clean energy as a wasteful distraction while praising fossil gas and coal. Last week at an industry event, Energy Secretary Chris Wright said wind and solar have “obvious scale and cost problems,” and dismissed their prospects for serving more than a fraction of the country’s power needs.
But Energy Innovation’s report repeats findings from a series of studies over the past months that forecast major downsides to repealing the tax credits, including lost jobs, hundreds of billions of dollars of foregone investment — and significantly more expensive electricity for U.S. businesses and households.
Energy Innovation projects that energy costs for U.S. households will rise if key IRA clean energy tax credits are repealed and other federal climate funding disappears.
Energy Innovation
“We looked at a state-by-state level at energy bills as well as jobs and economic growth,” said Robbie Orvis, Energy Innovation’s senior director of modeling and analysis. “Across the board, repealing the IRA is going to make it more expensive for the average household — and in some states, dramatically.”
The report modeled electricity costs in two scenarios — one in which current incentives and federal funding are kept in place, and one in which they are repealed this year. Under the “repeal” scenario, annual consumer energy bills would be more than $6 billion higher for U.S. households in 2030 and more than $9 billion higher in 2035. Translated to individual households, energy costs would increase by an average of $48 per year in 2030 and $68 per year in 2035, and continue to rise in future years.
Some states will see relatively low increases, Orvis said. “But when you look out over 2035, most households are over $100 per year in energy expenditures.”
The findings are consistent with other recent studies on the same topic.
Last month, The Brattle Group published a report, commissioned by conservative environmental advocacy group ConservAmerica, that found repeal of the clean energy tax credits would increase residential electric bills nationwide by an average of $83 per year by 2035, and up to $152 per year in California, New England, and much of the upper Midwest.
And NERA Economic Consulting projected in a February report commissioned by the Clean Energy Buyers Association trade group that repealing the tax credits would drive average U.S. electricity prices up nearly 10 percent by 2029, and by more than 30 percent for commercial and industrial electricity customers in certain states.
Republican leaders have committed to slashing federal spending to pay for the cost of extending the multi-trillion-dollar tax cut passed during the first Trump administration, which primarily benefits corporations and wealthy individuals. Cutting clean energy incentives could be on the chopping block as a result, although they’d only cover a fraction of the tax breaks.
But most of the investment in clean energy facilities and factories spurred by the law has been in states and congressional districts represented by Republicans, potentially making the path to repealing the Inflation Reduction Act’s clean energy incentives more difficult.
Last week, 21 GOP Congress members wrote a letter demanding to preserve those tax credits, saying they’re critical to growing the economy and achieving the Trump administration’s “energy dominance” agenda. They also warned that repealing them “would increase utility bills the very next day.”
Why clean power is cheaper power
The reason repealing these tax credits would drive up costs is simple, Orvis said. Solar and wind energy can supply U.S. power grids with electricity at lower long-term cost than alternatives such as coal, gas, and nuclear power plants. The more of it that can be built, the more it can supplant those costlier resources.
Over the past decade, solar and wind power have become the cheapest source of new electricity generation across the majority of the world, according to the International Energy Agency. Those cost advantages have been driven primarily by technology improvements and economies of scale of production as well as the deployment of solar panels, lithium-ion batteries, and wind turbines, although government subsidies have played an important role.
In the U.S., newly built solar and wind farms can provide power at a cheaper rate than 99 percent of the country’s remaining coal plants. Even fossil gas, the workhorse of the U.S. grid, struggles to compete with new clean energy. A study from think tank RMI found that portfolios of solar, wind, and batteries paired with utility energy-efficiency investments can serve grid needs at a lower cost than newly built gas-fired power plants.
What’s more, the cost of solar and wind power isn’t tied to fluctuations in the price of fossil gas, which has driven significant electricity price increases in the past several years, Orvis said. That lack of fuel cost, along with lower operations and maintenance costs, make wind and solar a long-run winner financially.
Wind and solar farms do cost more to build than the equivalent gas power plants, however. That makes the pace and scale of their growth more dependent on the cost of capital, which is influenced by interest rates, and on incentives to reduce those up-front costs. In the U.S., the Inflation Reduction Act supercharged federal tax credits that have supported the industry for decades, delivering the law’s single biggest boost to reducing greenhouse gas emissions while helping to finance cheaper electricity.
Cutting off those tax credits would curtail that growth and leave the country more reliant on fossil-fueled power plants that would not only create planet-warming emissions and harmful local air pollution but cost U.S. consumers more money. That would add roughly $20 billion in additional fuel, operations, and maintenance costs to U.S. electricity prices per year in 2030 and 2035, according to Energy Innovation’s analysis.
An ‘energy emergency’ — false claims versus real solutions
The Trump administration has moved to undo decades of federal policy seeking to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, fight climate change, and protect the environment. It has also declared a “national energy emergency” that casts renewable energy as a threat to grid reliability and calls for expanded use of fossil fuels as the solution.
Energy Secretary Wright, a longtime gas industry executive who has denied that climate change is a crisis, attacked solar and wind power in his keynote address at the CERAWeek by S&P Global conference in Houston last week. “Everywhere wind and solar penetration have increased significantly, prices on the grid went up and stability of the grid went down,” he said.
But that assertion is “not borne out by the data at all,” Orvis said. Rising risks of grid outages and emergencies are primarily driven by increasingly extreme weather, which is linked to global warming. And while the variability of wind and solar power generation is intimately tied to weather, traditional power plants have proven to be far less reliable than their backers have claimed, particularly during winter cold snaps like those that led to massive grid outages in Texas in 2021 and across the U.S. Southeast in 2022.
As for clean energy’s relationship to rising electricity prices, an Energy Innovation report last year highlighted that surging electric utility costs in recent years are linked not to renewables but other factors, including spikes in fossil gas prices following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the increasing cost of expanding and maintaining utility power grids.
Ember
A report out last week from think tank Ember reiterated the absence of data to correlate reliance on clean energy and utility electricity costs. “Some states with high wind and solar penetration — such as Iowa, South Dakota and Kansas — have some of the lowest electricity prices in the country,” the report notes.
Other states with aggressive clean-energy mandates, such as California and Massachusetts, also have some of the country’s most expensive electricity, the report says. But those costs are more closely driven by aging infrastructure, “expensive imported fossil fuels” in the case of Massachusetts, or in California, “natural disaster damage” — namely, the massive costs of wildfires, many caused by utility grid failures, and the investments meant to prevent more of them.
More broadly speaking, the cost of electric utility service is primarily tied to rising investments in utility transmission and distribution grids and the cost of fuel to power their generation, said Paul DeCotis, a senior partner at consultancy West Monroe. And “if people are concerned about the high cost of fuel, the federal government has made tax credits available for decades for renewable energy, which brings down the cost of electricity.”
In his speech at CERAWeek, Wright also mocked the idea that wind, solar, and batteries could completely replace fossil fuels for providing reliable round-the-clock generation capacity. But the U.S. isn’t facing that problem in the near term. Instead, it must cheaply and quickly build new capacity to meet the country’s growing power needs — and clean energy and batteries are best positioned to do that, according to energy industry analysts and executives.
The U.S. is experiencing a first-in-decades boom in demand for electricity, driven by new data centers and factories in the short term, and in the longer term by the push to shift from fossil-fueled to electric vehicles and building heating. A number of utilities are proposing to build gigawatts of new gas-fired power plants to meet that demand. But as of today, manufacturers of gas turbines say they’re unable to supply power plants not already in planning until 2028 or 2029.
“If we’re really in this energy security and energy supply scenario this administration has talked about, we’re not going to be able to meet it with gas, because we’re tapped out on building it,” Orvis said.
New solar, wind, and battery projects can be built in roughly half that time, making them a vital near-term solution to rising power demand, NextEra Energy CEO John Ketchum told The New York Times at CERAWeek, adding that “if you take renewables and storage off the table, we’re going to force electricity prices to the moon.”
A lawsuit filed by a Peruvian farmer against major German energy company RWE began on Monday.
The claim, which argues that global heating fueled by the firm’s greenhouse gas emissions poses a risk to the farmer’s home, could set a new precedent for climate litigation, reported The Associated Press.
“We have waited 10 years for this day, this decisive day,” said Saúl Luciano Lliuya, as supporters cheered outside the courthouse. “I’m very excited; I hope that everything goes well.”
The lawsuit, filed in the Higher Regional Court in Hamm, western Germany, makes the case that RWE’s historical emissions have contributed to the global warming that has accelerated glacial melt near Lliuya’s hometown of Huaraz.
There’s less than 24 hours left to respond to energy regulator Ofgem’s latest consultation on unfair standing charges on energy bills.
Campaign group Fuel Poverty Action is urging the public to take action and call on it to finally scrap the unjust flat-rate levy. This is because, despite Ofgem’s warm words on a “zero standing charge option” – that’s not at all what the energy regulator is actually putting forward.
Ofgem standing charges: consultation set to close soon
As the Canarypreviously reported, Ofgem is currently running a consultation on the standing charge it applies to people’s energy bills.
Ofgem explains that this is a cost:
that is included in your electricity and gas bill. It is also included in the energy price cap.
Your energy supplier will charge you a standing charge cost each day, even if you do not use any energy on that day. The amount you pay will depend on your supplier, how you pay for your energy and where you live within England, Scotland or Wales.
However, the standing charge is an extremely unfair flat-rate levy on customers, disproportionately impacting the poorest households. Crucially, the charge is cementing fuel poverty.
It’s why many people think Ofgem should abolish the standing charge altogether – and have demanded it do so in a number of previous consultations.
The ‘strength of feeling’ against cruel standing charges
Since late 2023, Ofgem has been consulting on these. Over 30,000 members of the public responded to its first consultation, which the regulator itself acknowledged:
demonstrated the strength of feeling among the public for change
On top of this, in September 2024, more than 20,000 people again flooded Ofgem’s inbox calling for change on the standing charge component of consumer energy bills.
Crucially, prominent among these changes was for Ofgem to completely scrap the standing charges. Instead, respondents said it should shift:
these costs to energy suppliers to absorb using profits
Now, this is exactly what campaign group Fuel Poverty Action is asking it to do – and wants to public to join them in demanding.
The regulator is once again consulting on standing charges.
It has put forward an alternative proposal which it’s calling a “zero standing charge energy price cap variant”. However, the name is deceiving, because it amounts to little more than moving money around. In reality, it’s only offering to shift this cost onto the unit price of customers’ bills – so in effect, the standing charge will still exist.
Third time’s the charm?
So Fuel Poverty Action has put together a template letter for people to fill out and send to Ofgem in response to its latest consultation. However, Ofgem is closing its consultation on 20 March – so people will have to hurry to respond.
And notably, it sets out how Ofgem can do-away with standing charges and indeed force profiteering energy companies to shoulder the costs. Notably, it lays out that the energy system could do this with a Rising Block Tariff in the form of its Energy For All proposal. This would:
everyone a share of the free and cheap renewable energy we generate.
And crucially, this would be funded by:
the £billions in excess profits, subsidies and costs of energy firms.
So now, you can join the campaign group in telling Ofgem that there is a better way forward than its sham “zero standing charge option”.
Fuel Poverty Action has pointed out to supporters that their:
record-breaking response to Ofgem’s last two consultations on energy bill standing charges helped to force Ofgem and Government to agree to reform the standing charge.
There’s still time to add your letter to the tens of thousands of people holding the regulator to account. And maybe, third time might actually be the charm.
In late February, Republicans in the House and Senate voted along party lines to repeal a Biden-era rule implementing a federal tax on methane pollution. President Donald Trump signed the measure into law on Friday — putting the country’s climate goals further out of reach. Since taking control of the White House and both chambers of Congress this year, Republicans have set about systematically dismantling Biden-era advancements on climate change, no matter the size or projected economic impact of the policy, with varying degrees of success.
Methane is a powerful but fast-acting greenhouse gas — it packs a big punch in the short term and weakens over time. Studies show methane is responsible for 20 to 30 percent of global warming since the Industrial Revolution. U.S. oil and gas operations are collectively responsible for emitting more than 6 million metric tons of methane every year — the equivalent of 10 percent of the country’s annual CO2 emissions, if you’re looking at a greenhouse gas’s first 20 years in the atmosphere. Methane is the primary component of natural gas, which often leaks out of drilling sites, pipelines, and storage facilities.
When Joe Biden was elected president in 2020, he made it clear that he intended to become the first president in American history to successfully take on climate change — a goal that necessarily included targeting methane emissions. In 2022, he signed the Inflation Reduction Act, or IRA — legislation that offered hundreds of billions of dollars in incentives, loans, and grants to households, utilities, and industries to cut their greenhouse gas emissions.
The IRA also amended the Clean Air Act to include a provision that directed the Environmental Protection Agency to establish a methane fee for major producers of oil and gas — essentially, taxing fossil fuel companies for every ton of the greenhouse gas they emitted above a certain threshold. The legislation included subsidies to help producers who emitted methane over the legal limit to install gas-trapping technology to reduce their emissions.
The rule the EPA finalized in November last year, technically called the Waste Emissions Charge, would have applied to facilities that produce volumes of methane that exceed the equivalent of 25,000 tons of carbon dioxide. The fee started at $900 per ton of methane in 2024 and would have risen to $1,200 per ton in 2025 and $1,600 in 2026 and every year beyond that. Most big oil and gas companies already meet the standards laid out in Biden’s fee, which means they wouldn’t have had to pay anything. The EPA was supposed to start tallying up fees this year based on 2024 emissions data, but Republicans repealed it before the agency could start collecting penalties.
The fee, had it taken effect, would have been the first-ever federal tax directly imposed on a greenhouse gas. It would have applied to roughly a third of the methane emissions that come from oil and gas infrastructure in the U.S. and diverted 1.2 metric tons of methane through 2035 — the equivalent of taking nearly 8 million gas-powered cars offline for a year.
Shell, BP, and other oil majors supported the initiative. But other parts of the oil and gas industry, and Republicans in Congress, opposed it.
Natural gas is flared during an oil drilling operation in the Permian Basin in Andrews, Texas, in 2022. Joe Raedle / Getty Images
“No one wants to do business when the federal government creates regulations that will put them out of business, which is what this natural gas tax is doing,” said Republican August Pfluger of San Angelo, Texas, the Congressman who wrote the measure that Trump signed on Friday. Pfluger’s district overlaps with the Permian Basin, the highest producing oil field in the U.S. “In reality this rule has only stifled American energy production, discouraged investment, and increased energy prices across America,” he said.
“It’s hard to imagine how a country that’s breaking records for production is being somehow constrained,” said Jon Goldstein, associate vice president of the Environmental Defense Fund’s energy transition program. “I don’t think that argument really holds water.”
However, the tax tackled only a sliver of U.S. methane emissions. The American agricultural and waste sectors produced almost twice as much methane as fossil fuel production between 2010 and 2019. But clamping down on emissions from those sectors is challenging. Methane emissions from agriculture come from myriad decentralized sources, like cows and manure storage facilities, making them difficult to regulate. And the amount of methane agriculture produces depends in large part on consumer eating habits, which are hard for the government to control.
Despite its limited impact, the methane fee was a step in the right direction, experts said. “There’s an order of operations in which we need to implement climate solutions,” said Daniel Jasper, the policy director for the climate solutions nonprofit Project Drawdown. “Methane is something we call an emergency brake, because we’ve got to do it now.”
The fee is one of seven climate and environment policies Republicans in Congress are targeting using the Congressional Review Act — a law that gives lawmakers the authority to reverse recently-passed regulations with a simple majority vote. But Republicans only repealed the EPA rule establishing the methane fee — not the IRA provision permitting the application of such a fee in the first place. If that remains intact, a future presidential administration could pick up where Biden left off. However, Republicans in Congress have signaled that they intend to repeal as much of the IRA as possible in the coming months, including the portions that empower the EPA to crack down on greenhouse gas emissions.
Spineless energy regulator Ofgem is failing to scrap the unjust flat-rate daily standing charges on energy bills. Currently, it’s running another consultation on this, with a purported “zero standing charge option” on the table. However, one campaign group has said the regulator is only “pretending” to get rid of it. This is because, in actual fact, it’s not abolishing this at all. In reality, it’s simply proposing to hide this in another part of the publics’ energy bills.
So once again, it’s set to do nothing to curb the soaring and unaffordable costs of households’ energy bills. After all, that would be too much like curtailing surging energy company profiteering – something Ofgem isn’t really seriously prepared to do.
Ofgem standing charges: disproportionately hitting the poorest households
A standing charge is one of the costs that is included in your electricity and gas bill. It is also included in the energy price cap.
Your energy supplier will charge you a standing charge cost each day, even if you do not use any energy on that day. The amount you pay will depend on your supplier, how you pay for your energy and where you live within England, Scotland or Wales.
Notably though, the standing charge is an extremely unfair flat-rate levy on customers, disproportionately impacting the poorest households. Crucially, the charge is cementing fuel poverty – as a previous survey from campaign group Organise highlighted. Writing on its findings from polling the impact of the charge on 45,000 people, the Canary’s Steve Topple detailed that:
standing charges impact adequate heating for 90% of people, with:
84% forced to cut heating, showers, baths, washing, and drying.
72% left in debt or unable to top up a prepayment meter.
Those on prepayment meters are one group hit hard by standing charges.
534,462 electricity customers and 269,351 gas customers were cut off between January and March 2023. However, this Ofgem data only covers 4% of households, so ignores millions of other low income struggling households. This includes the two million homes without gas supply that pay the higher electricity standing charges and unit costs.
And because of the way it works, the standing charge also makes up a disproportionate amount of low energy users’ bills.
Naturally, these typically tend to be poorer households who can’t afford to use as much in the first place. In other words, the higher proportion of what they pay for their bills goes towards the standing charges. It can even literally mean that those who haven’t used any energy for months build up this inflated cost.
It’s why many people think Ofgem should abolish the standing charge altogether. Yet, the regulator has instead resisted all calls to do so to date.
Overwhelming public demand to scrap the standing charge
Since late 2023, Ofgem has been consulting on standing charges. It closed its first consultation over it in January 2024. Over 30,000 members of the public responded to this, which the regulator itself acknowledged:
demonstrated the strength of feeling among the public for change
Crucially, prominent among these changes was for Ofgem to completely scrap the standing charges. Instead, respondents said it should shift:
these costs to energy suppliers to absorb using profits
Then, it followed this up with a second consultation which closed in September 2024. More than 20,000 people again flooded Ofgem’s inbox calling for it to do away with the charge. Largely, this was thanks to a campaign by Fuel Poverty Action, Green New Deal Rising, and the Peace and Justice Project.
Despite the enormous public demand for this, Ofgem is still obstinately refusing to do so. It has put forward an alternative proposal which it’s now once again consulting on.
It’s calling this a “zero standing charge energy price cap variant”. However, the name is deceiving, because it amounts to little more than moving money around. In reality, it’s only offering to shift this cost onto the unit price of customers’ bills – so in effect, the standing charge will still exist.
Another consultation…
So now, Fuel Poverty Action is once again stepping up, alongside the Energy For All campaign, and are asking the public to do the same.
The groups have put together a template letter for people to fill out and send to Ofgem in response to the consultation. As it notes in this, it has also put this together since Ofgem has made the consultation itself complex and inaccessible:
We need you to tell Ofgem what they are proposing is not good enough. They are trying to make it hard for people to respond with a long and complicated form. If you’ve not got much time, we’ve made it easy by drafting a letter that you can adapt
The Word document form for it runs to 44 pages, packed full of largely impenetrable information.
Fuel Poverty Action and Energy For All’s letter breaks through the bluster and makes clear, actionable demands for Ofgem to get:
our money back from profiteering energy firms and brings our bills down. It also suggests a zero-standing charge option that includes free essential energy to protect everyone, Energy For All.
In other words, it’s telling the regulator in no uncertain terms what it really should be doing. That is: protecting customers from parasitic energy companies.
Lining the pockets of the big energy corporations
Gallingly, Ofgem has framed the standing charges cost as a necessity, stating in its consultation that:
Standing charges represent costs of the energy system that do need to be paid for. Therefore, in designing a zero standing charge energy price cap variant we are considering how these costs are paid for, not whether they are paid.
Of course, it’s failing to mention that what these standing charges also do is facilitate energy companies making enormous profits.
Fuel Poverty Action’s letter emphasises this very incongruity given a recent cronyist move by Ofgem. Specifically, it notes that:
You claim all these costs are essential, but that’s not true. You’ve just gifted network firms an extra £3.9 billion. Now you need to give us our money back by taking this money off our standing charges. There are sufficient £billions in excessive profits, subsidies and overheads to wipe out standing charges completely.
This was in reference to a loophole in regulations which meant the companies that own our energy infrastructure benefitted from an overestimation of borrowing costs.
Meanwhile of course, energy companies have also been raking in gargantuan profits too. Notably, since the energy crisis began, 20 energy giants from oil and gas majors, to suppliers, and companies controlling the grid, have made more than £484bn in profits.
The figure is based on a recent analysis by the End Fuel Poverty coalition – which the Canary has updated with since declared year end results. While some are still outstanding for 2024, companies including Shell, Equinor, Drax, and Cadent have made more £85bn of this last year alone.
Take three on telling Ofgem where to stick its standing charges
Ultimately, Fuel Poverty Action and Energy For All’s letter eviscerates the very basis of Ofgem’s argument that these are necessary costs in the first place – since customers are already paying far more for the unit price than it actually costs companies to produce energy:
We are generating a lot of electricity at less than 8p a unit but the Ofgem Price Cap is up again to 27p a unit plus 54p a day standing charges.
In short, the regulator has no intention of truly abolishing the standing charges. Rather, it simply plans to shift the costs onto the consumer elsewhere in their bill. Of course, this, on top of Ofgem raising the energy price cap again and costing households on average an extra £100 per year is another kick in teeth.
So, Fuel Poverty Action and Energy For All’s are urging as many as possible to once again flood its inbox and demand it ditch the standing charges for good. The public has until 20 March to send the letter to Ofgem, when it will close the consultation.
Of course, after ignoring multiple consultations calling for just that, it’s unlikely that this will make Ofgem meaningfully change its ways. After all, it has repeatedly shown itself less intent on protecting people from profiteering corporations, than it is at operating as a fundamental instrument propping up the energy privatisation racket.
However, with the campaign groups’ letter, the public can at least tell the sham regulator where to go on its latest corporate cronyist con.
Last May, Florida enacted a law deleting any reference to climate change from most of its state policies, a move Republican Governor Ron DeSantis described as “restoring sanity in our approach to energy and rejecting the agenda of the radical green zealots.”
That hasn’t stopped the Sunshine State from becoming a national leader in solar power.
In a first, Florida vaulted past California last year in terms of new utility-scale solar capacity plugged into its grid. It built 3 gigawatts of large-scale solar in 2024, making it second only to Texas. And in the residential solar sector, Florida continued its longtime leadership streak. The state has ranked number two behind California for the most rooftop panels installed each year from 2019 through 2024, according to data the energy consultancy Wood Mackenzie shared with Canary Media.
“We do expect Florida to continue as number two in 2025,” said Zoë Gaston, Wood Mackenzie’s principal U.S. distributed solar analyst.
Florida is expected to again be neck and neck with California for this year’s second-place spot in utility-scale solar installations, said Sylvia Leyva Martinez, Wood Mackenzie’s principal utility-scale solar analyst for North America.
Overall, the state receives about 8 percent of its electricity from solar, according to Solar Energy Industries Association data. The vast majority of its power comes from fossil gas.
The state’s solar surge is the result of weather — both good and bad — and policies at the state and federal level that have made panels cheaper and easier to build, advocates say.
“Obviously in Florida, sunshine is extremely abundant,” said Zachary Colletti, the executive director of the Florida chapter of Conservatives for Clean Energy. “We’ve got plenty of it.”
The state is also facing a growing number of extreme storms. Of the 94 billion-dollar weather disasters that federal data shows unfolded in Florida since 1980, 34 occurred in the last five years.
“Floridians have long understood that not only is solar good for your pocket, it’s also good for your home resilience,” said Yoca Arditi-Rocha, the executive director of The CLEO Institute, a Miami-based nonprofit that advocates for climate action. “In the face of increasing extreme weather events, having access to reliable energy is a big motivator.”
The tax credits available under former President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, or IRA, have also made buying panels cheaper than ever before, she said.
“A lot of people took advantage of that. I’m one of them,” Arditi-Rocha said. “As soon as I saw that the federal government was going to give me 30 percent back on my taxes, I decided to make the investment and got myself a solar system that I could pay back in seven years. It was a win-win proposition.”
But solar started growing in Florida long before Democrats passed the IRA in 2022, and that’s thanks to favorable state policies.
Municipalities and counties have little say over power plants, giving the Florida Public Service Commission ultimate control over siting and permitting. Plus, solar plants with a capacity under 75 megawatts are exempt from review and permitting altogether under the Florida Power Plant Siting Act.
The latter policy in particular has made building solar farms easy and inexpensive for the state’s major utilities, said Leyva Martinez. Companies such as NextEra Energy–owned Florida Power & Light, the state’s largest electrical utility, have for years patched together gigawatts of solar with small farms.
“We’re seeing this wave of project installations at gigawatt scales, but if you look at what’s actually being built, it’s a small 74-megawatt [project] here or a 74.9-megawatt project there,” she said. “It’s just easier to permit in the state, and developers have realized that they can keep installations at this range and they don’t need to go through the longer process.”
The solar buildout has prompted some backlash in rural parts of the state. A bill Republican state Senator Keith Truenow filed last month proposes granting some additional local control over siting and permitting solar farms on agricultural land.
“You’re starting to see a lot more complaining about the abundance of solar installations in more rural areas,” Colletti said. The legislation, he said, “would add some hurdles and ultimately add costs” but “wouldn’t necessarily reverse the state’s preemption” of local permitting authorities.
NextEra and Florida Power & Light did not respond to an email requesting comment. Nor did Truenow return a call.
While the bill is currently making its way through the Legislature, DeSantis previously vetoed legislation that threatened Florida’s solar buildout.
In 2022, the governor blocked a utility-backed bill to end the state’s net metering program, which pays homeowners with rooftop solar for sending extra electricity back to the grid during the day.
“The governor did the right thing by vetoing that bill that would have strangled net metering and a lot of the rooftop solar industry in Florida,” Colletti said. “I know Floridians are much better off for it because we are able to offset our costs very well and take more control and ownership over our households.”
A telephone survey conducted by the pollster Mason-Dixon in February 2022 found that among 625 registered Florida voters, 84 percent supported net metering, including 76 percent of self-identified Republicans.
“It’s not about left or right,” Arditi-Rocha said. “It’s about making sure we live up to our state’s name. In the Sunshine State, the future can be really sunny and bright if we continue to harness the power of the sun.”
The first time Majd Mashharawi left her native Gaza was in 2017, to visit Tokyo. Her flight landed late at night, and she was struck by the airport’s many glittering lights. Then when she got to the urban core, she was astonished. “This is the life people have outside Gaza?” she thought. “Why don’t we have this life?”
Growing up, Mashharawi had been accustomed to life with inconsistent power — as little as three hours a day. “It’s not easy to describe unless you live it,” she said. “Your life is completely messed up. Everything is controlled by others. Your life is controlled by when power is on and off.”
Last week, Israel cut off all electricity to the Gaza Strip in an effort to strengthen its hand against Hamas in ceasefire talks. But in fact, the two parties’ dysfunctional relationship around energy has a long history. In 2007, after Hamas took control of the Gaza Strip, Israel established a land and sea blockade. This included electricity: Israel came to control 10 power lines running into Gaza, as well as the diesel fuel needed to run its one power plant. The blockade also gave Israel gatekeeping power over any materials — cement, steel, batteries — needed for domestic infrastructure, if Israeli authorities judged they could help militants.
Israel’s security establishment thought this hammerlock over Gazan energy meant leverage over Hamas, said Elai Rettig, a lecturer in energy politics at Bar-Ilan University. As for Hamas, many Gazans felt the group was more interested in its crusade against Israel than addressing public works.
For the people of Gaza, the conflict meant energy poverty. The Strip’s combined power resources could at best meet a quarter to a third of demand. This translated to daily power outages averaging 12 to 16 hours a day. Even worse, Mashharawi said, the outages were unpredictable — whenever the power flicked on, you had to scramble. This maddening unreliability landed especially hard on women, who had to jam all their chores into these fleeting windows of opportunity.
But over the last decade, as solar prices tumbled worldwide, more Israeli leaders started thinking that getting solar into Gaza had a strategic benefit. Gaza’s energy dependence wasn’t cheap. Years of Palestinian counterparties failing to pay Gaza’s power bill — for financial and political reasons — had by 2023 racked up a debt to Israel of 2 billion shekels, about $500 million.
In 2016 and 2017, Israel approved about 100,000 solar panels to enter Gaza, according to researchers at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Satellite imagery soon showed solar arrays sprouting on thousands of buildings across the Gaza Strip, especially in crowded areas like refugee camps.
Around the time of Mashhawawi’s trip to Tokyo, she’d been working to start a company that manufactured Gaza’s war rubble into bricks. But her production lines were being constantly kneecapped by the start-stop of the grid. It occurred to her that unreliable power was not just a burden in households, like the one she grew up in. Thousands of businesses across Gaza — restaurants, workshops, bakeries — yearned for a source of energy more reliable than what they had. Mashharawi decided to get into the energy business.
She started Sunbox, a social enterprise promoting solar power, in 2017, working doggedly with Israeli authorities to get the equipment approved. She started by selling small arrays — 1 kilowatt and up, about enough to power a home with a small fridge — to families. She soon helped supply bigger projects. Sunbox equipped 20 small desalination plants, the engines of Gazan water production, with solar. It set up solar-charged streetlights so girls could feel more confident walking to school in the wee hours.
Large international organizations like the World Bank and U.N. were also getting in the game, decking hospitals and schools in solar. A 7-megawatt system, partly financed by the International Finance Corporation, or IFC, got bolted onto the Gaza Industrial Estate, a manufacturing complex. The IFC said the smoother power supply made it possible to expand output and hire workers.
It was a renewable revolution born of political dysfunction. The total number of solar arrays in the Gaza Strip vaulted from about a dozen in 2012 to 8,760 in 2019, mostly in the form of small rooftop systems. The extraordinary growth made the Occupied Palestinian Territories one of the fastest-growing renewable energy markets in the world. By 2023, solar represented 25-40 percent of daytime power generation on the ragged Gazan grid, Rettig, of Bar-Ilan University, estimated.
Then came October 7, 2023. Mashharawi was abroad at the time on business travel. She spent the first two months of the war calling in favors and trying to get her family to Egypt. Meanwhile, Sunbox’s offices and warehouses were destroyed. Mashharawi is mourning the loss of a dear coworker, Mahmoud Abushawish, who she said was venturing north to help a school set up solar — and find some candy for the kids.
Israel’s military assault on Gaza has taken at least 48,000 lives and left its infrastructure in tatters. In February an interim assessment, led by the World Bank, estimated $53 billion in reconstruction needs. It said that 80 percent of Gaza’s power infrastructure is wrecked and that Gazans have experienced a “near-total blackout” since the start of the war. Because Gaza’s water supplies depend on energy to pump and purify it, availability has fallen to sub-critical levels. “There is no water and no electricity. It is stunning just how much damage occurred there,” Steve Witkoff, President Donald Trump’s Middle East envoy, told Axios after visiting the territory in January.
A ceasefire signed in January, which has been roughly observed even as its first phase expired March 1, has paused the bombing for now. But talks to end the war haven’t gained traction, and many sense that Israel’s ultra-right-wing government, emboldened by Trump’s return, wants to resume fighting. Meanwhile, today most of Gaza’s 2.1 million people live in desperate conditions in displacement camps and other makeshift shelters, often exposed to the elements and possessing minimal access to basic services. Humanitarian groups are begging Israel and the international community to preserve the ceasefire and rush aid to improve conditions at these camps — hopefully, as a precursor to reconstruction.
With Hamas weakened, world powers are deciding the future of Gaza. In February, Trump whimsically proposed to empty Gaza of Palestinians and redevelop it as a luxury riviera. The idea won plaudits from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — and categorical rejection by America’s Arab and Western allies. Trump’s vision is out of step with the majority of governments and experts who think that the reconstruction of Gaza can, and should, be done in a way that empowers Palestinians to live better lives on their land, without posing a threat to Israel.
Energy access is minimal in Gaza today. But solar has become one of the few ways to get it. About half of the electrons Gazans are using today come from solar power, according to a December estimate by the Shelter Cluster, a group that coordinates among aid organizations working in Gaza. The other half is coming from diesel, the customary fuel for post-disaster scenarios, but aid groups say Israel is withholding the necessary supplies.
With virtually no new hardware getting in, Gazans have created an internal economy for used cleantech. Solar units and their peripherals are being ripped from roofs, salvaged from rubble, and sold on Facebook. In the many camps of internally displaced people now dotting the strip, you’ll see solar panels leaning against walls and chairs — facing the sun. Some serve commercial ends. “You can find a guy with one panel, and a table, and his business is actually to charge cell phones and to charge batteries,” said one 55-year-old Gazan whose family has been displaced several times during the war.
The aid groups serving these encampments are hoping the most violent stage of the war is past and that they can switch to establishing basic services: food, water, shelter and critical health care. With diesel supplies scant, some are trying to import solar-powered gear instead. The U.N. Development Programme wants to deploy 1,100 prefab housing units, each equipped with a kilowatt of solar and rudimentary plumbing, as part of a $27 million program. The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization said in a statement that setting up off-grid photovoltaic systems is crucial to restoring agricultural activities like irrigation and cold storage.
Jumpstarting Hope in Gaza, a coalition of Palestinian, Israeli, and international NGOs, is supporting Palestinian-run IDP camps with 12,000 people in the south of Gaza with goods and equipment. The group aspires to set up a suite of solar-powered services — electricity, wastewater treatment, even units that produce drinking water from the air — to make them self-sufficient, dignified places to live during reconstruction, whenever that should begin. But in actuality, only a bit of traditional equipment got in before the ceasefire, and all equipment entries have stopped since then, said David Lehrer, a co-leader of the initiative.
Though the war isn’t formally over, many Gazans are returning to their homes, or the places their homes once stood. Some are beginning the early work of clearing rubble and laying to rest the bodies they find — a glimpse of the immense mourning that lies ahead.
As for the longer term, powerful parties are already competing to advance their respective visions of reconstruction. This month, Egypt, along with the 21 other members of the Arab League, issued a plan meant to counter Trump’s “riviera” concept. It proposes building 2,500 megawatts of power generation — about 20 times what Gaza had before the war — including solar, wind, and fossil-fuel generation. They’re not alone in envisioning Gaza as a renewable-energy powerhouse. The Palestinian Authority, which hopes to replace Hamas as Gaza’s ruling body, is developing a master plan of infrastructural priorities to be finalized with the World Bank, European Union, U.N., and Arab States. Wael Zakout, the Authority’s Minister of Planning and International Cooperation, has said solar and wind farms across Gaza could make it “the first region in the world to reach zero carbon emissions.”
Another idea that’s been mooted — one that Trump endorsed in his first term — is to build a solar farm in the sun-blasted deserts of the Sinai, just across Gaza’s southern border. Proponents say this has twin benefits: It frees up land in Gaza for other uses, and because it’s in Egypt, Israel’s not likely to target it.
But renewable energy won’t be the only resource considered for the repowering of Gaza. A modestly sized natural gas field was discovered offshore of Gaza in 2000. Political and economic conditions kept it from being developed, but the U.S., Egypt, and Israel have described it as an untapped energy reserve for Gaza. In November 2023, Amos Hochstein, a Middle East envoy for President Joe Biden and a former energy executive, said “as soon as we get to the day after and this horrible war ends, there are companies willing to develop those fields.” Supporters say gas-fired electricity would bolster Gaza’s overall energy supply and enable major new industrial infrastructure, like desalination plants and wastewater treatment, that would improve everyday life.
Josef Abramowitz, an Israeli-American solar developer who’s worked with Palestinian partners before, thinks the emphasis on large projects loses the decentralized character that has proven the most successful in Gaza. “The story of Gaza is: big projects that don’t get done,” he said.
Abramowitz’s favored model is minigrids: localized networks of solar panels and battery storage, which he said can supply round-the-clock energy at a fraction the cost of gas-fired generation. They’re flexible, sustainable, and — important in the Gazan context of blockade, frequent war, and poor governance — feasible with or without a grand resolution to the Israel-Palestine conflict.
As for Mashharawi, she said her vision for reconstruction involves something a lot more basic than energy: peace and quiet.
“One to two years from now, where are we going?” she said. “We don’t want to keep building and rebuilding things that are destroyed.”
United States Energy Secretary Chris Wright on Monday delivered a blunt critique of the energy and climate policies of the Biden administration to a group of oil and gas executives, promising a “180 degree pivot.”
The former fracking executive is fully behind President Donald Trump’s plan to expand fossil fuel production in the U.S. while doing away with federal policies to mitigate global heating.
“I wanted to play a role in reversing what I believe has been a very poor direction in energy policy,” Wright said during the kickoff to the CERAWeek by S&P Global energy conference in Houston, as The New York Times reported.
The United States is facing a pivotal moment in its fight against climate change as President Donald Trump carries out plans to roll back those efforts.
In 2019, when New York passed its landmark Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act, orCLCPA, it became a shining example of national climate action. The law established a roadmap for the state to mostly phase out planet-warming fossil fuels like gas by 2050, and transition to clean energy instead.
But 96 percent of the downstate region is still powered by fossil fuels, through pipelines for natural gas. In total, only about 29 percent of the Empire State’s electricity comes from renewable sources.
Since the CLCPA was passed, gas suppliers have made 10 attempts to increase the flow of gas across the state. But none secured New York permits to move forward, until now.
On February 7, the state greenlit an enhancement project by Iroquois Pipeline Company, which will boost the capacity of four facilities that compress gas to push more of it into the city.
Athens resident Lisa Thomas at the New York State Capitol last December telling lawmakers that the Iroquois Pipeline’s enhancement project isn’t welcome. Adi Talwar/City Limits
The approval of Iroquois’ project, which utility companies argue is needed to heat New Yorkers’ homes in the coldest months, amps up planet-warming pollution—and signals that the state’s commitment to reaching its climate goals is faltering, critics say.
The Iroquois project alone could generate $3.78 billion in climate damages through 2050 and add the equivalent of 186,000 passenger cars to the road in planet-warming gasses. It will also spew pollution into communities like Athens, a town in southeast central New York that filmmaker Lisa Thomas calls home.
‘Right under your nose’
When Lisa Thomas first moved out of New York City’s bustling concrete jungle 23 years ago for the quiet town of Athens, she was looking for a peaceful place to settle down. She believed her new 16-acre property, surrounded by trees, was it.
“I wanted to have a place that I could call home and feel safe in. But somehow now it feels like that’s in jeopardy,” Thomas said.
Nearly two years ago, Thomas learned that the multinational gas supplier, the Iroquois Pipeline Company, had plans to more than double the capacity of a compressor station a few miles down the road from her home.
Compressor stations, which make gas smaller so more of it can get pushed through the system, are widely regarded as health hazards. They spew air pollutants that can contribute to preterm births, asthma, heart disease, strokes, and a shorter lifespan, environmentalists say. And emissions released by compressor stations in New York contained 39 cancer inducing chemicals, one study found.
“A lot of times the most dangerous things are actually happening right under your nose, and you don’t even know it,” Thomas said.
Athens isn’t the only town where Iroquois was granted air permits from New York’s Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) to enhance its infrastructure. Another compressor station in Dover, a town in the southeastern tip of the state, will get a boost too. And the company hopes to do the same in two facilities in Connecticut, although permits for those are yet to be issued.
The venture, known as the ExC Project, aims to push an extra 125 million cubic feet per day of gas into New York City. To make it happen, 48,000 horsepower of new compression will be added to the four compressor stations along Iroquois’ pipeline, which starts in Canada and stretches all the way to the Big Apple.
Map of Gas New York’s gas pipeline projects developed by Patrick Spauster.
Patrick Spauster
Until ExC got New York’s seal of approval, the Empire State had denied all post-CLCPA requests from fossil fuel suppliers to secure permits for expansion.
The move signals that the state’s commitment to phasing out fossil fuels is waning, environmentalists say. Deadlines laid out by the climate act, to have 70 percent of the state’s energy come from renewable sources by 2030, have already been pushed back by three years.
Utility companies National Grid and Con Edison argue their New York City customers need the added supply, especially in the colder months. “Issuing the permits for the Iroquois ExC project is essential for maintaining a safe, adequate, and reliable gas supply for downstate New York customers,” DEC agreed in an email.
But the approval tightens the grip of dependency on fossil fuels in a state where gas-fired power plants generated twice as much electricity as any other fuel source in 2023. It will also increase pollution in towns like Athens, critics say, and add to the national carbon footprint at a time when President Trump is scaling back efforts to fight climate change.
The project has the potential to generate $3.78 billion in climate damages over the next 25 years, according to an analysis put together by the Environmental Protection Agency when Iroquois sought federal permits for the venture.
“[New York’s administration] is leaning into the wave of conservative policy. It just feels really tone deaf to what most New Yorkers actually care about and want,” said Emily Skydel, New York Hudson Valley senior organizer at Food & Water Watch.
‘A political problem’
When New York first passed the Climate Act, the state’s commitment to reducing greenhouse gas emissions appeared unwavering. Government officials were shutting down bids to bring more gas into the state left and right.
Gas supplier Williams Transco, which sought to build a massive pipeline stretching from Pennsylvania to New York City’s Rockaways, had its third request for a state permit rejected in the spring of 2020. A year later, the state also denied attempts by Danskammer and Astoria Gas Turbine Power to turn peaker plants—used only during times of peak demand for gas—into full service facilities.
Each time, DEC gave the same reason for the rejections: the projects generated too many planet-warming emissions, making them “inconsistent with the requirements of the Climate Act.”
Governor Andrew Cuomo signs New York’s Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act in July of 2019.
Kevin P. Coughlin/Office of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo
But since then, officials’ tone has changed.
In an interview last summer, Governor Kathy Hochul said that New York will probably “miss” hitting the goals set by the CLCPA “by a couple of years.”
“The goals are still worthy. But we have to think about the collateral damage of all of our major decisions,” Hochul said, citing concerns about the transition to clean energy still being too costly for consumers. “You either mitigate them or you have to rethink them.”
Seven months later, Iroquois’ compressor station expansion was approved even though the amount of climate pollution the project is set to emit exceeds limits the DEC previously considered inconsistent with the climate law.
Astoria Gas Turbine Power’s buildout, for instance, was set to launch 723,872 tons of the potent greenhouse gas carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) into the atmosphere per year. The amount, the DEC said at the time, was “substantial” as it would “interfere” with achieving the statewide emission limits set for 2030.
Meanwhile, Iroquois’ ExC project, which is projected to generate 859,057 tons of CO2e annually, did get DEC’s stamp of approval. The amount is comparable to adding 186,000 passenger cars to the road, the environmental group Sierra Club says.
As a condition for issuing the permits, however, DEC said Iroquois is required to invest $5 million in “mitigation efforts” to “minimize emissions.” That will include investing in electric vehicle charging stations or establishing a program for heat pumps, a clean electric solution to heating homes.
But efforts like these just don’t add up, environmentalists argue.
Protestors at New York’s Capitol last December urging the State to stop Iroquois’ enhancement project.
Adi Talwar/City Limits
“Green lighting projects that have a tiny marginal impact in lowering emissions are not good enough,” said Josh Berman, an attorney at Sierra Club’s Environmental Law Program.
Berman points out that the state is only marginally below 1990 greenhouse gas emissions levels, even though the climate act says it’s supposed to be 40 percent below those levels in just five years.
“We need to be doing things that are fundamentally lower-emitting and much cleaner,” Berman added.
Just 29 percent of the state’s electricity currently comes from renewable energy like solar and wind, a far cry from the goal set by the climate law, which calls for 70 percent by 2030. A state report issued last year admitted that the Empire State would probably only hit this goal by 2033.
“I think that it’s very much down to a failure of leadership by Governor [Kathy Hochul] to take seriously our legal mandate to hit our climate goals,” said Michael Paulson, co-chair of the Public Power Coalition, an environmental group that supports the shift to renewable energy.
“It is a political problem and a problem of leadership,” Paulson added.
The governor did sign legislation last year that would force big oil companies to pay for climate change destruction, and banned fracking for gas with a new technique that uses carbon dioxide. Plus she invested $1 billion “in clean energy projects in this year’s budget,” her office pointed out in an email.
“Governor Hochul has demonstrated a clear commitment to an affordable and reliable transition to a clean energy economy,” Hochul’s Deputy Communications Director Paul DeMichele added.
Inconsistent funding, long timelines for the completion of large scale renewable energy ventures and cancelled contracts have delayed the shift to renewables, the state comptroller’s office said.
In the meantime, the gas industry has quietly sought to expand by building out several existing facilities.
Map of proposed compressor station build outs in New York State.
Patrick Spauster
More gas is already being funneled into New York’s Westchester County thanks to compressor station expansions in neighboring states that concluded last year. The plan, carried out by the Tennessee Gas Pipeline company, brought a new compressor station and the enhancement of two others to New Jersey and Pennsylvania.
Within the last five years, pipeline companies have proposed eight compressor station buildouts to bring more gas into New York, a City Limits review of public filings show. Of those, three were approved by neighboring states.
“This is a strategy used by the fossil fuel industry to expand their infrastructure in a way that makes it look like they’re not really doing it,” Skydel from Food & Water Watch said.
“What people need to understand is that this is still adding gas into the system. It’s increasing air pollution and it’s still doing serious harm to our climate, to our health.”
A necessary evil?
For the nearly 4,000 people who live in the village of Athens, the approval of the Iroquois pipeline’s ExC project is not welcome news, Mayor Amy Serrago says.
“For Athens there’s really no community benefit. It’s all downsides,” argued Serrago.
Environmentalists say compressor stations, which operate on high pressure to boost more gas through the system, are accident-prone facilities. Weymouth compressor station in Massachusetts is a case in point, as the facility has reportedly had at least three unplanned leaks.
Athens is already deemed a disadvantaged community under the state’s climate criteria because it faces economic, health and environmental challenges; the town is home to large scale industrial activity like the Athens Generating plant.
“We need to find another solution to [New York’s] energy problem. I know it’s not an easy overnight fix, but we can’t keep piling these things onto our rural communities,” Serrago said.
Protestors at New York’s Capitol last December urging the State to stop Iroquois’ enhancement project.
Adi Talwar/City Limits
The Iroquois Pipeline Company told DEC that the project “will not disproportionately burden” Athens or “negatively impact human health.”
“The proposed project would not have a significant adverse impact on the environment or on individuals living in the vicinity of the project facilities, including environmental justice communities,” the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) agreed during proceedings that greenlit the project on the federal level.
But when it comes to the environment, the Iroquois Pipeline Company doesn’t have the best track record. In the spring of 1996, it pleaded guilty to four felonies for violating federal environmental laws. (Ironically, the company carries the name of the group of six Native American nations that were displaced from their territories in the 17th and 18th centuries.)
Still, fears that there won’t be enough renewable energy to heat the homes of New York residents permeate, especially in the New York City region, where dependence on fossil fuels has increased over the last five years.
In 2021, the state shut down the nuclear power plant at Indian Point, long regarded by some as an environmental health hazard. But it also supplied a large chunk of carbon-free electricity downstate.
After it began ceasing operations in the spring of 2020, downstate fossil fuel generation increased from 69 percent in 2019 to 96 percent in 2022, according to New York Independent System Operator (NYISO) reports analyzed by electrical engineer Keith Schue. Schue is part of the New York Energy and Climate Advocates, which champions the use of nuclear energy.
A slight increase in renewable energy reduced downstate dependency on fossil fuels to 94 percent last year, according to NYISO’s most recent report. But that’s still falling short of what’s needed to move off gas.
Governor Hochul briefs New Yorkers in Queens about Winter Storm Elliott. Darren McGee/Office of Governor Kathy Hochul
For Schue, the state is caught in a conundrum: while it wants to support the shift away from fossil fuels, it doesn’t have enough clean energy to do it. So it’s forced to approve projects like Iroquois to keep electricity flowing.
“People want to demonize Governor Hochul right now about this decision. But I don’t think that’s fair because ultimately we can’t let the lights go out. You can’t let people not have energy in their homes. So she’s stuck between a rock and a hard place,” Shue said.
Utility companies National Grid and Con Edison, which turn a profit by selling Iroquois’ gas to New York City residents, also say more capacity is needed.
The added supply will “significantly increase deliverability into capacity-constrained downstate New York,” National Grid said in a document issued to FERC. The utility “expects its demand growth to remain steady in coming years due to population and economic growth as well as continued oil-to-gas conversions.” Their priority, the company said in an email, is ensuring “customers have access to the energy they need.”
Con Edison agreed, adding that it needs the boost in capacity to “meet our customers’ demand on the coldest expected winter day.” A spokesperson also noted that “the approval of these permits is a step toward enhancing the reliability of our gas supply from interstate pipelines.”
The Department of Public Service (DPS), the agency that oversees utilities in New York, said in an email that it was “firmly committed” to transitioning to “cleaner and renewable energy sources.”
But it also painted the project as a necessary evil. The agency pointed out that New York came close to a “wide scale gas outage” in December of 2022, when Winter Storm Elliott led to a sudden reliance on electric generators, spiking demand for gas.
“This project is strictly about solving a safety and reliability issue on the system as it currently exists. The safety of New Yorkers during extreme cold weather is paramount, and we cannot compromise on the reliability of the state’s utility systems,” DPS said in an emailed statement.
‘Fear mongering’
Members of the environmental community, however, strongly disagree.
“One of the main tactics of the oil and gas industries is to fear monger with regards to public safety and the reliability of electricity,” said Niki Cross, an attorney at the nonprofit New York Lawyers for the Public Interest (NYLPI).
“They point to scenarios like Winter Storm Elliott and say that we were close to having an emergency breakdown of the system. But in fact, we didn’t and those storms are less and less likely to happen because of the warming climate,” they added.
New York City, once considered a humid continental climate, was redefined five years ago as a humid subtropical climate zone by the National Climate Assessment.
Plus, the amount of gas that utility companies National Grid and Con Edison say they need is based on unrealistic demand, environmentalists argue.
Both utilities use “65 Heating Degree Days” to measure how much energy is needed to heat buildings. This measure is equivalent to the temperature at Central Park reaching zero degrees over the course of an entire day. The last time that happened in New York was in 1934, experts say.
The forecasts, known as “design day demand,” are based on “extremely cold temperature conditions that occurred 90 years ago and have occurred only twice in the last 120 years,” Cross said.
A series of upcoming environmental laws are expected to further lessen New York’s need for fossil fuels. A state prohibition on the use of gas equipment in new construction takes effect in 2026 for new buildings of seven stories or less, and in 2029 for larger buildings. New York City’s own version of this law started last year. And starting this year, the city’s Local Law 97 will fine buildings larger than 25,000 square feet that fail to reduce their carbon emissions through energy efficiency upgrades.
Still, the state’s utility regulator, DPS, said that although these recent policies “reduced the overall growth of gas demand in New York City,” the demand for gas has “continued to grow, albeit at a slower pace” in a portion of ConEd and National Grid territory.
But a third party study commissioned by DPS itself begs to differ. After 2027, “no additional supply assets” like adding “additional capacity” to pipelines “will be required” to meet National Grid and ConEd’s “design day demands,” the 2023 report found.
“The question is: can you meet those design day goals with a portion of electrification? If you electrify 10 percent of [utility] customers, then you have 10 percent excess supply that you could use to cover greater demand during a winter peak,” said Michael Bloomberg, managing partner at the energy consulting firm Groundwork Data.
“You could do the same thing just through building efficiency. You don’t necessarily need to do it through added supply,” he argued.
Nationally, Trump’s “drill, baby, drill” agenda promises to increase the use of fossil fuels, as government incentives and federal permits needed for clean energy initiatives have already begun to unravel.
The Trump administration paused new leases and halted new permits for projects that generate clean energy using offshore wind farms. And it threatened to revoke federal approval for New York’s congestion pricing program, a toll that encourages Manhattan commuters to swap their cars for less carbon-emitting public transit.
“In New York we’re going to be facing a lot of headwinds coming from the federal government,” said Daniel Zarrilli, former chief climate policy advisor at the New York City Mayor’s Office.
“State governments need to be as bold as they can at this moment,” he added. “And so I would hope that New York would be at the leading edge on that. But there’s a lot of pressure pushing the other way right now.”
This coverage is made possible through a partnership between Grist and Verite News, a nonprofit news organization with a mission to produce in-depth journalism in underserved communities in the New Orleans area.
Nearly five years after a pipeline spewed poison gas across a Mississippi town, federal regulators appeared ready in recent weeks to institute new safety rules aimed at preventing similar accidents across the U.S.’s fast-growing network of carbon dioxide pipelines.
But the proposed rules, unveiled five days before the end of Joe Biden’s presidency, were quietly derailed during the first weeks of President Donald Trump’s second term.
A federal pipeline safety official not authorized to speak publicly said the proposed rules were “withdrawn” in accordance with a January 20 executive order that freezes all pending regulations and initiates a review process by Trump’s newly appointed agency leaders. Putting the pipeline rules in further doubt is a February 19 executive order aimed at rooting out all regulations that are costly to “private parties” and impede economic development.
Trump’s choice to lead the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, or PHMSA, which proposed the rules, is Paul Roberti, an attorney strongly backed by pipeline and energy industry groups. Roberti, who is awaiting Senate confirmation, oversaw PHMSA’s safety enforcement during Trump’s first term, a time marked by fewer citations and smaller fines than the Obama and Biden administrations.
Pipeline safety advocates still hope to push the Trump administration to approve the rules, which they say are critically important for reducing the risks of potentially deadly accidents across a growing number of states.
“It’s not dead yet,” said Paul Blackburn, an energy policy advisor for the Bold Alliance, an environmental group that tracks pipeline development. “It can be brought back by Trump, and I think the Trump administration should be pressured to do that.”
The more than 5,000 miles of CO2 pipelines in the U.S. are primarily used for enhanced oil recovery, a process that injects carbon dioxide into old oil reserves to squeeze out leftover deposits. Much of the current and predicted growth of the CO2 pipeline network is linked to the recent boom in carbon capture technologies, which allow industrial plants to store CO2 underground instead of releasing it into the air.
The CO2 pipeline network could top 66,000 miles — a thirteenfold increase — by 2050, according to a Princeton University-led study.
The Trump administration isn’t as supportive of carbon capture, but industry experts say growth will continue as companies try to meet state-level climate benchmarks.
While proponents say carbon capture will help address climate change, transporting pressurized CO2 comes with dangers, especially for rural stretches of the Midwest and Gulf Coast, where the network is concentrated.
CO2 can cause drowsiness, suffocation and sometimes death. Colorless, odorless, and heavier than air, carbon dioxide can travel undetected and at lethal concentrations over large distances.
The proposed rules would establish the first design, installation, and maintenance requirements for CO2 pipelines. Companies operating pipelines would need to provide training to local police and fire departments on how to respond to CO2 leaks, and emergency communication with the public would need to be improved.
Operators would be required to plan for gas releases that could harm people within 2 miles of a pipeline. The proposed rules show that PHMSA finally recognizes that the threats from CO2 pipelines are different from oil and natural gas pipelines, which can spill, burn, or explode but don’t usually imperil people miles away, said Bill Caram, executive director of the Pipeline Safety Trust, a nonprofit watchdog group.
“These are relatively strong proposals,” he said. “Would these rules make CO2 pipelines completely safe? No. But it would modernize the pipelines.”
PHMSA currently has no specific standards for transporting CO2. Rules governing the CO2 pipeline network haven’t undergone significant review since 1991, according to the trust.
The proposed rules apply “lessons learned” from a 2020 pipeline rupture in Satartia, Mississippi, PHMSA officials said in an announcement on January 15.
The rupture in the small community 30 miles northwest of Jackson forced about 200 Satartia residents to evacuate. Emergency responders found people passed out, disoriented, and struggling to breathe. At least 45 people were treated at nearby hospitals.
“I have learned firsthand from affected communities in Mississippi and across America why we need stronger CO2 pipeline safety standards,” then-PHMSA Deputy Administrator Tristan Brown, a Biden appointee, said in a statement on January 15. “These new requirements will be the strongest, most comprehensive standards for carbon dioxide transportation in the world and will set our nation on a safer path as we continue to address climate challenges.”
Accidental releases have occurred from CO2 pipelines 76 times since 2010, according to PHMSA data reviewed by Verite News. Of the more than 67,000 barrels of CO2 released over the past 15 years, the vast majority — about 54,000 barrels — came from pipelines owned by Exxon Mobil subsidiary Denbury Inc.
Denbury operates the 925-mile pipeline network that failed in Satartia and more recently in southwest Louisiana. Last April, a pipeline at a Denbury pump station near the Calcasieu Parish town of Sulphur ruptured, triggering road closures and a shelter-in-place advisory. Some residents reported feeling tired and light-headed, but local authorities reported no serious illnesses.
The pump station and pipeline weren’t equipped with alarms or other methods of alerting nearby residents when accidents occur.
Several Sulphur-area residents said they received no notice of the leak or became aware of it via Facebook posts more than an hour after the gas began to spread.
“There should have been alarms, and the whole community should have been notified,” Roishetta Ozane, a community organizer who lives near the station, told Verite in April. “I don’t trust the system we have at all.”
Unless the proposed rules are enacted, similar or worse accidents are likely, said Kenneth Clarkson, the trust’s communications director.
“In the absence of a rule, blatant regulatory shortfalls will remain, leaving the public fully exposed to the risks of CO2 pipelines,” he said.
Last week, British Petroleum announced that it was slashing more than $5 billion in planned green energy investments. It was a marked departure from the early 2000s, when the oil giant branded itself as “beyond petroleum,” and even 2020, when the company targeted a 20-fold increase in its renewables portfolio.
“Today, we have fundamentally reset BP’s strategy,” said BP’s CEO, Murray Auchincloss, as part of the most recent announcement. “This is a reset BP, with an unwavering focus on growing long-term shareholder value.”
BP isn’t the only oil giant rolling back its climate commitments. Shell and Norway’s state-controlled Equinor have also made similar moves recently. But, while the news has caught headlines, experts say that the moves will have little impact on the larger renewables industry — and that, from a climate perspective, the companies’ proposed increase in fossil fuel production is much more alarming.
“I don’t see the watering down of renewables targets as particularly significant. The oil and gas sector accounts for a negligible share of clean energy investment,” wrote Rich Collett-White, an analyst at Carbon Tracker, a nonprofit think tank researching the impact of climate change on financial markets, in an email. According to the International Energy Agency, the sector accounts for only 1 percent of the overall industry.
“Clean energy investment is still increasing globally — it’s just not coming from the oil and gas sector,” said White. “The changes they’re making to production targets are more significant.”
At the same time that BP cut its renewables portfolio, it said it was going to invest $10 billion more in oil and gas. The company is now aiming to produce 2.4 million barrels per day of fossil fuels by 2030, which is a 60 percent jump from its previous target. That 900,000 barrel difference amounts to about 387,000 more metric tons of carbon dioxide each day — which is equivalent to around 90,000 gas-powered cars operating for a year.
“Even before these renewable rollbacks, almost all the oil majors were locked in to new oil and gas production,” explained Kelly Trout, research director at Oil Change International, an advocacy organization aiming to facilitate a just transition to clean energy. A report from the organization last May found that six of the eight largest oil companies had explicit goals to increase oil and gas production. Since then, Trout says that has grown to seven companies, with Shell being the only exception.
These commitments come at a time when the oil market already shows signs of saturation. Of the 2,206 active leases in the Gulf, only a fifth are producing oil, according to records from the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, which regulates offshore drilling. White says that, climate aside, Carbon Tracker “would caution against locking in new, high-capex long-cycle developments that would need high oil/gas prices to be competitive.”
“Trump and the current administration is giving these companies a pass to keep their polluting practices,” said Mahyar Sorour, the director of the Beyond Fossil Fuels Policy program at the Sierra Club. “It is no surprise that these companies are following [Trump’s] lead.”
In BP’s announcement, the company is similarly distancing itself from its previous commitments to clean energy. “Our optimism for a fast [energy] transition was misplaced,” said Auchincloss. “We went too far, too fast.“
Rollbacks like BP’s are in some ways laying bare what activists have long argued: The commitments were insincere from the start. “Many of these tactics have been simple greenwashing,” said Sorour, adding that momentum will continue regardless. “We are well on our way to a green energy transition.”
Now that oil companies have made their intentions clear, Trout is watching whether investors and governments will respond with any pushback against the production increases. Meaningful reductions in planet warming emissions, she said, can’t happen without phasing out fossil fuels — a future oil companies clearly aren’t envisioning.
“We’re not going to solve the climate crisis simply by adding renewable energy on top of fossil fuels,” she said. “It’s a truth telling moment.”
