A Truly Dark Day in DC

And what you can do about it.

We get to choose: George Washington or MAGA Mike

Credit where due: I am ever impressed by the feral energy of Trump and his crew, who are able to do an extraordinary amount of damage every single damned day. And somehow their energetic cruelty seems to drain my own reserves: I want to stay in bed. But we fight as best we can, and so here’s my assessment of this dire day, and more importantly what we still might be able to do about it.

It began, early this morning, with House passage of the budget bill, which somehow managed to get even worse in the wee hours . Among other things, a single sentence was amended in such a way as to potentially kill off most of the rooftop solar industry in the U.S. As Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin explains:

While the earlier language from the Ways and Means committee eliminated the 25D tax credit for those who purchased home solar systems after the end of this year (it was originally supposed to run through 2034), the new language says that no credit “shall be allowed under this section for any investment during the taxable year” (emphasis mine) if the entity claiming the tax credit “rents or leases such property to a third party during such taxable year” and “the lessee would qualify for a credit under section 25D with respect to such property if the lessee owned such property.”

That arcane piece of language was enough to knock 37 percent off the share price of SunRun today, the biggest rooftop installer in the country. And it was only a cherry on the top of this toxic sundae, which would essentially repeal all of the Inflation Reduction Act. Nuclear power gets a little bit of a reprieve, and of course ethanol (earth’s dumbest energy source) does great. But it’s a wipeout far greater than anyone expected even a few weeks ago. Here’s how Princeton’s Jesse Jenkins and his team at REPEAT (Rapid Energy Policy Evaluation and Toolkit) sum it up:

• Increase U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by roughly 0.5 billion metric tons per year in 2030 and more than 1 billion metric tons per year in 2035.

• Raise U.S. household and business energy expenditures by 25 billion USD annually in 2030 and over 50 billion USD in 2035.

• Increase average U.S. household energy costs by roughly 100 to 160 dollars per household per year in 2030 roughly 270 to 415 dollars per household per year in 2035.

• Reduces cumulative capital investment in U.S. electricity and clean fuels production by 1 trillion dollars from 2025-2035.

• Imperil a total of 522 billion dollars in announced but pending investments in U.S. clean energy supply and manufacturing.

• Reduce annual sales of electric vehicles by roughly 40% in 2030 and end America’s battery manufacturing boom.

• Substantially slow electricity capacity additions, raising national average retail electricity rates and monthly household electricity bills by about 9% in 2030 — and as much as 17% in some states (including TX, OK and PA).

In the midst of all this, the Senate—ignoring its parliamentarian—bowed to the wishes of the auto industry and told California (and the 11 states that had followed it) that it couldn’t demand the phaseout of internal combustion vehicles by the middle of the next decade. (This is among other things federalism in reverse).

“Attacking these waivers will devastate our ability to advance the use of electric vehicles in the state,” California Attorney General Rob Bonta said in a press conference after the vote, flanked by California Gov. Gavin Newsom and other officials. “We won’t let it happen, not when we’re facing an air pollution and climate crisis that’s getting worse by the day.”

The 1970 Clean Air Act permits California to receive waivers from the EPA that enable the state to enact clean air regulations that go further than federal limits.

Oh, and then at day’s end the Department of Homeland Security told Harvard that 27 percent of its student body couldn’t study there beginning in the fall because they came from foreign countries.

If you add it up, this is all an effort to keep America precisely where it is now. It’s the Make America Immobile Act. Trump is doing his best to freeze things in place: on behalf of oil companies that want to keep pumping oil, on behalf of automakers that want to keep churning out SUVs. That depends, among other things, on shutting down research at universities, because they keep coming up with things that point us in a different direction, be it temperature readings demonstrating climate change or new batteries that enable entirely different technologies. If America lived alone on this planet that would be truly terrible; luckily for everyone else, there are other places (China, and the EU) that are not making the same set of stupid decisions. But if this stands it will kill the future for America.

It will also, of course, kill the present. I’m not bothering to talk about the deep cruelty of the Medicaid cuts (and the fact that they will destroy America’s rural hospital system). There’s also the not-small matter of the intense attacks on transgender people the bill contains. And I won’t bother gassing on about the utter grossness of handing over yet more money to the richest among us. (The top 0.1% of earners gain $390,000 a year on average, while Americans making less than $17,000 lose on average about $1,000. This is, among other things, Christianity in reverse).

So, our job is to do what we can to make it…less worse. The U.S. Senate still has to pass its own version of the bill. Given the GOP majority, they’ll pass something very bad. Perhaps, at Trump’s urging, they’ll rush it through in the next 24 hours; more likely it will take a little longer. We need to put as much pressure as we can on that process, in order to take out the most egregious parts of the bill. Here’s what Third Act sent out about an hour ago, and here’s the link we want you to use to register your opposition with Senators. It comes from our very able partners at Solar United Neighbors, who have done as much as anyone in America to help people build clean energy. Fill it out so you can get a call script and the numbers to use. Again, here’s the link. If you want a little inspiration, check out Will Wiseman’s video of rural Americans talking about one particular part of the IRA that’s helping change their lives.

I’m not going to bother pretending that this is guaranteed to work. The bad guys here are riding hard and fast, and they’re trying to shock and cow us into submission. But—don’t go easy. If they can summon the feral energy to wreck the country, we can summon the humane energy to try and save it.

In other energy and climate news:

+Politico has a fairly remarkable story explaining that for many GOP stalwarts, the fact that China has built a huge lead in renewable energy explains why they want to give up. This is one of these documents historians will use when they try to explain how we became a global also-ran in no time flat. America the can’t-do society.

“The second administration is really not about taking half-measures,” said Daniel Simmons, who ran the Energy Department’s energy efficiency and renewable energy office in Trump’s first term. “To all appearances, it is not a battlefield that they care about.”

Trump’s Energy Department confirmed as much in a statement to POLITICO that focused largely on oil — an energy source that the U.S. produces more of than any other country.

“Thanks to President Trump, America is leading the way in lowering costs by removing red tape and unleashing affordable, abundant, and reliable American energy,” the department said Friday, adding: “As the world’s largest oil producer, the United States welcomes a secure and stable global supply of oil that promotes economic prosperity at home and promotes peace and stability around the world.”

+Some short-term and long-term ocean news from the Guardian

First, with hurricane season on the horizon, the new forecast from the federal government’s storm-watchers is for an above average season with three to five major hurricanes crashing into the U.S. “Warmer sea surface temperatures are probably the major contributor to this,” said Ken Graham, director of the National Weather Service, who probably soon won’t be, thanks to his honesty

Second, stalwart environment editor Damian Carrington reports on a new study showing that even at present levels of warming Greenland will likely melt enough to raise sea levels by several meters in the century to come, and reminds us that

Today, about 230 million people live within 1 metre above current sea level, and 1 billion live within 10 metres above sea level. Even just 20cm of sea level rise by 2050 would lead to global flood damages of at least $1tn a year for the world’s 136 largest coastal cities and huge impacts on people’s lives and livelihoods.

And while we’re getting truly bad news out of the way, new data shows that an unprecedented level of forest loss last year—worse, more of it seems unconnected to land clearance, which means it’s simply rainforest and boreal forest catching on fire in our new climate.

In 2024, forest loss in Brazil reached rates far above any level recorded under the far-right president Jair Bolsonaro, fuelled by fire and the worst drought on record in the Amazon. The country accounted for 42% of all primary rainforest loss in the tropics, losing more than 25,000 sq km (10,000 sq miles). The data differs from Brazil’s official statistics, which uses a different definition of deforestation that does not include fire.

+As Keerti Gopal reports, great organizing seems to have convinced insurance giant Chubb not to underwrite the massive Calcasieu Pass LNG project

In 2023, Chubb added standards for methane emissions from oil and gas clients and further updated its corporate climate underwriting criteria in March. Natural gas is primarily methane, a potent greenhouse gas, and it leaks from wells, pipelines, LNG terminals and other infrastructure.

“We may decline coverage if a potential policyholder cannot meet our methane performance expectations,” the standards summary reads.

+Who’d a thunk it? It turns out that the fossil fuel industry sponsors art and cultural projects in an effort to influence officials. New reporting from DeSmog Blog

DeSmog discovered the documents by combing through thousands of internal memos, emails, and other communications subpoenaed by the Congressional investigation into climate disinformation by the fossil fuel industry, which published its report last year.

Dated between 2015 and 2021, the documents show oil companies funding sponsorship programs meant not only to enhance their reputations as socially responsible corporations, but also to ward off anti-climate change regulations that might undercut their oil and gas business.

The documents (which can be viewed online) reveal how BP America communications staff were instructed to use the company’s sponsorships to protect BP from “external threats” such as “the policy and politics of climate change,” how Chevron leveraged its sponsorship programs to “advance business objectives” with investors, government and customers, and how Shell used philanthropy to tackle the problem of “low credibility and trust” amid “rising societal expectations on climate action” while ensuring that oil and gas remained “a profitable cash engine.”

+Striking news from China, confirming that oil demand is now dropping there for the first time. Viktor Tachev, writing for Energy Tracker Asia:

Oil markets have long relied on China’s seemingly endless demand growth. However, 2024 data reveals that the tides are turning and not temporarily. Instead, experts believe China is entering an era of structurally weakening oil demand as part of its decarbonisation goals and strategy to promote transport electrification. The country’s progressive move away from oil-based fuels and the production of competitively-priced EVs can inspire Southeast Asian nations to follow the same path, improving their energy security and decarbonisation progress in due course.

“Transport electrification” means EVs, and the Chinese are getting ever better at making them. Here’s the BYD Seagull, about $8,000 in China. It comes

with autonomous driving technology, dubbed “God’s Eye”, which matches that available on much more expensive cars. The car, already a stark illustration of what European manufacturers are up against, could achieve further savings in future by using heavier sodium-ion batteries that sacrifice range for affordability.

Chinese carmakers are on average able to develop cars at 27% of the cost of European rivals, according to analysis by Bain & Company, a consultancy.

Meanwhile, as a small first sign of how China is going to exploit America’s new isolationism, Beijing announced this week that it would make up the $500 million that the Trump administration snatched away from the World Health Organization.

Chinese Vice Premier Liu Guozhong told the World Health Assembly that his country is making the contribution to oppose “unilateralism,” a trait Beijing often ascribes to Washington as relations between the two powers deteriorate.

“The world is now facing the impacts of unilateralism and power politics, bringing major challenges to global health security,” Liu said Tuesday in Geneva. “China strongly believes that only with solidarity and mutual assistance can we create a healthy world together.”

One imagines that the same thing will happen at global climate talks. Indeed Yixian Sun lays out a possible path

China still has developing country status in the UN’s climate change convention and, as such, has no official obligation to provide international climate finance.

Despite this, it has already provided or helped raise around US$24.5 billion (£18.32 billion) for clean energy, disaster recovery and other climate actions in developing countries. That makes it the world’s fifth-largest climate finance donor according to some estimates.

But for this investment to have a lasting impact, Beijing needs to be more transparent about where its funding goes and how projects are financed. It should also get local people more involved in designing and implementing the projects it funds.

With global climate leadership at risk, China has the chance to step up. As an emerging superpower with advantages in clean technologies and a leadership that recently reaffirmed their commitment to climate action, the country is well positioned. The world is watching to see if China will follow through.

+Data centers are the current excuse for fossil fuel expansion. Kairos offers an excellent toolkit for fighting back in your community. Meanwhile, the irrepressible Amory Lovins has an invaluable new flood of data and analysis on how seriously to take the energy demands of our new AI overlords. I highly recommend reading the whole (quite long) thing, but

The AI industry’s biggest challenge isn’t finding executives and investors willing to bet astronomical sums that aggressive scaleup will solve its problems, conjure its markets, and ensure its business success. Rather, it’s finding enough electricity, soon enough, to run scores, then hundreds, of planned new hyperscale data centers—each ~10–100× bigger than traditional ones, each about as powerhungry as a small city, and each costing typically $10–20+ billion to build and equip, plus a similar sum over the years for electricity to run it at the 2–3×-market price some eager data-center developers now offer. IEA estimates that powering global data-center growth will need $0.5 trillion of investment in the next five years (11% of base-case data-center investment)—nearly half of it in the US, or over 15% of total projected power-sector capital expenditures. Few renewable developers are rich enough to finance such big projects’ power supplies on their own. Huge balance sheets let Big Tech contract for long-term power and make renewable projects bankable. The same financial strength could also confer the market power to squeeze renewable developers’ profits, but so far, renewables’ faster, often ready-to-connect offerings have helped support their profit margins.

+Lots of people are losing their homes to the repo man after climate disaster, Eva Xiao reports in the FT

Uninsured damage from flooding, as well as the depreciation of home values and rising insurance premiums from increasingly destructive climate disasters, could lead to as much as $1.2bn in credit losses in 2025, said risk-modelling group First Street. It was estimated that mortgages on about 19,000 properties could be repossessed — or foreclosed, as the process is known in the US — this year due to climate risk. That figure is estimated to rise to $5.4bn in losses from almost 84,000 repossessions by 2035, according to First Street calculations.

+Joshua Harrison argues that foundations and philanthropists need to take a new approach to funding climate work.

Major liberal foundations operate under a basic misunderstanding of how to support long-term systemic change. Unlike their conservative counterparts, they often fail to recognize that transformative social and environmental progress requires sustained, patient investment over decades, not just short-term project cycles with immediate measurable outcomes.

The contrast becomes clear when examining the approach of foundations like Mellon and Scaife, which undertook a 60-year project of turning the United States from what they perceived as a liberal society to a conservatively oriented one. Their success stemmed from maintaining unwavering focus on a long-horizon goal, which led them to structure their grantmaking very differently from major liberal foundations like MacArthur, Rockefeller, and Ford.

Conservative foundations identified and nurtured talented individuals with aligned values, providing them with sustained support to develop ideas, build networks, and assume positions of influence. This long-term investment in human capital created a powerful ecosystem of thought leaders, policy experts, and institutional leaders who could advance their agenda across multiple fronts simultaneously.

Liberal climate philanthropy, by contrast, often focuses more on specific projects or organizations than on identifying and supporting talented individuals who could become effective climate leaders over time. The frequent rotation of program officers and shifting strategic priorities further undermines relationship-building and long-term talent development in the climate movement.

+Finally, I owe you some good news.

Africa’s off-grid solar revolution is now hooking up large numbers of people for the first time in their lives. Having seen this process in action, the numbers make me very happy because I can easily imagine what it means

Under Nigeria’s electrification programme, launched in 2018, around 5.5 million people have gained access through the installation of 125 mini-grids and more than 1 million solar home systems, according to the World Bank.

The government has also exempted smaller mini-grids from licensing and tariff approvals, meaning operators can set tariffs in consultation with communities. That’s helped push Nigeria’s off-grid solar energy capacity to 124MW at last count, from just 11MW in 2015, according to the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA).

Since it’s slow and costly to expand national power networks, decentralised solar-based mini-grids are “the most viable pathway to electrify underserved communities,” says Sam Duby, managing director of TFE Africa, a South African company that advises on the United Nations Development Programme’s African Mini Grids Programme.

Meanwhile a new study from the reliable folks at the Ember thinktank shows that Mexico could easily follow this path, and in the process shake off its vulnerability to Papa Trump.

Mexico generated 22% of its electricity from renewables in 2024, below the global average of 32% and well below the Latin American average of 62%. In October 2024, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum, in her inaugural address, declared that renewables would be promoted so as to reach a 45% share of electricity generation by 2030. The current National Electricity Sector Strategy outlines three possible scenarios for the energy transition, including one reaching the 45% target and another reaching 36%. This new analysis demonstrates the socioeconomic and energy security benefits of implementing ambitious clean energy targets by 2030.

Oh, and one last thing. Big Oil may be succeeding in wrecking clean energy in America, but it’s not doing them much good. As Evan Halper reports, Trump’s destruction of the economy, and all that clean energy development in the rest of the world, is weighing on their prospects. Allow me a small moment of schadenfreude at the end of this long day.

The market value of Liberty Energy has fallen by nearly half since its former CEO, Chris Wright, joined Trump’s Cabinet. The company reports it is among many in the industry struggling with the challenges heightened by Trump’s agenda, including “tariff impacts, geopolitical tensions, and oil supply concerns.”

Three months into the new administration, the price of U.S. oil has plunged to below the drilling profitability threshold of about $65 per barrel and the industry is ailing

Companies are opting not to add new wells out of fear they will lose money. The number of active rigs in Texas is lower now than it has been since the nation was climbing out of the pandemic. The president’s tariffs are meanwhile driving up costs in U.S. oil fields, leaving firms hesitant to invest in expanding production.

“It is truly affecting everybody,” said T. Grant Johnson, president of Lone Star Production Company, an oil exploration firm in Texas. “There was a lot of talk of, ‘drill baby, drill.’ But these companies are not going to drill if the economics aren’t there. All this fear and uncertainty is causing people to be far more cautious.”

He warns the challenges threaten political blowback for Trump.

“If this pain runs too long and spills into the midterm elections, it could become very uncomfortable for the people who got us here,” said Johnson