With the construction of the Ultium Cells LLC battery cell plant in Lansing nearly finished, General Motors announced it will sell back its stake to its joint venture partner LG Energy Solution.
According to a news release, the transaction does not change GM’s ownership interest in the Ultium Cells LLC project, in which GM and LG have invested a total of $7 billion U.S. taxpayer dollars, sourced from a Department of Energy loan program.
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The House Oversight and Accountability Committee is bringing in top Biden administration energy officials for a Dec. 4 hearing on the administration’s decision to pause approvals for certain new liquefied natural gas (LNG) export facilities.
Subcommittee on Economic Growth, Energy Policy, and Regulatory Affairs Chairman Pat Fallon, a Republican from Texas, will be hosting the hearing, to which senior Department of Energy (DOE) official Brad Crabtree and top Biden climate adviser John Podesta have been invited. The hearing will be a continuation of oversight into one of the Biden administration’s most aggressive policy moves against conventional energy, and the lawmakers intend to inquire about allegations that the DOE effectively buried a 2023 draft study that would have undermined the justification for the pause before officially announcing the freeze in January 2024.
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The lame duck Biden-Harris administration is already working to undermine the energy agenda of President-elect Donald Trump after he handed Vice President Kamala Harris a crushing loss in Tuesday’s election.
Less than 48 hours after Trump won decisive Electoral College and popular vote victories, federal agencies are moving to interfere with Trump’s plans to expand and unfreeze approvals for liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports and to drill for more oil and gas on American lands, according to Bloomberg News and CNN. The Biden-Harris administration paused approvals for LNG export hubs in January and took numerous actions to restrict energy production on government-controlled lands, and Trump campaigned hard against those policies leading into November.
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Ford said Wednesday that it is canceling its plans to build a three-row electric SUV as the wider U.S. electric vehicle (EV) market continues to struggle.
The company announced that it expects to take up to $1.9 billion in write downs and other special charges related to its decision after losing billions of dollars on its EV product line in 2023. In addition to canceling its three-row electric SUV, Ford is also pushing back its plans to roll out an electric pickup truck model until 2027, a one-year setback.
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When the Department of Energy announced that it had successfully replenished the nation’s stockpile with the total purchased volume of 40 million barrels, the announcement had some people scratching their heads.
The Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR), as the stockpile is called, contained over 630 million barrels of crude oil when President Biden took office in January 2021. Last week, it had less than 376 million barrels. How did the DOE refill the SPR with only 40 million barrels?
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The Biden administration announced Thursday that it is spending billions of dollars more to help automakers mass-produce electric vehicles (EVs).
The Department of Energy (DOE) is spending $1.7 billion to help manufacturers convert closed or struggling manufacturing facilities to produce EVs or EV components in eight states, including swing states like Pennsylvania and Georgia, as the American EV market struggles. The funding complements $12 billion the DOE unveiled in August 2023 to help major manufacturers retrofit plants for EV production, and the agency projects that the cash announced Thursday will allow for the retention of 15,000 union workers while creating nearly 3,000 jobs.
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Not long after Jeremy Gober started running a sleep center, he quit treating patients for narcolepsy and sleep apnea and went full-time submitting bogus insurance claims. According to Gober’s 2022 indictment, he committed at least one especially sloppy error: One of his make-believe billings included a Medicare claim for treatment in March 2018 for a patient who’d died in December 2017. Before Gober was caught, Medicare and California’s healthcare system, Medi-Cal, ended up paying him a total of $587,000 for claims that turned out to be fiction.
The payments to Gober were part of $260 million the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services spent from 2009 through 2019 to reimburse healthcare providers in 15 states and Puerto Rico for services to patients who were dead, according to the inspector general of the HHS, which administers Medicare and Medicaid — programs with combined expenditures of $1.7 trillion.
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The Biden administration is selling off a million barrels of gasoline from an emergency reserve in a deliberate effort to cut prices ahead of the upcoming holiday weekend.
The Department of Energy (DOE) announced that it has awarded contracts to five energy companies to purchase the barrels the administration is releasing from the Northeast Gasoline Supply Reserve (NGSR), which is part of the federal Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) system. The NGSR releases are intended to “help lower gas prices ahead of the Fourth of July holiday,” according to DOE.
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The Department of Defense (DOD) does not know how much money it directly or indirectly sent to Chinese entities to conduct research on viruses with pandemic potential, according to a new report by the DOD’s Office of Inspector General (OIG).
The OIG’s report found that DOD has supplied Chinese entities — whether directly or indirectly via subgrants — with taxpayer cash to research pathogens and the enhancement thereof, but the exact figure is unknown because of “limitations” in the DOD’s internal tracking system. Government funding for such research in China has come under scrutiny since the coronavirus pandemic, which multiple government entities believe started when an engineered virus leaked from a Chinese laboratory that was hosting U.S. government-backed gain-of-function research.
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In April, the Biden administration finalized efficiency standards for residential water heaters, as part of a broader climate goal of electrifying the American household.
The Department of Energy estimates that, under the new rules, 50 percent of newly manufactured electric storage water heaters will utilize heat pump technology to be in compliance. The standards go into effect beginning in 2029.
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Dozens of energy policy and advocacy groups signed a Monday letter to Congress to express their opposition to a bill they say could be the first step toward carbon taxes or tariffs.
The letter urges House lawmakers to vote against the PROVE IT Act, a bill that has not yet been introduced in the lower chamber but is expected to be soon. The PROVE IT Act — which has already been introduced in the Senate — would have the Department of Energy (DOE) study the carbon intensity of goods, including aluminum, steel, plastic and crude oil, produced in the U.S. and the carbon intensity of products from other countries, according to E&E News.
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If the devil is in the details, bureaucracy is hell on earth. Though terrain familiar to the Biden administration, Republicans must prepare to navigate it.
Witness the debacle over liquefied natural gas exports, wherein the White House, by “pausing” most new approvals, has catapulted the energy security of key U.S. allies straight into the buzzsaw of its climate ambitions. (The category of exports that will continue to be authorized is tiny.) The Department of Energy claims that a multifactor impact study due in early 2025 is required to determine whether and how the moratorium will be lifted.
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The Biden administration’s energy policies are increasingly costly for Americans, a newly released report says.
U.S. House Oversight Committee Chair Rep. James Comer, R-Ky., released the report, which argues Biden’s energy policies have increased costs for Americans and hurt the economy.
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Lawmakers will grill President Joe Biden’s Energy Secretary at a newly announced oversight hearing scheduled for Thursday.
Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm is expected to face lawmakers for questions amid elevated gas prices, a depleted strategic petroleum reserve, and ongoing criticism of Biden’s energy policies.
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The federal government funded a multilateral research project investigating how “populist” politicians allegedly sowed disinformation and eroded public trust during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The National Science Foundation (NSF) paid out a grant to support research investigating “how populist politicians distorted COVID-19 pandemic health communication to encourage polarized attitudes and distrust among citizens,” which made the public “more vulnerable to misinformation generally,” according to federal spending records. The project, titled “Pandemic Communication in Times of Populism,” received just over $160,000 from the NSF and is focused on how leaders in the United States, Brazil, Serbia and Poland approached the pandemic, stressing the importance of elevating public health experts over “populist” politicians, according to a presentation produced by the researchers.
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Stanford researchers recently claimed to have found a link between childhood respiratory illnesses and the use of gas stoves.
The study, which was reported last week across multiple national news outlets, posed an interesting contrast to a study in February funded by the World Health Organization and published in The Lancet that found no such link and appeared to received no mention in any such outlet.
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A coalition of 16 states is suing the Biden administration over its January decision to pause approvals for new liquefied natural gas (LNG) export hubs.
The lawsuit, which names President Joe Biden, the Department of Energy (DOE) and high-ranking DOE officials as defendants, seeks declaratory and injunctive relief from the pause, which the White House announced on Jan. 26 to give the DOE time to assess the climate impacts of new LNG export capacity. The states filed their challenge in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Louisiana, alleging that the federal government broke the law by broadly denying relevant permits.
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American billionaires bankrolled an activist campaign targeting liquefied natural gas (LNG) export terminals that influenced the White House’s decision to pause new and pending approvals for the projects, according to The Wall Street Journal.
The philanthropic organizations of the Rockefeller family and Democratic megadonor Michael Bloomberg cumulatively provided millions of dollars to activists who pressured Biden administration officials to crack down on LNG export hubs over the past several years, according to the WSJ. The activists ultimately got their way on Jan. 26, when the White House announced that the administration would pause new project approvals as the Department of Energy (DOE) widens the scope of its reviews to include climate impacts of LNG export terminals alongside considerations like national security and economic benefits.
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The U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals pushed back on a Biden administration effort to tighten regulations on dishwashers and washing machines.
In 2022, President Joe Biden issued an executive order on his first day in office that led to the Department of Energy replacing a less strict Trump-era rule on those appliances with a more stringent rule for energy and water use.
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The U.S. natural gas industry is pushing back against the Biden administration’s regulations targeting gas-powered residential furnaces.
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Across the country, towns and cities of various sizes envisioned an electrified public transit system that could shuttle residents with vehicles that produced no carbon-filled exhaust.
Many of those communities purchased buses from Silicon Valley-based Proterra, which was able to produce 550 buses over its 19-year existence before it went bankrupt in August.
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In an attempt to force Americans to conserve energy, the Department of Energy is banning a whole class of popular furnaces, eventually raising heating costs and reducing product choices for families and businesses alike. And it is using an outdated law to give itself the authority to do so.
While the DOE did recognize many of the comments that I submitted arguing against its attempt to regulate gas furnaces, it did little more than brush them off. Unfortunately, higher costs and less choice won’t be so easy for American families and businesses to ignore.
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The number of people who identify as “nonbinary” in the energy workforce has skyrocketed by more than 88% since last year, according to data from the Department of Energy.
The agency’s annual employment report (USEER), showed that last year, there were 22,723 individuals in the energy workforce who don’t identify as male or female (nonbinary). As of June 2023, that number had increased to 42,810—an 88.4% surge.
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The Biden administration announced Friday that it will spend up to $1.2 billion to fund two direct air capture (DAC) carbon removal projects, according to the Department of Energy (DOE), a technology which some reports have suggested may be an ineffective tool to counter climate change.
These projects in Louisiana and Texas will essentially be large vacuums that suck up carbon dioxide from the air, separate it with chemical processing and then condense the carbon dioxide for burial underground or for use in industrial products like cement, according to a DOE press release. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm has promoted this particular form of carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) technology, but DAC emits more carbon dioxide than it captures while relying on toxic chemicals, according to a January report from Food and Water Watch, a climate-focused nonprofit group that advocates for green policies.
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This year began with federal regulators targeting gas stoves, but we have since seen a host of other proposals going after washing machines, refrigerators, dishwashers, ceiling fans, water heaters, and others. They are all part of the Biden administration’s prioritization of the climate change agenda over the interests of consumers. Each runs the risk of boosting appliance prices, limiting choice, and compromising performance. And cumulatively, they add up to substantial headaches for homeowners that will only grow in the years ahead.
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It may take decades to refill the U.S. strategic petroleum reserve (SPR) after President Joe Biden released unprecedented amounts from its supply in 2022, according to Bloomberg News.
Aging infrastructure, higher oil prices and budget constraints have impeded the administration’s efforts to substantially replenish the SPR after Biden tapped its supply to tame spiking energy prices in the lead up to the 2022 midterms, according to Bloomberg. The massive underground salt caverns that hold the SPR oil now sit half-empty with no easy route to replenishment, and experts say it could take decades to refill the reserves, according to Bloomberg.
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In a move eerily reminiscent of the failed Solyndra, President Joe Biden’s Department of Energy has doled out massive loans in green energy initiatives to corporations.
Remember Solyndra? Way back in 2009, the administration of Barack Obama, newly inaugurated and stoked with the ideological fire of environmental zeal, greenlit a $535 million loan guarantee to a company by that name to mass produce easy-to-install cylindrical solar units.
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After Michigan taxpayers gave $1.75 billion for Ford’s Marshall electric vehicle factory, the company will lay off workers.
Michigan gave the money under the promise of creating 2,500 jobs, but the company cut 3,000 jobs last summer and expects a $3 billion loss on EVs in 2023. After those job cuts, a Ford spokesman said the company has nothing to announce.
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The Biden administration has decided against offering a $200 million grant to a lithium battery-maker that has been heavily criticized for its close ties to China.
The Department of Energy (DOE) had selected electric battery maker Microvast as one of its intended recipients to receive grant funding under the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. However, the DOE confirmed to the Daily Caller News Foundation that it was no longer in negotiations with Microvast concerning the grant, which would have been used to develop an electric vehicle battery production facility for General Motors, according to Reuters.
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Last week, President Biden’s Department of Energy (DOE) announced “Congressionally-mandated proposed standards” for household dishwashers.
In announcing the proposed dishwasher restrictions for Americans, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said the Biden administration is “using all of the tools” available to “reduce carbon pollution and combat the climate crisis.”
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On February 1, 2023, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) proposed an “energy efficiency standard” for gas cooking products. For those who are unaware, this is a blatant backdoor attempt to ban gas appliances—at least half of gas stove models sold in the United States today would not comply with this regulation according to DOE. The American people deserve answers to stop this draconian measure that would be detrimental for families, small businesses, and rural communities across our nation.
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As negations move forward on an international pandemic treaty, Republican House members are pushing a bill that would check the pandemic powers of the World Health Organization.
U.S. Representatives Tom Tiffany (R-WI-07) and Andy Biggs (R-AZ-05) joined a dozen of their Republican colleagues in introducing the No WHO Pandemic Preparedness Treaty Without Senate Approval Act.
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The Biden administration has drawn fire for admitting that killing the Keystone Pipeline cost the U.S. economy thousands of jobs and billions of dollars.
A report from the Department of Energy showed the pipeline would have supported tens of thousands of jobs, though the number is hard to nail down.
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The Department of Energy has fired Sam Brinton, thought to be the nation’s first openly gender fluid federal employee, amid multiple allegations of luggage theft.
“Sam Brinton is no longer a DOE employee,” a department spokesperson told the Daily Beast on Monday. “By law, the Department of Energy cannot comment further on personnel matters.”
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U.S. government scientists have recently managed to make significant progress toward successfully utilizing fusion energy, according to The Financial Times.
Scientists at the federal Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California managed to create net energy gain via a fusion reaction in the past two weeks, the FT reported Sunday, citing three people with knowledge of the experiment. Researchers have been attempting to produce more energy than they burn during fusion reactions, which power the sun, for 70 years; however, no reaction has produced more energy than it burns until now.
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The Department of Energy has rejected the Palisades nuclear plant’s application for federal funding.
Palisades was sold to Holtec Decommissioning International in June 2022, which applied for a federal Civil Nuclear Credit on July 5 to reopen Palisades.
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Alarm bells are sounding at the Department of Energy as the Biden administration has moved to triple the budget for the Weatherization Assistance Program, which provides low-income applicants with free home and apartment renovations, such as insulation, duct-sealing, new heating systems, and kitchen appliances. The last time the program was lavished with such a surge in funds, through President Obama’s 2009 stimulus bill, audits and investigations uncovered a pattern of fraud, embezzlement, shoddy work, inflated expenses for parts and materials, sketchy billing, kickbacks, and gimcrack construction.
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Ten Michigan church congregations, each of low-income nature, will share in a $1.24 million grant award for energy-efficiency upgrades.
Federal money will be appropriated through the Sacred Spaces Clean Energy program to “advance environmental justice and reduce greenhouse gas emissions,” the Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy said in making the announcement Wednesday.
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The Biden administration has rebooted the Energy Department’s green loan program that lent hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars in the Obama-era to the now-defunct green energy company, Solyndra, according to an announcement.
The Advanced Clean Energy Storage project in Utah will receive the loan, leaving $2.5 billion for other clean energy projects, the Department of Energy (DOE) stated Wednesday.
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The Biden administration announced plans Thursday to refill the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) two years after Democrats blocked the Trump administration’s similar, but cheaper proposal.
The Department of Energy (DOE) said it would initiate a long-term SPR replenishment plan involving a purchase of 60 million barrels of oil that would likely occur in 2023, according to the announcement. President Joe Biden has ordered a 50-million-barrel SPR release in November, a 30-million-barrel release on March 1 and a 180-million-barrel release on March 31 to combat rising gasoline prices.
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The price of crude oil touched its highest level in nearly 11 years on Wednesday amid the ongoing Ukraine crisis which has roiled energy markets.
The WTI index, the U.S. benchmark index, surged to $112.09 per barrel, its highest level since May 2011, early Wednesday before receding near $108 per barrel, marketplace data showed. The global Brent crude benchmark approached $114 per barrel then dropped below $111 a barrel.
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The top House Republican on a key oversight subcommittee has pushed a series of conflict-of-interest probes into the Biden administration over its ties to the renewable energy industry.
Republican South Carolina Rep. Ralph Norman, the ranking member on the Oversight Subcommittee on Environment, has probed leadership in the White House, Department of Energy (DOE) and Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), demanding accountability for potential conflicts of interests since President Joe Biden took office more than a year ago. While committee Democrats haven’t cooperated with the investigations, Norman and Oversight Ranking Member James Comer have forged ahead.
“The people in the administrations have no regard for the office that they hold,” Norman told the Daily Caller News Foundation in an interview.
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The Department of Energy (DOE) announced Tuesday the release of millions of barrels of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) to combat soaring gas prices.
The DOE approved the release of 13.4 million barrels from its SPR, marking the second-largest exchange from the reserve and bringing the total amount of oil released from the cache to almost 40 million barrels.
Exchange contracts for the released oil have were awarded to seven companies. President Joe Biden authorized a plan in November 2021 to release 50 million barrels of crude oil from the SPR in a coordinated effort with China, India, Japan, South Korea and the U.K. to combat surging gas prices and assist in the COVID-19 pandemic recovery.
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The Department of Energy (DOE) announced Thursday that it would begin hiring 1,000 employees for its so-called Clean Energy Corps which will be tasked with fighting climate change.
The new climate unit will be composed of both current DOE employees and the 1,000 recruits, according to the announcement. The Clean Energy Corps was created by the recently-passed bipartisan infrastructure bill, which appropriated $62 billion to the DOE for accelerating the nation’s transition to renewables.
“This is an open call for all Americans who are passionate about taking a proactive role in tackling the climate crisis and want to join the team that is best positioned to lead this transformative work,” Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm said in a message to applicants.
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A large group of House Republicans penned a letter to top Biden administration officials Friday, urging them not to ban U.S. crude oil exports.
The GOP lawmakers, led by Texas Reps. Roger Williams and August Pfluger, said the move would be a “catastrophic mistake” and further exacerbate high energy prices in the letter addressed to Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm and Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo. The congressmen noted that a previous crude oil export ban had been opposed by Democrats and Republicans alike.
“President Biden’s war on American energy continues with his Administration’s latest discussions to reinstate the export ban on crude oil, which was repealed in 2015 on a bipartisan vote,” Williams said in a statement.
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Expanding U.S. nuclear power — an energy source that many environmentalists and lawmakers oppose — could be the most reliable way to achieve a carbon-free electricity grid, according to experts.
Nuclear energy is considered a renewable energy source because it produces zero emissions through fission, the process of splitting uranium atoms, according to the Department of Energy. Currently, nuclear accounts for about 9% of total U.S. energy consumption, slightly less than all other renewable energy sources combined and coal, government data showed.
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As the supply chain crisis continues to worsen, Americans can expect to pay higher energy costs in order to maintain heating in the coming winter, says Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm.
In an interview with CNN’s Dana Bash on Sunday, Granholm said “this is going to happen…it will be more expensive this year than last year.”
While Granholm claimed that “we are in a slightly beneficial position…relative to Europe,” she nonetheless admitted that the United States has “the same problem in fuels that the supply chains have, which is that the oil and gas companies are not flipping the switch as quickly as the demand requires.”
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The U.S. has reduced emissions more than any other country in the world despite former President Donald Trump’s decision to leave the Paris Climate Accords.
“In the last 10 years, the emissions reduction in the United States has been the largest in the history of energy,” International Energy Agency (IEA) Executive Director Fatih Birol said at a Department of Energy press conference in 2019. “Almost 800 million tons. This is a huge decline of emissions.”
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The Democrats’ reconciliation package will likely include more than $500 billion worth of climate provisions, more than the entire Department of Energy budget, the White House said, according to The Hill.
The budget represents an opportunity for “historic investment in climate change,” White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain said during an event hosted by The Hill on Tuesday evening. The likely price tag for climate programs included in the bill is likely to fall somewhere between $500 billion and $555 billion, Axios previously reported.
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The U.S. Justice Department unsealed a criminal complaint Sunday alleging that a Navy engineer and his wife repeatedly tried to pass secrets about U.S. nuclear submarines to a foreign power in a plot thwarted by an undercover FBI agent.
Jonathan Toebbe, 42, and his wife Diana, 45, both of Annapolis, Md,. were arrested Saturday in West Virginia by the FBI and Naval Criminal Investigative Service on espionage-related charges of violating the Atomic Energy Act, officials said.
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