Loyal reader, this is your final edition of Greenwire.
It’s a move five years in the making: POLITICO is fully absorbing E&E News, which it bought in 2021.
The news you need isn’t going anywhere — we’ll just be coming to you in a new format, launching Aug. 31. Our newly unified Energy & Environment coverage portfolio will deliver the same high-quality, in-depth coverage E&E News readers have loved for decades. We hope the new format will fit readers’ evolving needs and interests and help narrate the landscape of environmental legislation, litigation and regulation in Washington and beyond.
The breakdown: On Monday, Aug. 31, in addition to Morning Energy, current E&E subscribers will receive a new slate of newsletters: Power Moves — a guide to the intersection of energy, regulation and politics; State Power — a daily look at state-level energy policy and politics; and Morning Environment — our definitive daily look at environmental policy and politics — including air, water, natural resources and climate impacts. We’ll also launch Surge — an international newsletter tracking the global forces shaping and supplying energy demand.
Our dozens of dedicated reporters and editors will also continue to supply subscribers with all the original news stories and investigations on which our readers rely.
Here on the environment team, we will have reporters covering investigations and federal agencies, air, water, chemicals and public health; a legal team following the Supreme Court and a range of environment and climate change litigation; and natural resources reporters covering public lands, national parks and agriculture. Our new extreme weather team will closely track natural disasters and federal planning and response, along with climate science, weather, and resilience and adaptation efforts nationwide. All of that comes with a close watch on the federal agencies that shape federal environmental policy, particularly EPA and the Interior Department.
Senior editor Erica Martinson sat down with five of our reporters to discuss some of what they see coming on their beats in the months ahead, to offer a taste of what kind of coverage to expect with our relaunch in one week. (The transcript has been edited for brevity and clarity.)
With us today, we have Alex Guillén, our legal coverage guru and longtime political reporter on the EPA beat; Chelsea Harvey, a member of our new extreme weather team covering NOAA and the National Weather Service, climate and weather and science initiatives and climate adaptation; Miranda Willson on the water beat; Heather Richards, who covers public lands and the National Park Service; and Andy Picon, one of the members of our killer Capitol Hill team covering energy and the environment.
Let’s go with Andy first. What’s coming up on the Hill in environmental coverage in the next few months?
Andy Picon: Data centers are always a big story, and they’ll continue to be a focal point for lawmakers throughout the fall. They’re going to be trying to move ahead with the Ratepayer Protection Act, which has become kind of the data center bill on the Hill, because it tries to codify the Trump administration’s ratepayer protection pledge.
And the other big energy story is permitting reform, which is making its way through the Senate now. They’re hoping to strike a bipartisan compromise sometime in September, but I’d say don’t be surprised if it takes a few weeks or months longer than that.
And then beyond that, there’s kind of the yearly congressional priorities that will have stakes for energy and environment policymaking. Things like the Appropriations process, they’re going to try to extend government funding when they come back in September, and beyond that, continue working on the Appropriations bills, including the Energy, Water, and Interior-Environment bills. There’s reconciliation, there’s the highway bill that they’re going to try to make more progress on, and the NDAA, which is loaded up with energy and environment provisions as well.
Miranda, you cover water for us, a core environmental beat. What’s ahead for you?
Miranda Willson: EPA has a pretty extensive list of regulations that they are looking to roll back or change, particularly policies enacted under the Biden administration, but also others as well, when it comes to issues around climate change and air pollution.
I’ve been writing a lot about the waters of the United States rule. There’s a proposal to significantly reduce the scope of the Clean Water Act through that rule. And then EPA and the Army Corps of Engineers, to everyone’s surprise, just a month or two ago decided to repropose it after an initial proposal came out in November, which I think speaks to the kind of challenge of all these regulations trying to reduce “regulatory burdens,” as the administration would say.
Speaking of water, Chelsea, you’re part of our new extreme weather team, and we are in the midst of hurricane season. What, in addition to hurricanes, do you see coming ahead on your beat?
Chelsea Harvey: So it is actually a peak hurricane season right now. We have seen a very quiet Atlantic hurricane season so far — that was expected because of the influence of a very strong El Niño event currently going on — but there’s certainly still time for a major hurricane to develop. So I’ll definitely be keeping an eye on that over the next couple of months.
In the meantime, we’ve seen a lot of other extreme weather events going on this season: really extreme wildfire activity in the West. We’ve seen floods in Texas, Appalachia and the Midwest. So keeping an eye on all of those things as the season continues.
And of course, watching the federal response to these disasters. How is the National Weather Service doing at forecasting extreme events after losing a significant number of staff last year? Where are federal disaster declarations being approved? And investigating how states and local communities are building up their resilience in disaster-prone places — or not?
Alex, you’re taking on a broader look at legal coverage in particular, although you’ve also spent years on the EPA air beat with POLITICO. What’s ahead for us?
Alex Guillén: Still at EPA are a few major deregulatory actions that we’re expecting. The power plant climate rule repeal has been delayed longer than a lot of people had expected. EPA just recently sent its rewrite of the oil and gas methane rule over to the White House.
That one’s a little harder, perhaps because it’s not a straight repeal. They’re just going to be rewriting it, so that takes a lot longer. And a lot of industry-specific pollution rules are also seemingly taking longer than the administration had perhaps originally predicted or than we may have thought based on some of the lightning-fast deregulatory work they already did.
But as with all things at EPA, regulation flows inexorably into litigation. And so we’re now at the stage of this term where we’re starting to see a lot of litigation action happening in the courts now that we have actions to actually sue over.
So some of the blockbuster stuff going on, obviously environmentalists and blue states are challenging rollbacks like the endangerment finding repeal and other deregulatory work.
Interestingly, they do seem to be slow-walking some of those cases. They’re suggesting continued delays and pushing deadlines back in ways that have been irking the administration. Apparently, it does seem to be a coordinated effort to attempt to delay court rulings that could bind future administrations.
I’m watching EPA in litigation over the Biden-era particulate matters standard. The agency tried this unusual legal maneuver where they went to the court where the case had been pending since the Biden administration and said, “We admit there was legal error here and you should just kick the rule back to us.” And the court said, “We don’t agree, there’s no legal error here, rule is upheld.”
And so EPA is now in a bit of an awkward position where it won but also probably wants to appeal to the Supreme Court. So we’ll see how that plays out in the next few months.
Also on its way to the Supreme Court, litigation over Lee Zeldin’s termination of the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund. The D.C. Circuit recently issued kind of a strange and fractured ruling, although they didn’t even issue sort of the traditional ruling that explains their legal reasoning very well. It was a very short judgment, perhaps reflecting a lot of disagreement behind the scenes on that issue. So that’s on its way to the Supreme Court for sure.
And also on the Supreme Court, Oct. 5, the new term will kick off. And the first case on their docket is one of the biggest climate cases they’ve ever taken up, certainly since the West Virginia ruling in 2022 and maybe even since Massachusetts back in 2007.
This case will determine whether or not fossil fuel companies can be held liable under state law for climate change, essentially. So we’re talking about potentially huge amounts of liability if that’s upheld. That’ll be a big blockbuster case, expected ruling sometime next year.
Heather, it’s been a really big year for the National Park Service. What’s ahead for NPS and for public lands elsewhere at the Interior Department?
Heather Richards: A big thing that we’re still looking closely at is what President Trump is looking to do in Washington, D.C. It’s a huge focal point for the White House.
Obviously, we have the ballroom that he has proposed and is trying to build on the White House grounds after he tore down the East Wing. That’s a huge priority for him. It’s been embroiled in court cases right now.
Construction has kind of aggressively moved forward. And one of the big arguments that the administration is going to be making to SCOTUS is that it’s so far along that you have to let us go forward.
Another thing that is on park grounds in Washington, D.C., is the monumental arch that the president wants built. It’s planned for a traffic circle in the city right along the Potomac River across from the Lincoln Memorial. That has gotten through quite a few hurdles. It is something that is before the National Capitol Planning Commission, which is an important green light that it needs to go forward.
It is not on the docket for the next meeting, which is in September, but it is on the schedule for the fall. So we’ll probably see something there.
Andy, you were the first one to mention data centers as something that’s a big focus on the Hill. It’s hitting on a lot of beats;. Miranda, where do you see that coming up for you in the coming months?
Willson: Andy mentioned, in Congress, questions about codifying ratepayer protections. There’s also a lot of patchwork stuff happening at the state level. There may be some more states that are going to look to do things like track water use from data centers, for example.
And then as more of these facilities come online and come under construction, there’s also questions about water disposal for projects that do use a lot of water, in terms of, after they use water, what happens with the wastewater, what are some of the contaminants in it? It’s still sort of a new waste stream for local communities to be dealing with.
It’ll also be interesting to see if EPA puts out any more policies on data centers. They have tried to encourage water reuse for data centers. So reusing wastewater, municipal wastewater, treating it and then using it for data centers. But that’s still not a very common practice across the industry because of the cost and other barriers as well.
Richards: A story that I’m finishing up right now is [about] what could be the first data center we see sited on public lands, and it’s already controversial.
It is the first time we’re seeing this kind of fight, and it is the exact same kind of concerns that people have about data centers, which is water use and noise and things like that.
But it’s unlikely to be the last, and it is a big question for how data centers interact with public lands.
Guillén: On the air side of EPA, the agency has taken several actions to try to help clear the decks for data centers in what ways they can.
They issued new guidance saying that data centers and certain other facilities can essentially start construction before getting key air permits, as long as they don’t start building the actual emissions part of the project and the agency theoretically acknowledged that you’re taking on risk if you choose to do that and the permit is denied, for example. One of the reasons a lot of opponents have tried to avoid that setup is that they feel like there’s pressure that once a large project has gotten underway, there’s too much momentum politically for regulators to, after that, try to stop it. So that was one policy.
We also saw EPA say that data centers aren’t subject to the acid rain program, which means they don’t count toward state budgets on sulfur dioxide, that kind of thing. And there’s a very furious enforcement case going on right now. The NAACP a few months ago sued Elon Musk’s xAI company over emissions from turbines at a data center in Memphis, which is right over the border from Mississippi.
And in a very novel and interesting twist, the Trump administration has tried to intervene in that case and ask for it to be dismissed. Typically when the government intervenes in a citizen suit, it’s to back up the citizens on the enforcement, not to undercut their case and try to get it tossed out. So it’ll be very interesting to see if that works. And if so, it could mean a real tide turn on citizen lawsuits.
Harvey: I would just add there’s a huge intersection between data centers and extreme weather. We’re looking at a lot of questions lately about how data center energy demand affects the reliability of the grid and how does that intersect with weather events that also strain the grid, like extreme heat, for example.
The Department of Energy did direct data centers to turn to backup generators during heat waves earlier this summer. It’s very interesting to see how extreme weather is sort of setting precedent for those kinds of policies. Is that a pattern we’re going to see going forward?
I’m so excited for all this coverage. Midterms are coming up. Andy, any races that are top of mind that are particularly interesting for environmental policy readers?
Picon: A couple of races that we’re keeping an especially close eye on are Michigan’s 7th District, which is Democrat Will Lawrence up against incumbent Tom Barrett, a Republican. Will Lawrence co-founded the Sunrise Movement, and he’s up against Barrett in a race that’s now considered a toss-up.
And just this week, Barrett came out with his own data center proposal. He’s planning on introducing a bill in the coming days to, again, try to help empower local communities to push back against data centers.
And the other big one that I’ll mention is the South Carolina Senate race with Darline Graham in the primary against Ralph Norman, the current South Carolina House member. This is one where solar energy funding, if you will, is playing a big role. This PAC called the Invest in Tomorrow Coalition is funneling at least a million dollars into trying to defeat Ralph Norman because of his views on solar power and renewable energy in general. He’s been one of the biggest opponents to solar subsidies in Congress, and now these solar investors backing this PAC are trying to get their revenge.
There are a couple of federal agencies that we tend to follow more closely than others, particularly EPA, Interior, NOAA. What is coming up that you want to keep a close eye on as far as leadership? It’s been a tough year for some of them for staffing cuts and restructuring. So where are things headed?
Richards: About 1 in 10 employees at Interior left because of buyouts by the Trump administration. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum had planned on laying off about 2,000 additional Interior employees. That is something that was held up by basically the government shutdown last year. The shutdown happened, and a federal judge told them they couldn’t lay off during the shutdown. And then Congress actually told them they couldn’t lay off for a certain period of time. And so they didn’t move forward with those layoffs, and it’s unclear whether or not they still have an interest in it.
One thing that we do know is there’s a lot of shuffling going along around at Interior with management positions, particularly senior executive service positions seem to be changing. So there are whispers of reorganization happening throughout the agency at subagencies like the National Park Service, but also more broadly at Interior. So what exactly they’re planning in the next couple of months is something that we’ll have a close eye on and see what happens in terms of the workforce for the remainder of the year.
Guillén: Certainly, EPA lost several thousand workers, and that’s not nothing, but we did see Administrator Zeldin resisting some calls for even additional further slashing, saying that he needs a certain amount of staff to carry out EPA’s statutory responsibilities.
Some of the lingering questions from all of that will probably take several years to really understand is, No. 1, the layoffs and reorganization of the agency’s research arm — the formerly named Office of Research and Development — which a lot of the states relied on for expertise and equipment and resources on a number of environmental issues that they are largely unequipped to deal with. So it’ll be interesting to see what the impact is there, along with things like shutting down research into the health effects of air pollution.
Another area that will be interesting to watch is the Enforcement Office. A lot of critics have said that enforcement has been dropping in the Trump administration. Enforcement is a really tricky thing to really understand. There are certain numerical ways to judge it, but … enforcement is as much art as it is science, if you will, and so it can’t be fully judged by the numbers. It’s very complicated. Enforcement takes years. So we’re still seeing things playing out that started under the Biden administration. That’s another area that will be very interesting to watch going forward, especially if we have a Democratic president in a few years who may want to step up enforcement in those areas.
And otherwise, just an interesting personnel point at EPA was the air administrator, Aaron Szabo, had expected to leave. He had announced he was going to leave the agency. He had three different going-away parties. And then didn’t. That quietly got canceled. He’s still there. The guy they had brought over from CEQ and was rumored to be a replacement, I guess is still at EPA, but nobody has really gone on the record to specifically say what’s going on and why that changed, but, very unusual sort of quiet, un-quitting, if you will. And so it’s unclear if he’s going to continue to stay at EPA long-term or if this is a short-term extension or what. But kind of unusual to have three going-away parties and then not go away.
Harvey: I’m especially keeping an eye on the National Weather Service, which lost hundreds of employees last year to staff reductions. The National Weather Service last year was authorized to begin rehiring several hundred employees, and they have been gradually posting these jobs and starting to hire folks. So I am watching to see how quickly they rebuild their ranks and especially hire for key leadership roles in some of the line offices across the country.
And then turning to NOAA more broadly — that’s the National Weather Service’s parent agency — so that is, of course, one of the country’s top climate science agencies. NOAA’s research arm has definitely been in the crosshairs of the Trump administration since last year.
The White House has proposed eliminating that office’s budget entirely. Congress did, of course, reject that proposal for the current fiscal year, but I am very closely watching NOAA science initiatives, how they’re using their funding, how these initiatives are being regarded or supported or not by the administration.
As an example, recently, our colleague Zack Colman broke the news that NOAA would no longer be continuing with its annual Arctic report card. That is a very prominent annual report on the Arctic climate. And so are we going to see any more reports or major science initiatives discontinued in the near future?
All things that I’ll be keeping an eye on.
