China Suspends Some Rare Earth Export Controls for a Year

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THE TOP FIVE

1. China suspends some rare earth export controls for a year

The rare earths will flow, for now. Cheng Xin/Getty Images

China’s commerce ministry promised to suspend its latest export restrictions on rare earths for at least a year as part of a trade truce President Donald Trump brokered with President Xi Jinping. Under rules Beijing issued on October 8, Chinese companies were required to obtain the ministry’s permission before exporting equipment to process ore and technology for mining and refining rare earths, magnets made from the metals, and components for electric vehicle battery manufacturing. That doesn’t mean Beijing is dialing back all its restrictions on rare earths, over which China controls roughly 90% of the world’s refining capacity. “Importantly, China’s commerce ministry today made no mention of suspending its April 4 regulations, which require export licenses for seven kinds of rare earths and magnets made from them,” The New York Times’ Beijing bureau chief, Keith Bradsher, wrote Thursday morning. “The April rules continue to disrupt production at the many factories in the United States and Europe that need Chinese materials.”

That’s bad news for Western rare earth companies whose stocks have been on a tear since China announced the latest export controls. But it’s good news for clean-energy companies who need access to the minerals — and not their only cause for optimism this morning. The Federal Reserve cut its benchmark interest rate by a quarter of a percentage point, bringing the cost of borrowing down to its lowest level in three years. The move came amid a flurry of economic uncertainty from the United States’ ongoing trade conflicts, accusations from the Trump administration’s over jobs and inflation reports, and the ongoing government shutdown. For the first time since 2019, two Fed officials dissented over the rate cut decision — one who wanted a larger, half-point cut, and the other who called for holding steady at the current level. The political upheaval aside, any cut is good news for renewable energy developers. As Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin wrote after last month’s quarter-point cut, the move may “provide some relief to renewables developers and investors, who are especially sensitive to financing costs.” But it still “may not be enough” to erase the challenges from higher tariffs.

2. GM lays off 3,400 workers at electric vehicle plant in Detroit

On Wednesday, General Motors pinkslipped more than 3,400 workers who build electric vehicles and batteries as the company “rapidly adjusts to new policy under President Donald Trump and sluggish interest among U.S. buyers,” The Detroit News reported. The automaker’s Detroit-area all-electric assembly plant, called Factory Zero, will be the hardest hit, with 1,200 cuts.

GM had emerged this year as the best-selling electric vehicle maker in the country, with record sales in the most recent quarter. By eliminating the $7,500 federal tax credit for electric vehicles last month as part of his One Big Beautiful Bill Act, however, Trump cost GM “1.6 billion,” as Andrew Moseman wrote last week in Heatmap.

3. Top Democrat says permitting reform talks are looking up

Just over a week ago, as I wrote here, Rhode Island Senator Sheldon Whitehouse warned that his vote on the bipartisan permitting reform ideas he helped put forward depended on the Trump administration easing up on what we’ve frequently called in this newsletter the “total war on wind.” Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum balked at the idea. And yet, talks seem to be progressing. On Wednesday, E&E News reported that Whitehouse, the top Democrat on the Environment and Public Works Committee and a longstanding climate hawk, said talks were "pretty constant right now” and that the Senate planned to release a framework by the end of the year. He added that “there’s good faith on all four corners, referring to Environment and Public Works Chair Shelley Moore Capito, a West Virginia Republican, Energy and Natural Resources Chair Mike Lee, a Utah Republican, and ranking member Martin Heinrich, a New Mexico Democrat. “I don’t think we necessarily have to be down to legislative language, but it has to be clear enough to where we’re going so our colleagues have a chance to look at it and kick the tires and see what their concerns are.”

4. Kentucky balks at paying for Trump’s orders to keep fossil fuel plants open

Kentucky is reeling from the looming halt to federal food stamps. Now the Trump administration wants to let the nation’s biggest grid operator charge Kentuckians to keep aging fossil fuel stations open in other states? No way, say one of the state’s biggest utilities and its attorney general. As Utility Dive reported, East Kentucky Power Cooperative, which serves nearly a quarter of the state’s ratepayers, and Attorney General Russell Coleman are challenging the PJM Interconnection’s plan to make utilities across its system pay for the Department of Energy’s emergency orders to keep coal-, oil-, and gas-fired power plants set to close this year open past their expiry dates. Much like the coal plant the agency ordered to stay open in Michigan, the Energy Department recently directed utilities in the PJM service area to keep two gas- and oil-fired units online near Philadelphia and a 400-megawatt oil-fired plant going near Baltimore. In August, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission rejected East Kentucky Power Cooperative’s arguments against having to pay for PJM’s overall costs. But now the utility and the attorney general, a Republican, are fighting back against the latest filings.

Elsewhere in the PJM territory, chip giant Nvidia is investing in a data center built to smooth out power use as demand for artificial intelligence surges. The project, announced in Axios, is “the first commercial rollout of software that adjusts energy draw in real time.” Nvidia is set to deploy grid-regulating software by the startup Emerald AI at a server farm under construction in Virginia. Once completed, the facility will be “the first built to a new industry-wide certification on flexible power.”

5. Los Angeles regulators approve converting biggest gas plants to hydrogen

The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power board voted unanimously to approve a contentious plan for an $800 million conversion of two units at the Scattergood Generating Station. The 3 to 0 decision to sign off on the plant’s environmental impact report clears the way for the city’s largest gas-fired plant to burn both natural gas and hydrogen. While the regulators said the plan was in line with the city’s goal of running on 100% renewables by 2035, since green hydrogen is made with clean electricity, opponents told the Los Angeles Times that the project would prolong the use of fossil fuels in the city and contribute to local pollution from nitrogen oxides.

If successful, the conversion will be one of the country’s biggest experiments in swapping gas for hydrogen. On Long Island in New York, utility giant National Grid announced a plan in August to install the world’s first linear generator that will run entirely on green hydrogen. Yet the efforts come as the Trump administration has eliminated federal funding for two of the seven regional hydrogen hubs set up under the bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act that were specifically designed to commercialize green hydrogen. And now, as Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo wrote, a list of rumored cuts that could come once the government shutdown ends puts the other five hubs on the chopping block.

THE KICKER

Artificial intelligence is starting to decode the language of whales. Now biologist David Gruber of the Cetacean Translation Initiative, who has spent decades trying to understand marine life, said that the work his research outfit is doing to detect patterns in whale songs could “dramatically strengthen legal protections for nonhuman life,” Inside Climate News reported. Already, Gruber’s work has uncovered a sperm whale “alphabet,” finding that click patterns shift with conversational context, and discovered that whales even have dialects with pods from different parts of the ocean “vocalizing as differently as a New Yorker and a Texan.”