Democrats are shying away from climate messaging. One of their own is fighting back.

There’s a schism within the Democratic Party about whether talking about climate change is the right message to win back control of Washington.

By Amelia Davidson & Kelsey Brugger, Politico, Jan. 25, 2026

One of Congress’ loudest climate hawks is trying to fend off a push within his party to abandon calls to combat climate change as left-leaning agenda-setters are plotting to reclaim both chambers of Congress in the midterms.

“There’s a thing out there called a ‘climate husher,’” Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, the top Democrat on the Environment and Public Works Committee, posted as part of a long social media thread last week.

“Anyone who cares about what fossil fuel pollution is doing to Earth’s natural systems needs to ignore these so-called ‘climate hushers’ — people who think Dems should stop talking about climate,” he said.

In a later interview about his posts, Whitehouse warned these “climate hushers” have also made their way into strategy conversations on Capitol Hill. He noted he’s been present for some of them, which he described as “polling presentations made to the Senate Democratic Caucus in a so-called strategy retreat that didn’t ask about climate change … There’s this massive blind spot.”

In recent years, Democrats have been handwringing over the best messaging on environmental issues to reach an electorate that cares about “kitchen table” matters – and doesn’t uniformly consider the rapidly warming planet to be one of them. Environmentalists made a strong argument during the 2024 presidential campaign that the climate crisis should be a motivator in electing Kamala Harris — but the contest went to Donald Trump.

Now Democrats are increasingly showing they have decided it’s a losing message to tout the ways in which they’d curb fossil fuel production to thwart the most dire effects of climate change. Instead, they’re choosing to focus on policies that would lower energy costs and lean hard into affordability talking points embraced by Trump and congressional Republicans.

Whitehouse understands the importance of talking about affordability — for years he’s spoken about the climate crisis as a threat to the global economy.

His social media thread notes that people are feeling the economic burdens of climate change throughout the country, from home insurance hikes to drops in property values.

That’s the message Democrats should lean into, he said, rather than shy away from.

“When leaders don’t talk about something, enthusiasm falls among voters,” Whitehouse wrote in his post. “In politics, you can often make your own wind, or you can make your own doldrums.”

This is something Democrats are grappling with on Capitol Hill. Interviews with a half dozen House and Senate Democrats revealed how many are still struggling with how to discuss climate change, a problem they consider existential but that doesn’t register among voters’ top immediate concerns.

Some are talking nearly exclusively about competitive prices for clean energy — largely in hopes of beating Republicans at their own messaging game.

“My theory of the case is that the argument that I’ve been making for 30 years is finally breaking through,” said Rep. Sean Casten (D-Ill.), a former clean energy professional.

“The urgency of climate change means that we have to focus on it especially when it’s not as salient with the American people, if we are to be the leaders we claim to be,” he added. “But I think that’s largely a separable conversation from what is the best way to talk about it in any given moment, that has the most ability to move public opinion.”

Sen. Brian Schatz of Hawaii, who is on track to be the next Senate Democratic whip, has a similar perspective.

Last year, he removed “climate hawk,” along with other self-descriptions, from his bio on X. And during an event this fall affiliated with New York Climate Week, he said that “those of us in the climate community who are used to making a more broad argument about where we are in the sweep of history have to get comfortable making a more immediate argument that says the reason prices are going up is a deliberate policy choice of the Republican Party.”

Schatz said in a statement last week that he and Whitehouse were united in their ideas around “climate action,” but he also doubled down on the importance of affordability messaging at this time.

“There are think tanks and advocacy organizations that are dedicated to the proposition that climate action is incompatible with affordable energy, but those factional rivalries have been overtaken by events,” Schatz said. “Cheap is clean, and clean is cheap.”

Recent actions from the Democrats’ Sustainable Energy and Environment Coalition, or SEEC — of which Casten is vice-chair — have also focused squarely on energy costs and the ability of clean energy to lower Americans’ bills.

At a SEEC press conference earlier this month meant to respond to the last year of energy and environment policy under President Donald Trump, a roster of climate-focused Democrats spoke nearly exclusively about energy prices. “Trump lied; Energy costs are up,” read the main sign at the presser.

Rep. Melanie Stansbury (D-N.M.), a member of the House Natural Resources Committee, said in an interview that Democrats need to focus on energy prices because Trump has used that as a justification for executive actions that bolster oil and gas.

“People, when they see the ways in which the energy policies that are serving big oil are hurting their pocketbooks, it makes it more tangible for why folks should care, in addition to the welfare of the planet,” Stansbury said.

Meanwhile, Republicans have picked up on the Democrats’ shift in talking points and have used it to their advantage.

“You actually see on the left, this debate going on right now, where a lot of people within the Democratic Party, they are talking about how they’ve lost the narrative, or the culture war, on climate,” EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said on Fox Business this month.

Left-leaning thinkers and independent analysts have also argued that Democrats may have gone too far in following the lead of environmental groups they say were out of touch with most Americans.

Columnist Matt Yglesias argued in a New York Times op-ed that Democrats should not be hostile to oil and gas. Longtime energy expert Daniel Yergin wrote in Foreign Affairs about the “troubled energy transition” and the need for a “pragmatic path” forward. And Veteran Democratic operative Adam Jentleson started the think tank the Searchlight Institute to curb the influence of the “groups” on party positions, including climate.

Rep. Kathy Castor of Florida, the top Democrat on the Energy and Commerce’s Energy Subcommittee, downplayed the notion that congressional Democrats were at odds over how to message on climate change. Talking about affordability need not negate the focus on the impact of climate change, she said.

“I think they are one in the same,” Castor said. “Take my community in Florida. We’re still recovering from Hurricane Helen and Milton and people understand that those storms were supercharged because the Gulf was very, very hot, very warm. And the rain was unlike anything we’ve ever seen. So they are trying to afford rebuilding their homes and paying their property insurance and also suffering higher rate increases.”

Whitehouse in an interview acknowledged some shortcomings to Democrats’ past depictions of climate change “as sort of a moral imperative, as an intangible thing floating out there, something that will affect polar bears,” but said the solution wasn’t to be silent in calling out the harmful impacts of fossil fuel emissions and the influence of oil and gas companies on Trump administration policy.

Ultimately, there’s only so much he can do to press his case. In recent months he has organized forums on climate change as the senior Democrat on the Environment and Public Works panel, toured red states to talk about rising insurance rates related to natural disasters spurred by global warming and said he has commissioned his own polling on the issue.

Those activities, plus delivering speeches and crafting social media posts, are among the limits of what he can achieve with his party in the minority and his colleagues making their own messaging choices.

He isn’t giving up.

“Democrats and environmental groups’ climate messaging for years has been crap, and so if you go back to that crap messaging, obviously it’s not going to succeed,” Whitehouse said. “But that doesn’t mean that the alternative is to throw in the towel.”

Andres Picon and Timothy Cama contributed to this report.

https://www.politico.com/news/2026/01/25/democrats-climate-affordability-trump-00745597?is_magic_link=true&experience_id=EXYF89KVT5UQ&template_id=OTJIR2CRKUD6&template_variant_id=OTV632IE7RALS

Trump Is Obsessed With Oil, but Chinese Batteries Will Soon Run the World

Op-Ed by Dan Wang, The New York Times, Jan. 19, 2026

Wang is a research fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution and the author of “Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future.”

President Trump has an unconcealed hunger for natural resources from abroad and the power they could grant him. He declared that the United States intervened in Venezuela to “take the oil,” betting that investors would put up at least $100 billion to revive a decrepit industry. His gamble is that countries will still want to buy oil from America to power their cars, trucks, ships and planes for decades to come.

Though China is the world’s largest oil importer, its leader, Xi Jinping, is less brash about coveting foreign resources. The country’s leadership is pushing intensively at substituting electricity for oil.

Chinese technology companies are paving the way for a world that will be powered by electric motors rather than gas-guzzling engines. It is a decisively 21st-century approach not just to solve its own energy problems, but also to sell batteries and other electric products to everyone else. Canada is its newest buyer of EVs; in a rebuke of Mr. Trump, its prime minister, Mark Carney, lowered tariffs on the cars as part of a new trade deal.

Though Americans have been slow to embrace electric vehicles, Chinese households have learned to love them. In 2025, 54 percent of new cars sold in China were either battery-powered or plug-in hybrids. That is a big reason that the country’s oil consumption is on track to peak in 2027, according to forecasts from the International Energy Agency. And Chinese E.V. makers are setting records — whether it’s BYD’s sales (besting Tesla by battery-powered vehicles sold for the first time last year) or Xiaomi’s speed (its cars are setting records at major racetracks like Nürburgring in Germany).

These vehicles are powered not by oil but by domestically generated electrical power that comes from coal, nuclear, hydropower, solar and wind.

In 2000, China produced only one-third of the amount of electrical power that the United States did; by 2024, it produced nearly two and a half times U.S. levels. China’s surging energy investments went substantially into building new plants for burning coal, which the country possesses in abundance. But over the past decade, it has also moved fast on building cleaner energy sources, especially wind and solar.

China now generates more electricity each year than the United States and the European Union combined. It has close to 40 new nuclear power reactors under construction, compared with zero in America. Last year, Beijing announced work on a new hydropower dam in Tibet that will have triple the capacity of China’s Three Gorges Dam, currently the world’s largest power station.

China isn’t just building gigantic amounts of power; its businesses are reshaping technological foundations to electrify the world.

China spent decades trying to build world-leading automotive champions; the results were not impressive until E.V.s arrived. Their adoption allowed Chinese automakers to stop trying to beat the Germans at building better combustion engines and leverage their greater expertise in electronics instead. If an E.V. is a smartphone with tires, then it makes sense that the country that makes most of the world’s electronics would also make nearly half of its cars.

Several technologies had to mature before they could be electrified. The lithium-ion battery was invented by American and Japanese scientists before Chinese companies took over most of this industry in the 2010s. The United States also used to dominate the production of rare-earth magnets, the crucial product in electric motors; China makes more than 90 percent of these magnets today. In addition to batteries and magnets, the writer Noah Smith identifies power electronics and embedded chips as the main drivers of the new electric age.

The oil-burning products that can now instead be powered by batteries and electric motors include not only cars, but also bikes, buses and even some boats. Heavy industry and temperature control for buildings are being electrified, too. And a future in which many noisy, gas-powered household tools can be electrically powered is in reach: Even the foul and loud lawn mower and leaf blower are gradually being replaced by a more gentle thrum.

Some products may never be electrified. Battery packs will probably not power a long-haul flight or container ship (though cleaner fuels are possible). But the opportunity to electrify almost everything else will grow over the next decade, and China is leading the charge.

The southern city of Shenzhen, which has been producing Apple products for two decades now, is leveraging its expertise in electronics — as well as more advanced batteries, magnets and chips — to remake whole categories of transportation and household and industrial products into the image of the smartphone. As the world moves on from combustion engines and into batteries, it will be looking away from oil producers and toward factories in Shenzhen.

The United States is far behind this competition. On the one hand, Elon Musk has done more than anyone else to raise the status of electric vehicles and create their associated technological improvements. But the broader U.S. industrial base has mostly shed its capabilities in batteries and rare-earth magnets, in part out of a deliberate effort to move these factories to China. American companies building drones or other products of the new electric age are also far behind their Chinese competitors.

Electrification demands engagement with the messy world of building power plants and manufacturing at scale, which are China’s strengths. But Silicon Valley has instead preferred to work in the realm of highly profitable digital businesses. Technologists like Sam D’Amico (who is making a high-powered electric-induction stove) and Ryan McEntush (a venture capital investor) have lately sounded the alarm at how comprehensively ahead Chinese capabilities have become.

The United States could compete on building better drones and electric vehicles if its businesses had greater access to electrical power and a vital industrial base. But it is governed by a president who is enthusiastic about powering the future with fossil fuels and has a personal pique against wind turbines, calling them the “SCAM OF THE CENTURY!” His administration is slow-walking approval of and canceling new solar and wind projects while favoring coal and gas — which makes it more difficult to electrify. No product is more important than batteries in electrification, yet an infamous ICE raid targeted a Korean company that was constructing a battery factory in Georgia. Meanwhile, Mr. Trump’s tariffs have hamstrung American manufacturing, which has lost around 70,000 jobs since April.

America had better shape up before losing out to an electric age ushered in by Beijing. Otherwise, it will be stuck with outmoded products at home while China conquers markets through better technology.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/19/opinion/trump-energy-china-future.html

Even Without Hurricanes, U.S. Disaster Costs Surpassed $100 Billion Last Year

A record-setting 21 thunderstorm events each caused at least $1 billion in damages, a sign that more people and property are in harm’s way.

By Scott Dance, The New York Times, Jan. 8, 2026

In 2025, frequent and severe thunderstorms and the Los Angeles wildfires drove U.S. disaster damage costs above $100 billion, reaching that level for the fifth time in the past six years, according to data released Thursday. And that was without a single hurricane striking U.S. shores for the first time in a decade.

A record-setting 21 thunderstorm systems that spawned tornadoes, large hail and damaging wind each caused at least $1 billion in damages, according to researchers at Climate Central, a nonprofit group.

It was a sign of both intensifying weather systems and population sprawl in storm-prone areas, which put more people and property into harm’s way.

Climate Central took over what is known as the “billion-dollar disaster” database last year, after the Trump administration announced that the government would no longer track such information. The database had been maintained by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

With a total of $115 billion in disaster damage, the data show, 2025 was the least costly year for disasters since 2019, but still above the $67 billion annual average dating back to 1980.

“Not having any billion-dollar severe storms or hurricanes in the fall was a nice break, and one that we have not seen as much of in recent years,” said Adam Smith, who had led the NOAA database for 15 years, until he left the agency last spring to run it at Climate Central as a senior climate impacts scientist. “Still, it was an impactful year.”

More than half of 2025 disaster costs, $61 billion, were tied to the wildfires that burned in Los Angeles last January. Angelenos are still recovering from that disaster.

But otherwise, severe thunderstorms drove extreme weather-related losses across the country. Such storms accounted for about $51 billion in damages, the researchers found.

Most of the storms occurred or originated in the central United States, where humidity from the Gulf of Mexico flows inland and clashes with colder and drier air moving down from Canada to fuel towering clouds.

The storms produced tornadoes that wracked the Southeast and the Mississippi River valley, as well as hail that hammered areas from Colorado to Texas to Tennessee. One high-wind storm, of a type known as a derecho, caused hundreds of thousands of power outages from Ohio to Quebec and blew out high-rise windows in downtown Pittsburgh.

While climate change is causing heavier downpours and causing hurricanes to intensify more quickly, the rise in thunderstorm damage is strongly linked to increased property development, Mr. Smith said.

“Denver or Dallas or Minneapolis can get easily hit by a billion-dollar hailstorm in an afternoon,” he said. “Twenty or 30 years ago, that might not have been the case.”

Still, a warming planet is increasing the potential severity of all storms. For every 1 degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) of warming, the air is capable of holding about 7 percent more moisture, which carries energy that storms unleash. As average global temperatures rise, surging to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels in 2024, that capacity for moisture, and potential fuel for storms, is growing.

Researchers have found that, as the planet warms, hail could be forming less frequently, while individual hailstones are growing larger. It is less clear how global warming may be changing tornado activity. Scientists have seen a trend of tornado outbreaks shifting from the traditional “Tornado Alley” of the Great Plains states toward the Southeast.

After NOAA stopped tracking billion-dollar disasters and Climate Central announced it was taking over the disaster database last year, Kim Doster, a NOAA spokeswoman, called it a project “based in uncertainty and speculation.”

But the data is of interest to emergency managers, public officials and insurance executives, who are all seeking to plan around changing disaster risks.

“The strongest value is in public awareness,” said Franklin Nutter, who served as president of the Reinsurance Association of America until last month. The trade group represents companies that insure insurance companies, helping protect them against catastrophic losses, including those from natural disasters.

The disaster data comes from public agencies, including the National Weather Service, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and federal and state emergency managers, as well as the insurance industry. It goes back to 1980, adjusted for inflation, because of the consistent and reliable data and methodologies employed over that era, Mr. Smith said.

Last year’s list of billion-dollar disasters did not include the July 4 Texas floods that killed at least 137 people, including children at a summer camp, because they struck in the state’s Hill Country, in an area that was sparsely developed.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/08/climate/us-disaster-damage-costs-2025.html?campaign_id=54&emc=edit_clim_20260108&instance_id=168995&nl=climate-forward&regi_id=66704053&segment_id=213374&user_id=97eb24ff9121d1a70f01fac05f86ea1b

How E.V.s Became Political Football

The political polarization of battery-powered cars may have started when Toyota released its first hybrid model 25 years ago.

By Lawrence Ulrich, The New York Times, Dec. 27, 2025

In a different world, an electric vehicle would be just another car. But in today’s hyperpartisan climate, battery-powered cars carry not just passengers but a punishing load of political and cultural baggage.

Supporters may view electric cars as heroes, helping halt climate change or making American automakers more competitive around the world. But others see in them the heavy hand of government, pressuring consumers to ditch gasoline whether they are ready to or not. Throw in Elon Musk and his highly charged social media commentary, and even loyalists of his car company, Tesla, may no longer know whom or what to believe in.

“E.V.s have become such a partisan thing that they’re not defined as cars,” said Mike Murphy, a Republican strategist who leads the EV Politics Project and EVs for All America, which aim to make electric cars less political. “It’s like we’re having political fights over toasters.”

To industry experts, the seeds of this poisonous debate may have been planted inadvertently 25 years ago, with a humble, shoe-box-shaped sedan: the Toyota Prius. The groundbreaking 2001 Prius kicked off an era of gas-electric hybrids and built Toyota’s reputation as the global leader in green cars.

Mr. Murphy said Toyota had used marketing that implied that buying a Prius was a way to save the planet. That excited liberals, but drew a strong backlash from people less attuned to environmental issues. Nissan made a similar choice with the Leaf, its electric vehicle, in 2010, he said. In one Nissan TV ad, a polar bear hugged a Leaf owner.

“Climate shouldn’t be polarized, but in America it is,” said Mr. Murphy, who worked for Arnold Schwarzenegger and Mitt Romney. “So when you market vehicles for green virtues, others see it as pushy dogma. Then you’re stuck in politics.”

Imported from Japan, the 2001 Prius arrived when many Americans were switching to sport utility vehicles. Average fuel economy for the 2001 model year had fallen to a 21-year low, at 20.4 miles per gallon. The Prius came bearing a green olive branch; federal testing showed that it could travel 48 miles per gallon.

Margo Oge bought one of the first Priuses. Later, as an official at the Environmental Protection Agency, she would become the chief architect of fuel-economy standards enacted under the Obama administration in 2010.

“The Prius was just this cool little car to save you money and protect us from air pollution,” Ms. Oge said. “The government didn’t ask for or require Toyota to develop this tech. It wasn’t seen as a mandate as E.V.s later were.”

Unlike electric vehicles, which use no gasoline, Ms. Oge said, the hybrid Toyota should have been less threatening to industries like oil and ethanol, or to consumers.

Even so, some critics attacked Prius fans for engaging in virtue signaling, being hypocritical or wanting to impose nanny-state policies. In 2001, an article in Car and Driver magazine praised the Prius’s engineering, but noted that its testers managed to get only 35 miles per gallon.

“It can be no surprise that Toyota Motor Corp. enjoys its share of adulation from the Sierra Club, from Washington, D.C., windbags and from everyone else who conveniently forgets about the five models of sport utilities and two models of pickups also peddled in Toyota dealerships,” the article said.

Toyota played up testimonials from stars, such as Leonardo DiCaprio and Meryl Streep, who publicly adopted the Prius. Sales boomed from 5,500 in 2001 to a peak of 236,000 in 2012.

Red-carpet appearances helped make the Prius a hit, Mr. Murphy said, but at a lingering cost. To some, hybrids and electric cars became vehicles for coastal liberals and do-gooders, not “mainstream” Americans. In 2006, “South Park” called hybrids the nation’s “leading cause of smug.”

But if the Prius attracted gibes, the Chevrolet Volt became a certified punching bag.

That model, a plug-in hybrid sedan, won top car awards. It also became inextricably linked to federal aid for General Motors. To some, the Volt was a four-wheeled symbol for “Government Motors” or “Obama Motors.” President Barack Obama sat in a Volt at its Detroit factory in 2010 and said he would buy one after he left office.

Mr. Obama and his E.P.A. also sought to double the fuel economy of the average new car to about 50 miles per gallon. Politicians assailed the Volt as a socialist scheme to force Americans into electric cars.

Representative Darrell Issa, Republican of California, accused the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration of conspiring to hide a Volt defect.

“I’m a free-enterprise guy,” Mr. Issa said. “And the Volt insults a lot of us with being a demo project funded by edict.”

Robert Lutz, a former Marine fighter pilot and the outspoken vice chairman of G.M. — who once derided global warming — publicly defended the car.

“The problem with conservatives is getting them to accept that an electric car is not necessarily a left-wing environmental plot,” Mr. Lutz, a Republican, said in 2012 before Mr. Obama was re-elected. “We’ll probably see the Volt as a political football through November, and then it’ll go away.”

If only. Electric vehicles became even more political as Tesla began its rise with the release of the Model S in 2012.

Though Mr. Musk, the chief executive of Tesla, is now a conservative star, many on the right previously attacked his company for earning billions by selling climate credits to other automakers, a windfall enabled by government policy. The company also received a federal loan, which it paid back early.

Of course, many businesses receive government support. Oil and gas companies enjoy many tax breaks, some going back decades.

Mr. Lutz, now retired, said he knew many “staunch Republicans” who drove and loved electric cars. The end of federal policies to encourage their sales and discourage the use of gasoline, he said, can ease some objections. Shorter charging times, he said, more than politics, may persuade more drivers to chose electric cars.

“E.V.s will progress more slowly now, but they will just continue to gain market share until they are by far the dominant technology,” he said.

Mr. Lutz, 93, owns a pair of electric Cadillacs, the Lyriq and the Escalade IQ. He recently got a Corvette ZR1, a gasoline sports car with 1,064 horsepower and a 233 mile-per-hour top speed. Yet Mr. Lutz believes internal-combustion engines, after 120 years of development, have nearly reached their technical peak. Electric cars are just getting started.

“When you drive them, there’s just no contest,” he said. “They’re better, they’re faster, they’re quieter, with fewer moving parts.”

In a bitter turn for Toyota, Tesla’s ascent turned the Japanese company, once an environmental hero, into an ostensible villain. Toyota, Ms. Oge noted, lobbied against pro-electric vehicle policies in several countries.

Now, as sales of electric cars have cooled, Toyota and its hybrids are back in vogue. Other automakers are rushing to offer more hybrids, and the cars are rarely attacked by politicians or in popular culture.

Tesla did not respond to a request for comment. Toyota and G.M. declined to comment.

The decades of pitched battles have culminated in President Trump’s fulsome attacks against electric cars. That includes a bid to unwind former President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s signature climate and energy legislation and regulations. The Biden administration’s policies would have effectively required automakers to sharply increase sales of electric and hybrid cars in the coming years.

Mr. Biden’s policies, which included a $7,500 federal tax credit for the purchase or lease of electric vehicles, helped lift sales. But Ms. Oge said his fuel economy and emission regulations were a “political overreach” that turned many car owners, not just Republicans, against them.

“The Biden administration lost control of that message, completely,” she said. “It became ‘The government wants you to buy this car.’”

But if the Biden administration’s rules were too ambitious, Ms. Oge said, the Trump administration is aiming to make them even weaker than those put in place by Mr. Obama 15 years ago.

With political temperatures hot enough to fry a battery, Mr. Murphy said he advised automakers to eschew controversy. They should not tout electric cars’ environmental benefits, he said, because people either know about them or don’t base buying decisions on them. Automakers should instead lead with the models’ zesty performance, hushed interiors, energy savings, easy maintenance or new technology.

“These cars can win a fair fight as vehicles for most people,” he said.

In his groups’ November survey of the public’s views about electric vehicles, 48 percent of self-identified Republicans held an unfavorable view of these cars, versus 22 percent of independents and 14 percent of Democrats. Conservative opposition has softened somewhat, Mr. Murphy said. He added that 40 percent of respondents identified as Republican.

“So if automakers can’t crack the Republican consumer market,” he said, “E.V.s will never become as big as we need.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/27/business/electric-vehicles-poilitics-republicans-conservatives.html?searchResultPosition=1

U.S. Is Seeking Exemption From a European Climate Law, Officials Say

Diplomats told E.U. officials that the bloc’s law on methane, a potent greenhouse gas, would hurt American oil and gas companies.

By Lisa Friedman, The New York Times, Dec. 16, 2025

The Trump administration wants the European Union to exempt American oil and gas companies from a landmark law aimed at curbing emissions of methane, a powerful planet-warming gas.

In recent days U.S. diplomats have verbally informed officials in European countries that the Trump administration considers the 27-member bloc’s methane regulations costly, confusing and a threat to American gas supplies to Europe, according to four E.U. and U.S. officials.

Short of a repeal of the law, the United States wants American oil and gas companies to be exempted from any penalties, according to the four people, who had direct knowledge of the conversations, as well as a document that European energy ministers circulated among themselves ahead of a meeting on Monday in Brussels, which was obtained by The New York Times.

The four officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly.

The methane law requires European importers to demonstrate, by 2027, that the oil and gas they buy from the United States or any other country adheres to strict monitoring standards. By 2030, all imports will have to be produced with low levels of methane emissions, though the specific limit has not yet been finalized.

The law requires U.S. companies that sell oil and gas in Europe to monitor and report emissions and to repair methane leaks in their facilities.

“It is regulatory overreach,” Chris Wright, the secretary of the Department of Energy, said of the regulation on Monday. He was speaking on the sidelines of an energy conference in Washington. The Trump administration’s opposition to the methane law was first reported by Reuters.

Europe’s methane law is the latest international climate policy attacked by the Trump administration as harmful to the American fossil fuel industry. President Trump has taken particular umbrage at Europe’s drive toward renewable power, claiming that climate policies have “devastated” the European economy.

But scientists say Europe has been devastated by climate change. This summer was the fourth-hottest on record in Europe. France, Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain, among other countries, suffered through extreme heat, health alerts and wildfires.

Reducing methane emissions is a key element of Europe’s climate strategy. Methane is considered a “super pollutant” because, while it breaks down more quickly than carbon dioxide, it traps about 80 times as much heat in the atmosphere in the short term. It is responsible for nearly a third of the rise in global temperatures since the start of the Industrial Revolution.

Methane, the main component in natural gas, leaks from oil and gas operations and is also intentionally released at refineries in a process known as flaring. Stopping leaks is seen as one of the most easily achievable climate fixes.

European and American oil and gas companies have lobbied for significant changes in the law.

They’ve noted that the European Union still has not finalized the way companies will need to report emissions and argued that the delay has led to confusion. And U.S. industry officials say they face unique challenges to meet a European requirement that companies precisely declare the origin of all the gas in every shipment. Unlike other countries, the United States has thousands of small gas fields and their output is often combined in pipeline systems, making origins hard to determine.

This year the Trump administration signed a trade deal with Europe that included a pledge for the European Union to purchase $750 billion in American oil and liquefied natural gas over three years in exchange for lower tariffs.

Mr. Wright warned that the methane restrictions pose a “huge” problem for trans-Atlantic trade, potentially making it “too legally risky” for the United States to sell gas to Europe.

And he questioned the efficacy of the methane regulation.

“Just because it has the name, ‘the methane rule,’ does that mean it’s going to drive down methane emissions faster? Absolutely not,” Mr. Wright said. He added: “Does that mean it might drive energy prices up and reduce energy supply into Europe? Absolutely.”

Environmentalists said the European Union was already working to iron out oil and gas industry concerns about the methane rule. None of the issues are big enough to require scrapping the law entirely or exempting any one country, they said.

“This really isn’t about the workability of the regulation,” said Dan Grossman, a vice president at the Environmental Defense Fund, a nonprofit group. “It’s more about this unhinged trade conversation that’s going on where the Trump administration is just wanting to push Europe to purchase hundreds of billions of dollars in U.S. oil and gas without any kind of standards or restrictions.”

Brandon Locke, the senior Europe policy manager overseeing methane issues for the Clean Air Task Force, called the U.S. opposition “perplexing.” He noted that U.S. companies stand to benefit from the law, since they’ve already invested billions of dollars in detecting and fixing leaks and reducing emissions.

He said if the United States gets an exemption, “you’re going to have 10 more lining up tomorrow, asking for the same thing,” and setting back efforts to fight climate change.

Dan Jorgensen, the European Union energy minister, said Monday the E.U. commission, the bloc’s executive branch, was in “a dialogue” with the Trump administration over how best to implement its methane policies.

“We are not considering withdrawing the legislation or an exemption to the legislation,” Mr. Jorgensen said on Monday after a commission meeting on energy.

Opposing solutions to climate change, both in the United States and abroad, has become a hallmark of the Trump administration.

This year diplomats from other nations accused the Trump administration of using bullying tactics to block the adoption of a landmark measure that would have imposed a global pollution tax on the shipping industry. The Trump administration recently sided with oil-rich countries including Saudi Arabia and Russia to block part of a United Nations report calling for the phaseout of fossil fuels.

The Trump administration also joined forces with Qatar to oppose Europe’s landmark sustainability rules, which require companies to root out environmental and social abuses in their supply chains.

At home, the administration has led a political assault on renewable energy. It has moved to repeal every federal climate change regulation. It tried to withdraw permits for six offshore wind projects, and eliminated federal incentives supporting wind, solar and electric vehicles.

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Once a Gamble in the Desert, Electric Grid Batteries Are Everywhere

An early grid battery was installed in the Atacama Desert in Chile 15 years ago. Now, as prices have tumbled, they are increasingly being used around the world.

By Ivan Penn, The New York Times, Dec. 5, 2025

ANTOFAGASTA, CHILE—Lithium-ion batteries, which power everything from cellphones to cars, are increasingly saving electric grids around the world.

Batteries as large as shipping containers are being connected to power lines and installed beside solar panels and wind turbines. They soak up power when it’s plentiful and cheap and release it when electricity use soars, helping reduce the need for expensive power plants and lines.

American researchers invented the lithium-ion battery in the 1970s and later showed that the devices could help the electric grid. But for a long time batteries made little headway because grid managers and utility executives dismissed them as expensive and risky.

One of the first breakthroughs came about 15 years ago when engineers at a U.S. energy company installed one of the first lithium-ion batteries tied to a grid in a desert nearly 9,000 feet above sea level in Chile. Challenging conventional notions of how the electricity system should be run, that team helped prove that batteries could help make electric grids more stable and reliable.

The concept of storing energy was not new. Thomas Edison developed alkaline nickel-iron batteries largely for industry and early electric vehicles. Various companies tried other technologies like sodium sulfur, which have not gained much traction. And some utilities have long pumped water uphill so that later it could be sent back down to generate electricity.

But those systems were relatively limited. The kinds of lithium batteries installed in the Atacama Desert in 2009, by comparison, are now being used around the world.

The rapid growth of wind and solar power and the rising demand for electricity from data centers are making batteries a necessity. They store surplus renewable energy for when it’s not windy or sunny, and maintain a balance between energy supply and demand.

Consider California. In recent years, state officials have often asked residents to use less electricity on hot summer days to prevent power outages. But there have been no such alerts since 2022, largely because batteries have allowed California to use its abundant solar power well into the evening. Over the last seven years, the state added 30 times as much battery storage capacity as it had in 2018.

The rest of the world has also seen impressive growth, according to the International Energy Agency, a multilateral organization in Paris. The boom was made possible by a stunning 90 percent drop in the cost of batteries over the last 15 years as new factories have come on line. China is by far the world’s largest battery manufacturer, but Europe, India and the United States have recently been increasing production, too.

“Batteries are changing the game before our eyes,” Fatih Birol, executive director of the International Energy Agency, said recently.

A Bumpy Start

The use of batteries on the grid did not come easy.

A Virginia company called AES began testing grid batteries in Indiana, Pennsylvania and California as early as 2008, but U.S. energy suppliers did not use them commercially until two years later. The pace was plodding for a while.

“There wasn’t the experience with battery storage,” said Carla Peterman, a former member of the California Energy Commission and now an executive vice president at Pacific Gas & Electric, the state’s largest utility. “It was a bit of a chicken or the egg, where there wasn’t enough on there to really say that this could be a big part of the energy system.”

But some Americans clearly saw the benefits of batteries. One of them was Christopher Shelton, an executive at AES, which owns utilities and power plants across the world.

He began to look into lithium-ion batteries when his bosses asked employees to pitch proposals for a “billion-dollar idea.” Mr. Shelton said he thought batteries could reduce the need for power plants that utilities used only when electricity demand climbed to peak levels.

“Why would you build an asset that you weren’t going to use more than 5 percent of the time?” Mr. Shelton said. “We were saying batteries should be an alternative to peaker plants.”

He first installed battery cells at a nondescript electricity substation outside Indianapolis, a city known for its 500-mile car race. His company later connected one in Norristown, Pa., at an operations center of the nation’s largest grid manager, PJM Interconnection. The Los Angeles area was connected next, followed by a larger battery for the Indianapolis grid.

While his tests were successful, they did not sufficiently impress many American utility executives. The reaction was typical of an industry that prides itself for sticking with what it knows best — large coal, gas and nuclear power plants. Anything else has generally been treated as a threat that may cause blackouts.

“Utilities have long been skeptical of new technologies,” said Leah Stokes, an associate professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who studies energy politics and policy. “They know how to make a widget, which is a giant fossil fuel power plant, so they keep doing that.”

Drew Maloney, president and chief executive of the Edison Electric Institute, a utility trade organization, disagrees with that assessment. “The U.S. energy grid is the world’s most important machine, and America’s electric companies are quick to pilot and deploy new technologies once they become commercially viable and affordable for customers,” he said.

But even now, U.S. utilities in many states are reluctant to add batteries. A lot fewer large batteries are being added in the Southeast, for example, than in California and Texas.

Utility executives are not the only ones who are skeptical. So are policymakers and many ordinary Americans.

Some local governments have banned big batteries because of safety concerns. In May and June, a large battery complex in Monterey County, Calif., was destroyed in a fire that spewed smoke and harmful chemicals.

Despite that disaster, energy experts say many risks have been addressed. The California fire happened in a type of battery that most companies no longer use. And those batteries were installed in a power plant building where the fire easily spread from device to device. Most batteries are installed outdoors to reduce the chances that fires spread.

‘Testing It on the Moon’

Not much beside the odd desert fox lives on the desolate plateau in Chile where AES set up its battery project. The site is several hours from the two closest airports, in Calama and Antofagasta.

After landing, visitors have to drive at least four hours to the salt flats of the Atacama Desert, where workers collect lithium — a key battery ingredient.

The AES camp is another hour away. It sits on a rocky unpaved path, lined with busted tires. Though temperatures during a late spring and early summer day can reach the 80s, the nights can be near freezing.

“It was like taking the battery and testing it on the moon,” said Joaquín Meléndez, an engineer who led the AES project there under Mr. Shelton.

In the early 2000s, Chile had an energy crisis because Argentina, its main supplier of natural gas, couldn’t provide enough of it. That left Chile, which has no domestic fuel sources, with too little energy for its people and its copper, iodine and lithium mines.

Chile was forced to rely on power plants that burned expensive imported coal. But those plants could not be easily turned up or down, and the needs of Chile’s mining companies fluctuated a lot.

That was where the batteries came in. While it can take a coal plant about 12 minutes to get going, batteries can discharge power almost instantly. By pairing the two, engineers realized that batteries could deliver the electricity that mines needed while coal plants fired up.

Mr. Meléndez worked 16-hour days for six months to connect the first commercialized lithium battery to an electric grid. That device still stands, though most of its tasks have been taken over by newer, more efficient and affordable units.

The project was immediately successful, helping keep the electricity system stable when mining operations caused surges that had previously led to grid failures and outages.

AES executives back in the United States kept close track of what was happening in Chile. And in 2010, the company installed commercial battery systems in New York and Texas. Two years later, AES began adding more batteries in Chile, including next to big solar farms.

Over the last decade, batteries have helped Chile use less coal. Last December, the country got more than 40 percent of its electricity from solar panels and wind turbines, up from 19 percent five years earlier, according to Ember Energy Research, a nonprofit. Australia, Britain, China, India and other countries have also been adding lots of renewable energy and batteries.

Mr. Shelton said that even he had been surprised by the recent rapid growth of batteries. “We under-predicted how far the prices would fall.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/05/business/energy-environment/battery-prices-electric-grids.html?searchResultPosition=1