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While significant, the decision — which was effective immediately — doesn’t change the Trump administration’s restrictions on using tax credits for projects made with Chinese imports. And Crux Climate, the tax credit marketplace, cautioned that few developers may be able to spring into action to seize on the ruling in the next 26 days before the rebates officially end.
New York State lawmakers passed a one-year moratorium on new data center construction that would pause permits on the facilities and require the state to create new rules on energy use, community investment, and labor standards for server farms. But News10, Albany’s ABC affiliate, warned that Governor Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, had not yet indicated whether she would sign the bill.
The move came as NBC News reported that Illinois Governor JB Pritzker, another Democrat, outlined plans to temporarily halt tax breaks to data centers ahead of a call to state lawmakers to come up with a new framework for how the facilities should be developed. The data center backlash, as Heatmap’s Robinson Meyer wrote, is becoming impossible to miss, with roughly 70% of Americans now opposing server farms built near their homes. More than 60% of Americans now support placing a moratorium on data center construction.
San Diego’s desalination plant. Nelvin C. Cepeda/The San Diego Union-Tribune via Getty Images
Desalination, as my colleague Katie Brigham put it in March, is “having a moment.” It’s not hard to see why. The San Diego County Water Authority is generating so much water from a desalination plant the utility opened a decade ago that it has not only ended its own shortfalls, it has produced a surplus. Now, as a result, the California city is poised to sell some of its rights to Colorado River water to Arizona and Nevada under the first large-scale deal to trade water between the states entitled a share of what flows through the nation’s fifth-longest river. The agreement highlights how desalination could “help parched inland states fill a widening gap between water supply and demand,” The New York Times reported.
It’s a welcome development. Just last week, experts told the Utah News Dispatch that the Colorado River’s largest reservoirs are approaching a “system crash.”
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New York’s Legislature might have backed its Democratic governor’s bid to weaken the state’s climate law, but Rhode Island is taking a different approach. Lawmakers in New England’s smallest state rejected Democratic Governor Dan McKee’s proposal to slash Rhode Island’s climate programs in the name of affordability. On Friday, E&E News reported that the state budget lawmakers advanced last week nixed the changes to clean energy policies.
In January, the United Kingdom, Norway, and several major European Union nations including Germany and Denmark agreed to a pact to build out a sweeping array of wind turbines in the North Sea, turning the waterway into “the world’s largest clean energy reservoir.” If the pledge holds, roughly 11% of the 222,000-square-mile sea could be covered in turbines. That’s the finding of a new study from Heriot-Watt University in Scotland. Under the current target, the North Sea would host a total of about 19,400 turbines by the middle of this century. By 2030, the U.K. alone is on track to have roughly 4,200 turbines, followed by Germany with about 2,700, and the Netherlands with 1,700, according to Renewables Now. The Dutch would claim the highest offshore wind density, with wind farms covering around 19% of its North Sea waters by 2050, followed by Belgium at 18%.
President Sheinbaum drives an Olinia.Office of the President of Mexico
There’s been much ado about Chinese electric vehicles being built in Mexico. But on Sunday, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum unveiled the Olinia — a 100% domestically designed electric van that looks a bit like Toyota’s Kayoibako EV minivan. In a post on X, she proudly called it “the electric car created by young Mexican women and men.” The name harkens to the Nahuatl word for “movement.”
Two days ago, I told you that the Trump administration planned to dismantle a decade-old U.S. monitoring system to track coastal environments and shifting ocean currents. Now the European Union is stepping up to fill the gap. Earlier this week, the European Commission announced plans to “position the EU as the world’s leading provider of ocean intelligence by contributing 35% of the global ocean observing system by 2035 and securing 35% of the market for ocean observation technologies.” In a statement, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said the program, called OceanEye Europe, will allow Europe to “lead the race to understand our ocean, to protect it, and to sustainably harness its potential.”
Cool, cool, cool: The U.S. just recorded its first case of flesh-eating New World screwworm in decades. Fun! On Wednesday, the U.S. Department of Agriculture confirmed that, for the first time in 60 years, the parasitic fly whose maggot larvae feed only on the flesh of warm-blooded animals had been detected in the umbilical area of a three-week-old calf at a ranch in South Texas. So far, the USDA said there are no additional cases. CNN outlined the stakes this way: “Although it is not a food safety issue, an infestation can be a food production issue. It could cost the economy billions and raise the price of beef at a time when Americans are already paying record high prices.” Not to mention, as Heatmap’s Robinson Meyer wrote last night, “the screwworm is a lesson about the reality of good governance. State capacity is not so different from managing the electricity system or, for that matter, cutting carbon emissions, in that there is little political reward for getting it right.”
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A view of the former Galileo Ferraris nuclear plant in Trino Vercellese, Italy. Stefano Guidi/Getty Images
In 1987, a year after the world’s only major deadly civilian nuclear accident at Chernobyl, Italians voted in a referendum to phase out its own atomic power stations. The last one shut down in 1990. Now Italy is once again looking to harness the power of fission. On Thursday, World Nuclear News reported that the lower house of the country’s parliament, the Chamber of Deputies, had approved a bill backed by Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni to restart the nation’s atomic power industry. A poll taken in 2024 found that nearly half of Italian voters supported construction of new reactors, with just 24% opposed. The bill that lawmakers just approved passed with 155 votes in favor, 86 against, and eight abstentions.
Meanwhile, yesterday afternoon the microreactor developer Antares — whose deal for TRISO fuel I broke news of back in February — split atoms for the first time in its test reactor built for the Energy Department’s reactor pilot program. When the administration announced the 10 companies selected for the program, the White House set a goal of at least three projects reaching “criticality,” meaning that they can demonstrate the ability to split atoms, for the first time by July 4. “Today’s achievement is a historic moment for American nuclear energy,” Energy Secretary Chris Wright said in a statement. “By bringing the first American non-light water privately developed reactor to criticality in more than four decades, Antares has shown what is possible when American innovation is unleashed.” Antares CEO Jordan Bramble said the company, which aims to sell its reactors primarily to the military and NASA, will produce electricity for the first time next year.
In January, the United Kingdom, Norway, and several major European Union nations including Germany and Denmark agreed to a pact to build out a sweeping array of wind turbines in the North Sea, turning the waterway into “the world’s largest clean energy reservoir.” If the pledge holds, roughly 11% of the 222,000-square-mile sea could be covered in turbines. That’s the finding of a new study from Heriot-Watt University in Scotland. Under the current target, the North Sea would host a total of about 19,400 turbines by the middle of this century. By 2030, the U.K. alone is on track to have roughly 4,200 turbines, followed by Germany with about 2,700, and the Netherlands with 1,700, according to Renewables Now. The Dutch would claim the highest offshore wind density, with wind farms covering around 19% of its North Sea waters by 2050, followed by Belgium at 18%.
China’s carbon dioxide emissions from its power sector increased 4% year over year in the first three months of 2026, despite surging deployments of renewables and nuclear power. Why? According to a new Carbon Brief analysis, it’s “wasted” wind and solar. With the grid in the People’s Republic unable to patch the new turbines and panels in, the capacity could not meet growing electricity demand. Had those units been online, the publication’s analysis determined, emissions from the power sector would have been flat in the first quarter of this year.
