Current conditions: Winds of up to 30 miles per hour will threaten the balloons at Macy’s iconic Thanksgiving Day parade in New York • Lake-effect snow could cause whiteouts across the Great Lake region • Temperatures are set to soar to nearly 90 degrees Fahrenheit in Queensland and New South Wales, Australia.
THE TOP FIVE
1. China forms a 10-nation alliance to work on fusion energy
China has formed a fusion energy alliance with more than 10 countries to promote open science and encourage collaboration among international researchers to hasten the commercialization of electricity generated from what is effectively an artificial sun. At a launch event on Monday, Beijing unveiled the so-called Hefei Fusion Declaration, whose signatories include France, the United Kingdom, and Germany. “We are about to enter a new stage of burning plasma, which is critical for future fusion engineering,” Song Yuntao, vice president of the Hefei Institutes of Physical Science, said in a government press release.
The first fusion reaction to produce more energy than it took to spark occurred at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in December 2022. Since then, billions of dollars have flowed into fusion energy research and a number of prominent companies have proposed building power plants harnessing the technology. As Heatmap’s Katie Brigham put it, it’s “finally, possibly, almost time for fusion.” But the U.S. risks losing its edge, according to a new report by the Congress-backed Commission on the Scaling of Fusion Energy. “While the United States has long been at the forefront of fusion research, the international competition is intensifying,” the report published last month concluded. “China, in particular, is rapidly advancing its fusion energy capabilities through massive state investments and aggressive technological development, narrowing the window for American leadership.”
2. Beijing is approving fewer new coal plants, too
A coal plant in Hanchuan, Hubei province, China.Photo by Getty Images
China’s emissions remained flat for another quarter in a row, continuing a downward trend that started last year, as I wrote here earlier this month. Backing up that data is new research from Greenpeace East Asia, which found that China approved just under 42 gigawatts of new coal-fired capacity nationwide in the first nine months of 2025. That may sound like a lot, but if the current pace continues, 2025 is on track to be the second-lowest year for approvals since the COVID-19 shock in 2021. It would also be the second consecutive year of decline. “China’s power-sector emissions peak is within reach as early as 2025. Yet maintaining momentum to curb coal approvals remains critical,” Gao Yuhe, Greenpeace East Asia’s Beijing-based project manager, said in a statement. “Clear policy signals to cap coal and boost renewables are essential to accelerate both the power sector and societal emissions peaks.”
In the U.S., meanwhile, the Environmental Protection Agency filed a motion late Monday evening asking the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit to eliminate a Biden-era rule tightening limits on soot. The regulation, E&E News reported, was “predicted to save thousands of lives by tightening the exposure limit to a pollutant tied to a higher risk of strokes, lung cancer and other cardiovascular and respiratory diseases.”
Sign up to receive Heatmap AM in your inbox every morning:
3. Despite tightening rules on offshore wind, Interior skips NEPA for offshore drilling
Since 1980, the Department of the Interior has run National Environmental Policy analyses on every five-year offshore drilling plan. But, as E&E News reported Tuesday, the agency’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management called that step “discretionary” in its latest proposal. To justify the change, the Trump administration cited two past rulings from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia that rejected challenges to NEPA assessments of five-year plans.
It’s a striking dichotomy with how the administration has dealt with offshore wind, most easily communicated via the meme of Shaquille O’Neal sleeping in one frame and awake with eyes ablaze in the next. Environmental damage from offshore oil and gas drilling? “I sleep,” as the meme goes. Environmental damage from offshore wind turbines? Now that, as I have written in this newsletter, has the Trump administration’s attention.
4. Iran’s president says the nation’s capital must move due to ecological strain
Iran “no longer has a choice” but to move its capital city as ecological strain on Tehran’s water and land make the metropolis impossible to sustain. In remarks carried on state media Thursday, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian said the government had “no option” but to consider an alternative city for the capital. “When we said we must move the capital, we did not even have enough budget,” he said, according to the London-based news service Iran International, which broadcasts in English and Farsi. “If we had, maybe it would have been done. The reality is that we no longer have a choice; it is an obligation.” As the capital sinks by near one foot per year and water supplies shrink, Tehran faces “catastrophe” and “a dark future,” he said. “Protecting the environment is not a joke. Ignoring it means signing our own destruction.”
Tehran wouldn’t be the only major city on the move. Indonesia is designing a new capital in Borneo called Nusantara to replace Jakarta, which is also slowly sinking.
5. Tesla co-founder’s battery-recycling startup fires dozens
Redwood Materials, the battery recycling startup led by Tesla co-founder JB Straubel, has cut dozens of workers as the company scales back some of its projects to focus on tapping into demand for grid-scale batteries, Bloomberg reported Tuesday. The layoffs took place this month and were spread across the company, amounting to up to 6% of the total workforce. Redwood is now focusing on repurposing old batteries for the grid and extracting critical minerals from scrapped power packs.
THE KICKER
Here’s a statistic for the vegetarians to whip out on Thanksgiving: A 16-pound turkey has a carbon footprint as big as the gravy, cranberry sauce, mashed potatoes, rolled biscuits, and apple pie combined, research from Carnegie Mellon University found. Before you go off starting a fight with your truck-driving, meat-loving uncle, the scientists noted that, “compared to all the environmental lifestyle decisions that an American family could make, these are very, very small potatoes.” I wish you all a happy and peaceful Thanksgiving holiday.
A coal plant in Hanchuan, Hubei province, China.Photo by Getty Images
