A federal judge focused in a hearing Wednesday on EPA’s choice to cut procedural corners and brandish claims about fraud and abuse in its effort to recover billions of dollars in Inflation Reduction Act climate grants. U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan, who is considering the recipents’ challenge of EPA’s abrupt termination of $14 billion in green bank awards, questioned the Trump administration lawyer about the agency’s actions leading up to the grant cancellations, including statements by EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin alleging grantee misconduct and a directive to Citibank, which is administering the grants, to freeze accounts with no notice to recipients. Chutkan asked the Department of Justice’s Marc Sacks whether he believed EPA had complied with the Administrative Procedures Act and its own grant regulations in freezing and then terminating the awards, which were intended to capitalize national finance programs to promote renewable energy and zero-carbon transportation and housing. Advertisement She noted the plaintiffs said they had received no advance notice from EPA before their accounts at Citibank were frozen in mid-February. When the cash became inaccessible and the grant recipients sued for its release, EPA requested that the initial court hearing to be delayed by one day and then issued letters terminating the grants that evening. GET FULL ACCESS

It’s tariff day in America. What form the new levies take remains to be seen, but this much is clear: President Donald Trump’s drive to impose tariffs on a broad range of imported products represents a new world order, one where America increasingly looks inward to make the goods it needs. That kind of transformation would almost certainly affect the global transition to green energy. One possible outcome: China might be forced to branch out and find new markets for its clean energy technology, accelerating their adoption. But major downsides are just as likely, analysts said, even as they acknowledged it is too early to predict the unintended consequences that could result from Trump’s moves. Advertisement “It just seems like where we are headed is totally uncharted,” said Noah Kaufman, a climate economist at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy who served in former President Joe Biden’s administration. “I feel very ill equipped to predict what the consequences could be.” Trump has labeled Wednesday “Liberation Day,” arguing tariffs are needed to drive investment in domestic manufacturing after decades of outsourcing U.S. industries and jobs. Many energy analysts say the move threatens to raise prices for electricity, automobiles and gasoline. Guessing the tariff’s form has become something of a Washington parlor game. One source with knowledge of the administration’s thinking said the president is gravitating toward a flat universal rate on a broad range of imports. But Trump also has publicly flirted with imposing reciprocal tariffs on America’s largest trading partners. “They’re reciprocal,” Trump told reporters at the White House on Monday night. “Whatever they charge us, we charge them, but we’re being nicer than they are.” Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, told reporters Tuesday that the president had made his decision and would announce it at a Rose Garden press conference Wednesday. However they look, the new tariffs amount to the latest in a series of new duties Trump has imposed or threatened to impose on foreign goods since taking office in January. Twenty-five percent tariffs on Canadian and Mexican imports are scheduled to take effect Wednesday after Trump last month postponed their implementation. They follow on the heels of a new 25 percent duty placed on foreign automobiles last week and a 25 percent levy on imports of steel and aluminum established in February. Trump sought to impose tariffs on foreign goods in his first term, many of which Biden kept in place as he looked to counter China’s manufacturing dominance. But the duties proposed by Trump since he returned to the White House go far beyond that, upending the global economic integration the United States has championed for decades. The global approach has bled over into climate efforts and the energy transition. America’s booming solar industry, for instance, has largely been supplied by Chinese panel makers operating in southeast Asia. Predicting the impact of this round of Trump’s tariffs is difficult because they deliver a hammer blow to both traditional energy industries, such as oil and gas, and relatively new ones, like renewables. When the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas released its quarterly survey of oil and gas industry executives last week, the word “uncertainty” was mentioned 13 times. That’s the most since the first quarter of 2020 when Covid-19 began spreading around the world, according to an analysis by the American Petroleum Institute. “The administration’s tariffs immediately increased the cost of our casing and tubing by 25 percent,” one executive told the bank. It was a similar story in the manufacturing sector, which contracted in March, according to a monthly survey released Monday by the Institute for Supply Management. Companies reported higher prices, fewer new orders and declining employment in large part due to uncertainties over the tariff environment. Energy industry already dealing with shortages Tariffs stand to exacerbate shortages of key components used by the energy industry, analysts said. A shortage of electrical components such as transformers, circuit breakers and switchgear has persisted for 54 consecutive months, according to ISM. And that’s hampered efforts to keep up with rising electricity demand from data centers. Some utilities responded by sourcing equipment from overseas — a strategy that looks increasingly risky, Wood Mackenzie wrote in a January analysis of the potential impact on tariffs. Transformer manufacturing might not seem like a big deal in the context of containing runaway carbon dioxide emissions or satisfying the energy demands of technology companies. But shortages of key electrical components have slowed the integration of renewables and other new power plants on the grid, limiting the number of data centers that can plug in, analysts said. “This isn’t a thing which is just good for renewables, bad for fossil fuels, or good for fossil fuels, bad for renewables,” said Antoine Vagneur-Jones, head of trade and supply chains at BloombergNEF. “It’s a period of massive uncertainty, and that’s difficult for businesses to navigate wherever you’re sitting.” The United States’ free trade agreement with Mexico meant that companies from a range of industries set up shop south of the border in an attempt to access the world’s largest economy while benefiting from lower labor costs. The U.S. imported $31.3 billion worth of wire and cable in 2024, and 52 percent came from Mexico, according to Ken Roberts, the chief executive of WorldCity, a data-tracking firm. Another $29.2 billion worth of power supplies and transformers came in last year, with 21 percent coming from Mexico and 13 percent from China. And $13.3 billion worth of electric motors and generators were imported, with 32 percent coming from Mexico and 13 percent coming from China. Automakers like General Motors, Honda and Ford, meanwhile, have spent decades building an interconnected supply chain that stretches across North America. The vehicles they assemble in the United States typically contain a large number of parts from Mexico, Canada and other countries, and they also build vehicles in Mexico and Canada with parts from the United States. Some American automakers’ most popular electric vehicles are assembled in Mexico, including Ford Mustang Mach-E, Chevrolet’s Equinox and Honda’s Prologue. Trump’s plan runs the risk of creating a spiral, where Mexico and other countries impose their own tariffs, prompting tit-for-tat responses, said Enrique Millán-Mejía, a senior fellow for economic development at the Atlantic Council’s Adrienne Arsht Latin America Center. “That’s where, in reality, a trade war starts, and that’s when everybody loses,” he said. Trump and his allies say that tariffs are needed to reverse decades of outsourcing that decimated manufacturing communities across much of the United States. They contend new duties on imports will force companies to invest in U.S. manufacturing facilities in order to access the world’s largest economy. And they argue the approach is already bearing fruit. As evidence, the White House has touted investments such as Hyundai’s plan to invest $21 billion in U.S. automobile factories and Schneider Electric’s plan to spend $700 million on expanding its U.S. operations. Schneider Electric, a French company, is one of the world’s largest makers of equipment for the power sector. “When I think about what is the vision of the Trump trade and tariff agenda, it’s bringing back American manufacturing, creating jobs and passing the tax policy that primarily benefits working class people,” said Nick Iacovella, who worked as an aide to Secretary of State Marco Rubio when he was in the Senate and now serves as executive vice president at the Coalition for a Prosperous America. Tariffs would raise revenue to pay for the extension of Trump’s tax cuts, Iacovella said. He expressed hope the president would impose a universal rate on imports rather than adopting a reciprocal approach. “A reciprocal tariff strategy that is primarily focused on other countries lowering their trade barriers and prioritizing market access — that’s essentially a free trade agreement,” he said. “You know, we’ve done this policy for like three decades. It doesn’t work.” U.S. Rep. John Moolenaar, a Michigan Republican who serves as chair of the Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), said tariffs are needed to counteract years of unfair trade practices in China. “There’s nothing normal about our trade relationship with China,” Moolenaar told an industry summit in Washington on Tuesday. “They will subsidize, they will steal technology IP, they have all sorts of unfair trade practices. And so we need to recognize that, just acknowledge that, and then reset the relationship so there’s a very different expectation, and I think that’s what President Trump’s tariffs are going to do, is to force this negotiation to reset this trading relationship.” China may seek new buyers for clean energy tech Some of Trump’s actions could rebound in ways that could benefit the transition to clean energy. China, whose economy increasingly depends on the production of clean energy technology, will be motivated to find new markets as it’s shut out of others by tariffs, sparking a solar boom in Pakistan or a jump in EV sales in Brazil, analysts said. A growing share of Chinese exports of batteries, solar panels, wind turbines and EVs are going to countries the World Bank classifies as lower or middle income, said Vagneur-Jones, the analyst from BloombergNEF. “So you start to see these sort of knock-on effects, and then you could conceivably see a world where the energy transition starts to accelerate slightly in some of those poorer countries where it was seemingly more of a rich country thing,” he added. But most analysts took a dimmer view, saying it would take companies years to readjust their supply chains and push up prices on energy, automobiles and consumer goods. Tariffs could add 15 percent to the average cost of vehicles, and companies will have no choice but to raise prices, said Sam Abuelsamid, vice president of market research at Telemetry Insight, a research firm that tracks the auto industry. The higher prices could drive down sales and lead to factory closures and layoffs. “You can’t just move production from one factory to another in a matter of weeks,” he said in an interview. “You’re talking years of pain before you potentially get to a positive place.” In the utility industry, it will take years for manufacturers to bring new factories online needed to make equipment such as transformers and circuit breakers, said Rob Gramlich, president of Grid Strategies, a Washington D.C.-based consulting firm. Expecting companies to bring enough manufacturing capacity online to keep up with growing electricity demand projections “is just not a reasonable timeframe to plan more facilities,” he said. “I think the tariffs are mostly just raising the cost to U.S. utilities and then their rate payers.” Even sectors that have traditionally viewed tariffs as a means of bolstering domestic manufacturing are feeling uncertain. U.S. solar manufacturers have been pushing for targeted tariffs combined with tax credits and other incentives like those contained in the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act. The U.S. has boosted its production of solar modules since the IRA went into effect, growing from 14.5 gigawatts of production in 2023 to 50 GW in early 2025, according to a Wood Mackenzie report conducted for the Solar Energy Industries Association. But those modules are still mostly made with imported components. Whether it will be cheaper to import entire solar modules rather than individual components likely will depend on the size of the tariffs and how they’re implemented. It also hinges on whether Congress maintains tax incentives for domestic manufacturers under the IRA. “Tariffs can be a part of the solution set, but they’re not necessarily dependable enough that you can invest against them,” said Michael Carr, executive director of the Solar Energy Manufacturers for America Coalition, which advocates for policies that support a U.S.-based solar supply chain. Dan Anthony, president of Trade Partnership Worldwide, a trade and economic research firm, said the tariff impact on U.S. solar panel production, ultimately would depend on how high the new levies are and if American producers face higher costs for imported materials. “Higher costs for imported finished panels don’t help production if U.S. costs rise just as much due to tariffs on imports,” he wrote in an email. Even if the final cost of U.S.-produced panels doesn’t rise as much as imported ones, he added, Americans may still choose to install fewer solar panels due to higher costs for the panels themselves or other purchases, such as cars, that are affected by tariffs.

The looming demise of three NASA satellites has scientists bracing for the loss of climate and atmospheric data — especially since there are no plans to replace some of the specialized instruments aboard the Earth-observing probes. The dying missions — known as the Terra, Aqua and Aura satellites — have been a source of scientific concern for years. Launched one after the other between 1999 and 2004, NASA researchers have always known they had built-in expiration dates. Most instruments don’t work properly forever, and the satellites themselves are running out of fuel, meaning they’re gradually drifting out of their intended orbits. All three could go dark within the next year. And some of the instruments they carry have no immediate replacements, meaning certain long-term datasets are poised to discontinue. These include climate and environmental measurements, from changes in the Earth’s ozone layer to the solar radiation that warms the planet. Advertisement That’s a big concern for climate scientists, who use these observations to track the ways the Earth is responding to greenhouse gas emissions. These measurements have grown increasingly important over the last two decades, as the planet’s temperatures have climbed skyward. GET FULL ACCESS

Another Canadian province is revoking a carbon tax, this time partly in response to President Donald Trump’s tariff on some Canadian imports to the United States. Premier Scott Moe of Saskatchewan, a province of 1.2 million people, suspended the provincial carbon tax on facilities with highest carbon emissions. The rule limited carbon intensity, or emissions per output. “We are facing as Canadians potential tariffs and some implemented tariffs in the steel and aluminum industry already” from the U.S., Moe told reporters. “We are taking very decisive steps to ensure that our industries in Saskatchewan are more competitive.” Advertisement Saskatchewan acted days after British Columbia, Canada’s third-most-populous province, with 5.9 million people, moved to eliminate a carbon tax that consumers paid on fossil fuel products including gasoline, diesel and natural gas. The tax ended officially Tuesday, a day after the providence’s legislative assembly voted to abolish it. GET FULL ACCESS

The recipients of EPA’s largest climate law program will ask a federal judge Wednesday to order Citibank to grant them access to award funds while litigation continues over whether the Trump administration can terminate the program. Climate United Fund, the Coalition for Green Capital and Power Forward Communities received a combined $14 billion last year to run national green banking programs under the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund (GGRF). They have been unable to tap those funds since mid-February, when Citibank froze the accounts as EPA tried to claw the money back into the U.S. Treasury. Without immediate access to its $7 billion award, Climate United Fund said it would be forced to close its doors. Advertisement “If Climate United does not obtain a preliminary injunction and is forced to wait to have access to its grant funding restored, Climate United would not survive as it exists today and would need to wind down its operations,” the nonprofit stated in a court filing last week. GET FULL ACCESS

California energy regulators Wednesday recommended denying a controversial wind energy project in Shasta County. What happened: California Energy Commission staff cited significant impacts to wildlife, forests and tribal resources as well as conflicts with local zoning laws in recommending that the agency not certify the 48-turbine Fountain Wind proposal that would produce energy for about 150,000 homes. Context: The project is one of the first tests of AB 205, a 2022 law giving the Energy Commission the authority to override local governments in service of the state’s clean energy goals. Advertisement The Shasta County Board of Supervisors, in one of the most conservative parts of the state, had voted down the proposal in 2021 over concerns about fire risks, property values, traffic and views. The project’s Texas-based developer, ConnectGen, applied to move forward through the CEC’s opt-in certification program established under AB 205. GET FULL ACCESS

A Democratic state lawmaker introduced a bill late Friday that would delay California’s zero-emission school bus purchasing mandate by a decade. What it would do: AB 1111, from freshman Central Valley Assemblymember Esmeralda Soria, would push back the state’s 2035 ban on fossil fuel school bus purchases to 2045. The proposal would also allow rural educational agencies to apply to the California Air Resources Board for five-year extensions due to feasibility concerns related to terrain and route constraints, rather than the annual extensions currently included in state law. The bill would also allow school districts to transfer buses that are less than 25 years old to other educational agencies after replacing them with zero-emission models rather than having to scrap them. Advertisement “As someone who represents rural school districts throughout the Central Valley, these timelines are simply not practical,” Soria said in a statement. “These rural districts don’t have the resources, capacity, or infrastructure to meet these state-mandated requirements.” GET FULL ACCESS

SACRAMENTO, California — Homeowners associations struggling to find fire insurance are set to finally qualify for coverage from the state’s insurer of last resort eight months after a deal first announced by Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara. What happened: Lara announced Friday that he had formally approved a new plan by the FAIR Plan Association to increase its commercial property coverage limits. The FAIR Plan must now make coverage available for up to $20 million per building and $100 million per overall location, up from just $20 million per location. “This targeted FAIR Plan expansion helps meet the urgent needs of homeowners associations, affordable housing developers, farmers, builders, and business owners who are being priced out or left without coverage altogether,” said Lara. “It is a short-term solution with long-term benefits — providing necessary insurance access while we continue implementing comprehensive reforms to restore a competitive and reliable market in California.” Advertisement Why this matters: The change is meant to extend the last-resort insurance to properties with multiple buildings worth tens of millions of dollars, like wineries and condominium complexes, that previously exceeded the FAIR Plan’s limits and found themselves with no other options for wildfire coverage as traditional insurers fled the market. Builders and homeowners associations had argued that the gap was hampering the construction of affordable housing. GET FULL ACCESS

LONDON — EU Climate Commissioner Wopke Hoekstra is considering options to soften the bloc’s 2040 climate goal as he tries to contain a backlash against Europe’s climate ambitions. The European Commission, the EU’s executive, is expected to propose legislation in the coming weeks to adopt a previously announced target to cut 90 percent of greenhouse gas pollution by 2040. But to allay political concerns about the effort’s cost to heavy industry and agriculture, Hoekstra is weighing “flexibilities” for reaching that goal, according to a Commission official and two people briefed on the discussions, granted anonymity to reveal details of confidential deliberations. Advertisement The options being discussed range from allowing countries to defer steeper cuts to letting them count carbon reductions they pay for in other countries. Another idea would be to lean more on carbon that forests or technology can remove from the air. GET FULL ACCESS

Josh Boone is taking his pitch for why Americans should buy electric vehicles nationwide — just as the industry faces headwinds from a hostile Trump administration. Boone is the CEO of Veloz, a Sacramento-based nonprofit made up of automakers, EV charging companies, utilities and state agencies. The group has worked with California officials to run ad campaigns featuring former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, actor Mark Ruffalo and actress Chloe Bennet and maintains a national database of EV purchasing incentives by ZIP code. Veloz announced Wednesday that it received $43.5 million from one of its members, the Volkswagen subsidiary Electrify America, to launch a nationwide ad buy focused on countering misinformation around EVs. Advertisement Boone spoke with POLITICO about plans for the ad campaign, California’s EV goals and President Donald Trump’s impact. GET FULL ACCESS