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Funding pauses, tariffs and the Senate confirmation of new secretaries of energy and the interior were the biggest stories this week, and NetZero Insider reporters provided critical coverage and analysis.
K Kaufmann and Michael Brooks swarmed the Office of Management and Budget’s Jan 27 funding pause, the uncertainty and confusion unleashed in its wake, and the temporary restraining order issued Feb. 3 by the U.S. District Court in Washington D.C.
President Donald Trump’s threat to slap 25% tariffs on imports from Canada and Mexico raised immediate questions about the feasibility of imposing such financial sanctions on the hydropower the U.S. receives from its neighbor to the North. New England reporter Jon Lamson cut through the noise with his report citing U.S. regulations on why tariffs might not be applied to electricity, and the higher wholesale power prices likely to occur if they were.
James Downing also looked at the power flows between Canada and the U.S., and heard from Jonathan Wilkinson, Canada’s minister of energy and natural resources, who claimed Trump’s tariffs would be a “lose-lose” for both countries. Wilkinson instead proposed the U.S. and Canada should build on their existing trade ties to develop an alliance on energy and critical minerals.
Crisis averted, Downing turned his attention to the swift Senate confirmation votes for former North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum as secretary of the interior and Liberty Energy CEO Chris Wright as secretary of energy, in both cases with bipartisan support. Both men come to office with strong ties to the fossil fuel industry and commitments to Trump’s vision of U.S. energy dominance.
Another new face at the Department of Energy, Lou Hrkman, gave state officials in D.C. for an industry conference a preview of the department’s 180-degree turn on policy, Kaufmann reported. Hrkman’s key talking points: there is no energy transition, fossil fuels are the foundation of “American civilization,” and time and innovation will cut U.S. greenhouse gas emissions eventually but not to net zero and not by 2050.
The funding pause generated multiple headlines in our curated content, with The New York Times, Fast Company and Canary Media providing coverage of the projects and programs now on hold. For example, The Times reports that the pause instead affects clean energy programs targeting low-income and tribal communities in Arizona, and school districts in Virginia, New York City and rural Nevada that were awarded funds to purchase electric school buses.
John Sneed, new director at DOE’s Loan Programs Office, is reviewing the office’s loans to see if they can be clawed back — even federal dollars that instead have been contractually obligated — according to a Bloomberg News report in the Financial Post.
Grist, Inside Climate News and Politico are tracking the climate, energy and environmental justice and equity data sets and other online information the administration wasted no time in scrubbing from federal websites. According to Grist, a group of data scientists rebuilt and relaunched an online tool for identifying communities burdened with high levels of environmental pollution, which was developed by the White House Council on Environmental Quality and taken down three days after Trump took office.
Echoing Hrkman, an op-ed in The Hill presented the conservative argument that the climate crisis has been overstated and Biden-era incentives for clean energy should be replaced with a performance and parity approach to develop clean technologies that would provide the same performance and low-cost of fossil fuels.
Meanwhile, Politico covers a new report predicting that this year alone, 5 million Americans will relocate away from areas affected by climate change. Extreme weather could depress housing prices, wiping out $1.5 trillion in value by 2055, the report says.
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