Current conditions: Hurricane Melissa now a Category 2 storm, has left as much as $52 billion in damages in its wake • Sadly for trick-or-treaters, a new storm moving northward from the Mississippi Valley is forecast to bring heavy rains and gusty winds to the Northeast, particularly New England, on Halloween • Heavy rains are bringing the highest possible flood risk to Kenya today.
THE TOP FIVE
1. Shell abandons its offshore wind project
Oil giant Shell withdrew from its Atlantic Shores project to develop offshore wind off the coast of New Jersey and New York. In a press release on Thursday, the company said it was pulling out of a 50-50 joint venture with the French energy giant EDF as the Anglo-Dutch behemoth grapples with the Trump administration’s so-called “total war on wind.” The decision, the company said, “was taken in line with Shell’s power strategy,” which includes “shifting away from capital-intensive generation projects to assets that support our trading and retail strengths.” The move comes nearly a month after Shell’s top executive in the United States called out President Donald Trump for setting what she called a bad precedent for future administrations that would use the legal approaches the White House has taken to attack offshore wind against oil and gas, as I wrote here a few weeks ago.
2. Senate votes to overturn Arctic protections
The Senate voted Thursday to overturn Biden-era rules limiting drilling in the Alaskan Arctic. The 52-45 vote, in which Senator John Fetterman of Pennsylvania joined Republicans to vote in favor, canceled out the 2022 Biden administration plan that made just 52% of land in what’s known as the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska available for drilling. A previous Trump administration proposal made 82% of the area eligible for drilling. “This will benefit North Slope communities with jobs & economic growth, and support their tax base to improve access to essential services like water and sewer systems and clinics,” Alaska Senator Dan Sullivan, who sponsored the legislation to withdraw the Biden-era rules, said in a post on X in September.
The move comes a week after Trump opened a broad swath of Alaskan wilderness to drilling, as I reported here.
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3. BYD’s profits slump
Chinese electric auto giant BYD reported another slump in its quarterly profits amid growing domestic competition. Much like Tesla, which has seen its market share in the U.S. drop in recent months as rivals surged ahead, BYD saw its third-quarter profits tumble 33% from a year earlier to roughly $1.1 billion. Total revenue dropped 3%. The Shenzhen-based company — the world’s largest electric automaker — remains dominant in China, but rivals Geely Automobile Holdings and Chongqing Changan Automobile Co. saw increases in third-quarter sales of 96% and 84% respectively, Bloomberg reported.
Still, BYD’s strength in the international market gives the Chinese company an edge over Tesla, the U.S.’s domestic EV champion. As Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin wrote recently, “Tesla’s stranglehold over the U.S. EV market may be weakening, so too is its hold on the international market.”
4. OpenAI plans a $7 billion data center outside Detroit
Real estate giant Related Companies agreed to build a data-center campus worth more than $7 billion on farmland outside Detroit, in what The Wall Street Journal called “one of the largest deals yet” for this class of property deals to power artificial intelligence. The 250-acre campus is the fourth new site announced as part of a $300 billion contract between Oracle and OpenAI to power the ChatGPT-maker’s Stargate project.
The news came the same day the small modular reactor startup Blue Energy announced a deal with the artificial intelligence company Crusoe to develop a nuclear-powered data center campus in Port of Victoria, Texas. The project, which aims to build up to 1.5 gigawatts of power, would first build natural gas-fired plants with the intention of phasing them out in favor of Blue Energy’s nuclear reactors by 2031. The nuclear company plans to construct its plants on sites where it can ship the reactors to the campus by barge. “We’re not really doing anything where there isn’t regulatory precedent in the past,” Blue Energy CEO Jake Jurewicz told nuclear scholar Emmet Penney on the podcast Nuclear Barbarians earlier this month. “In the end, it comes down to being really thoughtful with design, plant architecture, and site selection.”
5. Democrats largely fall in line behind bill to promote nuclear recycling
Nuclear waste recycling was once a third-rail issue among liberals who, like former President Jimmy Carter, feared that the technology to extract additional reactor fuel from spent uranium risked sending the message worldwide that the U.S. supported continued weapons proliferation. But when the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee voted Wednesday to approve legislation to streamline the process for licensing nuclear recycling plants, only a handful of Democrats pushed back. The radioactive waste sitting at power plants across the U.S. is relatively tiny compared to the amount of electricity those fuel rods produced. But part of why the spent fuel remains dangerously toxic for so long is that it still contains the vast majority of the energy in the uranium. By reprocessing the enriched metal to extract the useful fuel isotopes, the nation’s waste stockpile would shrink and, by some estimates, the U.S. could power its entire grid system for more than a century.
At this week’s vote, the opposition stood out against the unanimous support for other bills to promote plastics cleanup and diesel emissions, E&E News reported. But the bipartisan Nuclear REFUEL Act attracted just a handful of dissenters, ultimately passing in a 16 to 3 vote. Separately, in Illinois late Thursday, Governor JB Pritzker signed legislation to lift the state’s moratorium on building nuclear reactors. That puts the state, by far the largest nuclear hub in the nation, in play for new large-scale reactors that the Trump administration has pledged to fund.
THE KICKER
Pumpkin bumper crops? Quoth the farmer, nevermore. INOAA
Happy Halloween, to all who celebrate. In the holiday spirit, would you like to read something a little spooky? Climate change is already taking a toll on the nation’s pumpkin crop. Extreme heat and rain are reducing how many gourds are available for jack-o-lanterns, as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration warned last year. The downward trend continues. In the latest crop update from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the per capita availability of pumpkins fell by 11%, more than five times the reduction in squash and twice the fall in sweet potatoes.
Pumpkin bumper crops? Quoth the farmer, nevermore. INOAA
