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This is Heatmap Daily, an evening news digest written by our executive editor. Subscribe here. Happy Monday and welcome back. It’s been a big weekend: I’m fairly certain Saturday Night Live mentioned Heatmap’s data center polling in one of its Weekend Update segments over the weekend. Watch here. There are 22 days to the midterm elections here in the United States. We’ll soon enter that pre-election wormhole where only national politics can break through. So today I wanted to look at a story that might, on its face, seem like it has nothing to do with climate or energy. And warning: It’s a little bit of a weird one. Last week, OpenAI released what it described as the solution to more than 700 open problems in mathematics. Many of the problems, such as the Quasi-Riemann hypothesis, had gone unsolved for decades. Some of the solutions came with proofs written in the programming language Lean. The release made a stir in part because OpenAI had reached the solutions by using an internal model — that is, a version of ChatGPT not yet open to the general public. In a statement, the Association for Human Mathematics lambasted OpenAI for using an internal model to do research, violating what it described as a precept of AI-driven math research. (I’ve since seen speculation that OpenAI may not have even meant to solve the problems, but gave them to the internal model as a test … and then got the answers.) It’s also not clear whether all of OpenAI’s 700 solutions are correct — in many cases the proofs are so intricate that mathematicians are still wrapping their heads around them. “There are some sad stories related to their users getting scooped [and] conflicts of interest,” Levent Alpöge, a mathematician at Anthropic, posted on X. “It’s obviously the most significant moment in mathematical history.” On Friday night, the UCLA mathematician Terence Tao gave a pre-planned lecture at Caltech about what he called “Math 2.0”; it considered the revolution the field had seemingly undergone in the previous few days. (He posted the slides to his blog over the weekend, and I’m using them to summarize his talk here.) For most of math’s history, he said, the field operated under “proof scarcity,” in which finding a solution to an open math problem and confirming it as true was “difficult and rare,” requiring “significant human expertise.” But AI, it has turned out, is well suited to solving math problems. This is partly because math, like the large language models themselves, is entirely conceptual, so confirming a proof as true requires no recourse to the physical. But it’s also because math’s solutions are “objectively verifiable”: “There is broad consensus on what constitutes a correct and complete proof of a given problem,” and thanks to the existence of proof programming languages like Lean, they can even be checked by computer. The end result is that math is now entering a world of “proof abundance,” he said. That is, perhaps surprisingly, a problem for math’s practitioners, and it will mandate a new intellectual regime for the discipline. Mathematicians have often used open problems as “lighthouses,” Tao wrote, “not destinations to be reached … but useful guides to explore the mathematical landscape.” Mathematicians often learn more in the solving than in the solution, in other words. But if mathematicians can now generate shortcuts to math problems without knowing how they got there, or even how the problem works, then actual human mathematical understanding will suffer. (One way to understand this is that mathematicians are now dealing with the same problem that math teachers have faced since the invention of the pocket calculator: How do you confirm students actually understand the material? Except the world’s most elite mathematicians themselves are the students in question.) This disconnect can pose its own AI alignment problems, Tao said, analogizing math to pharmaceuticals. Suppose an advanced AI found what appears to be a cure for cancer that can pass a stage 3 clinical trial: “After a large amount of compute, it produces a cocktail of previously unknown chemicals which it claims, when mixed and injected into a patient, will kill all their cancer cells,” he said. It even generates a programmatic proof of the cocktail’s effectiveness. “Before injecting this cocktail into your bloodstream,” he asked, “would you find it reassuring to know that there is at least one human cancer expert who understands — even partially — the mechanism behind this cure?” If not, you can see mathematicians’ problem, confronted by a surfeit of proofs that seem to work, but nobody who can explain how or why they do. Now, Tao’s analogy is somewhat peculiar because something like this actually does happen all the time in medicine: Doctors still don’t fully understand how many drugs work, including acetaminophen, SSRIs, and lithium. (That said, those compounds were identified by trial and error, not by a mechanical superintelligence.) But the broader situation that Tao is painting — as well as the crisis posed by OpenAI’s 700 proofs — get at a significant question with economic importance far beyond just math: Will AI solve the economy’s secular attention shortage or worsen it? This question has greater import than it may seem — but let me qualify what I mean by “attention shortage.” Writing in 1971, the economist Herber Simon observed the sudden superabundance of information that had exploded in every economic domain. There were more facts, data, news articles, and opportunities than any individual or organization knew what to do with. He pointed out that this newfound “wealth” of information implied an insufficiency of something else: attention. “What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients,” he wrote in Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World. “Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.” He wrote this, of course, well before the advent of internet, smartphones, sensors, or networked cameras — all of which have worsened the problem. But in the ensuing half century, the economy has learned to deal (or at least intermittently manage) this secular scarcity of attention. Much of what we now call knowledge work is devoted to filtering, siphoning, processing, and otherwise attending to the information superabundance. AI is, in theory, supposed to help address this same set of problems. AI is commodified attention — or, at least, that is its promise. (The most important machine learning paper of the past decade, after all, is entitled “Attention Is All You Need.”) Many AI products, such as Meta’s Muse, now want you to believe that by ceding control of your email, your calendar, your restaurant reservations, and your digital life to AI, you will gain an attentional edge. The AI will do the grunt-work of attending to boring things for you, and you will feel less overwhelmed. If this vision comes true, the economy’s mismatch of information and attention will prove to be a short-lived historical blip. But the past week of math news and Tao’s “Math 2.0” regime suggest a different scenario is more likely, at least in the immediate near term. By allowing far faster and more automated information production, AI will create a new, more vicious, and even more abstract form of information overload. Every profession and intellectual discipline will be overwhelmed with new papers, ideas, observations, proofs, or choices. Yet the human understanding required to convert this new information into useful action will become even more scarce. In such a world, AI will not solve the economy’s attention shortage, but worsen it. I’m not sure which world would be worse for humanity, to be candid. One world suggests the eventual automation of all human effort. But in Tao’s world, many of us might still have jobs — they will just involve even more filtering, sorting, and processing of an ever-deepening pile of automated idea generation than we do today. And what is the connection to climate and energy? One easy connection might be to the permitting process: If you think a new transit line (at the local level) or transmission line (at the state or federal level) could be overwhelmed with procedural concerns 10 years ago, wait until you see what happens when information itself can be mechanically produced. But that is only one example of a more general problem. Soon, if not already, any process of providing input to an important policy question — on energy, decarbonization, or anything else — will be overwhelmed with facially high-quality analysis. It will be left to policy officials and elected leaders to sort through it.

California has around 3,400 miles of shoreline, ranging from the wild, foggy beaches of the North Coast to the sunbather-studded sands of Orange and San Diego counties. That’s a whole lot of border to share with the Pacific Ocean, especially when the water is as hot and tempestuous a neighbor as it is right now. Just ask the city of Long Beach, which this weekend was on the receiving end of some Super El Niño mischief. Swells from the storm briefly dubbed Hurricane Rachel “annihilated” beachfront mansions and flooded city streets, causing pieces of the local boardwalk to “shred away.” “It’s never happened like this before,” one resident of 64 years told the New York Post. But while things might look bad in California at the moment, they can still get much worse. One disaster modeler recently estimated the state could see as much as $3 billion in flooding and mudslide-related losses alone this winter — not to mention coastal erosion, king tides, and storm swell. Governor Gavin Newsom declared a state of emergency at the end of September, while many cities, including San Diego, have declared their own local emergencies. El Niño will likely peak in December, meaning that towns and cities across the state have just a few remaining weeks to finalize projects, whether that means improving drainage in landslide-prone environments such as Rancho Palos Verdes or distributing NOAA weather radios in areas likely to lose power, as emergency managers are in Santa Cruz. The approaching winter storms, combined with El Niño, represent “a humbling reminder of the ongoing effects of climate change and the importance of emergency preparedness,” Laath Martin, the public affairs lead for the city of Long Beach, wrote to me in an email. El Niño is a cyclical phenomenon, occurring when temperatures in a particular stretch of the Pacific Ocean rise half-a-degree Celsius above the average of the preceding 30 years. But there are signs these natural variations are happening less predictably because of climate change, and we know for sure that a warmer atmosphere makes the baseline for its impacts worse: king tides, Kelvin waves, and storm surge piggyback on top of rising sea levels to result in more severe coastal flooding and erosion. A warmer atmosphere also holds more water, which means more rain — perhaps 200% above normal — which, in turn, results in flooding and mudslides further inland, as well. “Based on what I am seeing now, I am officially concerned,” Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources, said last week after reviewing the latest outlook. There’s a reason this year’s El Niño is being called a Godzilla. In general, the weather pattern causes the jet stream to shift south in the winter, bringing wetter and snowier conditions to the lower U.S. while the northern part of the country stays drier and mild. (It’s also responsible for a weaker Atlantic hurricane season, as we’ve already seen this year.) In addition to El Niño-driven Kelvin waves, warm bulges of water that raise the sea level on the coast by as much as 18 inches, the state of California — and particularly southern California — sits directly in a storm track that will deliver “atmospheric rivers” of heavy rain to a region prone to landslides and flash floods. In many parts of the state, that rain will test the best-made plans in addition to plans deferred. In Los Angeles, the Department of Sanitation and Environment, or LASAN, has told the City Council it has concerns about the ability of the aging wastewater pipes and plants to handle heavy rainfall associated with a supercharged El Niño. In San Diego, which requires some $3.3 billion to upgrade what is in some places a century-old wastewater system, emergency managers are preparing to work with what they have by clearing debris and brush that could back up in the drains, CalMatters reports. In both cases, the time required for systemwide repairs far exceeds the time remaining before the winter’s supercharged atmospheric rivers are due to arrive. (Rezende told me inland flooding affects more businesses and residents in San Diego than coastal flooding, since the population in the city is set further back from the coastline.) The city of Roseville, northeast of Sacramento, by contrast, is leaning on decades of flood planning to get through the season. After a series of back-to-back storms in 1986 that killed 13 people and caused $400 million in damage, the city and FEMA invested $39 million to upgrade Roseville’s infrastructure, including widening streams and adding levees and stormwater bypass channels. With more accurate floodplain modeling that has “helped keep new construction at higher elevations,” Helen Dyda, the city manager’s public information officer told me that “less than 7% of the city is within a floodplain” today. Dyda added that the city prepares for winter storms every year — it has some 160 miles of creek shoreline, after all — but that the El Niño-specific preparations are, as a result, more similar to routine maintenance: “clearing more dense vegetation and fallen trees from key creek areas.” Long Beach is caught somewhere in the middle. After swells from Hurricanes Marie and Polo hammered the city in September, Long Beach hastily developed a seven-point plan to strengthen its peninsula in the near and long term. It will also begin a $11.4 million dredging project this fall that will place 415,000 cubic yards of sand on the beach as a buffer zone. “While this effort will achieve a much-desired result, it will not stop the ocean from pulling sand from the peninsula with every wave, especially during the significant weather systems Long Beach continues to experience,” Martin, the city’s public affairs lead, wrote to me. “Back-passing will need to continue to return sand back to the peninsula each day until more permanent, long-term man-made and environmental solutions can be identified, permitted and implemented.” In certain cities, preparations for the peak of El Niño overlap with ongoing repairs from the last bad storm season. In Santa Cruz County, the 2016 El Niño caused an estimated $9 million in damage, while many in the community of Pajaro are still recovering from the flood damage caused by a series of severe atmospheric rivers in 2023. “We have a list of hazards that the city is vulnerable to, and we plan for all of them not individually, but all together,” Meredith Albert, Santa Cruz’s emergency management manager, told me. She added that many of the city’s preparedness activities and El Niño initiatives, like urging the community to be prepared to spend 72 hours unsupported, overlap with other disasters it works year-round to prepare for, like earthquakes, landslides, and wildfires. “El Niño turns up the volume a little bit, but it doesn’t necessarily change our hazard landscape,” is how Albert put it to me. Santa Cruz has not declared a local state of emergency, and Albert told me they won’t until they “run out of resources.” Other cities, like San Diego, have declared one preemptively. “In the past, you’d have to go through a longer review if you wanted to make some headway on projects, and sometimes that would take many weeks or many months of permitting,” Rezende said. “With a state of emergency, we streamline that process and get projects in the queue.” Both Rezende and Albert told me the governor's statewide emergency declaration mostly helps state agencies position themselves for a faster response or has implications for higher-level permitting processes. (In Carlsbad, for example, which has seven miles of badly eroding beach, just one mile is controlled by the city; the other six are managed by the State Parks.) The state has also teamed up with ICEYE, a satellite imaging company, to receive information about flooding even in the dark or through rain clouds. No state of emergency, though, can make it so a city can replace a century-old sewer system by Christmas or reengineer a beach by the time January’s storms begin to make landfall. But if a Godzilla analogy fits the onslaught of a super El Niño, it also offers a classic disaster-movie lesson on how to survive it. Albert’s advice for how to prepare? Ask a neighbor for a cup of sugar. Take their dog for a walk. Build a relationship that could prevent a tragedy. “We know that our city will be cut off for at least a couple of days,” she told me of a hypothetical major disaster, referring back to Santa Cruz’s experience after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, which cut off the city’s power, communication, and supply lines. “And we also know that we can’t build those relationships during the disaster. We’re trying to build them before.” The city is doing a lot to prepare for the storm, she said. “But the question is also, what are all of us doing?” Albert went on. “You know better than I do, at the city level, who’s not going to receive that alert,” whether that be an elderly or unhoused neighbor or a nonnative English speaker who might not receive or understand emergency communications. “Check in on a neighbor” is easier said than done — active engagement and connection to one’s community is trending downward in most parts of the U.S. But the people and places that bounce back from disaster and tragedy are almost uniformly the ones that look after each other. Borrowing a cup of sugar, to this introvert, sounds like a nightmare. But there’s never been a better time than a Godzilla El Niño to bake a poorly resourced cake.

Current conditions: Japan is bracing for two major storms as Typhoon Nolo and the newly formed Typhoon Koguma barrel toward the country • A brief heat wave in Chicago is driving temperatures up past 85 degrees Fahrenheit today • It’s a sunny day in San Salvador Island, where the Genoan explorer Christopher Columbus first set foot in the Americas exactly 534 years ago today, when the indigenous Lucayan people called the smallest inhabited part of the Bahamas “Guanahani.” ## THE TOP FIVE ### 1. A trio of powerful storms slam into North America In the Gulf of Mexico, Hurricane Isaias plunged thousands along the Alabama and Florida coastlines into darkness and left at least four dead. In the Pacific off Southern California, Tropical Storm Rachel stirred a surf that badly battered Long Beach’s iconic boardwalk. Further south in the eastern Pacific, Hurricane Simon pounded Mexico’s west coast as a Category 4 storm with sustained winds topping 150 miles per hour. Isaias, the only one of the tempête a trois in the Atlantic, forced nearly two-thirds of U.S. oil and gas production in the Gulf offline, as I told you last week. The storm threatened to put further pressure on the fuel market as refineries went on pause. But in a post on his Truth Social platform Friday, President Donald Trump announced a surprise deal with Russian President Vladimir Putin to lift Moscow’s restrictions on diesel exports and release nearly 2 million tons of the fuel onto the market. “This is a very big and important announcement,” he wrote. On Sunday, the U.S. president posted another update that, “effectively immediate, there is an ENERGY CEASEFIRE” in the war between Russia and Ukraine, insisting “both parties have agreed.” Whether that holds longer than the last so-called energy ceasefire Trump claimed to have brokered between the two sides remains to be seen. Either way, it didn’t stop the Houthis from twice striking the main airport in Riyadh over the weekend, killing at least a dozen and injuring hundreds amid an oil industry summit in the Saudi capital, the Saudi Arabia-based Arab News reported. ### 2. A House climate hawk sees permitting reform’s defenders as a ‘red flag’ Representative Jared Huffman, a progressive climate hawk from California, wants you to know that he sees your breathless defenses of the bipartisan permitting reform bill and considers them a red flag. “It’s going to be very interesting for everyone to take stock after this election and think about what it means,” he told my colleague Jael Holzman in an interview we published this morning. “I was immediately attacked by right-wing Twitter and some of the boosters of this deal for simply saying, let’s see how this election goes. To me, that’s common sense! And no one is going to vote on this until after the election, anyway! The hypersensitivity tells you something.” When Jael asked what, exactly, it tells him, he responded: “There’s this choreographed attempt to preemptively flood the zone and prevent any kind of serious scrutiny about this. I think it should be a red flag for my colleagues and serious policymakers to have an attempt to shut down serious scrutiny and debate, or pretend there’ll never be another deal and this one can never be improved, and that it’s now or never or nothing. That’s just fishy and not intellectually honest.” ### 3. Exclusive: Automakers are propping up demand for Europe’s coal-fired steel, report shows After construction, automakers buy the most steel of any industry. That makes car companies key factors in how eagerly steelmakers decarbonize. In January, research by the climate advocacy group Mighty Earth concluded that roughly 60% of primary steel made in the U.S. went to automakers who had promised to support greener steel but remained top customers for the metal made from coal-fired blast furnaces. Now the group is out with a new analysis on the European Union, shared exclusively with me for this newsletter, that traced purchases of coal from blast furnaces in France, Spain, Germany, and Italy to vehicles made by Ford, General Motors, Honda, Stellantis, Tata Motors, Toyota, and Volkswagen. “We always talk about how Europe is leading the charge on green steel, which is true,” Matthew Groch, the senior director of decarbonization at Mighty Earth, told me. “But when you are looking at where these auto companies are being ranked, Europe is still falling behind.” The report proved more challenging than the U.S.-based research given that, in the EU, “it’s a little tougher because, with the common market, they don’t track the actual shipments like we were able to do with anything coming into the U.S.” Still, he said, the team was able to track the commercial relationships through things such as awards given out for “supplier of the year.” What the report ultimately suggests is that advocates of greener steel should seek to pressure shareholders in major automakers on both sides of the Atlantic to clean up their supply chains to spur more demand for lower-carbon materials. Sign up to receive Heatmap AM in your inbox every morning: ### 4. Kazakhstan’s uranium giant approves a Chinese deal and rejects a Russia one An old uranium mine in Stepnogorsk, Kazakhstan. Robert Nickelsberg/Getty Images Long one of the world’s top producers of uranium, Kazakhstan faced a choice with major geopolitical implications earlier this year when the Central Asian giant selected bids to build its first nuclear power station. Astana split the difference between its two powerful neighbors, inking a deal for a Chinese nuclear plant in February and another for a Russian atomic power station in March. The shareholders of the state-owned Kazatomprom, Kazakhstan’s state nuclear and uranium company, are proving less diplomatic. The firm’s stockholders voted by nearly 89% to approve a deal to supply uranium to China’s State Nuclear Uranium Resource Development Company, according to an official tally on Kazatomprom’s website. At the same general meeting, which NucNet called “extraordinary,” a deal to supply Russia’s Uranium One died with roughly 88% abstaining. Kazakhstan has drawn unprecedented distance between itself and Moscow since the start of the Ukraine war, which Astana refused to back even though the Kremlin had helped quell domestic unrest in its Central Asian neighbor just weeks before the 2022 invasion. Beyond increased investment from China, Kazakhstan has attracted more interest from the United States, as critical mineral prospectors such as Cove Capital look to expand across the region. ### 5. China tees up two historic firsts for green hydrogen China ramped up investments in hydrogen and its derivative products, such as green methanol and ammonia, late last year when the central government opened its budget for the first time to directly subsidizing an industry hitherto left to the provinces. The timing proved prescient as the Iran War put the squeeze on China’s crude imports and further accelerated the shift toward more domestic electricity-based resources. Two stories over the weekend show just how swiftly progress is underway. On Friday, Hydrogen Insight reported that the world’s first green ammonia-powered dry bulk vessel had set sail on its maiden voyage from a shipyard in China to Australia. Then, on Sunday, China Hydrogen Bulletin, a newsletter written by analyst Jian Wu, highlighted that China’s first long-distance pipeline dedicated to green hydrogen was approaching its first trial run. ## THE KICKER Four-hour stage compares very well to open-cycle gas turbines, labeled OCGT. Wood Mackenzie In markets with a lot of wind and solar, there tends to be a lot of gas to serve as backup and keep the lights on when the weather can’t. But batteries are rapidly getting cheaper. Four-hour battery storage is now less expensive than open-cycle gas turbines in all 43 markets where both technologies were modeled, according to a new Wood Mackenzie analysis published last week. “This economic shift is decisive and widening,” Ahmed Jameel Abdullah, principal analyst at Wood Mackenzie, said in a statement. “Gas turbine shortages and rising fuel volatility are driving up peaking costs, while expanding battery manufacturing continues to push storage costs down.” A word of caution: The report is comparing levelized cost of energy, a metric that — while popular — has some real problems, as my colleague Matthew Zeitlin wrote last year.

The most important voice in Congress criticizing the Senate’s bipartisan energy permitting deal is Representative Jared Huffman. A California Democrat who previously worked in environmental legal advocacy, Huffman has long been among the most impassioned lawmakers on climate issues. Under the first Trump administration, his voice was often the loudest calling for oversight and accountability on energy and climate policy. Under the second Trump administration, he has been a spirited defender of offshore wind. Should Democrats take control of the U.S. House of Representatives in the coming midterm elections, as expected, then Huffman is first in line to become chair of the lower chamber’s Natural Resources Committee. This makes him one of the few people able to armchair quarterback permitting talks in Congress right now. The proposed legislation currently on the table, known as the Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act, or BAAJA, would fundamentally reshape how federal project permitting happens. It would constrain National Environmental Policy Act reviews. It would radically alter transmission approvals. It would let companies sue the government for damages if they can show that an agency was unduly discriminating against them based on fuel type. It would limit state and tribal authority to object against projects under the Clean Water Act. And it would make this whole process more transparent by instituting digital reporting requirements. Huffman thinks it also gives too much benefit to oil and gas interests, and is an unnecessary capitulation to fossil-friendly Republicans who will likely lose power in this November’s midterm elections, anyway. He wants Democratic lawmakers to wait until after election day to consider what they do with the bill. I reported on Congress for years and often spoke with Huffman in the Capitol hallways; he knew me on a first-name basis. So last week, when a friend pointed me to a tweet of his criticizing the Senate bill by quoting my writing, I took note. His issue concerned the discrimination provision in the bill, which sets a rolling five-year average for approvals as a baseline for what constitutes normal regulatory behavior. Successful lawsuits under this provision would be paid out of the Judgment Fund, a Justice Department account Trump has used for his offshore wind developer buyouts. This part of the bill, Huffman wrote, “might pay some clean energy developers money from the judgment fund when they are screwed, but nothing to actually approve their projects. This is potentially a replay of the fake settlements that have bought out offshore wind projects,” he added. I reached out to Huffman’s team and asked to talk about what he meant by that. What followed was a 20-plus-minute back-and-forth about the future of permitting reform in the U.S. and what may happen after a midterm election defined by public anger over a rush to build another type of large-scale infrastructure: data centers. The following transcript has been lightly edited for clarity. So let’s start with your tweet. You quoted a portion of our story about BAAJA that I had written about the “permitting certainty” provisions in the bill, and specifically the fact that developers could be awarded damages under the bill for discriminatory treatment. Could you elaborate on your point? I don’t want to get too deep into the weeds, but this is the big thing being offered as an end to the war on clean energy, which was always the threshold matter before you get to a bipartisan permitting deal. It is built on this framework, basically, of cutting checks from the judgment fund. And I believe that requires some close scrutiny and consideration because we have seen this gamed already to the tune of $4 billion to buy out offshore wind developers. Well I know this can get quite technical, but the underlying point you were making was, this may not be as helpful as people think. I guess I was just wondering if you can you walk me through — It depends what you want. If you’re a clean energy developer and you’re worried about your shareholders and your balance sheet, this gives you at least some money when you get screwed. And it may come with some strings attached, like you have to turn around and invest it in [liquified natural gas]. That’s been the playbook from the Trump administration. If you’re a clean energy CEO — some of them, at least — that helps you mitigate risk. That’s probably better than nothing and will be attractive to some people. But if you care about climate policy [and] whether this is a meaningful assurance of permitting certainty to renewables, I think there’s a lot more to question here. You also said in your tweet that there’s nothing in the bill to get projects approved. Can you speak to that? Because those who negotiated it clearly say otherwise. Well, there are shot clocks and all sorts of other things that are designed to speed things up. There’s also broad categories of exemptions — categorical exemptions and other things like that, most of which will benefit fossil fuel projects. I have no doubt there’s going to be permitting acceleration and certainty for fossil fuel projects. You also have this five-year baseline mechanism being codified here that will further cement a high level of fossil fuel projects for many years to come, and will really operate as a ceiling. Help me understand what you mean by that, because I’m interested in understanding your concern there. People are going to want to look at this much more closely and think about how it’ll operate in practice, not just some model. Because in practice, Trump is going to keep doing exactly what he’s done for the last two years. He’s going to find ways not to permit renewables, even if some of them go through this new gauntlet of legal theories and challenges and at the end of the day get a check written to them from the judgment fund. You make this point about models versus reality. I spent last week trying to understand the implications of the bill for the nation’s buildout of AI data centers and associated energy infrastructure. How do you see that data center conversation weighing on your evaluation of the bill? It’s part of the context, for sure. It’s driving a lot of this — we have to be honest about that. This is about data centers and pipelines and grid improvements necessary to meet all this surging demand that’s mostly coming from data centers. That’s not to say we don’t need a more functional and robust grid. We do. Whatever you think about AI and data centers, we do need that. I’m not going to hold up a chance to improve our grid just because I have big concerns about data centers. I am concerned about how all this huge demand for energy in the next few years is going to be met. If we are stacking the deck for fossil fuel to meet a lot of this demand, that is deeply non-responsive to the climate crisis. In terms of “stacking the deck,” passing the bill or not passing the bill — which reality is a cleaner grid and cleaner buildout of these data centers? I mean, I would love to give you an absolute answer to that, but it depends. It depends how you assume this is going to play out in practice. Looking at the conversations around the bill and considerations about federal permitting, as well as the politics, I’m struck by this timeline we’ve found ourselves in. Over the next month, voters will be hearing about data centers, which is something they don’t want in their communities, per polling. They also will be hearing about energy prices, which people want to bring down. Faced with those two different signals, I’m wondering how any kind of lame duck conversation about permitting happens after those two signals land in the ballot box. It’s going to be very interesting for everyone to take stock after this election and think about what it means. I was immediately attacked by right-wing Twitter and some of the boosters of this deal for simply saying, let’s see how this election goes. To me, that’s common sense! And no one is going to vote on this until after the election, anyway! The hypersensitivity tells you something. What does it tell you? There’s this choreographed attempt to preemptively flood the zone and prevent any kind of serious scrutiny about this. I think it should be a red flag for my colleagues and serious policymakers to have an attempt to shut down serious scrutiny and debate, or pretend there’ll never be another deal and this one can never be improved, and that it’s now or never or nothing. That’s just fishy and not intellectually honest. I’m not on the Hill as much anymore, which means I don’t see you as often. But in my many years covering Congress, I can’t tell you how many times I’d ask your late colleague from Arizona, former House Natural Resources Chairman Raul Grijalva, about his conversations with former Senate Energy and Natural Resources Chairman Joe Manchin. I’m not going to sit here and expect you to read the minds of senators any more than I would expect senators to read the minds of House members. But can you, someone known as a climate champion, speak to how things are going with Senators Sheldon Whitehouse and Martin Heinrich, two people also respected in the climate community, when it comes to your reservations about this legislation? I mean, it pains me to have a different view of some of this than these two friends of mine I respect enormously. But this may be one of those deals where reasonable minds can differ about tactics, details. That’s what this is coming down to. I am sure negotiating with the hand they had over the past few months that they did pretty good work. Period. But I am sure with a better hand they and the rest of us could probably get a better deal. A better deal the president will sign? Yeah, that’s how it works. Let’s just take the logic of that argument you’re posing, which I hope is a devil’s advocate. Let’s say the president said he’ll agree to this and therefore we have to take the deal. By that reasoning, you should just always do what Trump demands. Always. And I find that absurd. Any time I hear that kind of reductive reasoning … Has no one been watching Trump his entire life? He’s a bluffer. He’s a threatener. And he changes his mind all of the time. Yeah I mean, to that effect, we asked Energy Secretary Chris Wright on stage at Climate Week if Trump would publicly post that he will sign off on approving more wind projects, and Wright said we shouldn’t count on that. I’m very suspicious of the whole thing. There’s so much posturing and choreography going down right now. They’re going to make it look like they won’t release any hostages, and then they will. It’ll be a very partial release of hostages. It’ll be maybe a dozen or so onshore wind projects that already have all their other approvals and [are] just waiting for the Department of Defense national security hold that is specious to be lifted, even though it’s never going to be held up in court. That’ll be shown as this big breakthrough that lets all this move through at lightspeed. That’s the charade we’re being walked through right now. To your point, I checked the court filings this morning, and the Justice Department did just tell the federal court hearing the challenge to the Defense Department that they’re now processing about that number of projects. But if I can ask you, to that point, I’ve known you almost as long as I’ve been a reporter — almost a decade. I also knew your colleague, the late Raul Grijalva, quite well. I don’t remember a single time when Grijalva was chair of the Natural Resources Committee that he ever supported a bipartisan permitting deal. I remember his opposition to the Barrasso-Manchin bill quite vividly, and a lot of other times that was the case — Well that might be a difference. I was ready to negotiate improvements in Barrasso-Manchin and try to get to something I could support, in part because I was worried what a Republican Congress and a Trump administration would do if we didn’t try in good faith to get to a deal at that time. I think we missed an opportunity there. But that was largely because the opportunity was shut down by Republicans. I can’t say what Grijalva would’ve done, but I can say what I would’ve done. I would’ve rolled up my sleeves and tried to get a deal. Well, I just pulled up a quote from you about that bill, in which you said, “We need to find a way to kill the zombie one more time.” There was also an opportunity to fix the problematic parts of it. I guess what I’m asking is, what would you say to people who claim there’s no bipartisan deal in the offing like this bill that you would support? Because any deal like that would obviously have to provide some things to industries like fossil fuels that you don’t want to sign off on. That’s the problem. If the “deal” has to always get worse, then yeah, that’s a zombie deal we’ve seen time and again, where it’s just the wishlist of the fossil fuel industry or nothing. That is the downward race to the bottom we’ve been on when we talk about permitting reform. But if you want grid improvements, if you want some of the other good provisions in this package — look at the fact I cosponsor Sean Casten and Mike Levin’s bill, [the Energy Bills Relief Act,] to do a lot of these things. Would you rather that bill is the starting point in the new Congress? Of course I would. That’s a good transmission bill that doesn’t come with all the other baggage. I’m pointing that out to say I’m not just against things but I’m for things, and you can see that from a longstanding record. My last question — and I want to ask it because people are raising it — if this bill doesn’t get passed, there are going to be at least some people who point fingers after it fails at the people who stopped it. Those people will say those who stopped it don’t want anything. I know you’re pointing at Levin-Casten and — No, I know your question, Jael, and I have to run here in just a minute. If we get to that point and you hear all this whining and recrimination, you know what I will say to those people? Shut up and get in the room and let’s work on a deal. [laughs] I mean honestly it’s just so absurd. If you want permitting reform, you’ve got to be willing to work in a more thoughtful way instead of all these absolutes. This or nothing. Now or never. I mean, you’ll see. What I can tell you is that you’ll see if we get to that scenario.

This week’s Q&A is with Dan Hartinger, senior policy director for The Wilderness Society, a prominent land conservation organization in D.C. that this week called for a moratorium on data center development on public land. The public statement was relatively scant on details about the group’s stance, and a decade of reporting on policy in Washington has taught me that its positions are quite influential, especially in more traditional outdoor recreation and conservationist circles that are also often bipartisan. So I reached out and asked if someone could further explain the society’s position, and Dan obliged. The following chat was lightly edited for clarity. Let’s start at the beginning. What brought The Wilderness Society to make a call for a moratorium against data centers on public lands? Like many others, we were concerned about news reporting on industrial-scale data centers being proposed on public lands. When we saw the scale of what was proposed – covering tens of thousands of acres of public lands, being pushed through without public input about whether this was an acceptable use of this land – it became clear we needed to hit the brakes and give the public a chance to evaluate this. Our mission and vision for The Wilderness Society is not on the broader debate about AI data centers. It’s on public lands. Those are a shared resource we need to manage for the benefit of all Americans. We need to be careful not to sacrifice those for poorly understood impacts from the data center boom. You called for Congress to do this during the lame duck session. Why call for this now? We think this is urgently needed now. If we allow public lands to be sacrificed for a data center boom, we could very well never get them back, so we think it’s urgently necessary a moratorium is enacted. We’d love to see the administration institute a moratorium, and we’re rightly skeptical given what boosters they’ve been. It really just kind of leaves it in the hands of Congress. There’s legislation introduced by Rep. Rashida Tlaib to institute a moratorium on data centers on federal lands, including Interior, Department of Defense, and Energy property. Do you support that bill? We don’t have any expertise on Department of Energy or Department of Defense lands. I know Sen. Ron Wyden introduced a bill recently to ban data centers on public land managed by the Agriculture and Interior Departments. Our focus right now is on calling for a moratorium. When you’re contemplating a novel industrial use, the public needs time to understand. Your call doesn’t include the Department of Energy or Defense lands? We’re not national security experts. We haven’t waded in on whether there are some limited use cases where maybe there’s national security reasons, I guess. So you want this to happen in a lame duck, when right now the likeliest thing Congress debates is instead building things faster through permitting reform. Does your organization have any stance on the impacts that the permitting reform effort underway in Congress could have regarding data centers on public lands? We’re still wading through our stance on the [Senate] bill. I don’t know I have much to share on that. We’re concerned about some of the impacts that bill could have on public lands, but there’s also a whole lot of other factors from that bill to weigh. Talking to folks who are more public about their stances on the bill, and looking at the set of projects even preliminarily underway on federal lands, it’s hard to imagine that changing NEPA and other environmental laws makes things on public lands go slower. I understand you’re still figuring out where you as an organization stand on the bill, but can you speak to the current state of infrastructure development on federal land and changes the administration has made to permitting? I think through the lens of data centers, narrowly, all of the project reviews and approvals – which is a limited number – have been attempted without additional NEPA analysis. We saw with the Townsite project in Nevada, they tried to claim a solar farm was essentially the same as a data center. There have been authorizations for data centers’ geotechnical surveys approved through categorical exclusions under NEPA. Certainly, we’re seeing the administration in every single possible opportunity eliminate or shortcut public input and review, and the permitting bill certainly seems to be pointing further in that direction. The whole rush for speed-to-power over the next few years makes the rest of the Trump administration, should the permitting reform bill become law, feel more important. How does that timing weigh on your organization as you approach the lame duck session? You’re calling for a moratorium on data centers on public lands as we approach a conversation about whether to make it easier to build on federal lands. That’s why we’re calling for a moratorium eyes open. It’s an uphill push. But if you look at the backlash happening, a lot of it is because the public is concerned these are being pushed forward with very little transparency, or regardless of whether the public supports them, and often done through mechanisms that hide the scale and scope of their impacts. That’s one of the big motivators behind seeking a moratorium. Because this is proceeding so fast, it’s even more essential we pump the brakes and give the public a chance for input. What do you want to see come after a moratorium? What are the appropriate safeguards? Or do you just not want to see these projects on Interior land? There are fundamental questions we need answered, including whether the BLM has clear authority to permit and authorize these large projects on public lands. They haven’t answered sufficient questions about that. There’s also the question of the public’s view on this. We don’t want to pre-suppose what the future post moratorium will look like. There’s just this huge, novel use case, and the public needs to weigh in. If they’re ever given a chance to actually say something, all the polling we’ve seen says the public doesn’t want these on public lands at all. And so, we hope this is also a conversation about what we want for our public lands generally.