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The Trump administration is making good on the president’s “drill, baby, drill” rhetoric with a new plan to open up vast areas of the U.S. coastline for offshore oil drilling projects. And though it will be years before any become operable, there are indications that both Red and Blue states don’t want them because of the likelihood of environmental damage.
“The Biden administration slammed the brakes on offshore oil and gas leasing and crippled the long-term pipeline of America’s offshore production,” Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said last week. “By moving forward with the development of a robust, forward-thinking leasing plan, we are ensuring that America’s offshore industry stays strong, our workers stay employed, and our nation remains energy dominant for decades to come.”
Among the areas it would make available to big energy companies to lease for new drilling are sections off the coast of California as well as Florida, where President Trump’s beachfront home resides. Not surprisingly, the plan was immediately attacked as “idiotic” by California Governor Gavin Newsom and members of the Golden State’s congressional delegation. But it’s not faring much better with conservative Republican leadership in Florida, which incurred billions of dollars of damage to its Panhandle region from the disastrous Deepwater Horizon spill in 2010.
Molly Best, a spokesperson for Governor Ron DeSantis, issued a statement noting that Trump had opposed offshore drilling in his first term, signing a presidential memorandum in 2020 “withdrawing new leasing for oil and gas developments off the coasts of Florida, Georgia and South Carolina until 2032,” according to the Tallahassee Democrat. The DeSantis administration “supports the 2020 Presidential Memorandum and urges the Department of Interior to reconsider and to conform to the 2020 Trump administration policy.”
Similarly, Rep. Jimmy Patronis and other Florida Republicans released a letter opposing offshore drilling plans for the state under the “Big Beautiful Gulf Lease Sale” owing to the possible negative impact on military installations in the Gulf of Mexico.
At a minimum, the new drilling plans will face federal court challenges from multiple states that don’t want offshore rigs popping up near sensitive coastal areas. Given that there’s no shortage of oil globally, and expectations that demand may peak and begin to fall over the next decade as clean energy and electric vehicle use rapidly rise, the risk-to-reward ratio of a big, pricey expansion in 20th-century carbon energy doesn’t seem like the wisest move.
Setting aside the fact that fossil fuels are a top source of planet-cooking carbon emissions, expanded offshore drilling is an especially bad idea given how dangerous oil is when it leaks and spills into the ocean. Because while Trump repeats false claims about offshore wind turbines killing whales – a whopper cooked up by groups with ties to the fossil fuel industry with no scientific credibility – he doesn’t talk about the devastating impact oil spills have on whales, as well as fish, shellfish, turtles, birds, sea otters and the entire aquatic ecosystem.
The Big Read
Elon Musk Can’t Legally Sell The Electric Tesla Cybercab As Promised
Minutes after winning Tesla shareholder approval for his unprecedented $1 trillion pay package at its annual meeting, a beaming Elon Musk took to the stage at the Austin plant to cheers from investor fans and board members to lay out his plans for the next couple of years. Chief among them: Cybercab, his vision for a dedicated, fully driverless, electric taxi and Tesla’s play for autonomous global transportation dominance.
Unlike its top-selling Model Y crossover, Model 3 sedan or even the Cybertruck – which has fallen far short of the billionaire CEO’s lofty volume goals – Cybercab is to be sold exclusively as a self-driving vehicle, without standard controls, according to Musk. It’s to be priced below $30,000, making it the company’s most affordable model. And according to Musk, it’s headed to market soon.
“We’ve got the first car that is specifically built for unsupervised full self-driving, to be a robotaxi. It’s called a Cybercab. It doesn’t even have pedals or a steering wheel. There are no side-view mirrors,” he said. “And that production is happening right here in this factory. We’ll be starting production in April next year.”
Whether Tesla is ready to sell a vehicle that’s truly capable of safely driving itself is debatable. In fact, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is currently conducting an extensive probe of Tesla’s so-called Full Self-Driving system owing to numerous accident reports. But leaving that aside, the company seems to be hurtling toward an unforced error. As of this writing, such a vehicle wouldn’t comply with federal vehicle safety rules that require specific types of equipment on passenger vehicles, including mirrors, pedals, steering wheels, windshields and wipers. And while there’s an effort to update those rules for autonomous vehicles, which don’t use those components, they’re not on track to be enacted prior to Musk’s target date for the new car.
Read more here
Hot Topic
Sam Wevers, director of product for Lunar Energy, on using AI to optimize residential battery and solar power systems
How does Lunar’s service, offered through Sunrun, differ from competing solar panel and storage setups?
So in addition to hardware, we do machine learning predictions of every home’s solar generation and household consumption multiple times a day. So we learn how two homes on the same street have different patterns. … We take a very personalized approach to AI control of people’s batteries, considering their rate plan, and we do that every day. By doing that, we can add a lot of value compared to the battery just sitting in its normal self-consumption modes.
We’ve seen, for instance, in 2025 that customers saved an average of $340 extra from our Lunar AI software control compared to if their battery had been in self-consumption mode. That’s us optimizing against the rate plans automatically, and particularly in California. On top of that, which is a bill saving, Luna and its grid-share platform delivers VPP services for the likes of Ava, Silicon Valley Clean Energy, Peninsula Clean Energy. We deliver VPP services for Sunrun. We’ve done 9 gigawatt hours of VPP services. We’re connected to 130,000 third-party batteries with our platform. And because we’ve got that mixture of behind-the-meter and VPP experience for Lunar customers, we can provide this end-to-end service where not only do we do really smart control of the battery looking, at customers’ rate plan, but they could then enroll in a VPP in our app. We ran that whole process end-to-end, and those customers earned on average $460.
In addition to supplying the battery system and software, Lunar also adds a component to the panels to pull more energy for the battery. How does that work?
It’s called the Lunar Maximizer and it’s module level power electronics. Essentially what it does is it maximizes the amount of solar power that can be obtained from each panel. If you have a string maximizer, if you imagine lining up 10 solar panels and you’ve got one inverter, you’re limited to the worst performing panel on that stream in terms of how much power comes out of those 10 panes. Whereas we take it at a module by module basis, solar panel by solar panel, so you get the best out of each panel, which means that over the life of the asset you generate more juice essentially with the same panels in the same place.
Given that you’re doing the battery system, AI software, inverter and power module, do you have a direct competitor in the residential solar market?
We clearly have competitors in the hardware space who make batteries and have software to control those batteries and sometimes also run with those batteries, but they do it with their hardware. There are companies who provide these VPP or other services, connecting to various third-party devices who we compete with on the software side. But those software companies don’t make their own hardware and therefore can’t use that hardware to prove out how smart their software is as they deploy it. I think that we are unique in that we are both making hardware that is controlled smartly, but we also have a software platform that does that smart stuff with fleets of patchworks of other devices as well. That’s what’s unique.
What Else We’re Reading
COP30 ends with a whimper, failing to target fossil fuel reduction (The Economist)
Tesla tops a survey of worldwide EV buyers of brands they’d avoid for political reasons (Global EV Alliance)
Electric and hybrid cars are the top source of global auto sales growth, accounting for 45%; internal combustion engine vehicle sales peaked in 2017 and are down to 30% (IEA)
Trump’s anti-climate agenda could result in 1.3 million more deaths globally, study finds (The Guardian/Pro Publica)
U.S. Energy Department providing $1 billion loan to restart Three Mile Island nuclear reactor (Associated Press)
How climate change is affecting insect biodiversity (Entomology Today)
The climate crisis needs a new catchphrase. “Two degrees” isn’t cutting it (Slate)
Recycling lead for U.S. car batteries is poisoning people in Africa (New York Times)
