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On greenhouse gases, LA’s fires, and the growing costs of natural disasters
Rob and Jesse talk all things solar, steel, and cement with CREA’s Lauri Myllyvirta.
The Biden administration is hoping they’ll be a starting gun for the industry. The industry may or may not be fully satisfied.
His intellectual influences include longtime climate action skeptics — and Bill Gates’ favorite author.
Answering your questions on AI and energy, the economics of solar, the Green New Deal’s legacy, and more.
Climate advocates have never met a solution they couldn’t argue about.
The end of 2024 marks the end of four of the busiest years the climate and clean energy community has seen to date. I think it's safe to say the energy transition is in full swing (despite certain opinions to the contrary), even if it's not yet on a glide path to a future that would avoid devastating climate impacts.
But with progress comes a new kind of conflict: infighting. Which climate solutions are the best climate solutions? How can we implement them the right way? When should other priorities, like affordability and national security, come first, if they should at all? Are those trade-offs even real? Or are they fossil fuel propaganda?
In a fantastic piece for Heatmap last year, researcher Joshua Lappen drew attention to this increasingly combative undercurrent in the climate coalition, inflamed by the debate over whether a compromise on permitting reform would be better for the climate in the long run than no reform at all. That fight — along with the related question of whether conservationists are slowing climate action — continued into 2024. But it wasn’t the only thing climate advocates fought about. Here are four debates that dominated the discourse this year that I think will continue into 2025.
Biden ignited a firestorm of controversy in January when he paused approvals of new liquefied natural gas export terminals until the Department of Energy could re-evaluate LNG’s potential economic and environmental impacts. The move followed protests from environmental groups that had named these facilities their number one climate bogeyman, arguing that new terminals would, as Bill McKibben put it, “install our reliance on fossil fuels for decades to come.”
What followed was much back and forth about whether growing U.S. LNG exports would help or hurt efforts to stop climate change. To be sure, producing and burning natural gas releases planet-warming emissions. But past government and academic studies have found that exporting U.S. natural gas could result in lower global emissions overall by helping other countries replace dirtier fuels such as coal or natural gas from Russia, where the industry has much higher methane emissions. Environmentalists pushed back on that narrative, citing a study by Robert Howarth, a Cornell scientist, which found that producing and transporting LNG could be worse for the climate than coal. Critics then pounced on Howarth's study, accusing him of using flawed assumptions about upstream methane emissions, LNG tanker size, and shipping route distances.
Ultimately, calculating the emissions impact of increased LNG exports requires making a lot of assumptions. How can we know, for example, whether creating a cheap supply of natural gas will displace coal or deter adoption of renewables? As Arvind Ravikumar, an expert in energy emissions modeling, told my colleague Matthew Zeitlin, “There’s no right answer. It depends on who buys, what time frame, which country, and how are they using LNG.”
A week before Christmas, the Biden administration finally put out its long-awaited study. It modeled a number of different scenarios, but found that approving additional LNG exports beyond what’s already in the pipeline would likely produce at least a small increase in emissions by 2050 in all of them. The report also found that demand from U.S. allies in Europe and elsewhere would be met by projects that have already been approved, making additional plants “neither sustainable nor advisable,” as Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm wrote.
The natural gas industry and its supporters were quick to question the results, and they’re about to have a much more sympathetic ear in the Trump administration. But the report gives activists a considerable weapon to use in future lawsuits if Trump tries to put LNG approvals on the fast track.
I checked my phone after dinner one evening in August to find the members of climate X (formerly known as climate Twitter) suddenly at each other's throats over a provocative essay published in Jacobin titled “Obsessing Over Climate Disinformation Is a Wrong Turn.” Written by the environmental sociologist Holly Buck, the essay argues that too much focus on the oil and gas industry’s disinformation campaigns risks dismissing or overlooking legitimate concerns people have about the energy transition. “Fighting disinformation becomes a cheap hack for the hard work of listening to people and learning from them,” wrote Buck. “We have to put resources into a different sort of public engagement with climate change, one that sees publics as competent and nuanced rather than as susceptible marks for memes.”
The message struck a nerve. While many praised the essay, a number of prominent climate activists and journalists with large online followings attacked it, defending the urgency of combating disinformation and accusing Buck of setting up a false dichotomy between this work and public engagement. Aaron Regunberg, a former Rhode Island state representative and lawyer for the nonprofit Public Citizen, wrote a response in Jacobin charging Buck with “arguing with a straw man” and not understanding how insidious the oil industry’s disinformation strategies are.
Buck tried to clarify her view in a followup piece, asserting that she was not denying that disinformation was a “serious obstacle to climate action,” but rather that the act of “fighting disinformation” won’t solve what she sees as underlying problems working against the energy transition: the absence of an engagement apparatus that helps regular people understand their options, and a media ecosystem that “profits from our hate and division.”
What’s clear moving forward is that with a clean energy opponent entering the White House and a mega-billionaire who, with X, literally owns a chunk of the media ecosystem standing by his side, both disinformation and the framework that supports it will stay in the spotlight.
After remaining basically flat for two decades, U.S. electricity demand is set to grow by an average of 3% per year over the next five years, according to the latest forecast from the energy policy consulting firm Grid Strategies. Domestic manufacturing will drive some of the demand, it predicts, but the majority will come from the buildout of data centers, “supercharged” by the rise of artificial intelligence.
On one hand, many of the companies building data centers have ambitious clean energy goals. Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and others have signed landmark deals with advanced nuclear and geothermal power companies, helping to get first-of-a-kind deployments of these technologies financed. If those projects are successful, they could pave the way for cheaper, cleaner, 24/7 power for the rest of us.
But energy-hungry AI is already causing those tech giants to fall behind on their targets and driving major investments in fossil fuel infrastructure. My colleague Matthew Zeitlin has chronicled how electricity demand growth is making it harder to close natural gas and coal plants . In the states that data centers are flocking to, such as Virginia, North Carolina, and Texas, utilities are revising their integrated resource plans to increase the amount of natural gas generation they expect to deliver. Exxon and Chevron are gearing up to build natural gas generation “behind the meter,” i.e. serving data centers directly, so they can meet demand more quickly than if they had to hook up to the grid. The gas pipeline company Williams is also planning a Southeast expansion to serve data center demand. Energy equipment manufacturer GE Vernova is seeing orders for natural gas turbines skyrocket.
There are layers to this debate. Should policymakers require hyperscalers to bring online new sources of clean energy to power their data centers, or will that prove counterproductive and “dampen investment in new industries” — a trade-off familiar to anyone following the back-and-forth over clean hydrogen? And is it possible that all the fuss about data center demand is overblown? Is there even a business case for AI that supports this buildout?
The incoming Trump administration has promised to “unleash U.S. energy dominance” and “make America the AI capital of the world,” so it’s likely this will continue to be one of the top questions for climate hawks for the foreseeable future.
The debate over the state of electric vehicle sales didn’t start in 2024, but headlines this year continued to sow confusion over whether or not EVs are catching on in the way climate advocates — and carmakers — hoped.
Each of the big three automakers, as well as most of the remaining companies serving North America, revised down their EV production plans this year, citing a waning market. In July, General Motors CEO Mary Barra said the company wasn’t going to hit its goal of producing a million EVs per year in North America by 2025. “We’re seeing a little bit of a slowdown here,” she said on CNBC. “The market just isn’t developing. But we will get there.” Ford cancelled plans to produce an electric three-row SUV, delayed its release of an electric medium-sized pickup truck until 2027, and paused production of the F-150 Lightning, and has decided to shift its near-term focus to selling hybrids.
Among non-U.S. automakers, Stellantis delayed the release of a new EV Ram pickup truck and will put out a hybrid version instead. Volkswagen delayed the North America release of an electric sedan. Several luxury automakers, including Aston Martin and Bentley, delayed the release of their first EVs until 2027. Mercedes-Benz once strived to have EVs make up 50% of its sales in 2025 — now it’s trying to hit that mark in 2030. Tesla sales also slowed significantly in the first half of the year. CEO Elon Musk cancelled plans to build a new low-cost EV.
But while sales numbers may not have met individual automakers’ expectations, overall sales continued to grow. “For every sign of an EV slowdown, another suggests an adolescent industry on the verge of its next growth spurt,” Bloomberg reported mid-way through the year. During the third quarter, GM saw record EV sales. Honda’s debut EV, the Prologue, jumped up the charts to become one of the top-selling offerings on the market. After looking at third quarter numbers, Cox Automotive analysts opined that “a 10% [market] share is well within reach.”
We’ll have to see how Trump’s plans to eliminate consumer subsidies for EVs changes that outlook, but expect there to be plenty more fodder for debate.
The central bank cut rates again, but that’s not the headline news.
The Federal Reserve cut interest rates at its third straight meeting — but don’t expect as many cuts next year.
The Fed indicated that it expects only two quarter-point reductions in 2025,down from the four it had forecast in September, when it began its rate-cutting cycle. The news will likely overshadow any relief over lower rates for renewables developers, who have been counting on future cuts to ensure the profitability of their projects.
Since renewables like wind and solar have essentially no “fuel” costs compared to fossil fuel projects like gas-fired power plants, a higher portion of their overall costs must come from borrowed money, not from revenues the project itself produces. This makes the projects much more sensitive to borrowing costs.
The Energy Information Administration has projected that solar capacity will grow by 19.5% in 2025 and that wind capacity will increase by 6%. Wind projects, especially offshore wind projects, could be imperiled by higher interest rates and higher borrowing costs. The energy consulting firm Wood Mackenzie has estimated that a 2 percentage point increase in interest rates causes the price of energy produced by renewables to go up 20%.
Further pressure from inflation could also increase the cost of building out renewables. Several major offshore wind projects — such as New Jersey’s Ocean Wind 1 and 2, which were cancelled last year — have had to have their contracts renegotiated or even thrown out due to unexpected cost increases.
And despite the Federal Reserve interest rate cuts in the last quarter of the year, market interest rates have actually been drifting up in the past few months. Trump’s victory supercharged the stock market with promises of deregulation and general euphoria around tech stocks like Nvidia and Tesla (and crypto) and raised the possibility of higher inflation, with a potential combination of tax cuts, some spending increases, and tariffs.
Some analysts thought that even the Fed’s new rate-cutting forecast was too loose considering the economic data that has been arriving in recent months. “We have a hard time squaring them up against the economic forecasts, which show higher near-term growth, higher near-term inflation, and lower near-term unemployment,” Jefferies analyst Thomas Simons wrote in a note to clients Wednesday.
The new rate-cutting forecasts “amount to a message that the FOMC will tolerate above-target inflation for even longer than they previously indicated,” Simons wrote.
But what the market is focused on is that there may be fewer rate cuts than expected, not that there maybe should have been zero.
Over the past three months, the yield on the 10-year Treasury bond, an often-used benchmark for borrowing costs, has risen from around 3.7% to 4.5%, including a substantial jump following the Fed’s Wednesday announcement. Longer-term interest rates have risen “quite a bit since September,” Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell said in a press conference Wednesday.
The iShares Global Clean Energy ETF, which tracks a basket of clean energy stocks, fell immediately following the Fed’s rate cut announcement; it fell around 3% today and is down 26% on the year, while broader stock market indices also fell, with the S&P 500 declining just under 3% today
Powell said that both the cut and the new, more restrictive forecast indicate that the Fed is “in a new phase in the process,” and that “from this point forward, it’s appropriate to move cautiously and look for progress on inflation.”
