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The Trump administration is facing lawsuits from states and environmental groups opposing its use of emergency power to force aging coal plants to stay online. Now, add utilities to its list of challengers.
Last week, the cooperative utilities Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association and Platte River Power Authority filed a petition asking the Department of Energy to reconsider its December order demanding that they keep running Craig Generating Station’s Unit 1, a jointly owned coal plant in Colorado, for the next 90 days.
Tri-State and Platte River — along with co-owners Salt River Project, PacifiCorp, and Xcel Energy — have been preparing to close the plant since 2016, both to comply with Colorado’s plan to shutter all coal generation by 2030 and to replace an aging and increasingly expensive source of power. Forcing them to operate it past December will require their members to bear unnecessary costs, which constitutes an “uncompensated taking” of their property in violation of the Constitution, the petition argues.
Tri-State and Platte River operate as nonprofit co-ops, which are owned by the customers they serve, meaning that they cannot pass the cost of keeping a plant open along to a multistate regional transmission network, as for-profit utilities can. Instead, their member-customers need to absorb the entire blow.
The consultancy Grid Strategies has estimated that keeping Craig Unit 1 running for 90 days would cost at least $20 million, and that running it for a year could add up to $85 million to $150 million. The utilities operating Craig Unit 1 have already had to take on the costs of repairing a valve failure that forced the plant offline in December.
It will also disrupt the use of long-planned replacement resources that can provide power more cheaply and reliably than Craig Unit 1 — including the 145-megawatt Axial Basin solar farm, which may be forced to curtail its electricity generation because of grid congestion due to keeping the coal plant online.
“We do not take this request for a rehearing lightly,” Tri-State CEO Duane Highley said in a Thursday press release. “But as not-for-profit entities, we face issues that other utilities do not, because it is our members that ultimately are going to pay for the cost of this order.”
The petition from Tri-State and Platte River marks the first time a utility has publicly contested a Trump administration must-run order, said Michael Lenoff, a senior attorney at Earthjustice, a nonprofit law firm that’s filed challenges and lawsuits against similar orders across the country.
“DOE should listen to utilities on the ground making sure the lights stay on, and not advance its policy to rescue the dying coal industry and force other people — in other words, ratepayers — to pay for it,” he said.
Since last year, the DOE has used its authority under Section 202(c) of the Federal Power Act to require a Michigan coal plant and an oil- and gas-fired plant in Pennsylvania to stay open for three consecutive 90-day periods. In December, in addition to Craig Unit 1, it issued similar orders for two coal plants in Indiana and one in Washington state.
The DOE has justified the orders by claiming that the power grid faces an imminent, increasing threat of major blackouts. But energy experts refute the idea that such a grid crisis is around the corner, arguing that the Trump administration is relying on a false premise. The true goal, they say, is to misuse emergency authority to benefit the coal industry by forcing customers to continue to pay for power plants that can’t compete economically against much cheaper power from renewables, batteries, and fossil gas.
State attorneys general and environmental groups have filed rehearing requests with the DOE on all of these must-run orders. To date, the DOE has declined to take up those administrative challenges, opening the pathway for challengers to file lawsuits.
In December, a coalition of environmental groups filed a legal brief with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit challenging DOE’s first Section 202(c) order, for the J.H. Campbell coal plant in Michigan. It asked the court to “put an end to the Department’s continued abuse of its authority, which has imposed millions of dollars in unnecessary costs and pollution on residents of Michigan and the Midwest.”
Indeed, the moves are pushing substantial costs on to utility customers at a time when electricity bills are already rising far faster than inflation. The Sierra Club, which is tracking the costs of keeping coal plants running under DOE emergency orders, estimates the price at just over $202 million as of Monday, up from more than $158 million as of the second week in January.
If the DOE forces the continued operations of every fossil-fueled power plant scheduled to retire between now and the end of 2028, the costs could add up to $4.8 billion, according to a 2025 study by Grid Strategies. Extending the analysis to also include every power plant that is 60 years old or more could increase the cost to nearly $6 billion, the study found.
These costs come in the form of retaining workers, securing new coal supplies, and undertaking maintenance and repairs that were once deferred. And they’re not the only expenses associated with the orders: Utility customers must also pay for the resources that utilities have already secured to replace the closing coal plants.
All these costs will add up if Craig Unit 1 is forced to stay online. “We have planned for the retirement of this resource for over a decade and have proactively replaced the capacity and energy from new sources,” Jason Frisbie, general manager and CEO of Platte River, said in the press release.
In other words, as Matthew Gerhart, senior attorney at the Sierra Club, previously put it to Canary Media, the Trump administration’s actions mean that customers will “end up paying twice.”
Since emerging as the world’s No. 2 producer of steel eight years ago, India has ramped up its exports to Europe. By some estimates, upwards of 60% of the country’s steel exports now head to the European Union.
But India’s steelmakers are poised for what one prominent New Delhi–based business magazine recently referred to as a “wake-up call.”
The EU’s world-first carbon tariff — known as the carbon border adjustment mechanism — took effect this month, forcing companies in the bloc to pay levies on certain imports based on how much planet-warming pollution was emitted during their manufacturing. That means metal from Indian steelmakers — which rely heavily on coal — will come in at a much higher price in the EU.
“Europe is the elephant in the room. It’s a pretty big deal,” said Kaushik Deb, executive director of the India team at the University of Chicago’s Energy Policy Institute. “It makes it a lot more urgent for India to start thinking about green steel.”
Coal dominates the steelmaking process in much of the world, and especially in India. The traditional method for producing the metal relies on a coal-fired blast furnace to refine iron ore into iron, which is then forged into steel in a basic oxygen furnace. That two-step process accounts for 43% of India’s steel output, according to a June report from Johns Hopkins University’s Net Zero Industrial Policy Lab.
The rest of the nation’s steel is produced in electric arc furnaces or induction furnaces, alternatives to basic oxygen furnaces that melt iron into steel using electricity. But even that equipment depends on iron refined using coal. The fossil fuel also generates upwards of 75% of the power on India’s grid, meaning that ostensibly cleaner methods that use electricity still generate plenty of emissions.
Some steelmakers in India have begun to build out the infrastructure for direct reduced iron, a cleaner method of making iron than relying on coal-burning blast furnaces. But in contrast to American or European DRI facilities, which typically use natural gas or hydrogen, Indian DRI plants often use coal as the input.
The Indian government has started looking to change the trajectory of its coal use. The fossil fuel is making up less and less of the country’s power mix as India installs record amounts of solar panels and wind turbines and embarks on plans to build new nuclear power stations.
In September 2024, India’s Ministry of Steel — the only cabinet-level agency in any major country dedicated just to steel — issued a 420-page report outlining the potential pathways to greening the industry. The report calls for studies into different approaches to slash emissions from steelmaking, including swapping the coal used in DRI for green hydrogen made with renewables and equipping fossil-fueled facilities with carbon-capture equipment. It also proposes studying ways to retrain workers on greener technologies. But the report acknowledges that financing remains a challenge.
“I don’t see the timeline for this happening optimistically,” said Shreyas Shende, the senior research associate at the Net Zero Industrial Policy Lab who co-authored last summer’s report. “The issue is the pricing. Green hydrogen has no cost competitiveness. The government is running a few pilot projects, but we have to see if it’s scalable.”
Some private companies in India have started their own decarbonization pilot projects. JSW Steel announced plans in 2022 to spend $1 billion on green steel by 2030, and later expanded the vision via a partnership with the South Korean steelmaker Posco to develop a new green-steel mill.
That same year, industrial behemoth Adani inked its own deal with Posco to develop a $5 billion green-steel facility in the western state of Gujarat.
In 2024, Tata Steel entered the green-steel market with plans for a low-carbon mill in the United Kingdom. At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, last week, the giant announced another $1.2 billion investment in a green-steel plant in the eastern state of Jharkhand.
Acting on its own, however, the “industry will take a long time to catch up,” Shende said.
“The most important development recently is that the government has talked about putting together a big plan,” he said. “We haven’t seen what that plan looks like. But if and when it does come out, that would have potentially the greatest impact on anything India will do.”
In the meantime, India’s steelmakers — which directly employ 2.5 million workers and generate as much as 2% of the country’s gross domestic product — face increased competition. Last August, a Chinese steelmaker scheduled the first shipment of green steel to Italy, an effort to establish a supply chain between the People’s Republic and the EU ahead of the carbon tariff taking effect. In November, industry groups representing European and Chinese steel producers and buyers came together to work on a uniform set of standards for determining whether steel is, in fact, green.
“The Chinese are much better prepared with green steel than India is, and they will probably gain market share at India’s expense by being more compliant” with the EU’s new carbon tariff, Deb said. “That threat of losing market share is relevant and important for India’s decision-making process. It would be a very hard blow to the Indian steel industry.”
This story was first published by Grist.
One year ago, with one of the first strokes of his presidential Sharpie, President Donald Trump signed an executive order declaring a “national energy emergency,” making good on a campaign promise to “drill, baby, drill.” It was the first of many such orders, signaling that the championing of fossil fuels would be a cornerstone of the new administration: A subsequent order pledged to revitalize America’s waning coal industry, eliminate subsidies for electric vehicles approved by Congress under former President Joe Biden, and loosen regulations for domestic producers of fossil fuels. Yet another executive order withdrew the U.S. from the Paris Agreement, the nearly unanimously adopted international treaty that coordinates the global fight against climate change. He resumed liquefied natural gas permitting paused by his predecessor and reopened United States coastlines to drilling.
In the days following his inauguration, Trump killed a climate jobs training program, closed off millions of acres of federal water designated for offshore wind development, and scrubbed mentions of climate change from some federal agency websites. To many observers, it looked like the most comprehensive reorientation of the executive branch’s environmental and climate priorities in American history.
On paper, it certainly appears as though Trump has continued to make good on these early promises. He pushed Congress to pass the so-called Big Beautiful Bill, which phases out an extensive set of tax credits — for wind and solar energy, electric vehicles, and other decarbonization tools — that were responsible for much of the progress the U.S. was expected to make toward its Paris Agreement commitments. (That move has already led some companies to abandon new clean energy projects.) Trump’s attacks on the nation’s offshore wind industry, which he recently called “so pathetic and so bad,” have been unrelenting, culminating in a blanket ban on offshore leases last month. A few weeks ago, he upped the ante on his earlier withdrawal from the Paris Agreement by severing ties with the United Nations framework that facilitates international cooperation on matters of climate change, environmental health, and resilience — a treaty that was ratified unanimously by the U.S. Senate in 1992.
“It has been an extraordinarily destructive year,” said Rachel Cleetus, climate and energy policy director at the nonprofit Union of Concerned Scientists. It’s not hard to find specific moves that have already done tangible harm to the climate: The EPA, for instance, delayed a requirement that oil and gas operators reduce emissions of methane, an ultra-potent and fast-acting greenhouse gas, for a full year. The Interior Department announced a $625 million investment to “reinvigorate and expand America’s coal industry” and directed a costly Michigan coal plant on the verge of closure to stay open.
However, while these moves have been effective in sowing panic and uncertainty, their long-term effects on the country’s climate policy framework are far from certain. Indeed, only a small fraction of the climate damage threatened by Trump is truly permanent, experts told Grist. That’s not only because many of Trump’s moves may ultimately be ruled illegal — federal judges in Rhode Island, New York, and Virginia, for instance, allowed offshore wind farms in those states to resume construction just last week — but also because executive actions can be reversed by a future president. And the president has not shown much interest in passing energy- or climate-related legislation, a far more durable form of policymaking than executive decree. Despite claims to the contrary, Trump has signed fewer bills than any president since Dwight D. Eisenhower.
“He is not changing law,” said Elaine Kamarck, who worked in the Clinton administration and is the founding director of the Brookings Institution’s Center for Effective Public Management. “He is changing practice.”
Even something as unprecedented as the EPA’s moves to relinquish its own authority to regulate the emissions that affect human health — a responsibility that is a core tenet part of the agency’s mission and is therefore widely regarded as unlikely to hold up in court — could be unraveled by a future administration even if it’s ruled to be legal, though that process would take years.
“You can’t make up for the lost time, the increased emissions, and the extent that new areas are opened up for [fossil fuel] exploration,” said Michael Burger, executive director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University. “But from a regulatory perspective, what this administration is doing to EPA and the other agencies are all executive actions that can be undone in the same way they were done.”
The major exception is the GOP’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, or OBBBA. If a future administration wants to restore expansive tax credits for wind and solar energy, that president will have to push Congress to pass new climate legislation. But the climate-relevant portions of OBBBA are noteworthy for being subtractive rather than additive — and are perhaps more accurately viewed as a representation of Trump’s quest to refute Biden’s legacy than as a desire to radically alter U.S. energy law. Indeed, the new law left in place the tax credits for other sources of carbon-free energy, including nuclear and geothermal — something that more moderate Republicans who do not share the president’s dismissal of climate science have been quick to note.
“We like to point out that the baseload clean energy credits were maintained,” said Luke Bolar, head of external affairs and communications at ClearPath, a think tank that develops conservative climate policies. Sean Casten, a Democratic U.S. representative from Illinois, said that the goal of the Biden-era climate legislation — ensuring that U.S. clean energy can be built in a cost-competitive way — has largely been achieved even if specific parts of the law have been repealed.
“Every single zero-carbon power source … is still cheaper on the margin than a fuel energy source,” he said.
The relative fragility of Trump’s assault on bedrock environmental and climate laws could be a product of the president’s prioritization of political dominance over lasting change, said Josh Freed, senior vice president for climate and energy at the think tank Third Way.
For example, the administration has taken steps to shield the American coal industry from the punishing blows of competition, environmental regulation, and the rising costs of mining. Trump has signed an executive order aimed at “reinvigorating America’s beautiful clean coal industry,” granted coal-fired power plants temporary exemptions from emissions limits, and ended a federal moratorium on coal leasing. But those interventions will do little in the long run to reverse a decline driven mainly by economics: The nation’s aging coal plants are becoming increasingly expensive to run while natural gas and solar energy have only gotten cheaper. And they certainly don’t help the president’s stated goal of reducing household energy costs.
To attempt to make sense of the president’s crusade to save coal is to assume there is a larger political strategy at play — which may not be the case, Freed said.
“There’s no reason to bring back coal other than to show that the administration can bring back coal,” he said. “It’s not like there’s this huge lobbying effort or donor base that will be of significant benefit to MAGA or Republicans if they do it.”
A style of governance motivated by political dominance is a good way to make headlines, but it’s not a particularly effective way to build a lasting legacy. Trump’s efforts to buoy coal may help the industry in the short term, but experts are broadly in agreement that coal can’t be “saved” without sustained support from the federal government. And an industry that can survive only with a coal-friendly Republican in the Oval Office isn’t exactly thriving.
“When you have to get the government to step in to put its thumb on the scale in order to help your industry,” Sean Feaster, an energy analyst at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, told my colleagues earlier this week, “it’s a sign that you’re not particularly competitive, right?”
For decades now, the pendulum of U.S. climate policy has swung left and right, reflecting the priorities of the sitting president. Trump’s climate blitzkrieg may be the starkest example yet of the benefits and drawbacks of that model. But despite his best efforts to stand out from the pack, the president’s first year back in office fits a well-worn pattern. As a result, his victories may not last much longer than his presidency.
Primary steel, the strongest and most durable form of the metal, is typically also the dirtiest kind. That’s because the most common way to forge it begins with producing iron in coal-fired blast furnaces.
Now, for the first time, a new report identifies who buys the lion’s share of primary steel in the United States — and how much steel they’re buying.
At least 60% of U.S. primary steel is purchased by automobile manufacturers, according to an analysis from the environmental group Mighty Earth that was shared exclusively with Canary Media. The six automakers identified in the report — Ford Motor Co., General Motors Co., Honda Motor Co., Hyundai Motor Group, Stellantis, and Toyota Motor Corp. — produce 73% of all new cars on American roads.
The finding highlights a point of leverage for customers in decarbonizing American steel production at a moment when steelmakers are largely reversing plans for greener mills and doubling down on coal-fired blast furnaces.
“The auto market drives blast furnaces in the U.S.,” said Matthew Groch, senior director of decarbonization at Mighty Earth. “If they really cared and wanted to, they could put pressure on these companies they’re buying steel from. But they aren’t, and they don’t.”
Only one of the six automakers, Honda, responded to emailed questions from Canary Media. But the Japanese firm declined to comment on its steel suppliers.
“Honda is actively working to reduce CO₂ emissions associated with raw material procurement and manufacturing processes,” Honda spokesperson Chris Abbruzzese said in an email. “We do not publicly disclose individual supplier relationships.”
Automakers have traditionally relied on primary steel to form the outer shell of their cars because it’s long been considered higher quality than steel made from recycled scrap metal in electric arc furnaces. Increasingly, though, thanks to improvements in its purity and strength, so-called secondary steel has been able to displace some of that demand. Steel recyclers like Nucor say the auto sector represents a growing share of their customer base, but primary steel made using coal still dominates the sector.
To identify the buyers of primary U.S. steel, Mighty Earth commissioned the consultancy Empower LLC to conduct “an exhaustive review” of supply chains, according to the report. The analysts then reviewed “everything from annual reports and investor presentations to new articles and company websites, looking for clues regarding links between the steel facilities of interest and their ties to the largest U.S. automakers.” The study relied on supply chain and financial data from the platforms Panjiva, Sayari Graph, S&P Capital IQ, and MarkLines, and it used OpenRailwayMap to track materials shipped by train.
Since President Donald Trump returned to office a year ago, the nascent efforts to clean up America’s primary steel production have largely collapsed.
Cleveland-Cliffs, which had been awarded a $500 million grant from the Biden administration to finance construction of new, greener equipment at one of its Ohio steelworks, abandoned the initiative and is now working with Trump’s Energy Department to develop a coal-focused scope for the project.
U.S. Steel, whose sale to Japanese rival Nippon Steel was approved by the Trump administration, finds itself at a crossroads. The company has promised some greener investments in the U.S. but has yet to announce any specifics. Its new owner, however, has a reputation as “a coal company that also makes steel” — and Nippon has also promised to invest in upgrading U.S. Steel’s blast furnaces to last longer.
That leaves Hyundai’s project to build a low-carbon steel factory in Louisiana as the flagship push for clean steel in the U.S.
Despite recent challenges from the Trump administration, Hyundai has signaled its commitment to bringing the facility online by 2029. The plant is designed to first use blue hydrogen, the version of the fuel made with fossil gas and carbon capture equipment, to produce the cleaner direct reduced iron. But by the mid-2030s, the facility is expected to switch to green hydrogen, made with electrolyzers powered by renewables.
The low-carbon iron will then be fed into electric arc furnaces to produce steel — making it the first integrated low-carbon steel plant in the U.S. That Louisiana plant could reduce emissions by at least 75% relative to a traditional integrated steel plant with a blast furnace and basic oxygen furnace.
In a sign of progress, Hyundai this month announced plans to test its DRI equipment at an existing steelworks in South Korea in anticipation of bringing the technology to Louisiana.
Once that Louisiana plant comes online, Groch said, it’s expected to generate enough steel to meet Hyundai’s needs and supply additional potential buyers — opening up an opportunity for other automakers. In its report, Mighty Earth calls on automakers to commit to buying more green steel in the coming years.
General Motors and Ford have committed to buying at least 10% green steel by 2030 as part of a pledge via the First Movers Coalition, led by the World Economic Forum. Other global carmakers not included in Mighty Earth’s report, such as Volvo, Mercedes-Benz, and BMW, have adopted separate targets. Honda, Stellantis, and Toyota, meanwhile, have avoided making such promises.
Holding car companies to those targets has proved challenging. While some companies have vowed to slash emissions by buying more low-carbon steel, a September 2024 report by the International Council on Clean Transportation found that carmakers’ pledges to buy fossil-free steel by 2030 cover less than 2% of their total demand for the metal.
“We’re not asking for everyone to have 100% green steel,” Groch said. “But these are their commitments, and the car companies are the ones driving investment in steel.”
In the far reaches of Appalachian Ohio, DeepRock Disposal Solutions and other companies pump salty, hazardous waste from oil and gas fracking thousands of feet underground at high pressure. Last year, the state gave DeepRock permits to drill two more injection wells for pumping such waste underground. The new wells are slated for rural Washington County, which sits on Ohio’s southeast border.
The state’s approval has drawn fierce opposition from surrounding community members and local governments that fear waste from the wells could escape and pollute their drinking water supply. Leaks have happened before, including from some DeepRock wells. But these opponents haven’t been able to stop the company’s latest drilling plans.
This lack of local authority highlights an unfair discrepancy in Ohio, according to legal experts and clean energy advocates: While state law allows counties, townships, and disgruntled residents’ groups to delay or even doom many solar and wind developments, it blocks almost all local decision-making power over fossil fuel endeavors.
The difference between how Ohio law deals with renewables and petroleum “is night and day,” said Heidi Gorovitz Robertson, a professor at Cleveland State University College of Law.
On one hand, state law gives the Ohio Department of Natural Resources “sole and exclusive authority” to permit oil and gas activities. “So the local governments are cut out entirely,” Robertson explained, noting a 2015 Ohio Supreme Court decision that held that the state’s comprehensive regulation of oil and gas activities preempts even city zoning ordinances that would otherwise restrict that work.
On the other hand, a 2021 law lets counties ban new solar and wind development for most of their territory. Even for “grandfathered” projects that are technically exempt from such bans, the Ohio Power Siting Board has used opposition from local governments as grounds for finding such developments were not in the “public interest.”
“What you have looks like total inconsistency” when it comes to deciding which energy projects should go where, Robertson said.
That has serious implications for the energy transition: It holds back the projects that would slash planet-warming and health-harming pollution while further entrenching the lead that the oil and gas industry has in Ohio’s electricity sector.
Ohio also treats renewables differently than it does fossil fuel projects when it comes to letting the community participate in permitting decisions. The state lets disgruntled residents intervene as official parties in wind- and solar-permitting cases, which allows those individuals to appeal permit approvals to the Ohio Supreme Court. Yet residents cannot intervene or appeal in cases about where oil and gas activities go.
Advocacy groups such as the Buckeye Environmental Network say this imbalance is making communities like Washington County, where DeepRock plans to inject more fracking waste, less safe.
Fracking — a drilling technique to extract fossil fuels from rocks thousands of feet deep — produces millions of barrels of waste per year. Regular wastewater treatment plants can’t handle those super-salty fluids, which can contain heavy metals, radioactive chemicals, and company “trade secret” compounds. That’s why the waste is typically disposed of in deep wells.
Ohio had more than 200 active fracking-waste injection wells as of late 2024, with several already in Washington County.
Marietta, a city of about 13,000 on the Ohio River, abuts Warren Township, where DeepRock will drill the new wells. The city’s leaders worry that the waste could migrate out of the rock layer where it will be stored. A 2019 investigation found that waste had escaped from another injection well in Washington County, although it wasn’t discovered in drinking water at that time.
The Marietta City Council passed a resolution in October that noted problems with waste escaping from other wells, and it urged the state to place a moratorium on disposing of more fracking waste in the area. The city also tried to appeal one of DeepRock’s permits, but the Division of Oil and Gas Resources Management at the Department of Natural Resources responded that its Oil and Gas Commission, which reviews those administrative appeals, lacks jurisdiction for Marietta’s claims.
“People are saying we don’t want these injection wells,” said Roxanne Groff, an advisory board member of the Buckeye Environmental Network. “And the main reason is the water.”
Groff’s group is taking another approach to stopping the DeepRock project: It’s suing leaders at the Ohio Department of Natural Resources over the permits issued for the wells. The lawsuit, filed in November, argues the agency illegally relied on outdated regulations that were in effect when DeepRock first filed for its permits but that were replaced in 2022 by stricter rules meant to better protect public safety and health.
“The law is very clear in our view that [the department] should be applying the rules in place at the time of permitting,” said James Yskamp, a senior attorney at the nonprofit Earthjustice, which is representing the Buckeye Environmental Network. When DeepRock applied for its permits in late 2021, the current siting rules were already in draft form, and the public comment period on them had ended. Moreover, the agency didn’t complete technical reviews, provide public notice about the permits, or accept comments on them until last year.
Karina Cheung, a spokesperson for the Department of Natural Resources, said her agency has no comment on pending litigation. But she did note that any permit to operate the wells after they’re drilled will need to comply with current rules in the Ohio Administrative Code. That permit would control how the company pumps waste underground under pressure, but not where that waste goes. And the wells would already have been drilled.
Lawyers for the officials at the Department of Natural Resources and for DeepRock want the case dismissed. The department had no duty to apply the current law, the filings claim. And any harm is speculative, they argue, because it wouldn’t happen until after fracking waste is pumped down.
The Buckeye Environmental Network’s petition before the Franklin County Court of Appeals indicates the two DeepRock wells are approximately 2 miles from protected groundwater resources for people in the city of Marietta and Warren Township. Already-operating wells in the area pump tens of thousands of gallons of fracking waste underground each day. Injecting yet more fluids under high pressure could cause waste to migrate out of deep rock layers and up through rock fissures, abandoned wells, or other conduits, the group alleges.
These concerns are founded on evidence, Groff noted, unlike people’s objections to solar projects, which she said tend to be lacking in factual support or based on false information.
Robertson at Cleveland State has the numbers to back up that claim: She analyzed the grounds for testimony against a utility-scale solar project in a permitting case in 2024. Most objections either had no basis in fact or had already been addressed by permit conditions. The rest were statements of opinion.
To the extent there is any consistency in how Ohio treats different types of energy projects, “it’s that the oil and gas industry wins every time,” Robertson said. “The oil and gas industry benefits by blocking local voices in oil and gas industry decisions. And the oil and gas industry benefits by having local voices involved in the wind- and solar-energy decision-making.”
The Trump administration is going after gas bans in two California cities.
Last week, the federal government sued to block the San Francisco Bay Area’s Morgan Hill and Petaluma from prohibiting the use of fossil gas in new buildings. Both have populations of less than 60,000.
The complaint, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, alleges that the restrictions violate a 1975 federal law that governs appliance efficiency standards. Climate advocates decried the move as federal overreach.
“Mayors and the people who elect them should decide the type of energy that powers the future of their communities,” Kate Wright, executive director of Climate Mayors, said in a statement. “The Justice Department’s lawsuit does nothing but tie the hands of local leaders who seek to help families find relief from high energy prices.”
More than 150 local governments have adopted some form of zero-emissions standards for new buildings, from banning gas outright to encouraging electrification. Such rules can benefit not only households’ comfort, health, and resilience but also their pocketbooks. Depending on local factors such as weather and energy costs, residents could save thousands of dollars over the lifetime of their homes’ superefficient electric appliances.
Why did the Trump administration target Morgan Hill and Petaluma? “I see it as part of a … broader harassment campaign between the federal government and states and cities that it’s unhappy with,” said Amy Turner, director of the Cities Climate Law Initiative at Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law.
In April 2025, President Donald Trump signed an executive order requiring the attorney general to identify state and local laws “burdening the … use of domestic energy resources” — namely fossil fuels, not local solar or wind — and take “all appropriate action” to stop their enforcement.
Empowered, the Department of Justice sued four Democrat-led states last year: New York and Vermont to block Climate Superfund laws, which would make oil and gas producers pay for their greenhouse gas pollution; and Hawaii and Michigan to prevent them from suing fossil fuel companies for climate damages. The cases are ongoing.
Now the administration is attempting to crush municipal efforts to curb fossil fuel use in buildings. But whether the Department of Justice’s lawsuit will be viable remains in doubt, Turner explained. “There are some really significant questions around whether the federal government has standing to bring this case.”
Morgan Hill’s and Petaluma’s ordinances — passed in 2019 and 2021, respectively — are essentially relics of a laxer era when gas construction across California went largely unchecked, according to Matt Vespa, senior attorney at the nonprofit Earthjustice.
“California’s really moved on,” he said. “We have a very strong state code now [that’s] pushing buildings to be all-electric,” making it less important that cities themselves block gas hookups.
The Golden State’s latest building standard, which took effect Jan. 1, encourages gas-free construction more vigorously than ever, according to Vespa. The code is also technology-neutral, stopping short of banning new gas connections.
Instead, the rules require developers to meet specific efficiency standards, which are based on the performance of electric heat pumps, he said. Heat-pump appliances are about two to five times as energy efficient as gas furnaces and water heaters.
Developers could choose to install gas in their buildings anyway. But for an edifice to pass muster, it would need more efficiency improvements, such as a thicker jacket of insulation or triple-pane windows. Plus, the code requires that certain new buildings equipped with gas also be “electric-ready,” meaning they have the electrical service and wiring required for the structures to eventually go fully electric.
California is also shifting the economics of gas and all-electric construction. In 2022, the state nixed subsidies for gas lines to new buildings; and in 2024, it eliminated electric-line subsidies to mixed-fuel construction. What’s more, developers of all-electric homes can claim incentives of $1,400 to $5,500 per gas-free unit through the California Electric Homes program, which still has $24 million in its coffers.
In its court challenge against Morgan Hill and Petaluma, the Trump administration is using the same premise that struck down Berkeley, California’s pioneering gas ban in 2023.
In California Restaurant Association v. Berkeley, a three-judge panel for the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the 1975 Energy Policy and Conservation Act (EPCA) preempts the city’s ban on gas hookups. The court’s reasoning, in brief, is that because this federal law prevents jurisdictions from deploying differing standards for the energy use and efficiency of covered appliances, it invalidates local bans preventing the use of gas appliances.
If you’re confused, you’re not alone. Many judges have found the EPCA argument flawed, even in the Berkeley case. When the three presiding judges decided not to authorize a rehearing en banc with a larger panel of judges in 2024, 11 circuit judges dissented. It was an unusual move, rarely done.
“In nearly a decade on the bench, I have never previously written or joined a dissent from a denial of rehearing en banc,” wrote U.S. Circuit Judge Michelle T. Friedland. “I feel compelled to do so now to urge any future court that interprets the Energy Policy and Conservation Act not to repeat the panel opinion’s mistakes.”
The opinion misinterpreted EPCA, she continued: “EPCA’s preemption provision guarantees uniform appliance efficiency standards. It does not create a consumer right to use any covered appliance” — such as a gas furnace.
In recent court battles invoking EPCA, judges have upheld the local laws restricting fossil fuel in new buildings in New York and New York City. These lawsuits — and many others brought on the same premise — continue to move through the courts. (In November, New York elected to pause its all-electric building standard, which would have taken effect at the end of 2025, for unrelated reasons.)
In the meantime, some towns have shifted to other tactics that encourage all-electric construction. New York City, for example, set an emissions limit of 25 kilograms of CO2 per million British thermal units that doesn’t explicitly prohibit gas use.
Regarding the future of all-electric buildings in Morgan Hill, Petaluma, and the rest of California, Vespa is sanguine.
“We see very high percentages of buildings going all-electric already,” he said. “Nothing about this lawsuit is going to change that.”
U.S. carbon emissions increased in 2025, even as clean energy installations surged.
Economy-wide emissions rose by 2.4%, according to a new analysis of federal data by the research firm Rhodium Group. This ended a two-year streak of emissions reductions and clocks in as the third-largest emissions increase in the last decade. The country is still emitting 18% less than it did in 2005 (compare that to President Barack Obama’s goal of a 26% to 28% reduction by 2025), but the economy has resisted a smooth glide toward decarbonization.
“It’s not the most notable increase that we’ve seen, but in the context of this bumpy downward trend, it is an up year,” said Rhodium Group research analyst Michael Gaffney.
Some of that emissions increase came from factors that Gaffney referred to as statistical “noise,” namely a very cold winter that pushed up space-heating needs in buildings. That kind of variation is to be expected. But changes in the power sector could be more potent signals of things to come.
The power sector has generally led the U.S. economy in emissions reductions, largely because gas plants have outcompeted coal plants over the last two decades, and gas emits less carbon when burned than coal. But in 2025, coal proved that it’s not dead yet. Natural gas prices rose by 58% over 2024 levels, under pressure from space-heating demand and global exports via liquefied natural gas terminals. At the same time, demand for electricity soared: Generation increased by 2.4% from the year before, as data centers, crypto miners, and electric vehicles consumed more energy.
Taken altogether, the rise in demand at a time when gas was less economically competitive gave coal an opening in the markets, and its generation surged by 13% in 2025.
“This year is a bit of a warning sign on the power sector,” Gaffney said. “With growing demand, if we continue meeting it with the dirtiest of the fossil generators that currently exist, that’s going to increase emissions.”
AI data center demand shows every sign of increasing far beyond 2025 levels in the years ahead. That’s while export capacity for liquefied natural gas is on track to double by 2029, greatly expanding competition for U.S. gas supplies. The Trump administration has issued a flurry of “emergency” orders to block coal plant retirements, and many utilities are also choosing to push back planned coal plant closures as they respond to the sudden growth in power demand, Gaffney said.
Coal generation has plummeted by 64% from its peak in 2007, but it has rebounded for brief periods along that trajectory. 2025 offered a reminder that coal isn’t on a one-way street to obsolescence. Even without new coal plant construction, existing plants can ramp up operations when the opportunity arises, and could well continue to do so over the next few years.
The data from 2025 also challenges another truism in climate advocacy circles: that breakthroughs in climate technologies have decoupled economic growth from emissions growth. Last year, though, emissions increased faster than real GDP, which grew by a projected 1.9%, per Rhodium.
“Were this to persist, this would be a troubling sign for the broader transition, just because we’ve predicated this whole thing on ‘you can grow the economy without exploding emissions,’” said Ben King, Rhodium’s director of U.S. energy projects.
The brightest spot for decarbonization came, not surprisingly, with the wild success of solar energy. The power industry is building more gigawatts of solar than any other type of plant, and that construction pushed solar generation up by 34%.
“We did see a record year for solar generation last year — but for that, we would be in a much worse position from an emission standpoint,” King said.
However, solar is growing very fast from a small baseline, and on a national level, it still lags behind natural gas, nuclear, coal, and wind in total generation. Without the tremendous solar build-out, utilities might have burned even more coal. But solar alone couldn’t satisfy the growing demand for electricity last year.
Looking ahead at the durability of these trends, King said, “the question is, to what extent can policy actions continue to suppress that solar growth?”
Solar installations last year rolled forward on momentum created by supportive Biden-era policies. But the second Trump administration has taken numerous actions to block or slow renewable power plant construction. If those efforts succeed in slowing the pace of solar development, and power demand and gas prices remain high, the country could be on track for more emissions increases in the years to come.
Hyundai Motor Group is building a facility at an existing steel plant in South Korea to test out its technology to produce direct reduced iron before opening its flagship project in Louisiana.
Last week, the automaker announced plans for a pilot-scale DRI plant at its Dangjin Steelworks in South Chungcheong province, southwest of Seoul. The facility already operates a coal-fired blast furnace, a basic oxygen furnace, and an electric arc furnace, which makes steel from recycled scrap metal.
But DRI, a cleaner method of making iron that relies on gas or hydrogen to turn ore into iron, instead of a more polluting blast furnace, was until now missing from the mix. Construction on the DRI facility has already begun. Once it’s complete, the facility will have the capacity to produce 30 kilograms of molten iron per hour and will provide key technical data to help inform the future U.S. operation; by contrast, a typical blast furnace can produce tens of thousands of kilograms of molten iron per hour.
Reports in the Korean newspaper Chosun Biz and the trade publications Hydrogen Central and Fuel Cell Works indicate that the DRI pilot will use hydrogen as the fuel for the iron-making process. While it’s not clear what kind of hydrogen Hyundai plans to use in South Korea, the company has said its debut steel plant in Louisiana will depend, at least for the first few years, on blue hydrogen, the version of the fuel made with gas equipped with carbon-capture equipment. In the mid-2030s, however, Hyundai intends to swap blue hydrogen for the green version, made with electrolyzers powered by carbon-free electricity.
Hyundai did not respond to emailed questions from Canary Media.
The Louisiana project, set to come online by 2029, will be the most significant clean steel facility in the United States. Hyundai has invested heavily in the U.S. as the South Korean automaker faces increased competition in Asia from Chinese car companies. In the U.S., automotive manufacturers are the largest consumers of primary steel. Since President Donald Trump returned to office last year, American steelmakers have largely doubled down on older, dirtier methods of making the metal.
That’s a problem for automakers that have pledged to curb emissions. Hyundai, for instance, has a goal of carbon neutrality by 2045. To ensure a supply of clean steel, Hyundai is charging ahead with its own plant, despite recent challenges from the Trump administration.
“We’re taking the positive view that they’re making this investment in South Korea,” said Matthew Groch, senior director of decarbonization at the environmental group Mighty Earth. “This is a good sign that they’re committed to clean operations in Louisiana.”
BYTOM, Poland — Adam Drobniak pulled into the parking lot of a convenience store and stepped out of his sedan into the overcast afternoon. A coal mine just across the street cast dust into the air as conveyor belts sorted the shards of black, burnable rock. Down the road, a goliath coking plant belched fire and thick clouds of steam as its roaring ovens cooked off impurities in the coal to refine it for blast furnaces. The air smelled burnt, and it was difficult to tell whether the sky was gray from clouds or smoke. Drobniak took out a silver case from his pocket and flashed a mischievous smile as he withdrew a hand-rolled cigarette, then dangled it from his lips and touched the flame of an old-fashioned Zippo to the tip.
“I spent decades around this,” he said, motioning to the surrounding area. “How much more damage can it do?”
Bytom is located in Silesia, an ethnically distinct province in southern Poland and the European Union’s biggest coal-mining region. Silesia still produces millions of tons of coal annually and has been extracting it from the ground for hundreds of years. The first state-owned coal mine opened about 20 minutes southwest of Bytom in 1791, when the region was controlled by Prussia. Over the next two centuries, the area was transformed into a key node in Central Europe’s industrial supply chain, with the third-largest gross domestic product of any province in the region, behind only the Polish capital of Warsaw and the Romanian capital of Bucharest. Coal became a way of life.
Now Silesia is figuring out the least painful way to kill the coal industry.
An economist by training, Drobniak has become something of a doctor administering palliative care.
Over the past five years, Drobniak, who works at Poland’s University of Economics in Katowice, Silesia’s provincial capital, has partnered with labor unions, local officials, and industry leaders on a “just transition” plan to shift Silesia away from coal without abruptly destroying the livelihoods of thousands of people whose families have worked in the industry for generations, spanning kingdoms, republics, communism, and capitalism.
That plan, which seeks to capitalize on an economic transition already underway in Poland and give workers the time and resources to adjust, has become something of a model for neighboring countries such as Romania and Bulgaria, which are struggling with their own transition away from coal. And, though the plan faces pushback from EU policymakers in Brussels and shifting priorities in Warsaw as different parties vie for national power, Poland seems to be moving in the right direction. Across the province, new industries — from manufacturing to technology — are booming.
However, development has not been evenly distributed. The economic gap between cities such as Bytom and Katowice has more than doubled in the past three decades. While Katowice teems with new buildings and businesses, Bytom represents what Drobniak called the “worst case” for the transition, a corner of Silesia unusually entrenched in coal and suffering from high poverty and unemployment rates as the industry shrinks. The city has lost nearly a quarter of its population since the early 2000s, with residents leaving in pursuit of better opportunities elsewhere. Indeed, the coal mine that was cranking away when Drobniak and I visited Bytom this fall was set to close in December. Most of the miners there will likely transfer to other coal mines in Silesia.
As in many parts of Europe, wind turbines line the horizon on the drive into Silesia. Solar panels glimmer on old stone roofs. Poland is racing to build its first nuclear power plant and is inking deals with virtually every major small-modular-reactor vendor in the U.S. and the United Kingdom. The country is even carrying out drilling experiments to see whether geothermal heat could replace coal in its district heating system. It’s no wonder why: Poland’s coal phaseout is set to kick up a notch this year, even as electricity demand is rising. But the size, history, and Europe-wide importance of Silesia’s coal industry put the phaseout on a different scale — making the steps the region is taking to avoid upheaval for workers especially consequential.
The Silesian coal industry’s first brush with death came three decades ago.
In 1996, Poland enacted sector-wide reforms meant to consolidate mines and privatize state-owned enterprises as the country transformed after the fall of the Soviet Union. Over the course of just a few years, the number of jobs in the mining sector plunged by 356,000. After Poland joined the EU in 2004, its economy grew rapidly and employment in the coal sector partially recovered. But it dipped again, by tens of thousands of jobs, during the 2008 financial crisis and the 2020 pandemic.
Poland’s overall wealth expanded as the country integrated into the EU. But the relationship also brought tensions. As Brussels imposed increasingly strict targets to cut emissions from power plants and phase out coal, many countries built up renewables backed by natural-gas-fired plants. Pipelines stretching westward across Europe from the bloc’s eastern border soon flowed with gas molecules from Russia, one of the world’s biggest producers.
Poland was reluctant to follow suit. Centuries of fighting off invasions from the east — including four decades under Moscow’s control as a Soviet satellite — left Poles wary of depending on Russia for fuel. When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022 and started throttling Europe’s gas supply, Warsaw’s continued reliance on coal seemed, to some extent, vindicated. However, even as the conflict underscored the risks of Russian gas, surging electricity demand across the EU and looming emissions-cutting deadlines only emphasized the need for Poland to find new sources of power.
To Silesia’s coal miners, the end is looking inevitable.
“We are fighting for our lives here,” Krzysztof Stanisławski, a lifelong miner, told me when I visited the headquarters of the Kadra trade union, which represents many of the region’s coal workers. “It’s a big problem. We are fighting, and we are losing.”
But there are degrees of losing. In July, Drobniak and members of the Kadra union had visited the British city of Newcastle as part of a tour of the U.K.’s former coal-producing regions. The location was fitting. The city in northeastern England was once a coal-mining capital whose product fueled the first phase of the Industrial Revolution. But in the early 1980s, then–British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher incapacitated the coal unions as part of the Conservative Party’s crackdown on organized labor, and the steady push toward cleaner sources of power shrank the industry. The final coal mine near Newcastle closed in 2005.
“We visited Newcastle to learn about what we should avoid in the future,” Drobniak said. “There were very poor provisions to support the people there. We saw it physically. The Newcastle area just seemed very degraded.”
Hoping that Poland could avoid a similar fate, Drobniak had already helped broker a deal with the national and provincial governments to phase out coal in waves. The talks started in early 2020, when government regulators invited a group of economists to prepare a report on what a just transition away from coal could look like. The economists came out with recommendations in May of that year and promptly began work on a national strategy in June, all while drafting regional plans for provinces such as Silesia.
To start, the agreement promised benefits to keep coal workers solvent. Under the plan, which took effect in 2021, workers can access free training to transition to other lines of work while continuing to receive some compensation from their mining jobs.
Workers who opt to quit the mining industry for good are entitled to a one-time severance payout of 170,000 Polish zloty ($47,000). Miners who are within four years of retirement and leave early can count on a salary equivalent to 80% of their typical annual earnings.
The deal that Drobniak helped broker set a deadline of 2049 for Poland’s final coal operations to shut down, years later than in many other EU nations. Not everyone supported the idea. Poland’s reliance on coal has rendered its air some of the dirtiest in Europe, shaving an average of nine months off its citizens’ lives. Its per capita greenhouse gas emissions are the fifth-highest in the EU, and Brussels has continued to pressure Poland to speed up its transition. Meanwhile, Warsaw is bristling at spending more money to keep the coal sector’s operations going for another 23 years.
Over coffee and cookies at Kadra’s modest offices on the outskirts of Katowice, in the shadow of idle smokestacks from now-defunct coal-fired plants, Grzegorz Trefon, the union’s head of international affairs, recalled a famous speech Nikita Khrushchev gave at the Polish Embassy in 1956, in which the Soviet leader vowed to defeat the capitalist forces of the world through patient confidence that “history is on our side.”
“That’s what we want,” Trefon said. “We want to win by time.”
The reference to a reviled Russian ruler drew chuckles among his compatriots in the room. Dariusz Stankiewicz, the regional government’s lead specialist on the transition from coal, stepped in to clarify what Trefon meant.
“This shows that when we are facing this in a very slow manner, our economy can transform itself and produce new workplaces,” he said.
Between 2005 and 2022, Silesia lost 55,000 jobs in the mining sector, according to government data. But the region added 160,000 jobs in other sectors during that same 17-year time period.
“If we slow down the process, the economy can cope with this problem and produce new jobs,” Stankiewicz said. “This is why I support this very slow phasing-out process.”
In Bytom, poverty is entwined with pollution. Men looking older than their years, with sinewy muscles and tattoo-covered torsos, arrive shirtless at the grocer to buy cases of beer or vodka after finishing midday shifts at the mine. Across the street from the coking plant, women visibly solicit customers for sex from the stoops of Soviet-era apartment blocks. Drobniak warned me to be ready to run if anyone seemed to be eyeing my camera.
A roughly half-hour drive east, on the northeast side of Katowice, is a neighborhood with similar-looking buildings but a dramatically different vibe. The cobblestone streets and old brick buildings of the Nikiszowiec Historic Mining District hark back to an earlier era when this part of the region was powdered with coal dust and ash from active mines and industrial sites.
Today, however, the district is spotless and filled with local tourists who come to see hockey games at its indoor rink, eat at upscale restaurants, and shop at its art galleries. A facility that once contained a major coal mine now serves as a hub for video game developers.
“This was not a place that people wanted to come to,” Drobniak said. “Now it’s hard to get a table at the restaurants here on a Friday night.”
Both Warsaw and Brussels have contributed to Katowice’s advancement over the past 20 years, as has celebrity academic Philip Zimbardo, the American social psychologist best known for the Stanford Prison Experiment, whose international work eventually led him to set up a nonprofit called the Heroic Imagination Project in the historic district in 2014. That organization worked to create employment opportunities for young people, and as conditions improved, the EU gave the city a grant of 200 million euros ($235 million) to help revamp industrial buildings for modern uses.
The starkest transformation, however, may be in the city center, where the newer industries that Silesia has attracted have flocked. While mining once accounted for more than half of the province’s gross domestic product, it now makes up a third, as factories producing automobiles, machinery, and electronics have popped up. Gleaming new office towers brandishing the logos of multinational consultancies rise between older brick buildings. Modern luxury condos with architecture one might expect in Miami or Tel Aviv but not Central Europe take up entire blocks of an otherwise quaint city. A grass-covered park swoops down to a vast, futuristic stadium built in the Soviet times. Once an area where coal was gouged from the ground, it is now a gathering space for entertainment and corporate events — part of why Katowice was recognized last year as Poland’s best city to live in.
But Katowice remains small compared with larger cities such as Warsaw and Krakow. To Drobniak, the future of Silesia should look something like Seoul or Tokyo.
A few years ago, researchers proposed the concept of the Metropolis GZM, short for Górnośląsko-Zagłębiowska Metropolia. Rather than a piecemeal approach to developing new industries in the patchwork of former coal-mining hubs that dot central Silesia, Metropolis GZM would unite the urban areas into one, interconnected with railways, bike paths, and corridors of tall buildings.
“In the entire surrounding area, we have about 2.5 million people,” Drobniak said. “We would be the biggest city in Poland.”
Merging would help solve one of the trickier elements of the transition. Bringing the entire region under one municipal planning organization would, in theory, help find ways to bridge the divide between thriving cities like Katowice and declining hinterlands like Bytom.
“People are afraid that they’ll lose their identities because they are connected by generations not with Katowice but with other cities like Bytom,” Drobniak said. “We’d like to put the discussion on a different level and say, ‘There is no Katowice. It will be something new.’ We don’t know what will be the name of this urban structure. But this is a must. We must do this. If not, we will be fragmented and separated, and the metro areas of Krakow and Wroclaw will attract young people from us.”
The critical thing, Drobniak said, is to revive the economy rather than push residents to leave, keeping the youths and workers who draw new industries and stemming the decline of Bytom and other cities.
In former American coal-mining hubs in Appalachia, such as West Virginia, generations of families remain entrenched despite the downward trajectory of the industry and the dangers of a polluted environment. But those roots are shallow compared with Poland’s, said Trefon. Miners in Silesia can trace their families in local history nearly twice as far back as 1777, when the U.S. was founded.
“My family lives here. There are churches with my relatives’ names going back 400 years,” he said. “That’s why we have so much connection to this land. It’s not possible to find another place to remake the mining industry. But we need to find a sustainable way for the development of new economic activity that will stay here.”
It might seem like a dicey time for building decarbonization in the U.S., where edifices and the energy they consume account for about a third of the nation’s annual carbon pollution.
Republicans in Congress have cancelled tax credits that would have helped households save big on clean energy upgrades. The Trump administration is dismantling federal building-decarbonization policies and trying to block states and cities from setting rules that restrict fossil fuel use in homes and businesses. Even some Democrats who once championed such mandates U-turned last year: Los Angeles’ mayor repealed an ordinance that most new construction go all-electric, and New York’s governor delayed a similar statewide law previously slated to go into effect last week.
These are very real headwinds, but they’re not the whole story. Several key barometers suggest that building decarbonization is poised to pick up speed as consumers grow more worried about energy affordability, installers get familiar with electric tech, and policymakers and building owners alike recognize the health, comfort, and financial benefits of ditching fossil fuels.
Let’s dive into seven indicators — and a few bonus figures — that show why the momentum behind climate-friendly buildings may be unstoppable.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the consumer price index for piped gas ballooned more than twice as fast as that for electricity, and nearly four times as fast as overall inflation for all tracked items. That makes utility gas one of the leading causes of inflation, which could give customers pause on whether to depend on the fuel in the future.
The price surge is partly thanks to the fact that the U.S. has been increasing its exports of liquefied natural gas, squeezing the domestic fuel supply and driving up costs at home, said Panama Bartholomy, executive director of the nonprofit Building Decarbonization Coalition.
Gas customers are also shouldering growing infrastructure costs. Utilities have massively ramped up gas-system spending since the 2010s — a result of increased safety investments in response to some high-profile explosions that decade, as well as a sense of urgency stoked by state climate laws, Bartholomy said.
“Many [utilities] view this as a race against time,” he noted in a December interview. “We now have 15 states since 2020 that have started future-of-gas proceedings, where they’re actually [taking] a regulatory approach to how they’re going to wind down the gas system in their state.”
In utility territories across 46 states and Washington, D.C., existing gas customers cover the cost of hooking up new customers to the system. The fees add up to $2 billion to $7 billion each year, according to an August 2025 analysis by the Building Decarbonization Coalition.
Policymakers and utilities in six states have reformed these “line extension allowances” to stop incentivizing growth of the gas system as well as to lower customer bills. Of the six, California, Colorado, and New York have eliminated the subsidies statewide. Another six states and D.C. are considering ending them.
Putting an end to gas-hookup subsidies is a fast-acting affordability measure, Bartholomy said. “States [that] stop subsidies in 2026 … are going to save people money in 2027.”
The majority of homes — both single- and multifamily abodes — are now built with electric heating, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. That’s a big change over the last decade for single-family homes especially; in 2015, 60% were equipped with gas or propane heating, and just 39% were heated electrically.
Among multifamily buildings, electrically heated units accounted for 63% of new construction in 2015. In 2024, the share rose to 76%.
The agency doesn’t break down how many newly built homes have super-efficient heat pumps. But the next stat shows that the appliances are increasingly popular.
Heat pumps beat out gas furnaces (3.1 million shipped in 2024) by their biggest margin ever, 32%, that year, according to data from the industry trade group Air-Conditioning, Heating, and Refrigeration Institute. The numbers for 2025 through October, the latest available, show heat pumps in the lead yet again.
These appliances, which provide both heating and cooling, are also steadily gobbling up the market share of conventional air conditioners. In 2015, ACs outsold heat pumps by two-to-one. By 2024, the gap had shrunk to 35%, with ACs still pulling ahead.
Bartholomy of the Building Decarbonization Coalition predicts that margin could shrink to just 20% in 2026.
Lawmakers in 13 states have approved bills that encourage gas utilities to reinvent themselves as utilities that provide carbon-free thermal energy instead of fossil gas. Some of these laws require gas companies to pilot thermal energy networks, which can decarbonize entire neighborhoods at once by replacing gas pipeline systems. Others unlock financing or establish regulatory frameworks that allow utilities to recover costs for these projects from customers.
Thermal energy networks that make use of geothermal heat, found tens to hundreds of feet deep, are also the rare climate solution that the federal government is incentivizing. Geothermal networks are eligible for a tax credit of 30% to 50% until 2033. The appliances that harvest underground heat and store it for later — geothermal heat pumps and thermal batteries — qualify for the tax credit, too, as long as eligible commercial customers lease instead of purchase these products.
“In many states, we’re seeing this lease [structure] as a real tipping point, where geothermal becomes less expensive than the status quo for the builders,” Dan Yates, CEO of geothermal heat-pump startup Dandelion Energy, told Canary Media last year.
That’s according to a survey released in January 2025 by the ACHR News. The same survey revealed that 71% of heating, ventilation, and air conditioning installers expect heat pumps to make up a larger fraction of projects in the next three years. Just 61% thought so the year before.
Contractors may be responding to warming consumer sentiment. About nine out of 10 heat-pump owners would recommend the tech to others, and a growing number of homeowners (32% in 2024 versus 23% in 2023) report having a good understanding of what these systems are, per a survey published in February 2025 by manufacturer Mitsubishi Electric Trane.
Innovation in some contractor businesses could also help the tech gain traction. One vertically integrated startup, Jetson, says it’s cutting the cost of heat-pump installations in half.
That nugget comes from the National Kitchen & Bath Association’s 2025 Kitchen Trends Report, according to a September Forbes story.
“I’m a big fan of induction,” Amy Chernoff, vice president of marketing at national retailer AJ Madison, told Forbes. Compared with gas cooking, an induction stove “keeps your kitchen cooler, it’s easier to clean, better for the environment, and much safer for households with children.”
The above numbers reveal how the markets for efficient, electric equipment — nudged along by policy — are steadily transforming. Let’s see if consumers, contractors, developers, advocates, and policymakers can keep up the building-decarbonization momentum in 2026.
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