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Orange Skies Are Back
Where is the smoke worst, where will it go next, and what causes that color?
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Where is the smoke worst, where will it go next, and what causes that color?
Deciding what counts as a heat death is more difficult than it sounds.
On America’s thorium progress, Google’s solar buy, and Chinese nuclear
On American nuclear, a labor union record, and climate tech’s resurgence
On Trump’s mineral paradox, China’s Great Green Wall, and sodium-ion batteries
Current conditions: After devastating the U.S. island of Rota in the Northern Mariana Islands territory, Super Typhoon Bavi is barreling toward Taiwan with winds of up to 200 miles per hour • Rare tornadoes brought on by storms touched down in China’s Hubei province, leaving 11 dead • Temperatures in Madrid are hovering at around 100 degrees Fahrenheit all week as the Spanish capital roasts in Europe’s latest heat wave.
Exactly three weeks after President Donald Trump signed a formal memorandum to halt the bombing campaign against Iran that the United States and Israel embarked on nearly five months ago, the war is back on. After Washington accused Tehran of launching missiles at tankers passing through the Strait of Hormuz this week, Trump officially declared the resumption of combat. Speaking Wednesday morning at the NATO summit in Turkey, Trump called the Iranian regime “scum,” “sick people,” and “vicious, violent people” when asked about the peace pact during a press conference. “If they had a nuclear weapon, they’d use it,” Trump said. “So as far as I’m concerned, it’s over.” He spent the rest of the day posting more than a dozen videos and photos on his Truth Social account purportedly showing U.S. missile strikes in Iran. “This is in retribution for yesterday’s bombing of ships by Iran,” Trump wrote in one post. “If it happens again, it will get much worse!”
The market is certainly preparing for worse. The price of Murban crude, the benchmark for oil flowing out of the United Arab Emirates, spiked nearly 7% on Wednesday. The European benchmark, Brent crude, jumped more than 5%. The American pricing yardstick, West Texas Intermediate crude, rose by just over 1%. Last month, my colleague Matthew Zeitlin cautioned that, despite a ceasefire, it would take a while for the Strait of Hormuz to return to normal — and “even longer” for energy markets. Emphasis on that last part.
The world’s capacity to generate nuclear energy has increased by 2.2 gigawatts already this year as new Chinese reactors have come online at a rapid clip. By 2035, global nuclear capacity is on track to surge by 44% to 535 gigawatts, up from 372 gigawatts last year. That’s according to the latest forecast from the consultancy BloombergNEF. China, the unrivaled global leader in domestic reactor construction, is largely responsible for the projected spike. Today, the People’s Republic is the world’s No. 2 user of atomic energy behind the U.S., which has long operated the largest fleet of plants on the planet. But China is on pace to surpass the U.S. by 2030 with 102 gigawatts of nuclear capacity.
Among the more promising signs for the democratic world: The U.S. is now working with Japan and South Korea to commercialize new small modular reactor technologies. On Tuesday, at the margins of the NATO summit, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio signed onto a memorandum with the foreign ministers of Japan and South Korea. The document “outlines opportunities for our three countries, which have complementary advantages in the civil nuclear field, to encourage mutually beneficial cooperation among their respective nuclear industries,” the State Department said in a statement.
Right after the presidential inauguration in January 2025, Matthew wrote a sharp piece identifying what he called the “paradox of Trump’s critical minerals crusade.” At issue was the fact that the new Trump administration planned to (and ultimately did) kill off policies designed to spur demand for domestically mined and processed minerals such as lithium, cobalt, and rare earths — even as he slashed barriers to increasing the supply of those metals. U.S. production of minerals is picking up as the White House brokers a growing list of deals to give the government equity stakes in mining firms in exchange for federal support for increasing output. Sure enough, the demand just isn’t there in the U.S. On Tuesday, the Financial Times reported that companies backed by the administration, including rare earths miner MP Materials, uranium producer Energy Fuels, and the rare earths refiner Phoenix Tailings are instead selling their goods to buyers in Asia. Japanese customers were “clamoring” for rare earth metals from Phoenix Tailings, CEO Nick Myers said. The materials the firm produces are ending up “primarily in Korea and Japan.”
That isn’t stopping Trump from reviving his calls for Washington to seize Greenland and its resources from Denmark, a founding NATO ally. Speaking at the conference in the Turkish capital of Ankara, the American president repeated his claim that the U.S. invasion of the world’s largest island following Copenhagen’s collapse to Nazi blitzkrieg in April 1940 should have qualified as a permanent conquest. “We took Greenland and then, stupidly, we gave it back,” Trump told reporters. “We shouldn’t have given it back to them. We’re the ones who need it. We need it for protection of the world, not just the United States.”
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Not to be an old man about it, but I remember the Iraq War distinctly — the debates over the role of Baghdad’s oil and the calls from Congress for increased U.S. production with an eye toward energy independence. Here’s some data that will make you want to dismiss your humble millennial correspondent with an “ok boomer.” On Wednesday, the U.S. Energy Information Administration issued a definitive new analysis showing that U.S. petroleum exports hit a record high in April after Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz, forcing overseas buyers to find new sources of fuel. Exports increased to 13.6 million barrels per day, 15% more than the previous record set in March.
On the other end of the American energy spectrum, the nation’s largest provider of home battery and solar equipment just launched a distributed compute pilot program for artificial intelligence servers. Under the program, Sunrun will coordinate “the selling of inference capacity to enterprise compute buyers.” In other words, homeowners can earn money by hosting “compute nodes” — small servers —that then supply output to AI companies in much the same way Sunrun’s customers are paid by giving the virtual power plant operators access to solar panels and batteries. “Over nearly two decades, we have perfected our ability to operationalize, finance, and scale distributed assets,” Paul Dickson, Sunrun’s president and chief revenue officer, said in a press release. “We are now using our leadership position in distributed home energy and proven infrastructure to bring compute closer to the sources of energy and inference.”
Much like the United Nations effort to plant trees at the southern edge of the Sahara to keep the desert at bay, China is building a Great Green Wall. Since 1978, the country has planted 66 billion trees and plans another 34 billion by 2050 in a bid to slow the spread of the Gobi and Taklamakan deserts. A new study using satellite measurements of leafy areas found that the planted forests are greening much faster than wild ones. Younger trees grow faster. But even at similar ages, planted stands grew 4.6% faster, meaning they can absorb more carbon. The findings, according to Fertilizer Daily, “suggest global climate models should better distinguish forest types and age when accounting for carbon.”
Sodium-ion technology, as Heatmap’s Katie Brigham explained two years ago, promises cheaper, less combustible batteries than its dominant lithium-ion cousin. But it remains niche and underdeveloped. Perhaps not for long. On Wednesday, sodium battery startup Peak Energy announced plans for a factory in Sacramento capable of producing 4 gigawatt-hours of sodium battery systems annually. “America needs energy storage that is lower cost, more affordable, more reliable and purpose-built to meet the demand coming onto the grid,” Peak Energy CEO Landon Mossburg said in a statement. “This facility is proof that America can lead not only in inventing the technology, but in building it at scale.”
Generate Capital, CalSTRS, and the Rhodium Group have teamed up on a new Transition Acceleration Framework to measure and assess emissions impacts.
The most common way to judge whether a company or project is helping to tackle climate change is to measure emissions. Has the company reduced its carbon footprint? Will the project add fewer greenhouse gas emissions to the atmosphere than alternatives?
It’s a useful metric, but a limited one. One company might be doing more to advance the energy transition than another — by investing in an expensive, early-stage solution such as geothermal power, for example — but a comparison of their carbon footprints won’t necessarily show it. At the project level, a solar farm in Mississippi, where solar deployment has lagged, will do more to decarbonize the U.S. power grid than one of equal size in California, even though both projects emit zero carbon.
This presents a challenge for climate-minded investors like Jonah Goldman, the chief strategy officer of Generate Capital, who are trying to figure out where their dollars can make the biggest difference. To solve it, Goldman worked with colleagues at the California State Teachers Retirement System, which backs Generate’s investments, and a team at the Rhodium Group to develop a new way for investors to assess where to put their money.
“The question that most of the frameworks out there ask is, what are your carbon emissions today, and can your carbon emissions be lowered?” Goldman told me. “The Transition Acceleration Framework asks, how can you apply capital that has the best chance of getting to decarbonization over a reasonable time frame?
“It sounds like a similar question. It sounds like semantics. But it’s actually quite different,” he said.
At a high level, the Transition Acceleration Framework measures how much additional decarbonization a given investment can deliver beyond what would likely have occurred anyway. It can also be used to evaluate policy interventions and procurement decisions, such as where to get power for a data center. The Rhodium Group published a white paper describing the methodology on Thursday, as well as an accompanying report using it to evaluate options for powering data centers in the U.S.
The Transition Acceleration Framework has three components: transition potential, transition efficiency, and acceleration factor.
Transition potential is “the size of the emissions-reduction opportunity,” the white paper says — it measures the gap between the current trajectory for a given technology and its potential deployment in a deeply decarbonized world. Some of the solutions with the highest transition potential scores, per Rhodium’s analysis, include light duty electric vehicles and utility-scale solar.
Transition efficiency measures how effective a dollar spent on that technology can be at closing the gap, based on an estimate of the total capital expenditure required to realize the potential. There, more nascent solutions like low-carbon cement and geothermal power score higher than EVs and solar.
Rhodium combines these two complementary metrics into a single “technology factor,” a score on a scale from one to ten that can help identify the highest-leverage sectors to invest in. (The project is similar in spirit to Heatmap’s Decarbonize Your Life series, in which we tried to determine the highest-leverage actions a given individual could take to cut emissions. If you missed it, check it out.)
While the transition potential and efficiency metrics provide a high-level view into how transformative different types of investments can be, the third component of the framework — the acceleration factor — helps distinguish between specific projects.
This starts with an assessment of five “acceleration attributes” — cost reduction, capital availability, new markets, infrastructure and supply chains, and political economy — that represent different mechanisms by which a single investment can help move an entire technology category forward.
For cost reduction, for example, an investor might ask how likely it is that the project will reduce the cost of future deployments through learning by doing or economies of scale. If it’s a first-of-a-kind project, the answer is likely yes. For capital availability, they might look at whether the investment will de-risk the technology. Goldman praised Amazon’s early investment in Rivian delivery vans — not just because it took gas-powered Amazon vans off the road, but because it also spurred other automakers and major shippers such as Walmart and GM to follow suit.
“While the Amazon-Rivian deal wasn’t 100% responsible for it, it certainly was a huge signal to the market that there was safety in solving this last mile delivery problem,” he said.
The Rhodium report outlines a method investors can use to score and weight the various attributes and combine them with the technology factor score to reach a final “acceleration factor” score.
In an accompanying report, Rhodium researchers used the framework to compare a number of different options for powering data centers in the U.S. It’s a high-level assessment — i.e. it doesn’t consider project-specific acceleration attributes — but it provides a rough hierarchy of the arrangements that accelerate the energy transition the most against those that do the most harm. At the top of the list is a grid-connected data center that signs a power purchase agreement with a clean, firm generator, such as a nuclear or geothermal plant. At the bottom, with a negative score indicating it would actually hinder progress relative to a regular grid connection, is an off-grid data center powered entirely by natural gas.
Of course, hyperscalers prioritizing speed to power are unlikely to wait around for a nuclear plant to get built. But there are plenty of options between that and behind the meter gas. An off-grid data center that builds enough renewables and batteries for 95% of its electricity needs and relies on gas backup scores higher than a grid-connected project that buys spot market renewable energy certificates.
“Different data center power configurations can have a meaningfully different impact on the transition, even if you’re looking at things that might on the surface seem relatively similar,” Michael Delgado, a partner at Rhodium, told me.
For now, the Transition Acceleration Framework is just that — a framework. Rhodium is piloting it with Generate and CalSTRS, as well as some additional partners, conducting bespoke assessments or their portfolios and projects. The hope is that it could eventually inform not just individual investment decisions or portfolio analyses but regulations and policy packages.
“This is an open method that we’re trying to put out there and get feedback on from the investment and philanthropic and policy world,” Delgado said.