Goodbye, Dolly

This is an edition of Heatmap Daily, an evening review of the day’s news written by our executive editor. Sign up for it here.

Even as state-level Republicans have started talking about the data center boom more skeptically, the Trump administration keeps hugging it.

The Environmental Protection Agency will ditch a federal rule requiring states to publicize air pollution permits for major new industrial sites, including data centers and off-grid power plants, The New York Times reports. Those are some of the permits that we used in our recent reporting to, for instance, make sense of the scale of the coming gargantuan gas buildout. This policy might make sense as realpolitik in a more subdued development environment, but I don’t understand it when trust in any type of project is so low — and when even a majority of Republicans have turned on local data center development.

We badly need insight into the scale of artificial intelligence energy use right now, but this policy could make things even more uncertain. It reveals, too, just how much President Trump has fallen out of touch with the public.

I was planning on writing about a different topic today — and then Dolly Parton died. The country legend was 80 years old. Her nephew announced her death on social media in a sad, sweet, and lovely video.

What can I say? She was among the most admired living Americans. So voluminous and impressive was her legacy that I don’t even have to stretch much to find an energy or climate angle in it. How many other musicians were born in a home without heat or electricity — but would be eulogized upon their death by the public utility from their Tennessee Mountain Home?

Her music spanned genres and generating technologies. Some of our readers may appreciate her trio with Emmylou Harris and Linda Ronstadt of Neil Young’s environmentalist classic “After the Gold Rush”; others, her takes on lighting — or liquid combustion. But most will enjoy the lead single off her final album, which confronted the prospect of a world on fire: “Now I ain't one for speaking out much / But that don't mean I don't stay in touch,” she sang. “Liar, liar the world's on fire / What we gonna do when it all burns down?”

In a fluke, the next tropical cyclone to form in the Atlantic basic will — according to the World Meteorological Organization’s 2026 list — be named Dolly. Let’s hope it puts on a show but doesn’t find any islands in its stream.