Democrats Sweep on Election Night in Key Climate Races

Current conditions: The Pacific Northwest is getting blasted with winds of up to 70 miles per hour • Heavy snow is coming this week for the higher elevations in New England and upstate New York • San Cristóbal de La Laguna in the Canary Islands saw temperatures surge to 95 degrees Fahrenheit.

THE TOP FIVE

1. Democrats win in key climate races

New Jersey Governor-elect Mikie Sherrill. Kena Betancur/Getty Images

Democratic candidates swept to victory in key races with implications for climate change on Tuesday night. In Virginia, Democrat Abigail Spanberger — who vowed to push forward with offshore wind, new nuclear reactors, and fusion energy — seized the governor’s mansion in the first major race to be called after polls closed. In New Jersey, Democrat Mikie Sherrill, who campaigned on building new nuclear plants and pressing the state’s grid operator, PJM Interconnection, to cut electricity prices, trounced her Republican opponent. In New York City, Democrat Zohran Mamdani, who said little about energy during his campaign but came out in the last debate in favor of nuclear power, easily beat back his two rivals for Gracie Mansion. Yet the Georgia Public Service Commission's incumbent Republican Tim Echols lost his race against Democrat Alicia Johnson, a defeat for a conservative who championed construction of the only two nuclear reactors built from scratch in modern U.S. history. In what one expert called a sign of a “seismic shift” on the commission, Peter Hubbard, another Democrat running to flip a seat on the commission, also won.

At a moment when the Trump administration is “disassembling climate policy across the federal government,” Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo wrote, “state elections are arguably more important to climate action than ever.”

2. Federal judge sides with Trump against SouthCoast Wind farm

A federal judge in Washington ruled Tuesday that the Trump administration can reconsider the Biden-era approval of SouthCoast Wind off the coast of Nantucket, Massachusetts. The decision, reported in The New York Times, is a setback for the joint venture between EDP Renewables and Engie, and handed the White House a victory in what we’ve called here the administration’s “total war on wind.” Judge Tanya S. Chutkan of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia ruled that the project developers would not “suffer immediate and significant hardship” if the Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management were allowed to reevaluate the project’s construction and operation permits.

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3. Federal court rejects gas industry challenge to Biden-era appliance rules

Meanwhile, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit upheld Biden-era Department of Energy efficiency rules for gas-fired residential furnaces and commercial water heaters in a ruling that rejected the gas industry’s challenge on Tuesday. “Overall, we find that DOE’s economic justification analysis and conclusions were robust,” the panel ruled, according to Bloomberg Law. The decision will maintain the status quo of how the agency enforces energy efficiency rules for the appliances. Under standards updated in 2021 and 2023, the Biden-era bureaucrats proposed raising efficiency levels to 95% for furnaces and using condensing model designs to heat water.

4. White House pressured the EPA to gut tailpipe emissions rules

White House budget officials pressed the Environmental Protection Agency to expand its rollback of tailpipe regulations this summer as the agency sought to repeal the foundational policy that undergirds federal climate rules, E&E News reported. Documents the green newswire service obtained showed the White House Office of Management and Budget pushed the environmental regulator to weaken limits on vehicular pollution, including soot and smog-forming compounds in addition to planet-heating carbon. The EPA initially pushed back, but the documents revealed the staffers at OMB demanded the agency pursue a more aggressive rollback.

5. Australia plans to force energy companies to offer free power during the day

Australia launched a new plan to force energy companies to offer free electricity to households during the day to use excess solar power and push the grid away from coal and gas. The policy, called the “Solar Sharer” plan, aims to take advantage of the country’s vast rooftop solar panels. More than 4 million of Australia’s 10.9 million households have panels, and the capacity has overtaken the nation’s remaining coal-fired power stations. The proposal, the Financial Times reported, would also extend the benefits of distributed solar resources to the country’s renters and apartment dwellers.

THE KICKER

For years, nuclear scientists have dreamed of harnessing atomic energy from thorium, potentially shrinking radioactive waste and reducing the risk of weapons proliferation compared to uranium. In the West, that has remained largely a dream. In China, however, researchers are vaulting ahead. This week, Chinese scientists announced a major breakthrough in converting thorium to uranium in a reactor. “This marks the first time international experimental data has been obtained after thorium was introduced into a molten salt reactor, making it the only operational molten salt reactor in the world to have successfully incorporated thorium fuel,” Shanghai Institute of Applied Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences said in a statement.