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The political landscape in Washington has shifted, and NetZero Insider reporters are providing frontline news and analysis.
James Downing covers one of FERC’s first moves with Mark Christie as chair: the withdrawal of a draft rule on including consideration of greenhouse gas emissions when permitting natural gas pipelines or other infrastructure. Rather, the commission will decide if and how to take up GHG emissions on a case-by-case basis.
Fossil fuel industry leaders were jubilant at the U.S. Energy Association’s State of the Energy Industry Forum on Jan. 23, seeing major growth ahead with President Donald Trump back in the White House, promising to “drill, baby, drill,” reporter K Kaufmann writes. Meanwhile renewable energy leaders at the event were positioning themselves as a key part of an all-of-the-above approach to U.S. energy dominance and abundance.
Kaufmann also reported on conference discussions on the roles of nuclear energy — both fission and fusion — and energy efficiency in the bigger picture of U.S. energy policy.
At the state level, our Jon Lamson provides a preview of legislative priorities across the six New England states, from concerns about energy affordability in Connecticut, to efforts to build more transmission to interconnect offshore wind in Maine.
Of course, Trump and his ongoing campaign against environmental regulations and further disbursement of funds from the Inflation Reduction Act and Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act were the big headline-grabbers in this week’s curated content.
The New York Times digs into the president’s initial attacks on the “endangerment finding,” which allows EPA to regulate carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases as harmful to human health. Previous efforts to roll back the finding have been unsuccessful, even before Trump’s conservative majority on the Supreme Court.
Grist reports on Trump’s firing of inspectors general at key agencies across the government, including EPA and the departments of Energy and the Interior, some of whom he had appointed in his first term. The IGs provide independent oversight of government policies and spending, to prevent fraud and abuse, and many of them are concerned that Trump will install loyalists.
In response to such actions, states are ramping up their climate ambitions and gearing up to take Trump to court to fight his funding and regulatory rollbacks, The Guardian reports, with short profiles of actions being take in New York, California, Rhode Island and even some Republican states.
The other major story affecting energy policy was the uproar over the release of the Chinese AI model, DeepSeek, which was designed to be more efficient and use significantly less energy than U.S. models like OpenAI, according to analysis from the MIT Technology Review. It could make projects like Stargate — OpenAI’s $500 billion initiative to build massive new, megawatt-guzzling data centers across the U.S. — less pressing or even necessary.
An article from the World Economic Forum similarly looks at the opportunities for AI to accelerate the global transition to clean energy ― by optimizing system operations and advancing clean technologies ― while also facing the challenges of growing demand from data centers.
Read on for this week’s Intelligence Report:
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