States Slap EPA With Yet Another Lawsuit Over Solar For All

Current conditions: Severe storms are sweeping through the central Great Plains states this weekend, whipping up winds of up to 75 miles per hour • Freezing temperatures are settling over Kazakhstan and Mongolia • A record heat wave in Australia is raising temperatures as high as 113 degrees Fahrenheit.

THE TOP FIVE

1. More than 20 states sue over Trump’s Solar for All cuts

Nearly two dozen states signed onto two lawsuits Thursday to stop the Trump administration from ending the $7 billion grant program that funded solar panels in low-income communities. The first complaint, filed Wednesday, seeks monetary damages over the Environmental Protection Agency’s bid to eliminate the so-called Solar for All program. A second lawsuit, filed Thursday, seeks to reinstate the program. Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes told Reuters the cancellation affected 900,000 low-income households nationwide, including some 11,000 in Arizona that the state expected to see a 20% spike in bills after losing access to the $156 million in funding from Solar for All. California would lose $250 million in funding. The litigation comes days after Harris County, which encompasses most of Houston, Texas, filed suit against the EPA over its own loss of $250 million due to the program’s termination. Earlier this month, a coalition of solar energy companies, labor unions, nonprofit groups, and homeowners also sued the EPA over the cancellation.

2. The UN’s maritime agency is voting on an emissions-cutting scheme

It remains to be seen whether other countries are willing to balk at the Trump administration’s push to gut key carbon-cutting policies. But at least in theory, later today, the drafting group for the International Maritime Organization, the United Nations agency overseeing global shipping, will vote on an emissions pricing mechanism meant to slash greenhouse gas output from an industry that still relies on some of the most heavily polluting fuels. The scheduled vote comes a day after President Donald Trump pressed the international body to reject the proposal, calling it “the Global Green New Scam Tax on Shipping” and vowing to ignore the rules.

The maritime shipping industry accounts for about 3% of global emissions. But the impact of shipping fuels is substantial. As Heatmap’s Robinson Meyer wrote in December, a study found that, when the IMO began enforcing rules to remove a toxic pollutant, sulfur dioxide from shipping fuels, the planet’s temperatures spiked. That’s because, in addition to inflaming the heart and lungs, triggering asthma attacks, and causing acid rain, sulfur dioxide can also reflect heat back into space, artificially cooling the Earth. When that fuel went away, the warming effects of all the carbon in the atmosphere became more apparent.

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3. Defense Department drops $500 million tender to buy cobalt

A child worker at a cobalt mine in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Michel Lunanga/Getty Images

The Department of Defense canceled a tender to buy cobalt, in what the trade publication Mining.com called “a fresh sign of the challenges facing Western countries trying to bolster domestic supplies of the battery metal.” In mid-August, the Defense Logistics Agency first sought offers for up to 7,500 tons of the bluish metal used in batteries and alloys for jet engines over the next five years, in a contract worth as much as $500 million. It was, according to Bloomberg, the U.S. government’s first attempt to acquire the metal since 1990. When no deals came in by the original due date of August 29, the offer was extended to October 15. But a notice published on a government website Wednesday indicated that the offer had been pulled. The move marks an apparent setback for the Pentagon’s effort to stockpile critical minerals, as I reported in this newsletter earlier this week.

While the funding doesn’t produce raw cobalt from mining, as I reported for Heatmap last month, the DLA has backed an Ohio-based startup called Xerion that’s commercializing a novel approach to processing both that metal and gallium, another mineral over which China has tightened export controls recently. It’s not alone. As Heatmap’s Katie Brigham wrote last month, “everybody wants to invest in critical mineral startups.”

4. The U.S. gains a rare earths refinery from Britain, (probably) loses a mine in Madagascar

The British rare earths processor Pensana has canceled plans for a refinery in East Yorkshire, England, in favor of investing in an American project instead. The company spent the past seven years developing a $268 million rare earths mine in Angola. One of the largest of its kind in the world, the project is scheduled to begin delivering raw materials in 2027. To turn that ore into industrial-grade materials, Pensana had planned to build a processing facility at the Saltend Chemicals Plant near Hull, England, that would have turned the metals into powerful magnets. The project won about $6.7 million in support from the British government. But Pensana’s founder and chairman, Paul Atherley, told the BBC that was “nowhere near enough.” He compared the deal to the Trump administration’s direct investment of billions of dollars into MP Materials, the country’s only rare earths mine. Pensana instead announced plans to work with the U.S. refiner ReElement to develop a domestic American supply chain, and plans to list its shares on the Nasdaq. As I wrote in Tuesday morning’s newsletter, the world’s top metals trader warned this week that the West’s mineral weakness is a lack of refining capacity, not mining. “Mining is not critical,” Trafigura CEO Richard Holtum said in London on Monday, according to Mining Journal. “True supply chain security comes from processing investment, not just extraction.”

But even the increased supply of ore from overseas projects could be in jeopardy. I have a scoop this morning in Heatmap that highlights the geopolitical challenges U.S. mining projects face overseas. On Sunday, following weeks of youth-led protests over electricity and water outages, Madagascar’s military overthrew its government in a coup. Now the new self-declared leaders have pulled support for Denver-based mining developer Energy Fuels’ plans for a giant mine that would produce rare earths, uranium, and other metals. The so-called Toliara mine, worth an estimated $2 billion, had won approval from the previous government last winter. But a consultant on the ground in Madagascar’s capital of Antananarivo told me the new leaders had “announced the definitive cancellation” of what was previously described as the future “crown jewel” of an economy where 75% of people live on less than $3 per day and less than 40% of the population has access to electricity.

5. Scientists warn of the ‘Greenlandification’ of Antarctica

As recently as the 1990s, the Greenland Ice Sheet and the Arctic were melting at a measurable pace thanks to global warming, but Antarctica’s ice cap seemed securely frozen. But, as Inside Climate News reported Thursday, “not anymore.” New satellite data and field observations show the only unpopulated continent is thawing at an alarming rate, leading to what some scientists are now calling the “Greenlandification” of Antarctica, turning it into an environment that’s melting at a rate closer to the Arctic.

There’s little question as to what is causing the meltdown. More than 100 countries now experience at least 10 more “hot days” per year than a decade ago, when the Paris climate accord was first drafted, according to new data analysis from the research groups Climate Central and World Weather Attribution published Thursday in the Financial Times. In 10 countries, the warming over the past decade added roughly a month of additional “hot days.”

THE KICKER

The good climate news, reported by Bloomberg: the Bay Area startup Rondo Energy has turned on the world’s largest industrial heat battery, a giant cubic structure that heats clay bricks with electricity from a 20-megawatt solar array to generate steam.

The bad climate news? That steam is used to force more oil out of the ground as part of Holmes Western Oil Corp.’s enhanced oil recovery system.

The mitigating factors to consider: The battery replaced a natural gas-fired boiler at the Kern County, California, facility. And proponents of enhanced oil recovery say the approach meets lasting demand for petroleum by extracting more fuel from existing wells rather than encouraging new drilling.