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Trump Is Disabling the Agency That Could Fight China’s Rare Earths Embargo
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The Loan Programs Office is good for more than just nuclear funding.
See also: federal policy, batteries, and electricity demand.
On earnings, a White House denial, and hydrogen
On LNG exports, Pope Francis’ legacy, and Schedule F
Catching up with David Funk of Zero Emissions Northwest on policy whiplash and complications from tariffs.
Tariffs and the loss of Inflation Reduction Act incentives could realign new power pricing, according to Morgan Stanley.
On modernizing permitting, IRA funds, and a revolt at BP
Current conditions: Central and northeast New Mexico will face “extremely critical fire conditions” over the next two days • Thousands of Iraqis are suffering from respiratory problems caused by a severe sandstorm • Temperatures could hit 120 degrees Fahrenheit in Balochistan, Pakistan, during a heat wave this week.
On Tuesday, President Trump signed a memorandum ordering the “maximum use of technology in environmental review and permitting process for infrastructure projects of all kinds.” The order also directed the Council on Environmental Quality, which oversees the implementation of the National Environmental Policy Act, to put together a process for modernizing technology in environmental reviews. Thomas Hochman, the director of infrastructure policy at the Foundation for American Innovation, a center-right think tank, celebrated the move by the Trump administration, writing on Twitter “it’s high time to eliminate paper-based reviews, modernize permitting technology (which is often as old as the laws themselves), and experiment with different permitting tools.”
In February, Trump also signed an executive order that gutted CEQ’s authority to oversee NEPA, a move Sierra Club’s senior attorney Nathaniel Shoaff called “rash, unlawful, and unwise.” As my colleague Katie Brigham has written, in theory that order would expedite “projects such as solar farms and clean energy manufacturing facilities; in reality, under the Trump administration, the benefits could redound to fossil fuel infrastructure first and foremost.”
A federal judge has ordered the Trump administration to immediately lift its freeze on billions of dollars tied to the Inflation Reduction Act and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. In her ruling, Judge Mary McElroy of the U.S. District Court for the District of Rhode Island, a Trump appointee, called the pause “arbitrary and capricious,” and added that federal agencies such as the White House’s Office of Management and Budget “do not have unlimited authority to further a president’s agenda, nor do they have unfettered power to hamstring in perpetuity statutes passed by Congress during the previous administration.”
The lawsuit was brought by conservation and nonprofit groups that had received grants under the two laws, although McElroy’s order will apply to all frozen IRA and IIJA grants in the country. “Today’s ruling marks a crucial victory for the rule of law and ensures these vital resources will flow to the people and projects Congress intended to support,” Skye Perryman, the president and CEO of Democracy Forward, one of the plaintiffs, said in a statement.
A group of BP shareholders, including UK pension provider National Employment Savings Trust and the financial services company Legal & General, announced they will vote in opposition to the re-election of the company’s chairman, Helge Lund, later this week. The move follows BP’s retreat from its goal of dramatically cutting oil and gas production after the company recorded its highest profits ever.
“While it’s disappointing to see BP rowing back on their climate pledges, what’s particularly worrying is they haven’t gone back to shareholders and given us a chance to vote on such a significant decision,” Diandra Soobiah, NEST’s head of responsible investment, told The Guardian last year. L&G, a 1.8% stakeholder in BP, added that it is “deeply concerned” about the retreat toward oil and gas and away from renewables investment. The decision to oppose Lund is, however, “largely symbolic,” Net Zero Investor writes, noting that the chairman has already announced plans to step down next year. BP’s annual general meeting will be held on Thursday.
Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin announced Tuesday that the EPA is launching a probe into the geoengineering startup Making Sunsets, citing alleged violations of the Clean Air Act. The small South Dakota-based company uses balloons to release sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere in order to reflect the sun and offset warming caused by carbon dioxide; it finances the operation by selling credits for each gram of released SO2. Geoengineering — and Making Sunsets more specifically — remain highly controversial, with many environmental experts calling it a “bad idea.” But Daniele Visioni, a climate scientist specializing in aerosols, wrote on Bluesky that while Making Sunsets’ “stunt was silly … I won’t enjoy seeing them attacked by a government that, at the same time, pretends ‘clean coal’ is a thing while pearl-clutching about ‘polluting our air’ with 10 grams of sulfate.”
The United States’ exports of petrochemical feedstocks to China are at risk due to the trade war touched off by President Trump — “yet another example of how Trump’s second term could prove ironically disastrous for the oil and gas industry,” my colleague Matthew Zeitlin wrote for Heatmap yesterday. The U.S. exported 83 million barrels of the natural gas product ethane to China in 2024, which the country processes into plastics that are often exported back to the United States. But “U.S. energy flows to China are done unless Beijing and D.C. come to an agreement,” Gregory Brew, an analyst at the Eurasia Group, told Zeitlin. “China is already looking to buy more crude from OPEC states to make up for losing U.S. [imports]” — and natural gas liquids, including ethane, “are sure to follow.”
ROV SuBastian / Schmidt Ocean Institute
Humans have observed a colossal squid in its natural habitat for the first time ever. Though science has known about Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni’s existence since discovering arm fragments in the stomach of a sperm whale in 1925, researchers captured the first images of a foot-long juvenile in its home waters nearly 2,000 feet below the surface of the southern Atlantic Ocean.
Rob and Jesse assess the climate geopolitics of Trump’s latest trade moves.
Donald Trump has implemented what is easily the most chaotic set of American economic policies in recent memory. First, the U.S. declared a trade war on the entire world, imposing breathtaking tariffs on many of the country’s biggest trading partners. He’s paused that effort — but scaled up punitive tariffs on China, launching what would be the 21st century’s biggest global economic realignment without any apparent plan. Now Trump says that more levies are coming on semiconductors and pharmaceuticals, no matter where we get them.
All of this is a disaster for the U.S. economy — but it’s also ruinous for any potential American role in decarbonization or the fight against climate change. Even more than Trump’s deregulatory actions, his trade war could spell the end of a long-held U.S. decarbonization dream.
On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Rob and Jesse chat about what Trump’s chaotic economic policy could mean for the global fight against climate change. What happens to global decarbonization if the U.S. no longer participates? If the U.S. kills its research sector, what happens next? And could China seize this moment to expand its clean tech sector? Shift Key is hosted by Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University, and Robinson Meyer, Heatmap’s executive editor.
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Here is an excerpt from our conversation:
Jesse Jenkins: Just to put a pin in the second point you raised, too, on finance — this is such, I think, a critical piece of the potential role, as you said, of the United States and others in influencing development paths in emerging economies. In many cases, the sovereign risks of those markets — the risks related to the potential lack of rule of law or presence of corruption or currency risk and uncertainty or fiscal risk, other things that characterize these environments that, in contrast typically, historically, at least, to the United States and its stability — lead to higher financial costs for everything in these countries, whatever you’re trying to build. And since so many components of the clean energy transition are capital intensive assets — investing in a wind farm, or a solar farm, or manufacturing capacity, or new low-carbon steel production, these all require huge amounts of upfront capital investment.
And so if the U.S. and other international partners can help lower the interest rates and costs of financing that are needed for deployment of these technologies abroad, that has a pretty substantial influence on the actual competitiveness or relative competitiveness of this infrastructure and the ability of emerging economies to afford to deploy it. So that’s one of the kind of key levers that I think is often underappreciated in this stor, and I appreciated that you called that out.
Robinson Meyer: And I would say historically, it’s also something we’ve totally underperformed. It’s a hugely important lever, and it’s also something that Republican and Democratic administrations alike — Republican more than Democratic, but both kinds of administrations have really not contributed enough to the financial cause, here. And so the argument is that the Trump administration, with its broad array of policies, but also with this specific reckless, unplanned, and pretty idiotic trade war that it’s begun in the past two weeks, has undermined all of those advantages for the United States and undermined America’s ability to play any of those roles in a global context.
I would add to all of this that I think there’s another part of the story that I hint at, but don’t go into, which is that obviously the U.S. has withdrawn again from the Paris Agreement, or is in the process of withdrawing again from the Paris Agreement. Beyond Paris alone, climate change is a public problem for the world. It’s a problem of the global public. That’s not the only kind of problem it is — it’s also a developmental problem, as we’ve been discussing. But it is generally higher on the Maslow Hierarchy of Needs for governments than other things they might need to attend to. And so addressing climate change is only possible in a world that is peaceful, rule-following, generally ordered by norms and something approaching laws, rather than a simple imperial prerogative. And of course, the Trump administration’s actions — not only in this trade war, but also over the course of a few months — have been disastrous for that. I think that’s worth stipulating going forward.
Part of what I was trying to do with this piece was, we know that Donald Trump is waging war on the regulatory state. We know that he’s waging war on international climate treaties, and people are very used to thinking about that. But I think understanding this most recent imbecilic action, this trade war that he’s launched against the entire world and then kind of focused on China, also massively undercuts any kind of climate action. And we should be unafraid to say that — at least any kind of climate action that the United States would play a role in.
Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.