The COP30 Climate Summit Kicks Off

Current conditions: A sharp dip in the jet stream will channel Arctic air from the Plains to the Northeast, with snow expected this weekend in Minneapolis, Chicago, and Detroit • Northern California is bracing for potential power outages amid winds of up to 90 miles per hour • Temperatures of about 91 degrees Fahrenheit in Jerusalem just broke records for November temperatures dating back nearly 150 years.

THE TOP FIVE

1. The UN climate summit begins in Brazil

Here's to a not-so-dirty 30? Wagner Meier/Getty Images

The world’s most important climate summit is set to begin. The first phase of the 30th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change — better known as COP30 — is slated to kick off this morning with a Leaders’ Summit that will bring together 143 delegations, including 57 heads of state and 39 ministers in Belém, a bayside city near Brazil’s northern coast. Negotiations over how to tighten ways to implement global emissions rules and hasten the speed of cuts are set to begin officially on Monday.

Taking place against the backdrop of the United States’ withdrawal from climate negotiations and pullback of ambition from many other countries, the confab comes as the latest modeling from Rhodium Group consultancy shows the world is now on track to blow past the Paris Agreement’s 2-degree Celsius target but avoid the cataclysmic warming once forecast. The data projects the world will warm between 2 and 3.9 degrees above pre-industrial averages by the end of the century. As Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo wrote this week, that range is largely unchanged from Rhodium’s 2023 forecasts, suggesting that, “in the long run,” the Trump administration’s policies “might not mean much for the climate’s trajectory.” COP30 President André Corrêa do Lago on Wednesday unveiled a $1.3 trillion climate finance roadmap to fulfill promises made at last year’s meeting in Azerbaijan, but told reporters that “there is no plan” for the roadmap even to be discussed at the summit, let alone formally adopted, according to Climate Home News.

2. Geoengineering startup Stardust has started quietly lobbying Congress

Stardust Solutions, the U.S.-based, Israeli-led geoengineering startup just raised $60 million to commercialize technology to reflect the sun’s heat back into space, has quietly begun lobbying the U.S. government for contracts. In the first quarter of this year, the company hired law firm Holland & Knight to start appealing to Congress, but didn’t disclose its efforts “due to a clerical error,” the lobbyist told E&E News on Wednesday.

To many scientists, geoengineering is too dangerous to even study, posing a moral hazard to decarbonization by offering a temporary solution to the effects of warming. But, as I reported exclusively in this newsletter in September, more than 100 scientists — including former President Joe Biden’s science adviser — signed onto a public letter calling for a publicly-accountable research program to start now in case global warming gets bad enough that a country or corporation tries to unilaterally carry out geoengineering before it’s fully understood. The emergence of a major commercial contender such as Stardust suggests the tides are turning in favor of the technology. As Heatmap’s Robinson Meyer reported last month in a scoop about Stardust’s fundraising, the company claims its technology will be ready to go by the start of the next decade.

3. Data center companies are lobbying more than ever

Meanwhile, data center companies are sparking a boom in Beltway influence-peddling. The four largest cloud providers — Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Meta — have all “reported tens of millions of dollars in federal lobbying in 2025 alone,” according to a new analysis from the federal records nonprofit OpenSecrets. The number of lobbyists per data center has also increased. Meta hired 21 more lobbyists this year than last year, and ChatGPT-maker OpenAI increased its stable of lobbyists nearly sevenfold since 2023.

The lobbying push comes amid mounting backlash. A Heatmap poll published in September found that only 44% of Americans would welcome a data center near their homes.

4. Taiwan inches closer to restarting its shuttered nuclear reactors

Taiwan this week took what may be its most significant step yet toward restarting its nuclear reactors. In May, the island became one of the only countries in world history to abandon nuclear power entirely after shutting down its final reactor. The move rendered the self-governing republic, which China claims as a breakaway territory despite the Communist Party never ruling there, almost entirely dependent on imported fossil fuels for its energy. Electricity prices are soaring — the domestic rates the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, the country’s national industrial champion, now pays are the highest of any of its global operations — and outages have grown. Worse yet, Taiwan is now vulnerable to blockades by the Chinese military that could weaponize blackouts in much the same way Russia has against Ukraine. Despite this, the ruling Democratic Progressive Party in Taiwan, which nominally supports independence from China, has opposed nuclear power since its inception. While Taiwanese President Lai Ching-te struggled to halt the final shutdown in the year after he took office, his administration has expressed an openness to nuclear power again.

On Wednesday, the state-owned utility Taipower submitted its assessment of how to restart shuttered reactors to the Ministry of Economic Affairs. In a referendum in August on whether Taiwan should restart its most recently closed plant, a majority of voters who cast ballots approved the measure, yet the plebiscite failed because it did not attract a large enough share of eligible voters. But the United Daily News reported that Taipower’s top boss said “there are opportunities and conditions” for restarting not just that last plant but the country’s second station, too. The news comes just days after Spain, the only country still pursuing a nuclear phaseout plan, officially started the paperwork to reconsider the policy, as I reported in Monday’s newsletter.

5. The godfather of the geothermal industry is getting into storage

The new generation of geothermal startups promising to use novel drilling techniques to expand the energy source’s footprint get a lot of attention. But Ormat Technologies dominates the U.S. industry with conventional operations. In August, Ormat entered a strategic partnership with one of the next-generation companies, Sage Geosystems, in a move analysts told me at the time amounted to the giant in the space picking a “winner” among the newcomers. Yet Ormat’s latest earnings suggest it’s found a new area for growth: storage. Revenue from energy storage deals skyrocketed 108% year over year thanks to good weather conditions and higher capacity prices in the PJM Interconnection, the nation’s largest grid. The company said it expects annual growth in the sector of up to 17% over the next three years, Utility Dive reported.

THE KICKER

Depending on how you feel about arachnids, this will either horrify you or delight you. Scientists just discovered the world’s biggest spider web, a subterranean “megacity” spanning nearly 1,080 square feet in a sulfur cave on the Albania-Greece border. Attached to a wall near the cave’s entrance, the colony — much like our own urban dwellings — has a large and diverse population. Roughly 69,000 Tegenaria domestica, known as the domestic house spider, call the web network home, along with 42,000 Prinerigone vagans spiders. Researchers believe this to be the first documented case of a colonial web formation for both species.