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On electrolyte factories, Josh Shapiro's flip, and Canadian clean power
On the battery backlog, Canadian U, and Peter Thiel goes gas gaucho
On Trump’s mineral deals, the gas turbine backlog, and Turkic offshore wind
On transmission corridors, China’s Russian reactor, and long-duration energy storage
On copper prices, nuclear’s jellyfish woes, and Leo DiCaprio’s Chilean NIMBYism
Current conditions: The death toll from Colombia’s earthquake has risen beyond 250 • A severe thunderstorm flipped a car in Columbus, Ohio, as a large system swept across the Midwest • A partial solar eclipse is set to occur the Northeast.
David Crowley. Scott Olson/Getty Images
David Crowley, a moderate Democrat and local official in Milwaukee, narrowly defeated Francesca Hong, a leftist state lawmaker and former ramen chef, in the Democratic gubernatorial primary in Wisconsin last night. The race marked one of the most significant tests of Democratic voters’ willingness to elect a member of the ascendant Democratic Socialists of America, now the most popular socialist group in U.S. history. Her campaign promised to make childcare and school lunches free, repeal anti-union laws, and give renters more protections against eviction. She also pitched what she called her “control-alt-delete” plan to eliminate tax credits for data centers and put a statewide moratorium on permits for new artificial intelligence facilities.
Ahead of Tuesday’s primary, the AI developers Vantage, Oracle, and OpenAI announced a $60,000 community investment in Port Washington, which my colleague Jael Holzman described as “the most controversial data center development area in the state.”
Just last week, the Trump administration agreed to pay the energy giant RWE more than $1.2 billion to abandon an offshore wind project, the latest in a series of deals in which taxpayers hand over billions to not receive new sources of clean electricity they badly need. On Tuesday, Senators Alex Padilla, the California Democrat, and Angus King, the independent from Maine, introduced a bill that would give companies that reject Trump’s payouts an expedited route to more development. “The Trump Administration is doing everything it can to kill California’s offshore wind future, handing energy companies billions of taxpayer dollars to walk away from projects that would have powered millions of homes,” Padilla said in a press release. “This bill makes sure their destructive approach doesn’t waste what’s already been invested so we can get these leases back to work, create the jobs Trump killed, and keep energy bills low for working families instead of letting his war on renewables cost Californians even more.”
The bill has one potential flaw, other than the fact that Republicans are unlikely to pass it and President Donald Trump is even less likely to sign it. That, as my colleague Robinson Meyer wrote this week, is that the roughly $4 billion in payouts so far went to projects that were “already dead or dying.” The money spent, in other words, is “for nothing.”
Please read the following two sentences in the tone of the famous scene of Tony Soprano defending Christopher Columbus: In this newsletter, Ea-nāṣir, the Mesopotamian copper merchant from Bronze Age-era Ur whose stone-carved complaints about a subpar metal shipment remain readable millennia later, is a hero. End of story! Why, you might ask? Because we are once again living through an age where copper, the basic building block of all things electric, is in high demand. Copper soared back to within half a cent of its record high Tuesday of nearly $14,000 per metric ton after an outage at a major smelter in Indonesia rattled global prices, Mining.com reported.
The fight over North America’s only major cobalt refinery, meanwhile, is heating up. The mining giant Glencore made a bid for control of Sherritt International, which has taken a beating from U.S. sanctions due to its 50% stake in Moa, a joint venture with the Cuban government. The joint venture’s assets include the Canadian refinery and Moa nickel-cobalt mine in Cuba. The Glencore-backed consortium is up against Gillon Capital, the family office of Ray Washburne, a Republican fundraiser and former Trump official, according to the Financial Times.
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Weeks after Europe’s latest heat wave forced inland nuclear stations to pare down output for lack of cooling water in the continent’s rivers, a “massive influx” of jellyfish has forced France’s EDF to shut down three units at its Gravelines nuclear station and cut power from a fourth. That’s taken at least 3.2 gigawatts of capacity offline, Bloomberg reported, right as temperatures are expected to surpass 104 degrees Fahrenheit in the coming days. The unusually hot temperatures off France’s shores have encouraged jellyfish populations to “bloom,” clogging the pumping stations through which coastal nuclear plants like Gravelines pull in cooling water.
In Egypt, meanwhile, construction crews working on the country’s first nuclear station hit a critical milestone. The containment vessel for the Russian-designed El Dabaa plant’s first unit is nearly completed, according to World Nuclear News.
Digging deep enough into the bedrock around New York City to tap into lava-hot rocks for electricity production is probably still years away, despite the progress that next-generation geothermal companies such as Fervo Energy have recently made. But thermal networks that maintain a steady environment year-round by circulating air at a constant temperature are increasingly popular ways for New Yorkers in private homes outside the city to stay warm in winter and cool in summer. Now the city itself is seeing whether a large-scale version could work for the subway system and municipal buildings. A study is set to begin soon into whether a thermal energy network could be built along subway routes to capture, store, and redirect excess heat that accumulates in the Brooklyn Bridge-City Hall and Chambers Street station complex to municipal buildings above ground. “Radiant cooling technology will absorb heat from the subway platforms and transfer it to geothermal boreholes drilled beneath Chambers Street,” reporter Carlo Cariaga wrote for Think Geo Energy. “This excess heat will then be stored underground until it can be used for supply to nearby municipal buildings during winter.” The contract for the feasibility study is due to be awarded in the fall, with work scheduled to start in early 2027.
“It seems like it’s a good place to test geothermal solutions because it sounds like there is a part of the tracks that isn’t being used, so they don’t have to stop service,” Jack Klein, the citizen researcher who conducted his own gonzo Subway heat study last year, told my colleague Jeva Lange this week.
Leonardo DiCaprio has long been a major donor to environmental causes. But rarely has the actor taken as clear a stance against green development if it comes at any ecological cost as this. On Tuesday, Bloomberg reported that the Oscar winner had told his nearly 60 million Instagram followers that fewer than 1,000 Pehuenche spiny-chest frogs remain in the wild, and that construction of the proposed Chile-Argentina transmission line threatens the amphibians’ habitat. “Conservationists are not asking for the transmission project to be stopped,” the celebrity wrote in the post over the weekend. “They are asking for it to be built where it does not put a Critically Endangered species at even greater risk.”
Rob checks in on this season’s supercharged ocean temperatures with climate researcher Zeke Hausfather.
Every few years, the Pacific Ocean’s surface waters become especially warm near the equator, a climatic phenomenon known as El Niño.
El Niño is a normal part of the climate system, but even in a normal year, it can trigger extreme weather around the world. Forecasters are worried that the current El Niño — which just began a few weeks ago — is going to be anything but normal. Models suggest that we could soon see the hottest El Niño ever measured, with unpredictable and catastrophic effects for ecosystems and societies around the world.
What does that mean? And why does this El Niño look so bad? On this episode of Shift Key, Rob is joined by Zeke Hausfather, a climate research lead at Stripe and a research scientist at Berkeley Earth. They discuss what forecast models are saying about this El Niño, why it gives us a glance at the future, and whether climate change itself is accelerating.
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, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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Here is an excerpt from their conversation:
Robinson Meyer: How much, at this point, are we in an El Niño that is record-breaking? Like, how much do we see in observations, physical observations of the ocean or the atmosphere and the rest of the climate system, and how much do we think from the models that it is going to get even hotter?
Zeke Hausfather: So the way that we track the strength of an El Niño — there’s a few different ways to track it. But the most common one is from this particular region of the tropical Pacific called the Niño 3.4 region, which is sort of like about a third of the way into the Pacific off the coast of Chile, right around the equator. And that’s where this tongue of warm water forms during El Niño events. That’s sort of the characteristic signal of El Niños. And temperatures in that region, as of today, are at 2.8 degrees centigrade above normal, normal meaning the average of the last 30 years. So it’s sort of a sliding window that tries to remove some of the human-caused warming.
Robinson Meyer: Are we comparing temperatures from that region to another region? Or they’re just in that region two or more degrees above normal?
Zeke Hausfather: So it’s a good question. The traditional way that El Niño has been defined is to just compare that region to itself, but with a 30-year moving average applied to remove the effects of human-caused warming. There is another metric that was introduced by NOAA last year called the Relative El Niño Index, which is a variant where you sort of subtract out the average over the tropical ocean as a whole from that region, so you’re looking at the difference between that region and the rest of the tropics.
There’s pros and cons of that approach. Arguably, it removes the human warming signal a bit better, but it also can overly penalize really strong El Niño events that reach outside of that region because they start warming the whole tropics. So anyway, the details are technical, but the point on the observations is that we’re already seeing a very strong event occurring there today. You know, temperatures as of today, when we’re recording, August 10, are 2.8C above normal. To put that in perspective, the strongest ever anomalies we’ve recorded, at least daily in the satellite record since the 1980 or so, were in 2015, 2016, and those were about 3.1 degrees above normal. And so as of today, by itself, it would be the third strongest El Niño signal ever recorded in that region.
But what’s different is that El Niño almost always peaks near the end of the year. So if you look at all the El Niño events on record, there’s been one or two that have peaked in October, but the vast majority peak in November or December, and a couple as late as January. It’s a very persistent pattern of these events. And so the fact that it’s only the beginning of August now and we’re already at this extremely high level, we’re essentially running two to three months ahead of any other El Niño on record in terms of how quickly it’s developing, which is one of the reasons why we’re increasingly convinced that this is going to be a record-setting event. It’s going to blow any event we’ve seen previously out of the water. And if you look at the latest models that came out this morning, actually, it’s good timing. They’re predicting a peak of around 4C in the Niño 3.4 region, which will be, you know, more than a degree above the previous record and could end up being the strongest El Niño in 500 or 1,000 years. We don’t have great proxy estimates going back, but, it certainly is something well outside of anything we’ve seen since records began in 1850.
Robinson Meyer: The swimmer Katie Ledecky swims a race sometimes in the Olympics and she’ll be out swimming and then behind her there’s a computer-generated line which is the current world record, and she’s way out in front of the current world record, and you’re watching her and then she does she turns around in the pool and then the world record is behind her. That is the current El Niño. This is the Katie Ledecky-style El Niño.
You can find a full transcript of the episode here.
Mentioned:
NOAA’s El Niño page and the relative El Niño index
An Assessment of Earth's Climate Sensitivity Using Multiple Lines of Evidence, the 2020 paper where Zeke was a coauthor
Zeke’s blog post on AI emissions: The real energy use of agentic AI
John Bistline’s post on AI emissions at Watershed
Heatmap’s coverage of AI emissions: A New Guesstimate for Corporate AI Emissions
This episode of Shift Key is sponsored by ...
Discover the Yale Clean and Equitable Energy Development online certificate program at the Yale Center for Business and the Environment. In this fully online, 5-month program, you’ll learn from leading experts, develop practical skills, and grow a powerful network. Visit cbey.yale.edu to learn more and apply.
Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.
