Energy
Global Coal Demand Is Rising, and America Wants In
The CEO of Cleveland Cliffs is just the latest U.S. voice to affirm the dirtiest fossil fuel’s unexpectedly bright future.
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The CEO of Cleveland Cliffs is just the latest U.S. voice to affirm the dirtiest fossil fuel’s unexpectedly bright future.
On betrayed regulatory promises, copper ‘anxiety,’ and Mercedes’ stalled EV plans
On presidential proclamations, Pentagon pollution, and cancelled transmission
On IRA funds, rescissions, and EV battery technology
On the NRC, energy in Pennsylvania, and Meta AI
On a new plan for an old site, tariffs on Canada, and the Grain Belt Express
Current conditions: Phoenix will “cool” to 108 degrees Fahrenheit today after hitting 118 degrees on Thursday, its hottest day of the year so far • An extreme wildfire warning is in place through the weekend in Scotland • University of Colorado forecasters decreased their outlook for the 2025 hurricane season to 16 named storms, eight hurricanes, and three major hurricanes after a quiet June and July.
President Trump threatened a 35% tariff on Canadian imports on Thursday, giving Prime Minister Mark Carney a deadline of August 1 before the levies would go into effect. The move follows months of on-again, off-again threats against Canada, with former Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau having successfully staved off the tariffs during talks in February. Despite those earlier negotiations, Trump held firm on his 50% tariff on steel and aluminum, which will have significant implications for green manufacturing.
As my colleagues Matthew Zeitlin and Robinson Meyer have written, tariffs on Canadian imports will affect the flow of oil, minerals, and lumber, as well as possibly break automobile supply chains in the United States. It was unclear as of Thursday, however, whether Trump’s tariffs “would affect all Canadian goods, or if he would follow through,” The New York Times reports. The move follows Trump’s announcement this week of tariffs on several other significant trade partners like Japan and South Korea, as well as a 50% tariff on copper.
The long beleaguered Lava Ridge Wind Project, formally halted earlier this year by an executive order from President Trump, might have a second life as the site for small modular reactors, Idaho News 6 reports. Sawtooth Energy Development Corporation has proposed installing six small nuclear power generators on the former Lava Ridge grounds in Jerome County, Idaho, drawn to the site by the power transmission infrastructure that could connect the region to the Midpoint Substation and onto the rest of the Western U.S. The proposed SMR project would be significantly smaller in scale than Lava Ridge, which would have produced 1,000 megawatts of electricity on a 200,000-acre footprint, sitting instead on 40 acres and generating 462 megawatts, enough to power 400,000 homes.
Sawtooth Energy plans to hold four public meetings on the proposal beginning July 21. The Lava Ridge Wind Project had faced strong local opposition — we named it the No. 1 most at-risk project of the energy transition last fall — due in part to concerns about the visibility of the turbines from the Minidoka National Historic Site, the site of a Japanese internment camp.
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Republican Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri said on social media Thursday that Energy Secretary Chris Wright had assured him that he will be “putting a stop to the Grain Belt Express green scam.” The Grain Belt Express is an 804-mile-long, $11 billion planned transmission line that would connect wind farms in Kansas to energy consumers in Missouri, Illinois, and Indiana, which has been nearing construction after “more than a decade of delays,” The New York Times reports. But earlier this month, Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey, a Republican, put in a request for the local public service commission to reconsider its approval, claiming that the project had overstated the number of jobs it would create and the cost savings for customers. Hawley has also been a vocal critic of the project and had asked the Energy Department to cancel its conditional loan guarantee for the transmission project.
New electric vehicles sold in Europe are significantly more environmentally friendly than gas cars, even when battery production is taken into consideration, according to a new study by the International Council on Clean Transportation. Per the report, EVs produce 73% less life-cycle greenhouse gas emissions than combustion engine cars, even considering production — a 24% improvement over 2021 estimates. The gains are also owed to the large share of renewable energy sources in Europe, and factor in that “cars sold today typically remain on the road for about 20 years, [and] continued improvement of the electricity mix will only widen the climate benefits of battery electric cars.” The gains are exclusive to battery electric cars, however; “other powertrains, including hybrids and plug-in hybrids, show only marginal or no progress in reducing their climate impacts,” the report found.
Aryna Sabalenka attempts to cool down during her Ladies' Singles semi-final at Wimbledon on Thursday.Julian Finney/Getty Images
With the United Kingdom staring down its third heatwave in a month this week, a new study warns of dire consequences if homes and cities do not adapt to the new climate reality. According to researchers at the University College London and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, heat-related deaths in England and Wales could rise 50-fold by the 2070s, jumping from a baseline of 634 deaths to 34,027 in a worst-case scenario of 4.3 degrees Celsius warming, a high-emissions pathway.
The report specifically cited the aging populations of England and Wales, as older people become more vulnerable to the impacts of extreme heat. Low adoption of air conditioning is also a factor: only 2% to 5% of English households use air conditioning, although that number may grow to 32% by 2050. “We can mitigate [the] severity” of the health impacts of heat “by reducing greenhouse gas emissions and with carefully planned adaptations, but we have to start now,” UCL researcher Clare Heaviside told Sky News.
This week, Centerville, Ohio, rolled out high-tech recycling trucks that will use AI to scan the contents of residents’ bins and flag when items have been improperly sorted. “Reducing contamination in our recycling system lowers processing costs and improves the overall efficiency of our collection,” City Manager Wayne Davis said in a statement about the AI pilot program, per the Dayton Daily News.
On an Interior Department memo, unstoppable wind and solar, and a lawsuit
Current conditions: Invest 93 could develop into a tropical depression and dump 3 to 6 inches of rain on southern Louisiana between now and this weekend • Western and central Massachusetts face a small tornado risk this afternoon and evening • Spain attributes more than 1,100 deaths this spring and summer to extreme heat.
A new secretarial order from the Department of the Interior’s deputy chief of staff for policy, Gregory Wischer, states that “all decisions, actions, consultations, and other undertakings” that are “related to wind and solar energy facilities” will now be required to go through multiple layers of political review from Wischer’s and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum’s respective offices. My colleague Jael Holzman, who reviewed the document, explains that the new layer of review would apply to “essentially anything Interior and its many subagencies would ordinarily be consulted on before construction,” creating a further bottleneck for projects that need to be underway to qualify for federal tax credits under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. The order lists 68 different activities that will now come under this extra level of review. In sum, the order is “so drastic it would impact projects on state and private lands, as well as federal acreage,” Jael writes. “In some cases, agency staff may now need political sign-offs simply to tell renewables developers whether they need a permit at all.” Read her full report here.
Solar and wind are “economically unstoppable,” even without tax credits, a new report on the One Big Beautiful Bill Act from the Columbia Business School found. According to the report, solar photovoltaic prices have decreased by approximately 80% over the past decade, wind by approximately 70%, and lithium-ion battery by approximately 90%. As a result, gas combined cycle power plants are now more expensive than both solar and wind. Still, given the 2026 phaseout of production tax credits, “we will likely see a brief spike in projects for the next 18 months as they race to be placed while still eligible, then a deceleration,” Columbia Business School found. Additionally, while the OBBBA offers a “silver lining” for renewable projects like nuclear, geothermal, and carbon capture, cuts to Department of Energy research and development funding will mean “the United States will only fall further behind in the global clean energy race,” the report continues.
A coalition of 20 Democratic-led states filed a lawsuit in federal court in Boston on Wednesday against the Federal Emergency Management Agency over its elimination of a natural disaster mitigation grant program, The New York Times and Associated Press report. The lawsuit, which follows near-record rains in New York and New Jersey, as well as the catastrophic floods in Texas, claims that terminating the Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities program is unlawful because it wasn’t done with the approval of Congress. The Trump administration’s shutdown of the grant is “making it much harder for communities across our state to protect themselves against future extreme weather events and putting lives at risk,” New Jersey’s attorney general, Matthew J. Platkin, said in a statement.
Initially established by law in 2000, BRIC’s roughly $4.5 billion grants have helped fund nearly 2,000 resiliency and mitigation projects around the country. FEMA justified its decision to terminate the program as part of an ongoing effort by the Trump administration to eliminate “waste, fraud, and abuse.”
A bipartisan group of governors representing nine of the 13 states in which PJM operates issued an open letter on Wednesday demanding the grid operator appoint “widely respected leaders” to its two open board seats to “restore PJM’s legitimacy.” The letter specifically cited a lack of confidence in PJM due to its “multi-year inability to connect new resources to its grid efficiently and to engage in effective long-term transmission planning,” as well as the termination of two members of its Board of Managers and the upcoming departure of its CEO. The governors further requested a meeting with PJM’s nominating committee to share its proposed slate of candidates who “understand the concerns of ratepayers facing rising costs and who will be ready to collaborate with the incoming CEO to instill a new, more collaborative and more effective ethos at PJM.”
As my colleague Matthew Zeitlin has reported, though many states in PJM’s service area on the Mid-Atlantic have ambitious decarbonization goals, the operator is “actively seeking to bring new gas-fired generation onto the grid to meet its skyrocketing projections of future demand.” But while PJM has blamed permitting woes and the retirements of power plants for its challenges, “state officials and clean energy advocates have instead placed the blame for higher costs and impending reliability gaps on PJM’s struggles to connect projects, how the electricity market is designed, and the operator’s perceived coolness towards renewables,” Matthew goes on.
The Netherlands will cut its offshore wind goals by as much as 40%, claiming its aim of 50 gigawatts of generation capacity by 2030 is “not realistic,” Bloomberg reports. The new target will be in the range of 30 to 40 gigawatts, adjusted to consider both the high cost of development and lagging power demand growth. The announcement comes as part of a larger slowdown in offshore wind globally. The International Renewable Energy Agency has stated that to meet global targets of tripling renewable energy use by 2030, offshore wind capacity would need to grow to 494 gigawatts by 2030, up from 73 gigawatts currently.
Tesla
Tesla teased the launch of a six-seat version of its Model Y, the Model YL, on Wednesday. The car will be available in China in the fall, and appears to be a strategic move by the automaker to “boost its sales amid rising competition from BYD and other domestic manufacturers,” The Verge reports.