Pennsylvania Abandons its Leading Climate Policy

Current conditions: A powerful storm is rolling in from the Pacific to dump several inches of rain across Southern California, threatening floods • The Northeast is set to remain roughly 5 degrees Fahrenheit below historical averages, with New York City topping out at 50 degrees • A major storm is developing over Namibia, bringing flooding to its southern regions.

THE TOP FIVE

1. Pennsylvania governor agrees to exit climate alliance

Governor Josh Shapiro.Win McNamee/Getty Images

Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro has withdrawn his state from the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, leaving the state with the fourth-highest emissions in the country without a significant climate policy. The cap-and-trade market included 10 other states, including all of New England, New York, and some Mid-Atlantic states. After a two-year legal fight over the state’s decision to quit the carbon-cutting alliance through regulatory fiat, Virginia’s Republicans governor successfully exited the group. But, as E&E News noted, Shapiro is the first governor from any party to sign legislation pulling his state out of RGGI. The millions generated from RGGI were earmarked for clean energy and transportation projects in the commonwealth. Philadelphia’s transit system is teetering on the brink of a budget crisis, alongside the bus and light-rail network in San Francisco and Chicago, Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo wrote last month. Shapiro, widely considered a serious contender for the Democratic presidential nod in 2028, has sought to dominate the moderate lane in his party, maintaining vocal support for Israel, touting his popularity with his state’s Republican voters, and now reversing a major climate initiative in the name of “cutting costs.”

Meanwhile, in another blow to the climate movement, 350.org, the advocacy group founded by writer Bill McKibben to protest construction of the Keystone XL oil pipeline more than a decade ago, plans to “temporarily suspend programming” in the U.S. amid a funding pinch, Politico reported.

2. Electricity prices are set to continue climbing

Wholesale electricity rates across the United States are forecast to spike again next year by as much as 8.5% to $51 per megawatt-hour, up from $45 per megawatt-hour this year, according to the latest outlook from the U.S. Energy Information Administration. This year’s prices were already 23% higher than the 2024 average. The biggest driver pushing up rates next year is the northern pricing hub of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, the state’s independent grid operator, as demand from data centers and cryptocurrency mines exceeds available supply. The EIA warned that natural gas prices are the primary determinant of power prices. “But in 2026,” the federal analysts wrote, “the increase in power prices in ERCOT tends to reflect large hourly spikes in the summer months due to high demand combined with relatively low supply in this region.” Rising electricity rates could make the pitch for electrifying heating, appliances, and transportation a tougher sell, as Heatmap’s Katie Brigham wrote.

Get Heatmap AM directly in your inbox every morning:

3. New research boosts hopes for sodium replacing lithium in batteries

Lithium is geographically limited, costly to mine, and, in batteries, has a bad tendency to overheat and blow up. Sodium-ion batteries solve all of those problems. But it’s been difficult to get sodium ions to move quickly and reliably through solids. Scientists at Western University in Ontario say they have a fix by formulating a new material containing sulfur and chlorine. Traditional electrolytes are chemically stable, but tend to move sodium ions too slowly between the positive and negative ends of a battery. Adding sulfur to the design boosts the conductivity by making it easier for ions to volley through the battery.

Katie has covered the nascent sodium-ion battery business well. Back in April, she wrote about the death of the startup Bedrock Materials. Last month, she described how the startup Alsym planned to break the industry’s streak of failures and establish a manufacturing line in the U.S.

Sign up to receive Heatmap AM in your inbox every morning:

4. TVA embarks on ‘historic’ gas and nuclear buildout

In his first few months in office, President Donald Trump fired most of the Tennessee Valley Authority’s board of directors and, in July, demanded the remaining members terminate the federally owned utility’s top brass. But CEO Don Moul has held onto his job, and is now singing a tune the administration should like. On Thursday’s earnings call, Moul said the TVA was “undertaking one of the largest new asset campaigns in our history,” with 3.7 gigawatts of new generation under construction. What kind of generation? It’s “a historic gas build right now,” the TVA’s finance chief Tom Rice said, according to Utility Dive. The utility is also developing new nuclear fission and fusion power plants, including what may be the nation’s first small modular reactor.

5. New studies highlight the mounting problem of climate change

Global emissions from fossil fuels are on track to rise 1.1% this year, reaching an all-time high, according to data published Thursday by the Global Carbon Project. “Keeping global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius is no longer plausible,” Pierre Friedlingstein, a climate researcher at the University of Exeter who led the study, told E&E News. The findings also suggested that the amount of carbon the planet’s land and forests absorb “is substantially smaller than previously estimated,” while the volumes the ocean takes in are now understood to be even greater, Bloomberg noted.

A new study by researchers at Pusan National University in South Korea illustrated what’s at stake for big global systems as temperature rises beyond humanity’s control. Melting sea ice in polar regions is transforming how oceans move and mix. New models to examine previously difficult-to-study patterns found that sea ice loss “strengthens currents and turbulence, particularly in the Arctic and Southern Oceans,” and that “such changes are expected to substantially alter the transport of heat, carbon and nutrient, ultimately affecting polar marine ecosystems.”

THE KICKER

The symbolism is almost eerie, a microcosm of the violence and discomfort heralded by rising global temperatures. As the global climate summit in the Amazonian city of Belém reaches the end of its first week, the United Nations has scolded Brazil for failing to maintain security at the conference and keep the facilities at a comfortable air conditioned temperature.