Trump Opens Alaskan Wilderness to Drilling Months After Climate Disaster

Current conditions: Tropical Storm Melissa is gathering enough strength to potentially reach Category 5 status as the cyclone tracks northward toward Florida and the Bahamas • Up to six storms are barreling toward the Pacific Northwest, threatening flooding from up to six inches of rain on Saturday • Parts of South Africa’s coast are roasting in temperatures above 109 degrees Fahrenheit.

THE TOP FIVE

1. Trump opens Alaskan Arctic coastline to energy development

The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska.U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service/Getty Images

The Department of the Interior unveiled a package of executive actions opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling and mining exploration, a controversial move that fulfills a decades-long ambition for industry. The decision marks what The New York Times described as “the latest twist in a long-running fight over the fate of the refuge’s coastal plain, an unspoiled expanse of 1.56 million acres that is believed to sit atop billions of barrels of oil but is also a critical habitat for polar bears, caribou, migratory birds, and other wildlife.” During his first term, in 2017, President Donald Trump signed a tax bill that required two oil and gas leases in the area, but the Biden administration later blocked those leases. “From day one, President Trump directed us to unlock Alaska’s energy and resource potential while honoring commitments to the state and local communities,” Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum said in a statement. “By reopening the Coastal Plain and advancing key infrastructure, we are strengthening energy independence, creating jobs and supporting Alaska’s communities while driving economic growth across the state.”

The Trump administration has made industrializing the northernmost frontier state a key priority, approving a mining road though pristine forested lands and taking an equity stake for the federal government in the company aiming to extract minerals in the region. But the Environmental Protection Agency also yanked funding meant to help reinforce infrastructure in Alaska Native villages against warming-fueled floods, dismissing the money as left-wing ideologically driven “diversity, equity, and inclusion” spending, as I wrote in this newsletter. Those very communities were devastated by a typhoon earlier this month, displacing residents, with evacuees struggling to adjust to life in Alaska’s “concrete jungles,” the Northern Journal reported.

2. Stardust Solutions raises $60 million to develop a geoengineering system

Heatmap’s Robinson Meyer has a big scoop this morning: Geoengineering startup Stardust Solutions is set to announce that it has raised $60 million in venture capital to develop the tools needed to artificially cool the planet by reflecting sunlight away from Earth. The company, led by a team of Israeli physicists, aims to spray aerosols into the atmosphere that will bounce energy from the sun back into space to balance out the effects of greenhouse gases. The technology is on track to be ready by the end of the decade. Lowercarbon Capital led the funding round, which is the company’s second, following a $15 million seed round in 2024. Rob’s story offers a measured assessment of the dangers of potentially geoengineering the atmosphere — and the threat of failing to do so when efforts to mitigate emissions are so far from where they need to be to preserve the climate norms in which humans evolved as a species. In a line that harkens to one of my favorite books, journalist Charles C. Mann’s environmental history of the global trade network that developed after Christopher Columbus’ arrival in the Americas called 1493, Rob notes that “the Earth has not been free of human influence for millennia,” and that “the world has over and over again been remade by human hands.”

“Stardust may not play the Prometheus here and bring this particular capability into humanity’s hands,” Rob writes. “But I have never been so certain that someone will try in our lifetimes. We find ourselves, once again, in the middle of things.”

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3. Rivian lays off nearly 5% of its workforce

Rivian, the maker of luxury electric trucks and SUVs, slashed more than 600 employees, representing nearly 4.5% of its roughly 15,000-person workforce, The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday. “These are not changes that were made lightly,” Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe said in an email to staff. “With the changing operating backdrop, we had to rethink how we are scaling our go-to-market functions.” The cuts were meant to help “profitably scale” the business as it prepares to launch its new R2 midsize SUV.

The move comes as electric automakers reel from the Trump administration’s elimination of the federal electric vehicle tax credit. Tesla, as I reported here yesterday, posted a nearly 40% drop in profits on Wednesday afternoon as the company lowered prices to keep costs to customers in line with what federal write-offs previously made possible. But as Andrew Moseman wrote in Heatmap, the lower prices came with stripped-down features.

4. Trump teams up with Abu Dhabi for a critical minerals fund

The U.S. government has backed a new billion-dollar fund to invest in critical minerals along with the New York-based Orion Resource Partners and Abu Dhabi’s ADQ. The investment vehicle, dubbed the Orion Critical Mineral Consortium, was announced Thursday with support from the federal International Development Finance Corp. The funding totals more than $1.8 billion, Bloomberg reported.

This is just the Trump administration’s latest foray into mining. The Department of Defense took the largest stake earlier this year in MP Materials, the only active rare earths producer in the U.S. Since then, the administration has taken stakes in other critical minerals projects, and considered similar ownership positions in companies developing rare earths in Greenland.

5. South Carolina’s nuclear boondoggle sees new life

VC Summer, the project to build Westinghouse’s state-of-the-art AP1000 reactor in South Carolina, became such a financial boondoggle, utility executives went to jail; The final defendant was sentenced just last year. Yet the project — widely mocked as a billion-dollar hole in the ground — may end up built after all. Utility Santee Cooper officially notified regulators this week that it plans to execute a contract to restart the project.

The announcement, part of what Heatmap’s Katie Brigham called the “nuclear dealmaking boom,” came the same day Canada’s government put up $2 billion to back a small modular reactor project in Bowmanville, Ontario. The progress north of America’s border on new reactor technologies has drawn attention from potential Democratic presidential candidates in the U.S. When New York City mayoral contender Zohran Mamdani expressed support for building new reactors in the state during this week’s debate, Arizona Senator Ruben Gallego — widely discussed as a possible White House seeker — responded to the news in a post on X: “I am all for Nuclear power in this country but it would be quicker and cheaper to buy into the Ontario plant being built and coming online by 2030.”

THE KICKER

Mining giant Fortescue has made a breakthrough. In its latest earnings call with investors Thursday, the Australian giant said it planned to replace the trucks that carry its ore with electric alternatives. “We’re not doing this because we don’t think our total cost of ownership is going to be less,” Fortescue CEO Dino Otranto said in a statement. “Of course, we’re doing it because of that.”