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Matusiak added on LinkedIn that since February, Rewiring America has been “unable to access our competitively and lawfully awarded grant dollars,” some $2 billion of which were awarded through the GGRF last year to the organization and four other partners to help decarbonize American homes. The Environmental Protection Agency has tried to rescind $20 billion of the GGRF’s $27 billion in total funding, wreaking havoc “on organizations such as Rewiring America, which structured projects and staffing decisions around the grants,” Katie goes on. Read her full report of the layoffs here.
The acting administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Cameron Hamilton, was fired on Thursday, one day after defending the existence of the department he’d been appointed to oversee, E&E News reports. Testifying before a House Appropriations subcommittee on Wednesday, Hamilton had told lawmakers that “I do not believe it is in the best interests of the American people to eliminate” FEMA — a response to Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s remarks that “the president has indicated he wants to eliminate FEMA as it exists today.”
Though Noem swiftly appointed Hamilton’s successor — David Richardson, a senior official at DHS with experience in the Marine Corps commanding artillery units — Democratic Senator Patty Murray of Washington slammed the move, telling Noem, “We have seen an upheaval at FEMA that is going to put lives in jeopardy. We are losing indispensable staff just weeks away from fire and hurricane season.” Hurricane season begins in fewer than 23 days, with the possibility of the first named storm of the year forming before then, and forecasters are also anticipating an above-average fire season. “There is a reason the law requires the administrator of FEMA to have state emergency management experience,” Chad Berginnis, the executive director of the Association of State Floodplain Managers, told E&E News.
The Supreme Court declined this week to hear a pair of challenges brought against Vineyard Wind, the offshore wind farm under construction south of Martha’s Vineyard. The petitions were brought by the fishing industry lobbying group Responsible Offshore Development Alliance, which argued the approval of Vineyard Wind violated protections against ocean users and endangered species, as well as the Texas Public Policy Foundation, which represents Rhode Island fishermen and a seafood company. “We will continue to pursue our goal of shutting down the Vineyard Wind project by filing an administrative petition with the Secretary of the Interior,” TPPF Senior Attorney Ted Hadzi-Antich said in a statement, per The New Bedford Light. To date, Vineyard Wind has — haltingly — installed 32 of the planned 62 turbines, with an anticipated eventual capacity of 806 megawatts.
The Japanese-flagged LNG tanker Energy Glory.Dan Kitwood/Getty Images
Energy groups and CEOs are seeking exemptions to the Trump administration’s rule requiring 1% of U.S. liquified natural gas exports to be shipped on American-made, operated, and flagged vessels within four years, with incremental increases up to 15% by 2047. There are 792 LNG carriers worldwide, most of which belong to South Korea and Japan; just five, dating to the 1970s, were made in U.S. shipyards and are not currently in use, Reuters reports.
As a result, energy executives and groups, including the influential American Petroleum Institute, argue that the Trump administration’s rule puts U.S. energy companies at a disadvantage. Exporters “have little control over their ability to comply with [U.S. Trade Representative’s] new requirements but ultimately face the consequences of not doing so,” API CEO Mike Sommers wrote in a letter reviewed by Reuters. Building five LNG tankers in the U.S. by the end of the decade to meet the 1% threshold is not doable, Sommers added, because it takes five years to make such a carrier at one of the two U.S. shipyards capable of such production.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced Thursday that its database of extreme weather events “will be retired” as part of ongoing cost-saving cuts and reorganization at the agency. Though the database doesn’t explicitly focus on climate event attribution, it contains data going back to the 1980s, charting the upward trend of billion-dollar disasters in the U.S., including severe hail, flooding, wildfires, and hurricanes. “This administration thinks that if they stop doing the work to identify climate change that climate change will go away,” Democratic Representative and former meteorologist Eric Sorensen of Illinois told The Washington Post.
Though the Trump administration has made deep and sweeping cuts across the federal government, it has especially singled out climate-related programs and databases. Some grant seekers have been encouraged to reapply with climate-related language removed from their proposals, a rhetorical shift that has also made its way into business branding, as my colleague Katie Brigham and I have covered for Heatmap. In addition to obscuring the picture of how climate change is potentially increasing damage and deaths in the United States, sunsetting the database is also causing headaches for insurance groups and financial risk modeling firms like First Street, whose head of climate implications and co-founder Jeremy Porter told CNN, “without it, replicating or extending damage trend analyses, especially at regional scales or across hazard types, is nearly impossible without significant funding or institutional access to commercial catastrophe models.”
The new pope, Robert Prevost — now known as Leo XIV — is expected to follow in Pope Francis’ footsteps when it comes to calling for urgent action on climate change. Speaking last year, Prevost “reiterated the Holy See’s commitment to protecting the environment, enumerating examples, like the Vatican installing solar panels and shifting to electric vehicles,” Vatican News reports.
The global solar market is expected to grow only 10% in 2025, down from 33% growth in 2024 and 87% growth in 2023, according to a new report by SolarPower Europe. The firm’s “most realistic scenario” accounts for the natural slowdown in development after a boom caused by high energy prices in 2022 and 2023, as well as the “uneven distribution of solar market growth” worldwide, with China accounting for 55% of the market share, lending to the dip in overall solar as it implements reforms this summer in how its renewables are priced and traded.
Speaking at the opening of the Intersolar 2025 conference in Munich on Wednesday, Abigail Ross Hopper, the CEO of the Solar Energy Industries Association, echoed some of the uncertainty expressed in SolarPower Europe’s report. “I don’t think any of us could be in this business if we weren’t optimistic,” she said, adding, “I think we’re going to weather through this storm, but it is going to be a bit rocky for a few years.” SolarPower Europe’s report, meanwhile, anticipates “likely” growth from 2 terawatts of global installed solar capacity at the end of 2024 to 7.1 terawatts of total installed capacity by 2030, which would meet “nearly two-thirds of the 11 terawatt renewable energy target set at COP28.” Under ideal conditions, solar could even quadruple capacity to more than 8 terawatts by the decade’s end. Read the full report here.
2. Orsted cancels 2.4-gigawatt offshore wind project in the UK, citing rising costs
The Danish energy company Orsted announced this week that it is canceling its Hornsea 4 offshore wind project in the UK due to rising supply chain costs and other “adverse macroeconomic developments,” the Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday. Hornsea 4 was expected to become one of the biggest offshore wind farms in the world, with a capacity of 2.4 gigawatts once it was completed. (Equinor’s recently paused Empire Wind I project, south of New York’s Long Island, would have had an 810-megawatt capacity by comparison.)
Orsted warned it would take a hit from the cancellation, with breakaway costs estimated to be between $533 million and $685 million. Nevertheless, “Orsted said the project no longer made economic sense, even with a contract to sell power at government-guaranteed prices for 15 years,” Bloomberg writes. Significantly, the canceled project will also hurt the UK’s efforts to add more renewables to its power grid.
3. ICYMI: Rivian lowered its delivery estimate by as much as 15% due to tariffs
Rivian beat Wall Street’s first quarter estimates, the automaker shared in its earnings letter to investors on Tuesday, but lowered its target for 2025 vehicle deliveries on account of tariffs, CNBC reports. Though the company builds all its electric vehicles in Illinois, “The current global economic landscape presents significant uncertainty, particularly regarding evolving trade regulation, policies, tariffs, and the overall impact these items may have on consumer sentiment and demand,” Rivian said by way of explanation. While it previously estimated it would deliver between 46,000 and 51,000 units in 2025, the revised outlook anticipates 40,000 to 46,000 deliveries. Last year, the company delivered just over 51,500 vehicles, Inside EVs notes.
The company also said it expects to take on “a couple thousand dollars” in additional expenses per vehicle due to the trade policies, though founder and CEO R.J. Scaringe said it’s not planning to increase the $45,000 starting price of the R2 as a result. Despite the continued uncertainty, Rivian said it still expects to achieve a “modest positive gross profit” in 2025.
4. Republicans sneak sale of public lands into reconciliation bill
Republicans on the House Committee on Natural Resources added an eleventh-hour amendment to their portion of the budget package late Wednesday night, calling for the sale of thousands of acres of public lands in Nevada and Utah. Introduced by Representatives Mark Amodei of Nevada and Celeste Maloy of Utah, the provision capitalized on longtime aspirations by Republicans to privatize Bureau of Land Management acreage in the West.
As I wrote on Wednesday, the Republicans’ maneuver, “which came at nearly midnight, left many Democrats and environmental groups deeply frustrated by the lack of transparency,” and critics had little time to comb through the extent of the proposal. While early reviews of the bill estimated the sell-off of about 11,000 acres of land, much of it apparently near cities — in keeping with Republican Senator Mike Lee’s aspirations to use BLM land for suburban sprawl — the Wilderness Society informed me last night that the accounting may end up as high as 500,000 acres or more. That’s consequential not just for public land advocates, but also because “turning over public lands to states — or to private owners — could ease the way for expansive oil and gas development, especially in Utah, where there are ambitions to quadruple exports of fossil fuels from the state’s northeastern corner,” I note in my piece. Moreover, “Reducing BLM land could also limit opportunities for solar, wind, and geothermal development.”
5. Thinning forests to reduce wildfire danger could also mitigate droughts: study
Thinning forests is a favorite idea of Republicans, who’ve rebuked blue states over forestry practices they claim exacerbate the dangers of wildfires. Now, a new study from researchers at the College of Agriculture, Biotechnology & Natural Resources at the University of Nevada, Reno looking at the hydrology of the Sierra Nevadas has found that the practice — along with prescribed fires — could also have potential upsides during drought years, including generating more mountain runoff.
According to the findings published in the journal Water Resources Research, water yields in forests thinned to densities closer to those of a century ago can be increased by 8% to 14% during drought years. That water would be “particularly valuable … to farmers and cities in central California and northern Nevada who rely on Sierra [Nevada] snowpack for much of their water supply,” according to a press release about the research. Significant flooding risks did not appear to increase with the water yields. As earlier researchers have found, however, the results of forest thinning treatments also depend on how, where, and to what extent the treatments are applied. Not all landscapes would necessarily benefit from such regimes. For example, while President Trump blamed the January fires in Los Angeles on poor forest management in California, the blazes were in chaparral, not in forests where thinning could be applied.
Riverside Clean Air Carshare
University of California, Riverside announced Wednesday that it is launching the nation’s only hydrogen-powered carshare program in a partnership with city and state agencies. Participants can rent Toyota Mirai sedans through a smartphone app and pay hourly rates competitive with Uber and Lyft fees.
