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The odds of BAAJA passing likely grew a few degrees worse.
On an NRC acceptance, Deb Haaland’s rejection, and Texas’ win over Chinese solar
Plus, one big opportunity for climate change.
Endurance Energy hoped its generator would run for a full year, but the team isn’t afraid of the “error” in “trial and error.”
On The Nuclear Company, Venture Global’s power dreams, and super pollutants
Current conditions: A cold front is sweeping into the Northeast, potentially bringing snow to higher elevations in New York and New England • Early snow is blanketing parts of the Mountain West, with as much as 16 inches in Great Falls, Montana • Temperatures in Jakarta are nearing 100 degrees Fahrenheit as Indonesia battles the world’s worst air with haze brought on by forest fires.
Smoke billows from a Gazprom refinery outside Moscow following a drone attack. AFP via Getty Images
President Donald Trump’s controversial and potentially illegal deal to unilaterally lift U.S. sanctions on Russia to allow Moscow to export millions of tons of diesel to the global market was meant to curb the surging price of the fuel, which has added as much as $1,000 per week to commercial truckers’ costs in the U.S. in recent months. But the agreement with Russian President Vladimir Putin could backfire as Ukraine responds by breaking with Washington and once again targeting the Kremlin’s oil refineries. In an interview Thursday with the Financial Times, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said the ban on attacking refineries “is out” after U.S. intelligence pulled back from sharing information with Kyiv and Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite internet service, on which the Ukrainian military has depended for drone attacks, weakened amid a wave of Russian attacks. “We’re done,” Zelenskyy said.
When Jair Bolsonaro took power in 2019, Brazil’s right-wing firebrand former president vowed to industrialize the Amazon, clearing the way for ranchers, loggers, and miners to exploit the vast jungle’s resources. Later that year, fires consumed broad chunks of the Amazon. Now Flávio Bolsonaro, Jair’s son, is the frontrunner in the October 25 runoff election against left-wing President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Bolsonaro’s supporters post semi-facetious, AI-generated videos depicting a hulking, muscly Flávio riding on the back of a velociraptor, flamethrowering the rainforest to make way for rows of McDonald’s. Right on cue, the Amazon is once again on fire. Droughts brought on by El Niño have “left the Amazon rainforest primed to burn, and scientists say the region has entered the early stages of what they think will be a long and severe fire season,” according to an analysis by NASA. Already, satellite images show a sharp increase in fire and smoke in the central and Eastern Amazon. Brazil now has the worst wildfire-wrought air quality in the world after Indonesia.
Last month, Holtec Nuclear — the company behind the nation’s first restart of an atomic power station and a frontrunner to build some of our first small modular reactors — canceled its plans to debut itself on the stock market with an initial public offering. The reason? Every nuclear company that went public in recent months has seen its stock price plummet. On Thursday, Axios reported that The Nuclear Company, the developer that brought together the team that helped build the country’s first Westinghouse AP1000 reactors at Georgia’s Plant Vogtle to build more large-scale plants, had backed away from its own IPO plans. (Listen to my colleague Robinson Meyer’s interview with The Nuclear Company’s chief executive here.)
The detail highlights how the market has cooled to nuclear startups since next-generation SMR developer Oklo went public and made billions of dollars as retail investors sought to bet on a nuclear comeback. And yet The Nuclear Company only raised its first Series A funding round last year. Its fate has always seemed tied to Westinghouse, which is eyeing its own IPO. While The Nuclear Company will almost certainly need to go public at some point, given the capital intensity of its projects, it hadn’t yet filed a confidential S-1 to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Without that, it’s unlikely The Nuclear Company would be IPOing by next year anyway.
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Venture Global has inked a deal with GE Vernova and Baker Hughes Energy Services to build up to 16 new 720-megawatt power island units and transformers as America’s No. 2 liquified natural gas company builds out a behind-the meter industrial power network. The deal, per a press release, provides “a pathway to make up to 10 gigawatts of new compute capacity available over time” at sites owned by Venture Global. The company already boasts 4.5 gigawatts of what it calls “island mode modular, gas-fired generation.” In a statement, Venture Global CEO Mike Sabel said the company will maintain “one of the world’s largest private industrial electric grids.”
The move comes as the U.S. added a record 89 gigawatts of clean power capacity in the second half of this year, with momentum building for another new high next year, according to the latest market outlook from BloombergNEF. The consultancy projected that solar will reach 48.9 gigawatts in 2026, with 430 gigawatts of utility-scale solar forecast to come online through 2036. That, surprisingly, is down nearly 8% from BNEF’s previous estimate at the start of the year. More surprising is the energy source that is on the rise: Onshore wind additions could peak at 9.2 gigawatts in 2028, with 99.7 gigawatts forecast through 2036 — and that’s 15% above BNEF’s past forecast. Energy storage is on track to add 383 gigawatts through 2036, a 35% bump from BNEF’s past estimate. Nuclear, meanwhile, is expected to pick up again after a decade of stagnation, with 13.7 gigawatts on track to come online through 2036.
Back in 2024, my colleague Emily Pontecorvo covered Google’s first-of-a-kind deals to lock in carbon removal. Two years later, she was lamenting the “sorry state” of the industry amid a broader pullback from the cutting-edge technology to suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. Things may be picking back up again. On Thursday, the tech giant backed an $11.7 million deal with the carbon marketplace Frontier to pay to remove 20,932 tons of carbon from the atmosphere using the startup 44.01’s mineralization technology, which converts carbon into solid rock within three years. “44.01’s technology dissolves captured CO2 that is injected deep beneath the Earth’s surface. There, it reacts to form solid carbonate minerals within a few years,” Randy Spock, Google’s head of carbon removal, wrote in a post on LinkedIn. “Those minerals stay put for millennia with no risk of reversal.”
In May, the Trump administration eased U.S. restrictions on so-called super pollutants, the class of refrigerants that rapidly spur on global warming. On Thursday, a coalition of climate philanthropies announced over $36 million in new funding to support a push to expand energy-efficient, sustainable cooling. “As demand for cooling grows, so do potential emissions,” Christie Ulman, president of Sequoia Climate Foundation, said in a press release. “Targeted philanthropic funding can be a catalytic force in unlocking broader investments in sustainable cooling and fast-acting super pollutant solutions that shield vulnerable communities and advance climate goals.”
Rob talks with Peter Erickson, an affiliated researcher at the Stockholm Environment Institute
No researcher has been more cited in lawsuits against fossil fuel infrastructure than Peter Erickson. As an affiliated researcher at the Stockholm Environment Institute, Peter studies how pipelines and other oil and gas supply expansions can increase global carbon emissions. His work has been critical to the activist fights against the Keystone XL pipeline, the Enbridge pipeline, and others.
But in recent years, he’s taken a more nuanced approach to fossil fuel supply — in part because, as he has shown, it can enrich the oil and gas industry in a surprising but direct way. On this episode of Shift Key, Peter joins Rob to discuss why blocking fossil fuel supply can lower emissions, why it can counterintuitively transfer wealth from energy consumers to fossil fuel firms, and what it all might mean for the future of climate policy.
Shift Key is hosted by Robinson Meyer, the founding executive editor of Heatmap News.
Subscribe to “Shift Key” and find this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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Here is an excerpt from their conversation:
Robinson Meyer: So first of all, let's talk about this finding that you've already previewed, which is that when you restrain fossil fuel supply, you might be able to keep those barrels off the market. But what you are doing is engineering a massive shift of wealth to the existing fossil fuel industry. I know you've already described it a little, but just why is that?
Peter Erickson: Yeah, the reason for that is because when you constrain supply and constrain supply outlooks, you are causing an increase in price, and that is what is needed to bring on the other new projects. And that increase in price and price outlooks is what causes consumers and all of the institutions that surround consumers, the car industries, et cetera, to reduce their oil consumption.
But that increase in price applies to every single producer in the whole world, right? You've penalized one producer or one whole region of the world by saying, "You can't produce oil here," but the price increase applies globally, and all producers see that. And all consumers see that. And when those economics balance out, and a new equilibrium is found, the consumers are paying for that price increase and giving the money to the producers.
And you can do straight-ahead math on that to give a first-order estimate of what happens.
Robinson Meyer: And you cite a recent example that everyone just saw, that we've been talking about on this show, which is in early 2026, Iran, following the US-Israeli war starting, closed the Strait of Hormuz. The price for oil and refined products spiked everywhere around the world. That increased fuel costs for consumers, and it increased profits for producers. It was quite mechanical, and we all saw it happen. And effectively what you're saying is that when you constrain fossil fuel production in some subnational region, effectively what you're doing is like a mini version of that.
Peter Erickson: That's completely right. And the logic of that has been consistent through all of my papers. But I think Hormuz and other events mean that this dynamic needs to be considered upfront. It needs to be daylighted in climate policy and in the fossil-fuel-supply-limiting community to grapple with. Price is the mechanism that causes a decrease in supply to lead to a reduction in consumption and a reduction in emissions, and that price has other effects that need to be considered.
You can find a full transcript of the episode here.
Mentioned:
Peter’s papers:
"Impact of the Keystone XL pipeline on global oil markets and greenhouse gas emissions"
"Limiting fossil fuel production as the next big step in climate policy"
"Rethinking the case against new oil and gas fields"
This episode of Shift Key is sponsored by ...
Every year Giving Green researches the top climate nonprofits and sends 100% of every dollar donated to its Giving Green Fund straight to them. Make your first gift before the new year, and it will be matched up to $500. Go to GivingGreen.earth/Shift.
Formed through a joint venture between Wärtsilä and RCT Solutions, Valo helps utilities, independent power producers, and developers navigate market and grid complexity without sacrificing system performance. Learn more at valoenergy.com.
RE+ 26 is the largest clean energy event in North America, happening November 16th through 19th at the Las Vegas Convention Center. Register at re-plus.com and use code SHIFTKEY20 to save 20% off a Full Conference pass.
Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.
