The recent federal funding freeze spurred immediate finger-pointing inside the Trump administration, with anonymous sources telling major news outlets that attorney Mark Paoletta was responsible for drafting the infamous memo that briefly paused trillions in federal funds. Paoletta, newly returned as the White House Office of Management and Budget’s (OMB) general counsel, is connected to a wide range of powerful figures on the right, including multiple conservative Supreme Court justices, the organizers of Project 2025, and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
Chris Wright, a Colorado fracking executive, was confirmed on Monday by the U.S. Senate with a vote of 59 to 38 to become the Secretary of Energy.
Wright’s nomination hearing, held last month before the Senate’s Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, was a relatively amiable affair. Though there were interruptions by Sunrise Movement protesters and a heated exchange with California senator Alex Padilla over Wright’s past comments dismissing the link between climate change and wildfires, Wright was not subjected to the contentious questioning that some of President Trump’s other cabinet nominees have faced. He was introduced by Senator John Hickenlooper, a Democrat, as a personal friend, and four of the committee’s Democrats voted for his confirmation.
While he acknowledged that “climate change is a real and global phenomenon,” Wright also insisted that “there isn’t dirty energy and clean energy; all energy is different and they all have different tradeoffs.” He pledged “to unleash American energy at home and abroad to restore our energy dominance,” to “lead the world in innovation and technology breakthroughs,” and to “build things in America again and remove barriers to progress.” Pressed on the policy particulars by the committee members, he expressed support for expanding nuclear power, renewables, and liquefied natural gas, and said he believed the nation’s transmission system needs to be expanded, and that this should be prioritized in future permitting reforms.
Part of the reason for Wright’s friendly reception was that he articulated a coherent, if tendentious, version of the “energy abundance” theory of how increasing the domestic production of energy in all forms — including fossil fuels — could enable the U.S. to adequately address the climate crisis. The vision Wright laid out broadly overlaps with a set of ideas that has gained prominence among energy policy thinkers in both parties — as well as in some sectors of the climate movement who see an opportunity for permitting and transmission reforms and nuclear subsidies as a reasonable tradeoff for increased oil and gas production.
In the committee hearing, Louisiana senator Bill Cassidy — a Republican and the lead sponsor of a bill to tax imports of carbon-intensive goods — told Wright, “I like your emphasis upon abundance.” And both the committee’s Republican chair, Mike Lee, and Democratic ranking member, Martin Heinrich, asked Wright to describe how he would promote energy abundance.
“The term ‘energy abundance’ is definitely having a moment,” said Katie Auth, policy director of the Energy for Growth Hub and a former USAID official. “I have heard it used in many different contexts by many different people who are coming at this from different ideological angles.”
Alex Trembath, deputy director of the Breakthrough Institute — the climate think tank perhaps best associated with the term, and a longtime gadfly of the environmental movement — said a core idea of his organization is that “technology and abundant energy can help solve ecological problems, not just cause them.”
Perhaps the most obvious example is the hope that nuclear energy can help speed our transition away from fossil fuels without sacrificing reliability, but self-described “ecomodernists” like Trembath dream of a wide range of possibilities that would be unlocked by sufficient energy.
“If you had really abundant solar or nuclear, then energy-intensive industrial processes like water desalination or indoor agriculture start to look a lot more economical,” Trembath said. “You could imagine desalinating seawater and not having to deplete rivers and aquifers. You could imagine sparing land that could grow produce and other water-intensive crops.”
To Auth, the term doesn’t just encompass futuristic hopes of unlocking miracle solutions by increasing electricity supply; it has immediate importance for the world’s hundreds of millions who lack access to electricity, and the even greater numbers whose countries’ development is hampered by inadequate power infrastructure.
“Outside of the U.S. and Europe, across Africa and Southeast Asia, we need a lot more power,” Auth said. “People need not only basic electricity services, but they need to build competitive economies, they need to build modern industry, they need to build manufacturing facilities, and to be climate resilient. They need electricity for air conditioning and all sorts of infrastructure. So I think abundance to me means that we need to be extremely ambitious in the scope and speed at which we try to build out energy infrastructure around the world.”
In Wright’s confirmation hearing, he spoke eloquently of the tragedy of energy poverty and the need for electrification in developing countries. “I think we’re going to see more abundant energy resources coming out of our country and hopefully out of the world so that everyone else can live lives like we do,” he said.
“I appreciated Chris Wright drawing attention to the fact that, here in the U.S., we take for granted that the lights will be on and that we have refrigerators and televisions, and that’s just simply not the reality for millions and millions of people,” said Auth, of the Energy for Growth Hub.
But Wright’s commitment to energy abundance stood in marked contrast to the agenda, augured in Project 2025, that seems to underlie Trump’s executive orders so far, which would make it very difficult for Wright to act on his stated priorities of increased energy supply and funding for research and development.
Trump started off his second administration by declaring an “energy emergency” — but followed this up by unilaterally freezing all new permitting and leasing for wind energy in federal lands and waters. The president then attempted last week to freeze many federal grants and loans — an order that threw the government into chaos and whose current status is contested. And Trump’s blanket freeze of foreign aid has already gouged the administration’s ability to make good on Wright’s vision of helping the developing world electrify: Programs like Power Africa, which directed USAID funds toward ending energy poverty in Africa, are now in question and, according to Auth, may have already been halted.
The president’s moves raise the question of how exactly Wright, as energy secretary, can ensure “energy abundance” if his boss isn’t on board.
“From day one, the incoming Trump administration dispelled any pretense of supporting energy abundance,” said Tyler Norris, a Duke University doctoral fellow and former special adviser at the Department of Energy, in an email. “Instead, it is taking the unprecedented step of leveraging the executive’s emergency powers to block energy resources the president dislikes. To the extent Mr. Wright favors energy abundance, he faces a steep uphill battle against a White House controlled by ideologues who appear more focused on waging tribal energy warfare than solving real-world problems.”
“You see shades of energy abundance in both parties,” Trembath said. On the Republican side, he pointed to the emergence of the term “‘energy dominance’ — which I think is really a Trumpy spin on the idea of energy abundance.” And among Democrats, energy abundance can practically be described as the guiding vision of the last four years’ American energy policy, which combined massive federal investments in green technology with record levels of oil and gas production. “The Biden administration and Democrats in the Department of Energy and Congress had their own vision of abundance articulated in the Inflation Reduction Act and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act,” Trembath said.
But both parties also have their corners of resistance to the energy-maximization agenda, for motivations ranging from conservationism on the part of environmental groups to profit on the part of fossil fuel companies who see renewables as an existential threat. And while liberals and the regulations they pass often get cast as the villains in the endlessly proliferating laments about America’s lost industrial age, the new administration is showing its ability to use the same tools to its ends.
“A very cogent argument could be made that Trump’s executive orders so far are not in the spirit of energy abundance or energy dominance; they’re draping more red tape over projects they don’t like,” Trembath said. “This is the NIMBY proceduralism that Republicans complain about with drilling for oil and gas, but when the shoe’s on the other foot they’re happy to weaponize the National Environmental Policy Act against projects they don’t like.”
Wright’s ability to increase energy production will be hobbled by the fact that the Energy Department simply doesn’t directly control the building or permitting of most new energy infrastructure, or write the rules that govern it. The most substantial portion of the department’s budget is spent on the maintenance of the nation’s nuclear weapons arsenal. The DOE’s primary levers of influence over the nation’s electricity grids are the purse strings for investments in new technologies and subsidies for project developers — and even in those areas, the money must be approved by Congress and, politically speaking, ultimately subject to the president’s agenda.
“EPA actually has more say over regulating energy infrastructure than DOE; the Interior Department has more say over leasing of public lands,” said Trembath. “In terms of building and regulating and permitting infrastructure, it’s largely out of the remit of the DOE. Likewise, Congress is in charge of what gets spent at the DOE.”
There are some arenas in which Wright will have the power to enact his ambitions, like liquefied natural gas terminals, for which Trump has lifted a Biden administration moratorium and the DOE issues permits. Another is buying and selling oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve in order to stabilize energy prices, a practice heavily used by Biden’s energy secretary Jennifer Granholm. Finally, the Department of Energy controls a once-obscure energy financing agency called the Loan Programs Office, which came into the public eye as the most prominent vehicle for the Biden administration’s climate investments under the leadership of Jigar Shah, a former solar developer who likes to talk about “energy abundance” (the phrase appears in his Twitter bio).
One signal of Wright’s intentions arose during his confirmation hearings, when the energy committee’s Republican chair, Mike Lee, asked him to commit to immediately suspending the issuance of new Loan Programs Office loans on the basis of a Trump-appointed inspector general’s report alleging conflicts of interest in the contracts the office had awarded. Wright said he was aware of the report, but did not commit to suspending new loans.
However, the question — and Wright’s authority to decide how to proceed — was soon preempted by the administration’s funding freeze. For the time being, the office is effectively shut down.
This coverage is made possible through a partnership with Grist and Interlochen Public Radio in Northern Michigan.
The owners of a shuttered nuclear plant on the shores of Lake Michigan are still banking on its historic reopening later this year, despite the confusion of President Donald Trump’s first days.
The Palisades Nuclear Plant ran for over 50 years in southwest Michigan’s Covert Township before it went offline, seemingly for good, in 2022. Soon after, lawmakers across the political spectrum and owner Holtec International pushed for a reversal. Holtec officials say they’re confident in the restart, partly because Trump’s administration has signaled strong support for nuclear power.
However, Trump’s messaging on nuclear hasn’t been uniform in the past, and more confusion has been kicked up by orders to pause Inflation Reduction Act funding and a now-rescinded memo calling to temporarily pause all federal loans and grants.
Such an environment could complicate things for projects like Palisades that require stability to plan for, say, large capital investments, according to Josh Freed, senior vice president for climate and energy at the centrist think tank Third Way.
The nuclear industry needs to know that policies, regulations, and promised funding “are actually delivered on time and in predictable ways,” he said. (Third Way supports the restart.)
The White House Office of Management and Budget did not respond to requests for comment.
There’s been renewed interest in nuclear power — and restarting mothballed plants — amid increased demand for electricity from technologies like data centers and efforts to lower greenhouse gas emissions.
Last year, the Biden administration pledged about $2.8 billion in Inflation Reduction Act funding toward the restart and other clean energy, including a $1.5 billion loan for Holtec and $1.3 billion in grants to help two rural electric cooperatives purchase that power: Indiana-based Hoosier Energy and Michigan’s Wolverine Power Cooperative.
Based in northern Michigan, Wolverine plans to buy over half of Palisades’ energy — whether or not it receives the estimated $650 million in IRA funding, which the co-op said would be passed along to customers.
Michigan law requires 100 percent clean energy by 2040, and it considers nuclear power clean. The state is allocating $300 million for the plant’s restart, which is expected to bring back 800 megawatts of power — enough for some 800,000 homes.
Wolverine officials said this would allow their members to reach the state’s energy goals a decade ahead of time. Zach Anderson, the chief operating officer, said during an interview with Grist in October that Palisades was a “perfect fit” for the co-op.
If the restart doesn’t happen, he said Wolverine wouldn’t lose money, but would have to take more time and “a lot more solar to replace something like Palisades.”
Now the co-op is figuring out what to make of Trump’s orders to pause and review IRA spending, and subsequent guidelines.
Officials with Holtec maintain that they don’t pose a problem, and that the Department of Energy will stick to the $1.5 billion loan. As for the power purchase agreement with the electric cooperatives, it “was completed well before any grants were factored in,” said spokesperson Patrick O’Brien in an email.
Nuclear power is polarizing, and behind the latest deluge of executive actions, the debate continues around whether and how much to rely on, invest in, and develop it.
Critics — and even Trump himself — have pointed to the industry’s history of delays and going over budget, like the new Vogtle reactors in Georgia, which came online years behind schedule.
Kevin Kamps, a radioactive waste specialist with the group Beyond Nuclear, thinks the Palisades restart is ill-advised.
“This is unprecedented risk taking that they’re talking about now. They’ve never done this before. It’s not needed,” he said. “Renewables are really the way to go, not resurrecting very problematic nuclear power plants.”
Beyond Nuclear has been an outspoken critic of Holtec, with longstanding concerns including radioactive contamination and nuclear waste storage. It has also intervened in the licensing process for the restart. Kamps said if necessary, they will take the matter to federal court.
“We’ll fight it as long as we can, till the last opportunity,” he said. “We feel that strongly about it.”
Environmental groups like Sierra Club Michigan have spoken against the restart as well, urging the state to develop renewables and energy storage instead.
While renewable energy has been on the rise — and generated over a fifth of the country’s electricity in 2023 — nuclear power is the third-largest source, something its supporters say can’t be dismissed. A common argument for nuclear is that it provides a baseload of power necessary to supplement less reliable renewable technologies harnessing the sun and wind.
Of course, developing nuclear power is expensive. Allison Macfarlane, a professor and director of the University of British Columbia’s school of public policy who chaired the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission from 2012 to 2014, said advancing nuclear technology, including things like smaller reactors, will require federal support.
“To bring any of these new technologies to a real commercial level will take an investment of tens to hundreds of billions of dollars. The only place where you can find that amount of money is the government,” she said, pointing out that the Trump administration wants to cut costs.
There are also procedural obstacles. Before reopening the Palisades plant, Holtec must get approval from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which will assess the facility, including its safety and infrastructure. For instance, inspectors are looking at issues with the plant’s steam generators, and regulators have called Holtec’s timeline “very, very demanding.”
More broadly, the recent funding back-and-forth may complicate the landscape for nuclear, according to Tyler Norris, who worked in the Department of Energy during the Obama administration and is now a fellow at Duke University.
“Based on real-world conversations with regulators, I can say firsthand that the uncertainty the Trump administration has created around the future of these programs is dampening the investment environment for advanced nuclear,” Norris said.
Others say Trump’s support for nuclear is clear in signs like his pick for energy secretary, fossil fuel executive Chris Wright, who has talked about expanding it. Quill Robinson, a senior advisor with the right-of-center nonprofit ConservAmerica, thinks that could continue.
“For many Republicans who have questions about the intermittency issues of wind and solar and the concentration of renewable supply chains in China, they see nuclear as a solution that also happens to be quite environmentally friendly,” he said. “So I would imagine that this administration is going to be pretty bullish on [nuclear] technology.”
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.
Despite President Donald Trump’s calls to “drill, baby, drill,” many oil companies operating in the Gulf of Mexico will likely do what they’ve done for years: sit on hundreds of untapped oil leases across millions of acres.
Trump has repeatedly said eliminating barriers to drilling will unlock vast untapped reserves of “liquid gold” and ignite a new era of national prosperity. But most of the drilling leases already granted to companies in the oil-rich Gulf are idle and unused, and they’ll stay that way until the United States’ record-breaking production rates wane and the high costs of drilling offshore drop precipitously.
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. Oil industry executives and analysts say the current number of 448 oil-producing leases is unlikely to grow significantly, even if Trump makes good on promises to expand leasing opportunities and expedite drilling permits.
The market is saturated with oil, making companies reluctant to spend more money drilling because the added product will likely push prices down, cutting into profits.
“It’s not the regulations that are getting in the way, it’s the economics,” said Hugh Daigle, a professor of petroleum engineering at the University of Texas in Austin. “It’s true that there are a bunch of undeveloped leases in the Gulf, and it’ll stay that way if we continue to see low or stagnant oil prices.”
Clayton Aldern / Grist / Peter Olexa / Unsplash
Global oil production is expected to grow more than demand over the next two years, likely forcing the price of crude to drop 8 percent in 2025 and another 11 percent next year, according to a January forecast from the U.S. Energy Information Administration, or EIA.
The Gulf accounts for 97 percent of all offshore oil and gas production in the U.S. Nearly 12 million acres are under active leases in the Gulf, but only about 2.4 million acres are being used to produce oil and gas, according to BOEM data.
So, what’s the actual benefit of a quicker and easier regulatory process for companies that don’t appear to need more leases?
“It’s simple,” said Brett Hartl, the Center for Biological Diversity’s government affairs director. “The companies make more money when they have to spend less time and effort on permits and environmental regulations and mitigation.”
A host of environmental and worker safety rules enacted after the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil disaster has made obtaining a lease and drilling permit a multi-year process. Companies must demonstrate their operations are prepared to deal with potential blowouts and worst-case-scenario discharges, and all drilling platform designs and materials must undergo certification by independent engineers.
It’s unclear how the Trump administration will change these and other offshore drilling rules. During Trump’s first term, his administration loosened requirements for offshore well designs, materials, and monitoring technology. Former President Joe Biden reinstated most of these rules.
Oil companies cheered Trump’s recent calls for a more streamlined process and a series of energy-related executive orders he signed this month. The orders declared an “energy emergency,” expanded drilling in the Arctic and repealed Biden’s ban on drilling off the East and West coasts and parts of Alaska.
“Directing regulators to expand access to resources [and] streamline permitting processes … will help deliver a stronger, more prosperous energy future for all Americans,” Mike Sommers, president of the American Petroleum Institute, said in a statement last week. “This is a new day for American energy, and we applaud President Trump for moving swiftly to chart a new path where U.S. oil and natural gas are embraced, not restricted.”
But industry leaders have also been clear that these and other policy changes floated by Trump won’t lead to more drilling. The U.S. is already producing more crude oil than any country, ever, according to the EIA. Last year’s production rate of 13 million barrels per day was a new record high, surpassing the previous record set in 2023.
“I don’t think today that production in the U.S. is constrained,” ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods told Semafor in November. “So, I don’t know that there’s an opportunity to unleash a lot of production in the near term, because most operators in the U.S. are [already] optimizing their production today.”
In essence, oil is just too cheap to justify more drilling. If prices do go up, companies are likely to tap into Permian Basin shale in Texas and New Mexico rather than seek offshore reserves, which cost more to drill, according to industry analysts.
But that doesn’t mean companies won’t snap up even more offshore leases if they’re offered, Daigle said.
“Some of these (leases) might be drilled in the future, but many are being held just so somebody else doesn’t lease them,” he said. Companies may also stockpile leases to raise funds from investors, or they may simply be playing “mind games” with competitors. Buying up leases in one area of the Gulf can sometimes throw rival drillers off the scent of richer deposits elsewhere, Daigle said.
Leases have been sold too quickly and cheaply in recent decades, according to a 2021 report by the U.S. Department of the Interior, which oversees BOEM. This fast and loose approach “shortchanges taxpayers” and encourages “speculators to purchase leases with the intent of waiting for increases in resource prices, adding assets to their balance sheets, or even reselling leases at profit rather than attempting to produce oil or gas,” the report said.
“More leases may make the companies look good, on paper, to investors,” said Tom Pelton, communications director for the Environmental Integrity Project, an environmental watchdog group. “But they won’t necessarily even produce more oil and gas. And they certainly will not be good for the climate or clean water.”
If Trump really wanted to slash energy prices for U.S. consumers, he wouldn’t have banned offshore wind leasing in federal waters or restarted permitting for new liquefied natural gas (LNG) export terminals, said Scott Eustis, the community science director for Healthy Gulf, a nonprofit environmental group.
Shipping LNG overseas contributes to higher electricity and natural gas prices in the U.S., according to a recent U.S. Department of Energy report.
“LNG exports make everybody’s energy cost more because we’re giving it to China and not using it domestically,” Eustis said.
Beyond the economics, giving companies an easier route to secure leases and permits does little more than put the Gulf at risk of another Deepwater Horizon-scale disaster, Hartl said.
“The only result we’ll have is more risky drilling,” he said. “And then the question is not ‘if’ but ‘when’ we’ll have the next catastrophic spill in the Gulf.”
The arrival of a Chinese challenger shows Australia isn’t out of the AI arms race and could even carve out a dominant position in powering the technology, according to one of Australia’s leading AI experts. DeepSeek disrupted the AI scene this week by releasing a genuine alternative to US giants like OpenAI that it built…
During his first week in office, President Trump withdrew from the Paris climate agreement, declared an energy emergency, renewed his vow to “drill, baby, drill,” and began dismantling American climate policy. That has left environmental advocates looking to states to lead the nation’s efforts to burn fewer fossil fuels — and a report released Wednesday shows there is much more they can do.
One of the most powerful tools at each state’s disposal is the ability to work with utilities to encourage energy efficiency. But, the report from the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy, or ACEEE, details how only 26 states, along with the District of Columbia, have established a so-called “energy efficiency resource standard,” or EERS. These targets, set by legislators or utility regulators, require utilities to implement programs — such as weatherization or rebates on appliances — that cut energy consumption by a certain amount each year.
“There is more work that needs to be done,” said Jasmine Mah, a senior research analyst at the Council and an author of the report. Since 2012, just three states have added such a standard, while New Hampshire, Ohio, and Iowa repealed theirs in favor of less ambitious or scaled back programing. Arizona is also pursuing a rollback. Mah says the report is aimed at state policymakers and regulators, who could shift that tide.
“We hope that highlighting the positive impacts of having an EERS in place would encourage states to pass a policy,” she said. An earlier ACEE report found that, as of 2017, states with an energy efficiency resource standard saw four times the electricity savings as states without one. In 2023, states with such a plan accounted for about 59 percent of the U.S. population but 82 percent of the savings.
“States aren’t doing this just because of climate change,” said Barry Rabe, a political scientist at the University of Michigan who studies energy and climate politics. “There is an economic advantage.”
Fossil-fuel friendly Texas, Rabe noted, was the first to adopt an EERS in 1999. But efficiency can become less of a priority when energy supplies are abundant and costs are stable. “The decline in interest,” Rabe said, “has in some degree coincided with the massive increase in natural gas use in the U.S.”
Still, the Council also found that many states have gone beyond baseline policies and implemented what the report dubs “next-generation” initiatives that aim to lower greenhouse gas emissions, spur electrification, serve lower-income populations, and reduce consumers’ financial energy burdens. All but four of the 27 states (including DC) with an energy efficiency resource standard have implemented at least one such effort, but only nine have adopted all of them, leaving plenty of room for growth.
“We found that low income targets are the most common complimentary goal related to efficiency standards,” said Mah. “[But] not many states had provisions for energy affordability.”
The report spotlights five states that have been particularly effective at employing these programs. Illinois has targeted using only clean energy by 2050. Massachusetts aims to install half a million heat pumps by 2030. Michigan mandates that utilities dedicate at least 25 to 35 of their energy efficiency funding to programs serving low-income customers. Utilities in New York and Minnesota have capped the portion of a customer’s income that can go toward utility costs at 6 and 4 percent, respectively.
President Trump’s push to repeal the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, or IRA, likely won’t impact state EERSs because they are generally funded through fees added to utility bills. “We see that as probably the best way to bring significant funds,” said Justin Brant, the utility program director at the Southwest Energy Efficiency Project.
Critics of Arizona’s EERS, which was adopted in 2010, point to the $3 billion cost to customers. “Utilities should select the most cost-effective energy mix to provide reliable and affordable service, without being constrained by government-imposed mandates that make it more expensive for their customers,” said Arizona Corporation Commissioner Nick Myers, in a statement last year. But the state’s largest electric utility found that, in 2023, EERS investments reaped about twice as much in returns as was spent.
“We’re saving money for all customers, even those who aren’t participating,” said Brant.
The IRA does provide nearly $9 billion for energy efficiency and electrification programs, almost all of which is distributed via states and could be used on next-generation programs, like those serving low-income households. That money has already been awarded. But the Republican-controlled Congress could roll back federal tax credits for energy efficiency and electrification, which indirectly make it easier for states to achieve their energy efficiency resource standard and next-generation goals.
Brant says he would add another policy to the Council’s “next-generation” wishlist for states: programs that encourage customers to spread out the timing of their daily energy use. Lower peak demand means power plants don’t need to be as large and that, he said, will be especially critical as renewable energy becomes an increasing part of the country’s electricity mix.
“Time shift is not something that this report looked at,” he said. “I think that’s another piece that needs to be prioritized.”
“Alberta is taking a zero-tolerance approach to crime,” bragged Alberta Premier Danielle Smith in 2023 on social media after her government announced more enforcement, greater emphasis on public safety, and limited discretion of prosecutors to let offenders off the hook. “
“There is an increasing sense that the system is not holding criminals properly accountable and letting the public suffer the consequences,” chimed in Alberta Minister of Justice Mickey Amery during the announcement. “This is simply unacceptable.”
If only the governing United Conservative Party applied those laudable principles to oil sands companies that repeatedly flout legal requirements not to pollute waterways, air and land.
Offshore wind is a fledgling industry in the U.S. — one that, until this week, was poised for renewal after a slew of cancelled projects. The Biden administration had set a goal of deploying 30 gigawatts of projects by 2030 (approximately a 150-fold increase from the current amount of offshore wind generation nationwide), and state-level commitments are even higher. But President Donald Trump has long nursed an apparent vendetta against wind energy.
On Monday, his first day in office, Trump fulfilled a campaign promise and issued an executive action pausing new permits and lease sales for wind energy on federal lands and waters, pending a review by federal agencies. “We don’t want windmills in this country,” he told Fox News.
As a result, trade unions and low-income port communities that were depending on construction jobs from those projects will be disappointed; some coastal states’ climate targets will be harder to meet; and the prospects for grid reliability in the face of the expected nationwide growth in energy demand are a little less bright.
Besides its climate value as a form of carbon-free energy, offshore wind plays a useful role in a power grid alongside solar energy and onshore wind. Like other renewable technologies, its power is intermittent — but because its availability depends on different environmental factors from those resources, offshore wind can be thought of as “a form of storage,” explained Daniel Kammen, a professor of energy at the University of California, Berkeley and a former U.S. Science Envoy.
There are three operating wind farms in American waters today, off the coasts of Rhode Island, New York, and Virginia. Of these, only one — New York’s South Fork Wind Farm — is a large-scale project. But many others are in various stages of development — and among the major open questions around the executive action is whether projects that have already received leases and permits will face jeopardy. “I’m worried about not only future projects but also about the current ones,” said Kammen.
The executive action notes that the offshore leasing pause does not affect “rights under existing leases in the withdrawn areas” — but also mandates that the Secretary of the Interior conduct a review of “the necessity of terminating or amending any existing wind energy leases” and of the “legal bases for such removal.”
One such legal tool available to Trump is to simply drop the federal government’s defense of permits that are being contested in court.
The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, or BOEM, is currently being sued over the permits it awarded to at least four wind projects: Rhode Island’s Revolution Wind, New York’s South Fork Wind, Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind, and the Maryland Offshore Wind Project.
Timothy Fox, managing director of the research firm ClearView Energy Partners, told Grist in an email that the executive action “strongly suggests … that the Trump Administration is unlikely to vigorously defend offshore wind project permits issued by the Biden Administration,” and moreover will “encourage offshore wind foes to file additional legal challenges” against existing projects.
But there may be a countervailing incentive for the administration to avoid dropping its defenses of the projects, according to Patrick Crowley, president of the Rhode Island AFL-CIO: the fact that BOEM is also responsible for awarding permits for offshore oil drilling — which Trump hopes to supercharge.
“I think their legal calculus is going to take into account: ‘If we simply fold the cards, what does that do to this agency’s authority?’ They don’t want to give up that authority,” Crowley said. “In my experience no federal administration wants to give up any authority that it has.”
“If they want BOEM to approve offshore drilling, and they ceded that authority on offshore wind, that’s going to allow people that don’t want offshore drilling to happen to point to this decision as a precedent,” Crowley added.
Fox characterized this as a “fair argument,” agreeing that “if the Trump Administration were to firmly side with petitioners, and if the court(s) were to agree, it could set a precedent that sets a high environmental bar for other energy sectors (e.g., offshore oil and gas).” But there may be ways around this dilemma.
The administration could simply invoke arguments that are particular to the environmental effects of offshore wind and don’t apply to drilling, which largely occurs in different regions and has different ecological impacts. “For example, the Trump Administration could argue that individual offshore wind projects and their cumulative impacts could negatively impact the North Atlantic right whale, a listed endangered species,” Fox wrote — an issue that has little bearing on drilling operations.
Like many in the flurry of Trump’s first-day executive orders, the ambiguity creates uncertainty — and leaves some room for hope for stakeholders in the wind industry.
“One of the ways to interpret what Trump is doing is creating the situation where he can eventually take credit for the offshore wind industry continuing and expanding,” Crowley said. “If we’ve learned anything from Trump, he’ll take credit for good things and deflect blame for the bad things.”
One of the biggest myths about renewable energy is that it isn’t reliable. Sure, the sun sets every night and winds calm down, putting solar panels and turbines to sleep. But when those renewables are humming, they’re providing the grid with electricity and charging banks of batteries, which then supply power at night.
A new study in the journal Renewable Energy that looked at California’s deployment of renewable power highlights just how reliable the future of energy might be. It found that last year, from late winter to early summer, renewables fulfilled 100 percent of the state’s electricity demand for up to 10 hours on 98 of 116 days, a record for California. Not only were there no blackouts during that time, thanks in part to backup battery power, but at their peak the renewables provided up to 162 percent of the grid’s needs — adding extra electricity California could export to neighboring states or use to fill batteries.
“This study really finds that we can keep the grid stable with more and more renewables,” said Mark Z. Jacobson, a civil and environmental engineer at Stanford University and lead author of the new paper. “Every major renewable — geothermal, hydro, wind, solar in particular, even offshore wind — is lower cost than fossil fuels” on average, globally.
Even with the incessant challenge of wildfires, California utilities are rapidly shifting to clean energy, with about half of the state’s power generated by renewables like hydropower, wind, and solar. The study compared 116 days in 2024 to the same period in 2023 and discovered California’s output from solar was 31 percent higher and wind 8 percent. After increasing more than 30-fold between 2020 and 2023, the state’s battery capacity doubled between 2023 and 2024, and is now equivalent to the juice produced by more than four nuclear power plants. According to the study, all that new clean tech helped California’s power plants burn 40 percent less fossil fuel for electricty last year.
Those batteries help grid operators be more flexible in meeting demand for electricity, which tends to peak when people return home in the early evening and switch on appliances like air conditioners — just when the grid is losing solar power. “Now we’re seeing the batteries get charged up in the middle of the day, and then meet the portion of the demand in the evening, especially during those hot summer days,” said Mark Rothleder, chief operating officer of the California Independent System Operator, the nonprofit that runs the state’s grid.
Another pervasive myth about renewables is that they won’t be able to support a lot more electric vehicles, induction stoves, and heat pumps plugging into the grid. But here, too, California busts the myth: Between 2023 and 2024, demand on the state’s grid during the study period actually dropped by about 1 percent.
Why? In part because some customers installed their own solar panels, using that free solar energy instead of drawing power from the grid. In 2016, almost none of those customers had batteries to store that solar power to use at night. But battery adoption rose each of the following years, reaching 13 percent of buildings installing solar in 2023, then skyrocketing to 38 percent last year. (That is, of the 1,222 megawatts of solar capacity added last year, 464 megawatts included batteries.) That reduces demand on the grid because those customers can now use their solar power at night.
Batteries also help utilities get better returns on their investments in solar panels. A solar farm makes all its money selling electricity during the day. But if it has batteries attached to the farm, it can also provide energy in the evening, when electricity prices rise due to increased demand. “That evening battery contribution is very key to the economics working out well,” said Jan Kleissl, director of the Center for Energy Research at the University of California, San Diego, who wasn’t involved in the new paper.
So utilities are incentivized to invest in batteries, which also provide reliable backup power to avoid blackouts. But like any technology, batteries can fail. Last week, a battery storage plant caught fire on California’s central coast, the largest of its kind in the world, but it only knocked out 2 percent of the state’s energy storage capacity. A grid fully running on renewables will have a lot of redundancy built in, beyond multiple battery plants: Electric school buses and other EVs, for instance, are beginning to send power back to the grid when a utility needs it — a potentially vast network of backup energy.
But here’s where the economics get funky. The more renewables on the grid, the lower the electricity prices tend to be for customers, according to the new study. From October 1, 2023 to September 30, 2024, South Dakota, Montana, and Iowa provided 110 percent, 87 percent, and 79 percent, respectively, of their electricity demand with renewables, particularly wind and hydropower. Accordingly, the three have some of the lowest electricity prices in the country.
California, on the other hand, got 47 percent of its power from renewables over the same period, yet wildfires and other factors have translated into higher electricity prices. The California Public Utilities Commission, for instance, authorized its three largest utilities to collect $27 billion in wildfire prevention and insurance costs from ratepayers between 2019 and 2023.
Climate change is making California ever more prone to burn — a growing challenge for utilities. But the state’s banner year for solar and batteries just poked a whole lot of holes in the notion that renewables aren’t reliable.
An Australian energy system relying on a the Coalition’s nuclear power plan would shrink the opportunity for emerging technology like AI and the data centres that power it, the Prime Minister warned on Friday while launching his yearly agenda. During a National Press Club address in Canberra, Anthony Albanese said the Opposition’s energy plan left…
The Clean Energy Finance Corporation has secured a $2 billion top-up from the federal government to help households and small businesses lower emissions amid the race to meet 2030 climate change targets. The world’s largest dedicated green bank will use the new investment, announced on Thursday, to “offer significant savings for households and small businesses…
Even before this transformation, however, years of research suggested that Twitter and other social media apps were vectors of misinformation and propaganda, including from fossil fuel interests. In 2015, oil and gas companies were active on Twitter during international negotiations over the Paris Agreement to limit global warming, promoting the incorrect notion that Americans did not support taking action on climate change. More recent research has shown similar industry messaging in the lead-up to climate negotiations in Glasgow and Dubai, and one multi-year analysis of more than 22,000 tweets from Exxon Mobil-funded think tanks and industry groups found that they have frequently disseminated the ideas that climate change is not threatening, and that former president Joe Biden’s energy plans hurt economic growth.
Other branches of the fossil fuel industry — including plasticproducers and agrichemical companies, both of which depend on oil and gas and their byproducts — have also taken to social media to discourage actions to reduce the use of their products. In a new paper published last week in the journal PLOS Climate, researchers suggest that climate communications from these three sectors — oil and gas, plastics, and agrichemicals — are “aligned and coordinated … to reinforce existing infrastructure and inhibit change.”
“They were all talking to each other,” said the study’s lead author Alaina Kinol, a public policy doctoral candidate at Northeastern University’s College of Social Sciences and Humanities in Boston.
According to the authors, the study represents the first attempt to characterize the network of misleading climate communications from these three distinct but connected nodes of the fossil fuel industry. They said the connections between these sectors are often underappreciated, even among those advocating for a fossil fuel phaseout. “You don’t want to look only at energy, which is where a lot of the attention goes,” Kinol said. Oil and gas companies see plastics as a “plan B” for their industry as policymakers try to transition to clean energy, and the agricultural sector is heavily dependent on fossil fuels for everything from fertilizers to pesticides.
Kinol and her team downloaded more than 125,000 tweets posted between 2008 and 2023 by nine Twitter accounts — one industry association per sector, plus two of each sector’s largest corporations — and then conducted a two-part analysis, first examining the connections between the accounts (“who’s ‘at-ing’ who,” as Kinol put it) and then analyzing the content of the tweets.
The network analysis revealed that companies and their trade groups across all sectors were frequently tagging each other, with accounts owned by Exxon Mobil, the chemical company Dow, and the trade group the American Petroleum Institute among the most mentioned.
For the contextual analysis, Kinol read every single tweet to identify common themes. With the 12,000 tweets that related to five selected categories — the economy, the Environmental Protection Agency, pipelines, sustainability, and water — she categorized them using a framework she dubbed “discourses of climate obstruction,” which builds on existing research to describe the way the industry groups either deny the existence of climate change or downplay the possibility and importance of responding to it. The framework includes eight types of arguments — four that represent outright climate denial, and four that represent a more nuanced form of “climate delay.”
Denial discourse 1: It isn’t happening
Example: “#natgas is a game-changer benefiting the economy, public health, and environment.”
– @Chevron, 22 August 2016(Note: This tweet has since been deleted)
More on this strategy →
The “it isn’t happening” rhetoric denies the existence of climate change — or, more subtly, fossil fuels’ contribution to it. Kinol said she observed that companies usually didn’t claim outright that climate change isn’t happening, but rather implied that the use of hydrocarbons aren’t causing an increase in global temperatures. The tweet shown here by Chevron alleges that natural gas benefits the environment.
Denial discourse 2: It isn’t that bad
Example: “Oil, mining groups urge House to curtail EPA climate rules in CR”
– @AmChemistry, 17 February 2011(Note: This tweet has since been deleted)
More on this strategy →
In the “it isn’t that bad” approach, fossil fuel companies argue that climate change is not severe enough to merit a policy response. This particular tweet repeats the headline of a 2011 article in The Hill describing the American Chemistry Council and other industry groups’ request that U.S. House members oppose provisions of a spending bill that would allow the Environmental Protection Agency to set stricter greenhouse gas emissions standards for some polluting facilities.
Denial discourse 3: It isn’t us
Example: “Congrats @exxonmobil, recipient of ACC’s #ResponsibleCare [Registered Trademark] Company of the Year Award, for initiatives to improve #EHSS performance, drive emissions reductions toward #NetZero, & inspire local communities.”
– @AmChemistry, 30 April 2009(Note: This tweet has since been deleted)
More on this strategy →
The “it isn’t us” technique may acknowledge the reality of climate change and even fossil fuels’ contribution to it, but argues that fossil fuel companies should not be held responsible for the climate impacts of their products and that they may in fact be part of the solution. Kinol and her co-authors noted that the approach “is echoed across the sectors as the organizations provide cover to each other.” Here, the American Chemistry Council commends Exxon Mobil for ostensibly helping to reduce emissions, without acknowledging the company’s continued role in causing climate change.
Denial discourse 4: It’s taken care of
Example: “Collaborative approaches like @MITEngineering’s Climate and Sustainability Consortium are how we will achieve our shared vision for a sustainable future. #SeekTogether”
The “it’s taken care of” rhetoric, also referred to as “dismissal,” holds that climate change is not a crisis because human ingenuity is adequately addressing it — no further regulations are needed. The PLOS Climate paper describes the argument as “the smart people are on it.”
The four types of denial rhetoric argue that climate change is either not happening, not that bad, or not caused by humans, or that it’s being adequately taken care of — arguments that have become all too familiar to those tracking the history of fossil fuel obstructionism. The tweets that promoted delay either redirected responsibility for climate change, advocated for nontransformative solutions, emphasized the downsides of climate regulations, or “surrendered” to the idea that solving climate change isn’t feasible.
According to Jennie Stephens, a co-author of the report and a professor of climate justice at the National University of Ireland Maynooth, talking points about delay and denial were happening together in concert between 2008 and 2023. “There was climate denial — like, ‘It’s not really a problem,’” she said — “but also delay, which was, ‘We’re already reducing emissions,’ to promote the notion that they don’t need to be regulated to further reduce emissions or fossil fuel use.
“It all connects back to this overarching strategy of trying to control the narrative, … reinforcing this sense that there’s no way we’re ever going to phase out fossil fuels, no matter how bad the climate crisis gets,” she added. (Editor’s note: Stephens was selected as a Grist New England Fixer in 2019.)
Delay discourse 1: Redirection
Example: “Which do you choose – install a low-flow showerhead or wash clothes in cold water? #EarthDay”
– @DowNewsroom, 24 April 2014 (Note: This tweet has since been deleted)
More on this strategy →
This “redirection” technique deflects responsibility for climate change away from petrochemical companies and onto individuals, often by promoting consumer choices instead of government regulations or other levers for systemic change.
Delay discourse 2: Nontransformation
Example: “A new project aims to design a process that recycles plastic with near-zero environmental pollution. Learn more about this joint initiative between NAFRA, Charles Darwin University, and the United Arab Emirates University. #flameretardants #circulareconomy”
The “nontransformation” approach focuses on solutions that are unlikely to jeopardize continued petrochemical use, often relying on technologies that are unproven or that only address problems on a surface level. Stephens and Kinol said this type of rhetoric was particularly prevalent among the tweets they analyzed. For energy companies, this often meant the promotion of carbon capture technology that remains prohibitively expensive, and that has been used by fossil fuel companies to justify ongoing fossil fuel extraction and burning. For plastic companies, it was recycling, despite its well-documented failure to manage more than 10 percent of the world’s plastic waste. This tweet by the American Chemistry Council highlights recycling as a solution to the plastic pollution crisis, instead of more systemic measures to reduce plastic production.
Delay discourse 3: Downside emphasis
Example: “RFS proposal threatens U.S. #energy independence, #farmeconomy”
The “downside emphasis” tactic suggests that the drawbacks of climate and environmental regulations outweigh the benefits. For instance, this 2016 tweet from the Farm Bureau — a group that lobbies for agribusiness interests and whose state-level members have fought climate science and regulation — stresses the tradeoffs of renewable fuel standards, or RFS, which require that transportation fuels contain a minimum amount of fuel that’s deemed “renewable,” like fuel made out of plants.
Delay discourse 4: Surrender
Example: “Air-pollution limits proposed by the EPA on the oil & #natgas industry will be ‘overly burdensome.’”
– @APIenergy, 2 December 2011 (Note: This tweet has since been deleted)
More on this strategy →
This rhetorical device “surrenders” to the idea that climate change mitigation is not feasible. It’s reflected here in the American Petroleum Institute’s claim that pollution limits are too burdensome to be implemented.
The study also found that the nine companies and trade groups frequently mentioned schools and universities, which the authors interpreted as “a focused effort to shape or at least interact with teaching and learning at all levels.” Stephens said this finding was “striking” and that it reinforced otherresearch showing how fossil fuel companies have been “very strategically investing in education as a way to normalize and demonstrate their beneficial contributions to society.”
In response to Grist’s request for comment, a spokesperson for the American Chemistry Council said “chemistry plays a vital role in the creation of innovative products that make our lives and our world healthier, safer, more sustainable, and more productive.” Mike Tomko, communications director of the Farm Bureau said, “I can’t speak to a tweet that’s almost a decade old, but I can tell you that we’ve contributed positively to developing voluntary, market-based programs that are advancing climate-smart farming and helping America reach its sustainability goals.”
Six of the other organizations — the American Petroleum Institute, Chevron, Corteva, Dow Chemical, Exxon Mobil, and FMC Corporation — did not respond to questions. DuPont declined to comment.
Jill Hopke, an associate professor of journalism at the DePaul University College of Communication, was not involved in the new study but has done her own research on climate-related misinformation on Twitter. She praised the PLOS Climate study as “innovative” and grounded in prior research, although she said she’d be interested in further analysis of how the relative proportions of obstructive tactics — delay vs. denial, and nuances within those categories — have changed over time, and of the fraction of tweets that were promoted as ads.
“You can’t do everything in one paper,” she conceded.
Irena Vodenska, a professor of finance at Boston University who has experience researching climate misinformation on Twitter, agreed that the PLOS Climate paper was “comprehensive in its approach,” although she suggested additional analysis is needed to confirm whether the organizations in question really intended to obstruct climate action. This constitutes the difference between misinformation and disinformation, the latter of which refers to intentionally disseminated falsehoods and is usually much harder to prove — though it could be possible by looking at more accounts on X and across social media platforms, she suggested.
Vodenska also noted that the transition from Twitter to X has brought changes in algorithms and content moderation policies that could complicate the extraction and analysis of future data.
Kinol readily acknowledged this. “This paper was written in a previous era, when Twitter was sort of the central meeting place of the world,” she said. “That’s changed, but social media is still part of a major communications strategy [from industry groups] to use various methods of denial and delay to prevent the implementation of successful climate policy.”
Despite the rapidly changing social media landscape, Kinol is confident companies are still using the same strategies to minimize the need for climate action. “We’re at the stage of climate change where it’s all hands on deck, and I hope that our paper is helpful as a tool to combat this denial and delay,” she continued. “If you’re aware that something’s happening, it’s a lot easier to push back against it.”
The environmental harm of oil and gas wells doesn’t end when the pumping stops. If disused wells remain unplugged — the term of art for closing them up with concrete and remediating the environment around them — they can leach toxic chemicals and spew planet-warming methane into the air. Some 3 million such wells dot the U.S., and the companies responsible for them have often fled the scene. In recent years, Congress has poured billions of dollars into cleaning up the mess, giving rise to a niche industry of hardscrabble well pluggers across the country.
But all that money still isn’t anywhere close to enough, which is why carbon credit developers are also getting in on the action. A handful of private companies and nonprofits are now attempting to use the voluntary carbon market — which sells emissions-reducing schemes to institutions attempting to meet their climate goals by cutting down on carbon pollution other than their own, essentially — as a source of funding for cleanups of these orphan wells.
Here’s how it’s supposed to work: The amount of methane leaking out of a given well can vary dramatically, so carbon credit developers first identify high emitters. They secure access to the well from landowners, obtain the right to operate and plug the well from regulators, measure the amount of methane being released, plug the well, and estimate the amount of emissions avoided as a result of their work.
The methodology for this last, crucial calculation varies depending on the standards that the developer decides to adhere to. If the standard setter requires independent verification, the developer also hires a certification firm to audit the emissions calculation. Once the developer clears these hurdles, the standard setter issues the equivalent carbon credits into the voluntary carbon market where companies — think data centers, automobile manufacturers, and any corporate actor making promises to green their operations — can purchase them.
Nearly 5 million credits have been generated since the first project was issued in the summer of 2023. While it’s unclear exactly if and how much these credits sold for, experts told Grist it’s reasonable to assume that they can fetch at least $10 to $30 per credit, each of which constitutes 1 metric ton of avoided carbon dioxide emissions.
There’s clearly money to be made through the voluntary carbon market for orphan well cleanups, but the exact environmental benefits are less certain. For one, the amount of methane emissions avoided as a result of plugging a well is difficult to estimate, in part because leakage rates decline at an uncertain pace over time, as more natural gas escapes from a well and the pressure underground decreases. Some wells leak significant amounts in short bursts, while others pollute gradually. And even when a well is plugged, it’s not entirely clear that the methane will remain trapped underground. In some cases, it could bubble up from neighboring leaky wells.
“There are a lot of hurdles that you have to get over in order for those [carbon] credits to be any good,” said Adam Peltz, a director and senior attorney at the nonprofit Environmental Defense Fund. “And some of those hurdles require a lot of thinking and vigilance.”
When it comes to verifying the credibility of carbon offsets, the American Carbon Registry is the most prominent standard setter. The program, founded in 1996, has developed a methodology for estimating the climate benefits of reducing emissions from landfills, restoring wetlands, and planting trees, among other activities. Since establishing a set of standards for evaluating oil and gas well pluggings in May 2023, the Registry has issued more than half of the nearly 5 million credits generated by the industry so far. The other major standard setters are CarbonPath and BCarbon.
As for calculating the amount of methane pollution avoided when a leaky well is plugged, each standard setter has a different approach. This leads to different assessments of the number of credits that can be issued for a particular project. A key difference lies in each setter’s assessment of methane’s potential to heat the planet. Once it’s in the atmosphere, methane degrades into less potent greenhouse gases in about a decade. That means that its warming power, compared to that of carbon dioxide, is highly dependent on the timescale one chooses: Methane’s warming potential is about 80 times greater than carbon dioxide’s over a 20-year timeframe, but roughly 27 times greater over a 100-year timeframe. In calculating methane’s potential to warm the planet, BCarbon uses a 20-year timeframe while the Registry and CarbonPath use a 100-year timeframe. Because it’s using a shorter time horizon, BCarbon issues more credits.
The standard setters also use different time horizons to estimate the period over which methane emissions are avoided as a result of a well plugging. CarbonPath assumes that by plugging a well, the developer helped protect the planet from up to 50 years of methane emissions. The other two standard setters use a period of 20 years.
Brad Handler, a researcher and program director of the Energy Finance Lab at the Colorado School of Mines, suggested that the methodologies might come closer together as more data is gathered. “I can’t sit here and tell you that one is wrong,” he said. “As buyers get more educated about all of it, the methodology may be refined.”
In the meantime, it’s entirely possible that developers are overestimating the planetary benefits of plugging wells — and in turn helping corporations overstate their progress on their climate goals. Peltz, the Environmental Defense Fund attorney, said there was little reasoning behind assuming that emissions were avoided over 50 years rather than 20 years. “I’m hard-pressed to see a basis other than generating more credits for the same activity,” he said.
Concerns about overcrediting are already circulating about at least one project. Last year, a company called Rebellion Energy Solutions plugged six orphaned wells in Oklahoma and estimated that the wells leaked between 2.7 and 285 kilograms of methane per hour. Based on two measurements taken 30 days apart, Rebellion calculated an average methane leak rate of 68 kilograms per hour. Those numbers are orders of magnitude higher than the values measured by researchers. Most studies have found that unplugged orphan wells emit 10 to 30 grams of methane per hour. One study in Colorado estimated an average leak rate of 586 grams per hour and identified one instance of a super-emitting well releasing 76 kilograms per hour.
Rebellion issued nearly 1.9 million credits for the project — more than a third of all credits issued so far. BeZero Carbon, a global carbon credits rating agency, found that the project likely overestimated the amount of methane released. (A spokesperson for BeZero said the firm doesn’t comment on specific ratings.)
“The values recorded by the project may reflect the worst-case-scenario baseline; a scenario that may not come to pass,” the ratings firm noted, adding that the project “faces significant over-crediting risk as a result of uncertainties regarding the project’s modeling of baseline methane leakage rates.”
But Staci Taruscio, Rebellion’s CEO, said that the high leakage rate in the pool of wells they’ve plugged so far is in part because the company spends significant time and resources to identify high emitters. Rebellion staff conduct analyses to select wells that have historically produced natural gas and are likely to hold reserves underground that can leak. They also sign agreements with landowners giving them access to wells that academics typically can’t reach when collecting standard measurements. The company measured methane levels at roughly 3,000 wells before selecting the dozen or so highest emitters that they’ve plugged so far, said Taruscio, who worked most of her career in the oil and gas industry.
“We have a lot of tools in our tool belt to identify those [high-emitting wells],” she said. “If you think of the oil and gas industry, our entire existence depends upon finding reservoirs with energy. That’s all we’re doing.”
Taruscio said she was “shocked” by BeZero Carbon’s rating and has submitted the methane measurements from the other 3,000 wells for the agency to reconsider its finding. “We realized a big part of their rating was because they haven’t seen all the wells that weren’t included,” she said.
Taruscio said that, given the novel nature of carbon credits for plugging wells, developers, standard setters, certifiers, and rating agencies are all still moving up the learning curve.
“There are bad actors out there,” she said. “So everybody just has to be really cautious at this point so that we don’t let bad projects through.”
Editor’s note: The Environmental Defense Fund is an advertiser with Grist. Advertisers have no role in Grist’s editorial decisions.
Even before President-elect Donald Trump’s return to the White House next Monday, California got ahead of things. Anticipating more of the federal meddling they’d seen in the past, like when Trump’s first administration tried to block the state’s vehicle emissions standards, lawmakers met in a special session to start preparing a defense of its progressive civil rights, reproductive freedom…
Equinor has retracted a claim that it stores about a million tonnes of carbon dioxide annually at its flagship carbon capture project after DeSmog obtained data showing the real figure was as little as a tenth of that amount.
The Norwegian oil company scrubbed the estimate from its website in November, when presented with official figures showing that it captured 106,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2) at its Sleipner carbon capture and storage (CCS) facility in 2023.
Equinor has not captured 1 million tonnes of CO2 per year at the site since 2001, according to the data, provided by the Norwegian Environment Agency.
Around 5:30 in the morning on December 31, Yvonne Santiago was woken up by a sudden stillness: The fans had switched off. It must be a power outage, she quickly reasoned, and went back to sleep.
When she woke up again hours later, she learned that the outage wasn’t contained to Bayamón, the Puerto Rican city where she was spending the holidays with her boyfriend’s family, but was in fact an island-wide blackout. “Reading the news, I burst out laughing,” she said.
“We have a saying: Ríe para no llorar — laugh to not cry,” she explained. “Things are constantly happening on this island. We’re always on alert, but we also have to let go of certainty.”
Then she set about the practical tasks that a potentially prolonged blackout demands. “The first thing that always freaks me out are the fridges, the food,” she said. She and her boyfriend packed the contents of their fridge into the ground floor of his parents’ house, which has solar power that stayed on during the blackout. Other power outages across the island have marked the first weeks of the year.
Santiago, an illustrator and an archivist at the General Archives of Puerto Rico, said her decisions were characterized by a listlessness she’s come to find familiar in the seven years since Hurricane Maria — a period in which blackouts have become a feature of daily life in Puerto Rico. “Every time the light goes out for such a long period of time, everyone’s kind of out of it,” Santiago said. “It becomes this weird twilight zone where no one knows what to do — I guess we go into survival mode. It becomes this weird limbo.”
Hurricane Maria was the deadliest natural disaster in the U.S. since 1900 — and it was the moment “when we all truly realized we are an island in the Caribbean,” Santiago said, “because it took so long for people to come help us.” Besides killing thousands of people, the storm also laid waste to the island’s already decaying electric grid.
By evening on New Year’s Eve, the lights still weren’t on. Santiago was supposed to attend a party but decided not to go. “We cancelled any plans that we had, because we didn’t know what areas were gonna have electricity or not and it can be pretty dangerous if the street lights aren’t on, so we stayed at home with candlelight,” she said. Without knowing how long the blackout would last, the family was reluctant to use the limited amount of power from the solar panels to microwave up the food in the fridge. She ate a bag of Tostitos for dinner.
The essential public infrastructure destroyed by Hurricane Maria was not adequately rebuilt; it was privatized. In 2020, Puerto Rico’s energy transmission and distribution system was sold to an American-Canadian consortium called LUMA Energy, which is overseen by Puerto Rican government agencies. And in 2023, the power generation system was similarly privatized, with all power plants under the control of a subsidiary of the American natural gas company New Fortress Energy.
The writer Naomi Klein has analyzed these moves as a textbook application of the “shock doctrine” — a paradigm whereby capital interests take advantage of disasters to undermine public institutions and turn giant profits. In Puerto Rico, the energy privatization set off a massive protest movement whose slogan was “Fuera LUMA.” (“Get out LUMA!”)
Since LUMA took over the electricity grid, it has raised electricity prices repeatedly — without delivering results for Puerto Ricans like Santiago, who was driven out of her last apartment in San Juan by a problem she’s found even more disruptive than the frequent blackouts: unpredictable power surges. At night, particularly if her neighbors’ lights were on, the electricity flickered on and off at random. The fluctuations destroyed three of her refrigerators in succession. After LUMA didn’t respond to her repeated complaints, she finally stopped paying the rising utility bills.
When a power surge destroyed her air conditioner, she decided she had to finally move out of her apartment — but she currently owes LUMA nearly $3,000 in unpaid bills. In order to turn the lights on at her new apartment, she will have to sign up for a payment plan.
The energy crisis has affected Santiago’s work, too — and the security of the archives it is her job to preserve. “I deal with digitization and digital preservation, which is really hard to do when you’re having constant outages,” she said. In 2023, a storm flooded a transformer, and the General Archives lost power for months. More recently, one of her hard drives was destroyed, possibly by a power surge.
In those archives, Santiago recently found a document that reminded her of just how old the problems Puerto Rico is facing really are. It was a 1934 “manifesto to the country” published in El Mundo, a San Juan newspaper, written by Luis Muñoz Marín, then a senator in the Puerto Rican legislature — and later the island’s first elected governor.
The manifesto contained a warning to Puerto Ricans based on inside knowledge Marín had acquired in Washington: Foreign investors were planning, “under more or less alluring disguises,” to exploit the economic and public health crisis the island was suffering in the wake of the Depression and a 1928 hurricane. He said hotel developers, sugar refineries, and bamboo cane growers were using recovery money to “extend and to intrench more firmly the control of absentee capital over the lives of the Puerto Ricans.”
And he warned that the real agenda behind this was to “use recovery funds, and give them to private companies to take over certain things,” Santiago said. “They were going to poison us in our medicine — which did happen — and the Americans were going to use different tactics to have control from far away.”
The parallels to the aftermath of Hurricane Maria seemed all too real to Santiago. “I’ve been connecting the dots for a while now and it’s all colonialism,” she said. “LUMA is colonialism.”
It eventually emerged that the cause of the New Year’s blackout was the failure of an underground cable that, like much of the island’s energy infrastructure, should have been repaired long ago. The company that built it has been out of business for 25 years.
“Right now, we’re in an emergency,” Puerto Rico’s governor, Jenniffer González-Colón, said in a news conference. “Our electrical system is in such a precarious situation that anything can cause the power to go out.”
On New Year’s Eve, the power stayed out all day for some 1.2 million LUMA customers. Santiago was watching the time when, at 11:57 p.m., the lights came on for less than a minute, then flickered back off. Then, at 11:59, as if to herald in the new year, they came back on again.
On the first day of 2025, a rate hike from LUMA kicked in. González-Colón was inaugurated on January 2, and though she has appointed an energy czar to address the grid’s problems, the island will enter another year with the constant risk of power failures.
In 1981, a Democratic president who’d made energy policy a centerpiece of his administration left the White House after just one term — voted out partly due to the perception that he didn’t do enough to combat inflation and high energy prices amid destabilizing conflict in the Middle East. His successor promised to open up the country’s oilfields and to “make America great again.”
It’s not exactly 1981 all over again, but today — as the country holds funeral services for Jimmy Carter, the 39th president, who died on December 29 at the age of 100 — the echoes of his term in office are loud enough to warrant taking a second look at how Carter’s presidency inaugurated the world we live in, one in which energy is central to American politics.
“From the minute he took office, Jimmy Carter made it clear that energy reform was top of his agenda. Literally,” the Princeton historian Meg Jacobs, author of the book Panic at the Pump: The Energy Crisis and the Transformation of American Politics in the 1970s, said in an email. “He got out of his limo during the procession to the White House, during the freezing cold, and watched the rest from a solar-heated viewing stand.”
In symbolism and substance, President Carter displayed an obsessive attention to energy. He famously installed solar panels on the roof of the White House, but more consequentially, he created the Department of Energy, and allocated what remains a record amount of funding into energy research and development.
Carter’s energy policy had two primary objectives: reducing the U.S.’s dependence on foreign oil, and reducing its energy consumption altogether. The first goal has remained the watchword of the nation’s energy policy ever since. But the second, rooted in the Sunday school teacher’s conservationist and communitarian ethos, helped end his presidency — and helped convince future leaders that Americans’ refusal to be told to make do with less was an immutable political fact.
Carter’s attention to energy was the result of its appearance in the 1970s as a novel political problem. For most of the 20th century, the country had had little in the way of a coordinated energy policy, and the subject was far removed from political contestation in the public eye — even as the postwar American dream of car-dependent suburban homeownership was predicated on the assurance of oil’s eternal abundance and cheapness. The ’70s was the decade in which that promise started to crack up.
“By the mid-1970s, if you’re a middle-class working person who’s been encouraged to move to the suburbs and buy a V8 Ford or Pontiac, you’re structurally dependent on cheap oil and access to that oil for the reproduction of your everyday life,” said Caleb Wellum, a historian at the University of Toronto.
So it was a profoundly disruptive moment for the nation when, in October of 1973, the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries announced an embargo on exports of oil to any country that had supported Israel in the Six-Day War — catalyzing high gas prices in the U.S., lines of cars at gas stations stretching for blocks, and a years-long period of “stagflation” characterized by the demoralizing combination of high inflation, low growth, and high unemployment.
Besides the economic devastation it wrought, the embargo carried symbolic weight: “This comes after the Vietnam War, which was a blow to the collective ego of the United States because we had not emerged victorious. And then these nations that we thought were sort of our client states in the Middle East all of a sudden dictating to us about certain things. It was rather stunning at the time,” said Jay Hakes, the former administrator of the U.S. Energy Information Administration and director of the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library.
The presidents who immediately inherited the situation, Richard Nixon and, upon his resignation, Gerald Ford, sought to remedy the situation primarily by expanding domestic energy production. But their focus on energy was less zealous than Carter’s — and far less visionary.
By the time Carter took office, on January 20, 1977, memories of the gasoline lines were already starting to fade. But with inflation and oil prices still high, and the U.S. still reliant on foreign imports of oil, Carter made it his mission to remind the country that it needed to think about energy. “A lot of his presidency was about convincing Americans that there still was an energy crisis even though the embargo was over,” Wellum said. “The conditions that the embargo had taken advantage of were still present, and the U.S. still had this problem it had to figure out.”
But Carter had a complex political coalition to wrangle behind his ambitions. The Democratic Party he led was split between two visions of how to address the issue: “You have the kind of old left, New Deal Democrat who is interested in protecting consumers, protecting the working class, and making life more affordable for more people, and that is in tension with the new left, environmentalist side of the left wing that’s questioning the ethics of consumption, saying that maybe oil is too cheap,” said Wellum.
On the other side of the aisle, animated by free-market economic doctrines then on the rise, was a Republican Party insistent that the gas shortages were “not a matter of scarcity but a matter of government overreach, bad government policy, and environmentalist overreach,” Wellum said.
The prescription, eagerly supported by the oil industry: “We need access to Alaska. We need access to the Outer Continental Shelf. We need to rethink how we restrict or regulate oil production,” Wellum continued. “If we do that, the free market and the oil companies and the American spirit will innovate and produce our way out of this energy crisis. We don’t need to consume less; we can have even more.”
This narrative was more or less anathema to Carter, who complemented his push for energy independence with an insistence that Americans do their part and collectively sacrifice for the nation. Clad in a cardigan, he addressed the country two weeks after taking office and implored Americans to turn their thermostats down to “65 degrees in the daytime and 55 degrees at night” to address the ongoing natural gas shortages.
At the same time, Carter was a contradictory figure who in some ways embodied aspects of each of the coalitions of his time — at once a big-government liberal and a deregulator; simultaneously the conservationist who fought the oil industry to preserve vast areas in Alaska and the energy hawk who expanded domestic coal production despite being aware of the science, already established, behind human-made global warming. “People often talk about Jimmy Carter the peanut farmer, but he’s also Jimmy Carter the nuclear engineer,” said Wellum.
In some ways, Carter’s economic policy marked the turning point toward the era of neoliberalism — a transition that Wellum argues in his book Energizing Neoliberalism: The 1970s Energy Crisis & the Making of Modern America was directly spurred by the oil crises of that decade. Driven by a belief in the efficiency of markets, Carter lifted the price controls on oil that Nixon had imposed in 1971 — a move characterized by critics at the time as a giveaway to the oil industry.
But Carter also signed the country’s first significant appliance efficiency standards into law, and invested unprecedented amounts of federal funds in energy research and development. These investments laid the groundwork for later breakthroughs, including the drilling technology behind hydraulic fracking, which enabled the U.S. shale boom in the 2000s. They also included a full-scale embrace of solar energy — a policy that, Hakes argued, “50 years from now, will be considered Carter’s major achievement.”
Protesters outside the White House blamed the Carter administration’s handling of the energy crisis for fuel shortages and long lines at gas stations.
Wally McNamee / Corbis via Getty Images
Carter characterized the nation’s need to secure and conserve its energy as the “moral equivalent of war” — a phrase derided in the press using its acronym, MEOW. The political problem was simple: “Hectoring the electorate in that way is not good politics,” said Wellum. Carter had already cemented the public image of himself as a preachy moralizer when things came to a turning point in 1979, with dramatic events in Iran.
After the Islamic Revolution, another symbolic repudiation of American global hegemony, came a second oil shock — and more gas-station lines, which Hakes argued may have contributed even more to sinking Carter’s reelection than the hostage crisis at the U.S. embassy in Tehran. “Carter’s poll ratings were lower in the spring of 1979 when we had the gasoline lines than they were later after the hostages were taken,” said Hakes.
It was a perfect opportunity for a presidential candidate whose message to Americans was that they could have everything they wanted.
“Reagan was the candidate who was optimistic about America, who would talk about how, if we can get government off your backs, we can liberate you ‘to do those things that I know you can do so well,’” said Wellum. “And Carter came across as this kind of moralizing guy, saying, ‘Americans have become decadent and no one’s listening to me.’”
In the presidential debates, Wellum said, “Carter emphasized conservation, and Reagan was emphasizing how we can restore abundant American production in the future, as opposed to a more efficient, environmentally friendly future.”
Reagan won the Electoral College by 489 votes to Carter’s 49. “At the popular level, that is a blow to the 70s as the environmental decade — the creation of the EPA, the Department of Energy, Earth Day in 1970,” said Welum. “There’s the backlash to that, the feeling that it’s anti-American, it’s anti-growth, it’s anti-freedom.”
The lesson was heeded by politicians of all stripes. Hakes, whose books on energy policy include The Presidents And The Planet: Climate Change Science and Politics from Eisenhower to Bush, said the word “sacrifice,” once a political cliché, almost completely disappeared from presidential speeches after Carter. Hakes puts this down partly to the fact that Carter was among the last presidents from a generation with a different attitude towards abundance and sacrifice. “The political leaders of that time generally had experienced World War II,” notes Hakes. (Carter was at the Naval Academy during the war and didn’t graduate in time to serve.)
But for a few decades after Carter’s presidency, energy conservation became a nonissue in U.S. politics. Due in part to Carter and Reagan’s policies, as well as European and Japanese gas taxes, the world became far less reliant on Middle Eastern oil in the 1980s. Oil prices tanked in 1986 and remained low through the duration of the century.
Needless to say, the importance of reducing oil consumption has since returned with a vengeance to the foreground of current affairs, fueled by climate crisis as well as new geopolitical conflicts. But we have yet to solve the issues that Carter confronted.
Within the climate movement, self-described “ecomodernists” argue that environmentalism’s legacy of conservationism is an albatross that permanently tars it in the public eye with the unpopular politics of austerity, while proponents of “degrowth” insist on the need to focus on reducing consumption. For socialist critics of the environmental movement, meanwhile, the ingredient missing from its ability to persuade people to take climate change seriously is a class politics, given the levels of money and power invested in the status quo.
“Environmental politics around energy, but also on climate, is really difficult to do, especially without some form of redistribution,” said Wellum — and the times feel bleak for those invested in this approach: “I’m pessimistic, or sad, that we don’t really know what to do around rethinking and reorganizing consumption, and the argument around redistribution seems even more in the wilderness,” Wellum said.
To Hakes, the apparent defeat of Carter’s approach is tragic. “If climate change is a problem, people should feel under some moral obligation: I will turn off the lights, or I will obey the speed limit because I know that my pollution will be a lot less, or I will go out of my way to buy the most efficient appliances and automobiles that meet my needs and I can afford. Or maybe I’ll walk a mile to pick up something rather than drive,” Hakes said.
“But politicians since Carter have not dared to say that, and maybe that’s a political reality we have to live with,” Hakes added. “One would assume that at this point people would say, ‘Our children and grandchildren deserve to have nature, and we shouldn’t be changing the environment pell-mell,’ and conservation would come back onto the agenda. I haven’t seen that yet. And I don’t even see seeds of that.”
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.
Environmental groups applauded President Joe Biden’s decision on Monday to enact a sweeping ban on new offshore oil and gas drilling along most of the U.S. coastline. But the ban had one glaring omission: It didn’t include the western Gulf of Mexico, where the country extracts most of its offshore oil.
Aimed at safeguarding the environment and easing the harm caused by climate change, the ban will prohibit future oil and gas leasing in federal waters off the East and West coasts, in parts of the Bering Sea near Alaska and across the eastern portion of the Gulf. The exact boundaries haven’t been announced, but federal regulators generally define the eastern Gulf as the waters extending from the south tip of Florida to the Alabama line. That would leave the waters off Louisiana and Texas open to drilling.
“My decision reflects what coastal communities, businesses, and beachgoers have known for a long time: that drilling off these coasts could cause irreversible damage to places we hold dear and is unnecessary to meet our nation’s energy needs,” Biden said in a statement. “It is not worth the risks.”
Biden and other presidents have protected much smaller areas from oil and gas development, often with expiration dates. Monday’s action appears to be a permanent prohibition, though President-elect Donald Trump has already indicated he aims to “unban it immediately” after he takes office later this month.
“This is an epic ocean victory!” declared Joseph Gordon, a campaign director for Oceana, a nonprofit group focused on protecting the world’s oceans.
But some environmentalists weren’t as enthused.
“That’s great, but is the Central and Western Gulf of Mexico just a sacrifice zone, then?” asked Don Boesch, a marine scientist who served on the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill, which investigated the 2010 disaster. “That’s where all the [Outer Continental Shelf] drilling takes place and greenhouse gas emissions come from.”
The Gulf accounts for 97 percent of all oil and natural gas production in U.S. offshore waters. The vast majority of this production happens near Louisiana and Texas — not the Florida coast, which would be protected by Biden.
The oil and gas industry blasted the ban as misguided and potentially harmful to the economy.
“Though not directly affecting the western Gulf of Mexico, [the ban] is a blatant attack on the oil and natural gas industry — an industry vital to our nation’s energy security and economic strength,” said Tommy Faucheux, president of the Louisiana Mid-Continent Oil and Gas Association, an industry trade group.
But Boesch noted few oil companies are clamoring to drill off the the oil-poor East or West coasts or Florida’s Gulf Coast.
“The ban would not affect oil leasing in the Central and Western Gulf where essentially all drilling takes place or is likely to take place over next 4 years,” Boesch wrote on X.
It’s unclear if or how quickly Trump, a strong supporter of the oil and gas industry, will act on his promise to undo the ban. But some experts say overturning it could be time-consuming, complicated and may require action from Congress. The courts could also weigh in. In 2019, a federal judge ruled that presidents can block drilling but they can’t revoke past bans.
Trump hasn’t always opposed limits on offshore drilling. During his re-election campaign in 2020, Trump extended a drilling moratorium off Florida’s Gulf Coast and expanded it to include the state’s Atlantic Coast and the coasts of Georgia and South Carolina.
“This protects your beautiful gulf and your beautiful ocean, and it will for a long time to come,” Trump said in 2020.
On Monday, Biden evoked the Deepwater Horizon oil spill when announcing the new ban, saying the disaster is a “solemn reminder of the costs and risks of offshore drilling.”
The spill killed 11 workers and released four million barrels of oil into the Gulf off the coast of Louisiana over 87 days. Biden said the disaster “underscores the importance of the legal protections I am putting in place today.”
But the ban does little to protect the Gulf from future spills, said Martha Collins, executive director of the environmental nonprofit Healthy Gulf.
“We are disappointed that President Biden did not take the opportunity to withdraw additional areas in the Gulf of Mexico, particularly the risky deepwater regions and the western Gulf,” she said. “These areas remain vulnerable to catastrophic oil spills.”
Marine animals are still suffering from the Deepwater Horizon disaster nearly 15 years later. Last month, a study led by the Scripps Institution of Oceanography found that some whale species densities in the Gulf have declined by 83 percent since the disaster. Many of the whales found in the Gulf are threatened or endangered.
“I’m frustrated that many places left out [of the ban] are where offshore drilling does the most harm to Gulf communities and endangered species,” said Brady Bradshaw, an oceans campaign manager with the Center for Biological Diversity, a nonprofit group focused on wildlife conservation. “This was a missed opportunity to protect the Western and Central Gulf.”
The Simpsons did nuclear power dirty. With towers looming over Springfield, three-eyed fish swimming the lake, and an inept Homer running things, the show’s nuclear power plant is a perpetual existential risk. It’s a reliable running gag to be sure, but also a reflection of a society that’s soured on what used to be the bountiful energy of the future.
That turn has put human civilization in a pickle. The costs of renewables like wind and solar have fallen so sharply in recent years it’s caught even researchers off guard. Day by day, electric utilities around the United States are finding clever ways to store that energy, like tapping into idled electric school buses and using the earth itself as a giant battery. Still, humans can’t make the sun always shine and the wind always blow, so currently utilities have to burn planet-warming natural gas in power plants when renewables aren’t available.
Nuclear power plants generate electricity cleanly and reliably, but the technology has fallen out of favor. “When nuclear power burst on the scene, it was the first time that we would break with scarcity that we had known throughout human history,” said environmental journalist Marco Visscher, author of the book The Power of Nuclear: The Rise, Fall and Return of Our Mightiest Energy Source, publishing today. “This abundant energy source bloomed, and this was nothing less than a revolution.”
Through the early 1980s, operators started construction on an average of 19 new reactors a year. But as Visscher recounts, a variety of factors conspired to turn nuclear power from a miracle technology into a villain — and the butt of Simpsons jokes — thanks in large part to Chernobyl and other accidents. By the 1990s, new projects dropped to just a handful each year. Now, though, nuclear is once again having a moment, potentially working alongside renewables to accelerate the decarbonization of the grid, or even power data centers and artificial intelligence models. Grist sat down with Visscher to talk about the technology’s roller coaster history.
This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.
Q. Going back to the early history of nuclear energy, it started with the horrific use of atomic weapons against Japan. It transformed into this technology that in its early days, people really did think was going to be the future of energy.
A. When the first nuclear plants opened in the 1950s and early 1960s, there were these grand promises: It’s clean, it’s cheap, it’s modern. It could power plants for desalination, so there would be plenty of clean water around the world. It could produce fertilizer on a large scale, so that yields would be much higher. Nuclear energy could provide the fuel for trains and ships and airplanes.
Q. A section of the book talks about regulation becoming a problem, but not in the way people might think. Perhaps there was an overabundance of caution that started to turn nuclear power into something the public should worry about.
A. Regulation of nuclear power came through fears of exposure to radiation. These fears had originally everything to do with fear of nuclear war and the fear that people would get sick from the fallout. When nuclear plants were being built, people started to wonder: Isn’t that a source of radiation as well? Couldn’t their radiation somehow escape? Or if an accident occurs, what if it could explode like a bomb? In the ‘50s and 1960s, there was a call for more regulation, and the regulation was all about keeping radiation as low as reasonably achievable.
The focus became on safety, and the safety limits for a safe dose got lowered over and over again. Meanwhile, the coal industry, for instance, didn’t have all these regulations, nor did natural gas plants. So those industries could innovate, they could become more effective. But the nuclear power industry seemed sort of paralyzed by this narrow focus on bringing down any possible exposure to radiation.
Q. On top of that, we have a few disasters — Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima. But you argue in the book that among energy disasters — especially considering the ravages of climate change, brought about by the burning of fossil fuels — they were used to further beat down the nuclear industry.
A. Chernobyl was, of course, a unique design, in unique circumstances. But those reactors have no similarities to the reactors used in the U.S. at that time, but still, reactors in the U.S. had to go through multiple safety updates. It brought in money for some companies working in the nuclear sector, but it didn’t make the nuclear power plant any safer.
All these fears and all the suspicions gave rise to the idea that any accident in a nuclear power plant must be some kind of apocalypse. But the reality is much more mundane. It’s nothing like the fantasies that we have in our heads. You just called Three Mile Island a disaster, but really the radiation that was leaked into the environment was so low it didn’t cause any health effects.
In Fukushima, nobody died of radiation. Nobody will die of radiation. This is the scientific consensus on Fukushima: There’s no discernible increase in cancer or in birth defects or heart attacks or deformities in coming generations.
But these accidents didn’t help the nuclear industry to move on. After Fukushima, Germany decided to close down its nuclear reactors one by one. Japan did the same. Accidents rarely happen, but they have a huge impact.
Q. As the world turned on nuclear power and started decommissioning plants, we had to get that electricity somehow, and it was largely from natural gas. Can you talk about that missed opportunity, that transition, and our doubling down on natural gas as we’re waiting for renewables to ramp up?
A. What typically happens when a nuclear plant closes, a natural gas plant opens later on. Nuclear is a competitor to coal and natural gas, not so much to renewables, and this is simply because a nuclear power plant can be turned on and off, just like a coal plant and a natural gas plant. They work when you want, basically, and this is different with renewables like wind and solar that are dependent on the weather.
Q. You write that renewables can’t provide reliable power on their own. But utilities are finding more ways to store that energy in battery banks and other long-duration energy storage systems. Is there not a future where we can rely on renewables exclusively? Do we need nuclear?
A. Maybe one day it will be possible to run the entire world on renewables. I think it makes so much more sense to look at a proven technology that is available and that has shown that it can decarbonize the economy of a modern society.
Of course, nuclear power and wind and solar can work together, right? All societies, all economies, need base load power so there is a continuous, available, reliable source of energy that ensures there is enough electricity to meet demand. There is energy poverty in the world, and there will be such a rising demand for electricity in the next decades,
Q. Unlike fossil fuels, which are stagnant — there’s really no improving natural gas or coal — many companies are working on things like small modular nuclear reactors. Do you think that will help nuclear power grow once again?
A. Some of these designs are intended for remote areas. Others are designed for coastal cities. All of them are said to be cheaper, of course — more efficient, easier to build. They’re safer. Some say they require less uranium and produce less waste.
But I was thinking: Why exactly do we need innovation? And it seemed to me that many of these innovations are designed to comfort people. Reactors should be smaller because we don’t like things to be big — small is beautiful, that’s an environmental credo. We love hearing that it is safer — at least some of the startups think so — because we think that nuclear power is so dangerous.
I don’t want to be too cynical or skeptical about small modular reactors. I think they serve a purpose. They may have a psychological effect, because small modular reactors may allow long-time critics of nuclear power to ease up, to open up. Those are reactors I’m okay with.
Q. What, in your opinion, does the world risk by not going all in on nuclear?
A. We are going to have to live with climate change anyway. I don’t think nuclear or any technology can stop global warming, to the extent that we do not feel the consequences anymore. That doesn’t mean that we’re screwed, and that doesn’t mean that we don’t have to do anything. It means we’ll have to step up and do much more.
It would be ridiculous not to use nuclear power. It would be a crime to close down nuclear power plants that function perfectly fine, as they have done in Germany, but also in other countries. And I think there should be much more of an awareness eventually in politics that we can beat the fossil fuel industry if we really expand our nuclear fleet.
The fishers in Gulf of Mexico waters off Cameron Parish, Louisiana, estimate their catch has fallen catastrophically from 1 million tons a season to 150,000 tons since the first liquefied natural gas terminal in the parish began operating eight years ago.
Now, a new industry is being developed in the waters that were once the most productive grounds in the nation for fish, shrimp, and oysters.
A company called OnStream CO2 is developing the GeoDura hub, which it says could hold millions of tons of carbon dioxide captured from fossil fuel industries, including LNG terminals, a mile or more below the waters off Cameron Parish’s shores. It would be among the first of its kind in the United States. Currently, there are just a handful of projects in the world developing offshore carbon capture and sequestration, or CCS.
“These people are book smart, but when it comes to common sense, they have nothing,” said Travis Dardar about the project. Dardar is a Cameron-based fisher and founder of the group Fishermen Involved in Sustaining our Heritage, or FISH.
According to a report from the Center for International Environmental Law, in the best-case scenario, the injection of captured carbon may temporarily disrupt fisheries because of drilling and seismic testing.
In the worst-case scenario, underwater carbon sequestration wells could fail and release the stored carbon, killing off the plants, fish, and even the people in boats in the waters above. Storing carbon also has potential global implications, if, as opponents claim, carbon capture and sequestration will allow the fossil fuel industry to maintain the status quo as one of the world’s top emitters of greenhouse gasses.
A man fishes in Sabine Pass in Texas, across from a tanker carrying liquefied natural gas docked at Cheniere’s LNG export facility in Cameron Parish, Louisiana, in June 2024. Julie Dermansky / Julie Dermansky LLC
The federal government, which is supporting the GeoDura hub with a recently announced $26 million award, and geologists who have studied carbon storage say offshore sequestration projects make a lot of sense.
But as with other climate change mitigation efforts supported by the Inflation Reduction Act and the bipartisan infrastructure law — such as hydrogen and direct air capture — the effectiveness of offshore carbon storage is unclear. Worries and claims on both sides of the offshore carbon capture debate are mostly hypothetical, based on modeling and just a few existing offshore storage sites.
Gulf offshore carbon storage pushed
The geology of the Gulf of Mexico combined with the fossil fuel-heavy industries along the coasts of Louisiana and Texas make carbon capture and sequestration under the Gulf “the single best opportunity for developing a CCS industry in the United States that can effectively address national emission reduction strategies at the required scale,” University of Texas at Austin research scientist Tip Meckel told a congressional committee in 2022.
Acknowledging that potential, Congress directed federal agencies to develop regulations to permit carbon storage under federal offshore waters. Draft regulations, requested by November 2022, have yet to be issued. The U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management told Floodlight it will issue its first draft of a proposed rule this year.
In the meantime, companies have focused on developing carbon storage in the state waters off Louisiana, stretching 3.5 miles from the shore, and Texas, which controls the waters for about 10 miles from the shoreline.
Meckel says there are 10 proposed projects in the two states, including GeoDura. Louisiana, unlike Texas, has the authority to permit carbon storage underground, including under state waters.
Abandoned, idle, and unused wells are a recognized risk for offshore carbon storage, just as it is onshore. Ocean Conservancy Report: Protecting the Ocean and Taxpayers by Strengthening Standards for Offshore Oil and Gas Decommissioning
But the development of carbon storage in waters near the coast raises concerns about the higher number of abandoned, idle, or older oil and gas wells closer to shore that could allow stored carbon to leak out through existing wells. There are also questions about whether Louisiana would do a good job permitting and regulating carbon storage.
“I can’t say it cannot be done, but the history of this technology, the history of the lack of pollution monitoring in the Gulf and in Louisiana waters in particular, we are extremely skeptical,” said Scott Eustis, community science director for Healthy Gulf, a Louisiana-based community and environmental advocacy group.
Land grabs onshore and off
The concept of storing carbon under offshore waters was supercharged by the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, which increased tax credits for capturing and permanently storing carbon underground from $39 per ton to $85. The incentive spurred a rush of development in the United States, with about 125 new carbon capture, transport, or storage projects announced since 2022, according to the Clean Air Task Force, a nonprofit that focuses on solutions to the climate crisis.
The incentives also sparked a land grab in Louisiana and Texas, with companies competing to purchase rights for underground storage onshore, often acquiring multiple parcels from multiple landowners to have access to a single deep reservoir for carbon storage.
With offshore sites, though, a developer usually only has to deal with a single landowner, the state or federal government.
Offshore carbon storage projects, like the GeoDura hub proposed off Cameron Parish, Louisiana, would receive carbon captured from industrial facilities and piped to their sites to be injected a mile or more below ground. Global CCS Institute
In August 2023, Castex Carbon Solutions signed an agreement with Louisiana for the rights to store carbon underneath 24,000 acres off Cameron Parish, around Monkey Island, at an initial cost of $7.25 million. Additional millions will flow to the state when the project begins injecting carbon. Castex is one of the partners of the GeoDura hub, along with Carbonvert and Enbridge.
The OnStream CO2 collaboration says the hub will have the capacity to store 250 million metric tons of captured carbon, or the annual emissions from 58 million gas-powered cars. It has signed a contract with Commonwealth LNG in Cameron Parish to store the 9 million tons of carbon Commonwealth expects to capture each year from its terminal after it is operational.
Venture Global has signed similar, but less initially lucrative, contracts with the state to store captured carbon from its Calcasieu Pass and Plaquemines LNG facilities under waters off Calcasieu Parish and Barataria Bay, respectively.
The carbon captured from an LNG terminal, which super chills and liquefies natural gas for transport, equals just about 8.8 percent of the carbon emissions created by the LNG industry, according to a lifecycle analysis published by Cornell University Professor Robert Howarth. Howarth’s study, which has been attacked by oil and gas companies and House Republicans, concluded that LNG is worse for the climate than burning coal.
Offshore CCS raises a litany of concerns
OnStream says its project will be operational in 2028. In addition to completing a geologic assessment of the site — funded in part by the Department of Energy grant — the company will need to build a pipeline to move captured carbon from the nearby industrial hubs of Lake Charles, Louisiana, and Port Arthur, Texas. It will also need to obtain a permit to inject the carbon from the state of Louisiana.
Louisiana is the third state, and the first with a coastline, to receive permission from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to permit carbon sequestration wells. Patrick Courreges, a spokesman for the Louisiana Department of Energy and Natural Resources, said the state will be examining the same things in offshore carbon sequestration projects as it does for the onshore projects.
“What our folks are looking for is confining layers,” he said. “Clay, shale, something real thick and non-permeable that’s not going to allow anything to bubble up past it. Whether you’re offshore, onshore, that geology below ground is what we’re looking at.”
The state will also examine the construction of wells and pipes to move the carbon, he said, adding that the offshore wells also will have to be built to handle hurricanes and storm surges.
Another concern, acknowledged by both sides, is the possibility the injected carbon will come back out through abandoned, idle, or older wells. Such concentrated carbon could kill vegetation, sea life, and possibly even the fishers in the waters above.
The U.S. Department of Energy’s National Energy Technology Laboratory, or NETL, has issued contracts to study possible offshore carbon capture and sequestration sites in the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic. NETL
Debra James, a spokesperson for OnStream, told Floodlight there are no existing wells directly above the storage site.
“Technical evaluations show that the CO2 will not interact with wellbores near the project area,” she said.
Environmental advocates have a litany of other concerns, including that drilling and the injection of carbon could cause seismic activity in the region, a hotspot of industry. Meckel told Floodlight that “we do not anticipate much induced seismicity.”
These advocates are also concerned the storage of carbon under or near coastal marshes could damage the thousands of acres of wetlands along the Louisiana coast, which are already disappearing at a rate of 25 to 35 square miles a year.
Louisiana “is spending millions of dollars to protect the coast in one area, and then another area, they’re permitting the wholesale destruction of it. That is just totally inconsistent,” said Anne Rolfes, director of the environmental group Louisiana Bucket Brigade.
Brian Lezina, chief of planning for the Louisiana Coastal Restoration Protection Authority, said it’s the responsibility of the state’s Department of Energy and Natural Resources to ensure carbon storage along the state shorelines is done correctly. He added that the coastal agency — which has a stalled $3 billion project to help rebuild wetlands in Barataria Bay — will be paying attention to the activity.
Technology largely untested
There are just a handful of operating subsea carbon sequestration projects in the world, and none in the United States.
Two offshore carbon storage projects off Norway’s coast have been called a success. But in 2023, the Institute of Energy Economics and Financial Analysis published a study pointing out that even in those two projects — in what the institute called some of the most studied offshore waters — the storage of carbon yielded some unwelcome surprises.
In one of the fields, the carbon unexpectedly migrated out of where it was injected, though it has remained underground. Injection into a second field had to be halted when the reservoir reached capacity 15 years before anticipated.
The research “has revealed that storing carbon dioxide underground is not an exact science,” the report said. “It may carry even more risk and uncertainty than drilling for oil or gas, given the very limited practical, long-term experience of permanently keeping CO2 in the ground.”
Dardar hasn’t followed the offshore carbon debate closely. But the way he sees it, the presence of any more industry in his corner of Louisiana is “just no good, all the way around.”
As President-elect Donald Trump takes direct aim at federal climate policy, states and their attorneys general are preparing to fight back. In California, the governor has asked legislators for $25 million to fight off any effort by Trump to upend the state’s climate-friendly initiatives. In Washington, voters doubled down on the state’s landmark climate policy, and Jay Inslee — the outgoing governor — said his successor is set to work hard to protect the state from a fossil fuel-friendly president.
But in Pennsylvania, one of the largest energy producers in the country where voters narrowly voted for Trump, it’s unclear just how stiff that resistance will be if the incoming president follows through with his vows to shred President Biden’s environmental agenda and cancel funds for clean energy projects.
One clue might be found in the person voters elected as the state’s new attorney general — Dave Sunday, a Republican who was largely silent on environmental issues during the run-up to the election but drew on a large infusion of money tied to the fossil fuel industry to propel his campaign.
And while Democratic Governor Josh Shapiro took on the oil and gas industry and then-president Trump while he was attorney general, one of Sunday’s first moves was to name a noted oil and gas booster to his transition team.
State campaign finance records and Internal Revenue Service filings show that Sunday accepted direct contributions from a tax-exempt association tied to the fossil fuel industry called the Republican Attorneys General Association, or RAGA.
Some $550,000 in direct contributions flowed to Sunday through the Keystone Prosperity PAC, a political action committee created by RAGA. In 2024, RAGA received at least $1.6 million from fossil fuel and petrochemical companies, utilities, and trade groups, including Exxon Mobil, Chevron Phillips Chemical, the National Mining Association, the American Gas Association, and the American Petroleum Institute.
The Republican Attorneys General Association also received contributions from smaller fossil fuel interests with Pennsylvania-specific operations. Diversified Oil and Gas Co., which owns a slew of low-producing oil and gas wells, many in Pennsylvania, and which has come under fire for its financial reporting mechanisms, donated $15,000 to RAGA in June. Equitrans, which recently merged with Pittsburgh-based natural gas company EQT, contributed $50,000 in April. RAGA then donated funds to Sunday in two payments: $400,000 in July and $150,000 in September. These marked the two largest donations to Sunday’s campaign in 2024, according to data through September 24.
“RAGA’s early engagement in Pennsylvania paid dividends and proved to be one of our wisest investments to date,” Republican Attorneys General Association Executive Director Peter Bisbee said in a statement following Sunday’s victory. The organization, he said, “made a record investment in Pennsylvania” last year.
Sunday also received a handful of direct contributions from oil and gas-related entities, including $10,000 from the Koch Industries PAC; $1,500 from the Pennsylvania Grade Crude Oil Coalition; $1,000 from midstream oil and gas firm Energy Transfer; and $1,000 from the Pennsylvania Coal PAC.
“While we Pennsylvanians go about our lives, we hope our government is working to protect us from drinking and breathing toxic chemicals,” said Michael Bagdes-Canning, a member of Pennsylvania Action on Climate, a grassroots coalition of climate and anti-corruption advocates. “But in Harrisburg [the state capital], the fossil fuel industries are busy, behind the scenes and undercover, converting their enormous wealth into the political power they need to protect and enlarge that wealth.”
Capital & Main reached out to Sunday’s campaign and did not hear back by publication time.
Among those Sunday tapped to help in his transition as the state’s first Republican attorney general in 12 years is former Governor Tom Corbett, who became known for his pro-drillingstance during the state’s fracking boom. Prior to his tenure as governor, Corbett served as attorney general and, while in office, accepted gifts tied to the oil and gas industry.
From California to Pennsylvania, the role of a state’s top law enforcement official could be critical for states that intend to fight Trump’s promises to strip away regulations and initiatives designed to speed the transition away from fossil fuels.
“When people who care about the environment and climate lose the presidency to someone who obviously is about as radically against action on environment and climate as you could possibly be, then we turn to states,” said Joseph Romm, senior research fellow at the University of Pennsylvania Center for Science, Sustainability, and the Media.
As some line up to litigate against Trump’s policies, as well as corporations that violate laws in their states, the Republican attorneys general that are active in RAGA are likely to take a different tack.
The Republican Attorneys General Association was established in 1999 with the aim of electing Republicans to attorney general seats across the nation and “defending the rule of law,” its website states. The organization currently has 28 member states, though Pennsylvania is not yet one of them. Shapiro was attorney general until 2022, and Democrat Michelle Henry assumed office in an acting role in January 2023. She opted not to run for office in 2024, which opened the gates for a crowded primary.
RAGA has spearheaded legal challenges to majorenvironmental rules over the course of Biden’s term. It also led a robocall campaign four years ago urging attendance at the January 6 rally in Washington, D.C., which devolved into the attack on the Capitol. The organization receives contributions from industry and companies of all sizes, many that earn invitations to national conferences where they can get face time with attorneys general. Access to the conferences is tiered by the amount a donor gives. In a 2018 list of the perks, $15,000 earned a company two passes, while $125,000 earned five passes, invitations to dinners and club events, and the opportunity to sit on panels, among other rewards.
“What you have is state attorneys general who aren’t actually ever even assessing what the ordinary people in the state want,” said Lisa Graves, founder of True North Research, a political watchdog research firm. “Instead [they] are rubbing elbows, hanging out, going on these little mini-vacations with these industry lobbyists who get exclusive opportunities to bend their ear.”
The Republican Attorneys General Association does not file records of its contributions to the Federal Election Commission, but to the IRS. These donations can then be given to individual candidates in contentious attorneys general races across states, thus obscuring their origins. There’s little way for an outsider to know if one company intended for its RAGA donation to go to a particular attorney general candidate, for instance.
“I think they’re trying to obfuscate their involvement,” Romm said of companies that donate money through RAGA.
In 2017, The Wall Street Journal reported that, when giving to the counterpart Democratic and Republican governors’ associations, which function similarly to RAGA, donors have the ability to informally earmark their donations for a specific candidate.
“RAGA is one tentacle of the effort by right-wing billionaires and the fossil fuel industry to capture our courts and government to the benefit of big corporate interests,” U.S. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democrat from Rhode Island, told The Guardian in August.
Keystone Prosperity PAC’s donations to Sunday represented around 26 percent of his overall direct contributions and 83 percent of his direct contributions from political action committees. Spotlight Pennsylvania reported in October that Keystone Prosperity PAC also spent $5.4 million running ads on Sunday’s behalf, calling his opponent, Eugene DePasquale, “out of touch” and chiding him for his stance on immigration and police reform. The PAC’s spending levels raised alarm bells within the DePasquale campaign that Sunday hadn’t been forthcoming about the sources of the donations.
DePasquale, for his part, received around $1.6 million from the Democratic Attorneys General Association, which received contributions from some of the same fossil fuel entities that donated to RAGA, albeit in smaller volumes. Where the American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers gave $92,500 to RAGA, for instance, it gave $25,000 to DAGA. Where the American Gas Association gave $40,000 to RAGA, to DAGA it gave just $15,000.
Sunday’s campaign platform offered no indication of a specific tack he will take on climate. The Harrisburg native campaigned primarily on a “tough on crime” platform to reduce prison recidivism and address the state’s opioid crisis through a philosophy of “accountability and redemption.”
DePasquale once served as deputy secretary of the Department of Environmental Protection and, in 2019, authored a report that found that climate change had cost Pennsylvania hundreds of millions of dollars per year. That made the attorney general’s race in Pennsylvania one of the most important for climate in the nation, according to E&E News.
So, where do state environmental groups go from here?
“We’re going to sort of remain positive and optimistic, until we have reason not to,” said Jen Quinn, Sierra Club Pennsylvania’s legislative and political director, of Sunday’s election. Even so, she said having an environmental champion at the helm of the attorney general’s office might have served as a deterrent to polluters — it’s yet unclear whether Sunday will fill that role.
“Just having someone in there that is going to be strong on certain issues, I think, is helpful,” Quinn said. “If we’re seeing a lot of special interest money going to support him, then you just have to wonder, what are the long-term implications of that?”
The U.S. Department of Energy is rolling out the first installment of its $1 billion commitment to ramp up clean hydrogen production in the Midwest, part of a bid by the Biden administration to lock in a nationwide roadmap for decarbonization.
The Midwest Hydrogen Hub, which is set to span Illinois, Iowa, Indiana, and Michigan, was awarded $22.2 million late last month as part of a billion-dollar federal cost-share grant through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. The hub “aims to decarbonize a variety of industries such as manufacturing, steel and glass production, power generation, refining, and heavy-duty transportation through the use of clean hydrogen,” according to a Department of Energy factsheet.
The U.S. Department of Energy is rolling out the first installment of its $1 billion commitment to ramp up clean hydrogen production in the Midwest, part of a bid by the Biden administration to lock in a nationwide roadmap for decarbonization.
The Midwest Hydrogen Hub, which is set to span Illinois, Iowa, Indiana, and Michigan, was awarded $22.2 million late last month as part of a billion-dollar federal cost-share grant through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. The hub “aims to decarbonize a variety of industries such as manufacturing, steel and glass production, power generation, refining, and heavy-duty transportation through the use of clean hydrogen,” according to a Department of Energy factsheet.
President-elect Donald Trump has repeatedly promised to upend the federal government, and he has enlisted firebrands Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to help him do it. The two men are set to lead the Department of Government Efficiency and aim to trim $2 trillion from the U.S. budget.
That’s about one-third of all federal spending, and the pair also believe they can cut the government workforce by 75 percent. In announcing the office, known as DOGE, Trump said that “these wonderful Americans” will “dismantle” bureaucracy, “slash” regulations, cut “wasteful” expenditures, and “restructure” agencies. Ramaswamy took to X to promise, “We will not go gently.”
Overall, that’s likely going to be bad news for U.S. environmental policy and the Biden administration’s landmark climate bill, the Inflation Reduction Act. But there’s a chance that, if DOGE wields its cleaver widely enough, the department may actually please environmentalists by eliminating a few things they have long-loathed, including fossil fuel subsidies.
“It’s a truth test to all of their messaging,” said Matthew Tejada, a former Environmental Protection Agency official who’s now a senior vice president at the Natural Resources Defense Council. “These handouts to the oil and gas industry, which allows these multinational corporations to earn billions of dollars a year, fly in the face of everything else they talk about.”
The extent of these federal subsidies depends on how they are counted. The Fossil Fuel Subsidy Tracker pegged them at nearly $18 billion in 2023. The International Monetary Fund estimate is $757 billion, including what it calls ‘implicit’ subsidies, such as undervaluing environmental harm. While the exact number is debated, it is clear that ending these industry benefits could reap billions in revenue.
“The enormous handouts that we continue to make to an industry that extracts tens of billions of dollars out of our country already should certainly be somewhere within their line of sight,” Tejada said. “There are dozens and dozens of different subsidies.”
One major tax break allows companies to deduct most of the cost of drilling new oil and gas wells. The Joint Committee on Taxation, a nonpartisan panel of Congress, estimates that repealing this “intangible drilling costs” provision could bring an additional $6 billion in revenue by 2032. Another — the percentage depletion tax break — allows independent producers to recover development costs of declining oil, gas, and coal reserves and has been on the books since 1926. Eliminating it could generate an additional $7.3 billion.
“I don’t know how much they will be able to cut the tax code subsidies,” said Mark Jacobson, a Stanford University professor of civil and environmental engineering. In all likelihood, he said, oil and gas companies will lobby successfully to preserve their interests. And, he argued, the largest benefit they receive from the government is the ability to pollute, which is outside DOGE’s mandate.
“They don’t touch on hidden subsidies,” said Jacobson. “The biggest subsidy is allowing these companies to freeload off our health.”
Neither the Trump transition team or the American Petroleum Institute responded to multiple requests for comment.
Both Tejada and Jacobson said their wishlist for DOGE would go beyond fossil fuel subsidies. One deadline Tejada is watching arrives this spring, when the tax cuts of the first Trump administration expire. Letting them lapse could be one way the government could work toward a balanced budget. Jacobson said another often overlooked topic is Washington’s support for corn ethanol fuels. The government has spent billions propping up a fuel that studies show has greater climate and environmental impacts than gasoline and now accounts for 45 percent of all the corn grown in the U.S.
But, they say, for now these hopes for DOGE tackling environmental concerns remain just that. “They probably will end up cutting a lot less than they want to cut,” Jacobson said.
The much-vaunted “energy transition” that promised a great leap forward from fossil fuels to renewables along with a cornucopia of technologies is now struggling with history and complexity. A few facts tell the story.
Despite all the talk of “decarbonization,” global coal production reached a record high in 2023. The dirtiest of fuels accounts for 26 per cent of the world’s total energy consumption. And despite all the promises of a green revolution, oil, gas and coal still account for 82 per cent of the global energy mix.
Meanwhile greenhouse gas emissions galloped to a new high in 2023. The concentration of carbon dioxide gases in the atmosphere has increased 11.4 per cent in just 20 years.
Russian missile and drone attacks are continuing across Ukraine as the country already faces a cold, dark winter after Russia’s strikes destroyed about half of the country’s energy infrastructure. This comes as Russia and Ukraine completed a prisoner swap, repatriating more than 300 prisoners of war in a deal brokered by the United Arab Emirates ahead of the new year. The Biden administration, meanwhile, has approved billions more in military and economic assistance to Ukraine before President-elect Donald Trump returns to office with a pledge to curtail aid and end the war. Since Russia’s invasion nearly three years ago, Congress has approved $175 billion in total assistance to Ukraine. “Putin doesn’t want peace,” says Oleksandra Matviichuk, a leading Ukrainian human rights lawyer, who says Russia’s goal is to restore its empire by force. “Russian occupation means torture, rapes, enforced disappearances, denial of your own identity, forcible adoption of your children, filtration camps and mass graves,” she says.
This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.
In Barcelona, energy from train brakes that could otherwise be wasted is now being harvested to charge electric vehicles.
As part of Spain’s MetroCHARGE project, 16 subway stations in Barcelona use brake energy recuperators to redirect energy from the train brakes to EV charging stations on the streets, The Associated Press reported.
Regenerative braking is not a new concept, especially for trains. But the move to transport the energy from the brakes through cables to electric vehicle chargers is an innovative way to supply power to charging stations.
Across the European Union, traditional energy systems are still dominated by centralized fossil fuel power plants, slowing the transition to more ambitious climate targets.
Spain is no stranger to this. Today, the country’s electricity generation accounts for nearly 15% of its global greenhouse gas emissions, ranking third after transportation (30%) and industry (18%).
The good news is that the last five years have also been crucial for developing new solutions to curb emissions and improve energy efficiency. To reduce greenhouse gases, the E.U. has passed several directives promoting a more decentralized energy system, allowing local initiatives to flourish.
