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“Like New York, Vermont is usurping the federal government’s exclusive authority over nationwide and global greenhouse gas emissions,” Acting Assistant Attorney General Adam Gustafson said in a press release. “More than that, Vermont’s flagrantly unconstitutional statute threatens to throttle energy production, despite this administration’s efforts to unleash American energy. It’s high time for the courts to put a stop to this crippling state overreach.”
Arizona Senator Mark Kelly. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Arizona Senator Mark Kelly released a proposal Wednesday morning designed to give Democrats a roadmap to back the buildout of data centers to support the boom in artificial intelligence. The 16-page pitch makes no mention of novel tools grid operators are considering to force data centers to dial back electricity consumption when power supply is low, known as demand response. But the proposal does call for establishing a pipeline of projects to support large-scale clean electricity production from 24/7 sources. “While solar and battery storage dominate today’s pipeline, they alone can’t reliably power the AI,” the blueprint reads. “We must build an innovation pipeline for geothermal, nuclear, and other clean dependable sources, while also deploying near-term solutions that advance and strengthen our energy systems for the demands ahead.”
The value of finding ways to add more data centers before that large new power output is available is the big reason for supporting the curtailment of electricity usage at big server farms, Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin wrote last month. “Creating a system where data centers can connect to the grid sooner if they promise to be flexible about power consumption would require immense institutional change for states, utilities, regulators, and power markets.”
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The U.S. government is in talks to set up a multibillion-dollar fund for overseas mining projects to help counter China’s grip over the world’s critical mineral supply, the Financial Times reported. The Trump administration is discussing the effort with the New York investment firm Orion Resource Partners, and looking to establish the fund under the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation. The fund would invest in projects to produce minerals such as copper and rare earths. “These talks really show that the [Donald] Trump administration is trying to align its financial tools with its broader mineral ambitions,” Gracelin Baskaran, director of the critical minerals security programme at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, told the newspaper. “This public-private partnership stands to catalyze a significant amount of capital.”
The move is the latest effort by the Trump administration to take on a bigger role in the mining industry, which requires high upfront costs and years-long development timelines that pose problems for companies beholden to quarterly shareholder updates. In July, the Department of Defense took an ownership stake in MP Materials, the only active rare earths producer in the U.S., marking the most significant federal intervention in the private sector since Washington nationalized railways during World War I. In a sign of the dealmaking environment, Heatmap’s Katie Brigham wrote this month that “everybody wants to invest in critical mineral startups.”
The House of Representatives held a hearing Tuesday on the risks posed by weather modification and geoengineering technologies. Led by Georgia Republican Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, the hearing — entitled “Playing God with the Weather — a Disastrous Forecast” — examined the idea of manipulating the makeup of the atmosphere to artificially cool the planet, which is an emerging, if hotly contested, idea among some commercial startups. GOP officials such as Greene and Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., have raised concerns over what such technology could do. The issue took on a new partisan valence after the flash flooding that killed more than 135 people in Texas this summer, which Fox News suggested could be linked to cloud-seeding experiments underway in the region.
In his testimony, Christopher Martz, a meteorologist and policy analyst at the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, warned that there were still major uncertainties about the potential deployment of geoengineering technologies. At times, however, the questioning devolved into debates over the reality of settled science about the effects of fossil fuel emission on warming itself.
“Did man create the Ice Age?” Greene asked Martz at one point.
“No,” he responded.
“Yeah, right, so none of us were alive back then to know for sure,” she said.
Solar developer PosiGen is planning to pull out of three of its projects in Connecticut. The company told state officials late last month it would need to shut down its facilities, eliminating 78 jobs, as financing dried up for the projects. The move highlighted the challenges ahead for the solar industry as federal tax credits barrel toward next year’s phaseout deadline. In 2015, the Connecticut Green Bank helped fund low-and moderate-income homeowners’ purchase of solar panels through PosiGen. But the federal program backing the effort, known as Solar for All, is set to unwind under the Trump administration. The company expects to start laying off workers in Connecticut next week, according to the news site CT Insider.
Robert Redford died Tuesday at 89 years old. During his lengthy career and filmography, the actor fashioned himself as an activist voice for a number of causes, including the U.S. effort to decarbonize its electrical sector. In February 2016, after the Supreme Court paused the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan, Redford accused the conservative justices of rendering a verdict “on the wrong side of history” in an op-ed in Time magazine. “It was a clear departure from how our courts normally handle government oversight. And I cringe at how we will have to answer to history. When our children and their children ask, ‘When the majority of Earth’s citizens — its scientists, military professionals, industrialists, and more — realized the threat of climate change was real, why didn’t you do more? Why did you delay?’”
Orsted is offering investors a nearly 70% discount on the new shares issued to raise money to save its American offshore wind projects amid the Trump administration’s aggressive crackdown on the industry. The Danish energy giant won nearly unanimous approval from its shareholders earlier this month for a rights issue aimed at raising $9.4 billion. Shares in the company, which is half owned by the government in Copenhagen, closed around $32 each on Friday. But the offering of 901 million new shares came at a subscription rate of about $10.50 each. Orsted’s projects in the northeastern U.S. already “struggled” with what The Wall Street Journal listed as “supply-chain bottlenecks, higher interest rates, and trouble getting tax credits,” which culminated in the restructuring last year that saw the company “pull out of two high-profile wind projects off the coast of New Jersey.”
The offshore wind industry, as I noted in yesterday’s newsletter, is just starting to fight back. The owners of the Rhode Island offshore project Revolution Wind, which Trump halted unilaterally, filed a lawsuit claiming the administration illegally withdrew its already-finalized permits. After the administration filed a lawsuit to revoke the permits of US Wind’s big project off Maryland’s coast, the company said it intends “to vigorously defend those permits in federal court, and we are confident that the court will uphold their validity and prevent any adverse action against them.” But the multi-agency assault on offshore turbine projects has only escalated in recent months, as the timeline Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo produced shows. And Orsted is facing other headwinds. The company just warned investors of lower profits this year after weaker-than-forecast wind speeds reduced the output of its turbines.
Toyota issued a voluntary recall for some 591,000 Toyota and Lexus cars over a slight glitch in the display screen. The 12.3-inch screen could fail to turn on after the car started, or go black while driving. Toyota said it will begin notifying owners if affected vehicles by mid-November. The move came just days after the Japanese auto giant — which owns both its eponymous passenger car brand and the associated luxury line, Lexus — recalled 62,000 electric vehicles, including the Toyota bZ4X SUV and the Lexus RZ300e sedan and its luxury SUV, the RZ450. Subaru, in which Toyota owns a minority stake, is also recalling its electric SUV, the Solterra. With all four EVs, the issue revolved around a faulty windshield defroster that “may not remove frost, ice and/or fog from the windshield glass due to a software issue in the electrical control unit,” the company said in a press release..
States such as Mississippi and Idaho had the lowest drop in energy-related per-capita emissions.EIA
Americans who complain that the U.S. should bear less responsibility for mitigating climate change like to point out that China produces far more planet-heating emissions per year, and that India is not far behind. The cumulative nature of carbon in the atmosphere makes for an easy rebuke, since the U.S. and Western Europe are overwhelmingly responsible for the emissions of the past two centuries. But a less historically abstract response could be that Americans still have by far the highest per capita emissions of any large country. That doesn’t mean the U.S. isn’t making progress on a per capita level, though. Between 2005 and 2023, per capita emissions from primary energy consumption decreased in every U.S. state, with an average drop of 30%, even as the American population grew by 14%, according to a new analysis by the U.S. Energy Information Administration. The dip is largely thanks to the electric power sector burning less coal. Increased electricity generation from natural gas, which releases about half as much carbon per unit of energy when burned as coal, and the growth of renewables such as wind and solar have reduced the need for the dirtier fuel. But the EIA forecasts that overall U.S. emissions are set to climb by 1% as electricity demand increases.
For those keen to shrink their individual carbon output at a much faster pace than American society at large, Heatmap’s award-winning Decarbonize Your Life series walks through the benefits and drawbacks to driving less, eating less steak, installing solar panels, and renovating homes to be more energy efficient.
Following rebellions from various state chapters, the Sierra Club terminated its executive director, Ben Jealous, last month, as I reported here in this newsletter at the time. Now the group has named its new leader: Loren Blackford. The Sierra Club veteran, who served in various senior roles before taking on the interim executive director job last month, won unanimous support from the group’s board of directors on Saturday.
Jealous had previously served as a chief executive of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the 2018 Democratic nominee for Maryland governor before becoming the first non-white leader of the 133-year-old Sierra Club. His appointment marked a symbolic turning of the page from the group’s early chapters under its founder, John Muir, who made numerous derogatory remarks about Black and Native Americans. Jealous was accused of sexual harassment earlier this year.
Thermal battery company Fourth Power just announced $20 million in follow-on funding, building on its $19 million Series A round from 2023. While other thermal storage companies such as Rondo and Antora are targeting the decarbonization of high-temperature industrial processes such as smelting or chemical manufacturing, Fourth Power aims to manufacture long-duration energy storage systems for utilities and power producers.
“In our view, electricity is the biggest problem that needs to be solved,” Fourth Power’s CEO Arvin Ganesan told Heatmap’s Katie Brigham. “There is certainly a future application for heat, but we don’t think that’s where to start.” The company’s tech works by taking in excess renewable electricity from the grid, which is used to heat up liquid tin to 2,400 degrees Celsius, nearly half the temperature of the sun’s surface. That heat is then stored in carbon blocks and later converted back into electricity using thermophotovoltaic cells. This latest funding will accelerate the deployment of the startup’s first one megawatt hour demonstration plant.
The tropical storm that later became Hurricane María formed exactly eight years ago today and went on to lay waste to Puerto Rico’s aging electrical system. The grid remains fragile and expensive, with frequent outages and some of the highest rates in the U.S. on the hours when the power is accessible. That has spurred a boom in rooftop solar panels. Now more than 10% of the island’s electricity consumption comes from rooftop solar power. Data released by the grid operator LUMA Energy showed approximately 1.2 gigawatts of residential and commercial rooftop solar had been installed under Puerto Rico’s net-metering regulations as of June 2025. New analysis by the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis found that is equal to about 10.3% of Puerto Rico’s total power consumption — and that’s not counting any off-grid systems.
