NetZero Insider continued its coverage of the Trump administration’s attacks on clean energy and environmental policies, with the appearances of Energy Secretary Chris Wright and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum at CERAWeek and EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin’s announcement of the potential rollback of 31 environmental regulations.
Veteran Texas reporter Tom Kleckner was on-site for CERAWeek, as Burgum promoted Trump’s agenda for “unabashedly pursuing a policy of more American energy production and infrastructure.”
Our K Kaufmann reported on EPA’s avalanche of announcements on the 31 regulations it would now “reconsider,” including the landmark endangerment finding, which established the agency’s authority under the Clean Air Act to regulate greenhouse gas emissions as posing a danger to human health.
The turbulence created by Trump’s energy policies has generated uncertainty “around federal funding, permitting approvals and tariffs,” which is affecting clean energy developers in New England and could raise already high utility bills in the region, Jon Lamson reports from an industry conference.
Further down the Atlantic Coast, Maryland lawmakers are negotiating what could be a package of energy bills, hoping to find the best mix of solutions to the state’s tangled energy issues, Kaufmann reports. A key and very contentious question is whether Maryland should fast-track new natural gas plants while keeping consumer utility bills low.
And Nevada’s Public Utilities Commission has given a conditional go-ahead to the clean transition tariff developed by NV Energy in partnership with Google, according to West Coast correspondent Elaine Goodman. A final CTT model rate is needed before NV can launch the rate, which is aimed at allowing high-tech hyperscalers like Google to offset some of the cost of powering their data centers with new technologies, like advanced geothermal, while keeping consumer rates low.
Moving to our curated content, one of the top headlines in the past week was Zeldin’s efforts to cancel $20 billion in legally obligated grants from the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, authorized in the Inflation Reduction Act, to be used for clean energy projects in low-income and disadvantaged communities.
According to Inside Climate News, EPA is cutting off funds to individual grantees, such as the Climate United Fund, claiming “programmatic fraud, waste and abuse” with the larger Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund. But D.C. District Court Judge Tanya Chutkan challenged Justice Department lawyers representing EPA to show any actual wrongdoing by Climate United, according to POLITICO.
Another front on the administration’s retreat from climate science and GHG regulation is more nuanced, according to The Hill’s report on the Senate confirmation hearing for Aaron Szabo, Trump’s nominee to lead EPA’s office in charge of climate change and air pollution. Questioned by Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), Szabo suggested that the U.S. should “adapt” to climate change rather than attempt to minimize or curb it.
But a Guardian report on the newly named trend of “global weirding” notes that cities across the globe are experiencing climate whiplash, with major flips in extremes of wet and dry weather. “The changing climate of cities can hit citizens with worsened floods and droughts, destroy access to clean water, sanitation and food, displace communities and spread disease,” The Guardian says.
On the data center beat, E&E News covers a new Rhodium Group report, which finds that advanced geothermal could pump out close to two-thirds of the power that data centers need by the early 2030s.
Read on for more from this week’s Intelligence Report:
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