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President Trump speaking at the UN. Photo: Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images
In his opening address to the annual gathering of nearly all the world’s nations in New York, United Nations Secretary General António Guterres called for an end to what he desscribed as “the most profound intergenerational power imbalance of all.” Climate change, he said, has led to “one group profiting, while those least responsible suffer first and worst.” The former Portuguese prime minister from the Iberian country’s leading center-left party highlighted last month’s catastrophic flood in Nepal as an example of the unfair toll global warming is taking. “As tragic events have shown, impacts are arriving sooner, hitting harder, and spreading further than many anticipated. Now we face a near certain breach of the 1.5-degree limit, with a supersized El Niño speeding straight for humanity,” he said. “The dangers are real. But so is the hope.”
President Donald Trump struck a decidedly different tone in his remarks to the assembly. In a characteristically fiery speech defending the U.S. war with Iran, he vowed to “annihilate the Islamic Republic “ or “drive them into hell with no chance of survival” if Tehran doesn’t agree to a peace deal with Washington soon — and that doing so would bring down oil prices. “If we stand united, we will soon see a world free of the last 51-year menace of Iranian terror,” Trump said. “And oil prices will come plummeting down even lower than they were at the start of the conflict. And they were very low in the United States. They were really low. With courage and resolve, anything is possible.” As an example, he pointed to what he called the largest oil deal in history with Venezuela last month. “When you add the United States and Venezuela together, we have more than 60% of the oil in the world,” Trump said. “So it’s perhaps the biggest deal. It was a war, but it’s perhaps the biggest deal ever made. To the victor belong the spoils.” Among the other spoils the president sees: Tuesday’s signing of his updated deal with Greenland to permanently bar Russian, Chinese, and other adversaries from making large-scale investments or setting up military outposts on the Danish-controlled Arctic island.
Back in June, New York Attorney General Letitia James filed what my colleague Emily Pontecorvo clocked as the first major state lawsuit challenging any of the Trump administration’s series of deals to pay offshore wind developers to abandon their projects. The lawsuit zeroed in on TotalEnergies and the $1 billion the Department of the Interior offered for the French giant to walk away from two proposed projects. On Tuesday, Albany announced two more lawsuits seeking to block deals with the developers Bluepoint Wind and Invenergy that, combined, would equal “$1.4 billion in taxpayer dollars in exchange for canceling four critical offshore wind projects.” New York Governor Kathy Hochul, who joined the lawsuit, admonished “the Trump administration’s unlawful pay-to-not-play scheme to pressure companies to forgo planned offshore wind projects in America,” which she called “an outrageous abuse of taxpayer dollars that hurts our ability to meet our energy needs.”
That same day, California Attorney General Rob Bonta filed a lawsuit over the Interior Department’s deal with Invenergy to kill off what would have been one of the first major offshore wind projects on the West Coast. “At a time when we need more reliable, clean energy, President Trump is trying to send $111 million dollars to his fossil fuel industry friends and wants taxpayers and working families to cover the tab,” Bonta said in a press release. “This outrageous abuse of taxpayer dollars will damage the offshore wind industry and create unnecessary obstacles to clean and reliable energy powering our homes and economies.” Both states explicitly tied the timing of the lawsuits to New York Climate Week, the five-day series of events around Manhattan that are tied to the UN General Assembly and seen as the aperitif for November’s global climate talks in Turkey.
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A 190-mile transmission line stretching across Wisconsin is drawing blowback from Democrats and Republicans. The state’s congressional delegation is increasingly aligned. Representative Mark Pocan, a Democrat, said Midcontinent Grid Solutions’ outreach to residents on the power line “does not match the scale of the project’s impact on their land, their livelihoods, and their communities,” the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported. Senator Tammy Baldwin, another Democrat, called for a “slowdown” of the development process. On the other side of the aisle, Republican Representative Derrick Van Orden has backed a full moratorium on the project.
Coincidentally, Trump has signaled he’s willing to ease the administration’s blockade on renewables in a bid to secure a federal permitting deal with Democrats, Politico reported Tuesday. Two unnamed sources told the outlet that Trump has agreed to direct the Department of Defense to start clearing its queue of long-delayed onshore wind projects. My colleague Jael Holzman reported last week that, despite a court ruling ordering the military to resume its reviews, the administration hasn’t yet.
It was a bullish time for nuclear, it was a bearish time for nuclear. Billions of dollars are flowing into projects and ideas for reactors are proliferating as has not been seen since the mid-20th century atomic power buildout in North America, Europe, and East Asia. But startups debuting on the stock market are falling far short of expectations. Fuel maker Standard Nuclear went public in July in what Bloomberg called “a downsized U.S. IPO,” while the Amazon-backed next-generation reactor company X-Energy has fallen nearly 40% below its IPO price. America’s nuclear champion, Westinghouse, is still eyeing a $50 billion valuation ahead of a potential IPO. But it remains unclear whether that deal will ultimately go through. The market uncertainty isn’t stopping one of Europe’s most advanced nuclear startups from going public in the U.S. On Tuesday, Newcleo listed on the Nasdaq after completing a $247 million deal with a special purpose acquisition company, or SPAC, essentially a cheat code for a swift IPO that involves merging with an already-traded black-check company and thus allowing the firm to avoid the months of due diligence with investment bankers that typically precedes a stock market debut. Newcleo CEO Stefano Buono called the deal “a new steppingstone that sets up” the company “for long-term success.”
For fusion no longer to be “the energy source of tomorrow that always will be,” as the old joke goes, the startups promising to bring about the so-called holy grail of clean power need to scale up supply chains. Inertia, the fusion startup that formed with much of the team of U.S. government scientists that pulled off the historic 2022 breakthrough that made fusion energy a possibility, is now laying the groundwork for commercialization. On Tuesday, the company, led by former Twilio CEO Jeff Lawson (yes, the same one that’ll be at Heatmap House), announced what it called “close collaborations” with three companies to begin manufacturing the lasers needed for Inertia’s fusion power plants at scale. “These are the first of many industrial collaborations we will coordinate to bring the scale of mass manufacturing to industrialize the laser fusion energy supply chain,” the company said.
