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On Meta quits, Elon Musk’s solar plans, and federal coal reserves
On Trump’s power pledge, America’s offshore nuclear, and Japan’s offshore wind
France’s deadliest heat wave since 2003 killed more than 2,700 people — and possibly as many as 5,700.
Current conditions: Tropical Depression Two is set to strengthen into Tropical Storm Bertha as the system widens over the Gulf Coast from Texas to Tampa Bay, Florida • Temperatures will top 112 degrees Fahrenheit in Khartoum, the capital of war-ravaged Sudan • Canadian wildfire smoke may have largely cleared in the Northeastern United States, but nearly 900 blazes are still burning, and Chicago is still under an air quality warning.
Feel the Burnham. Carl Court/Getty Images
Andy Burnham, the new leader of the British Labour Party and the likely next prime minister of the United Kingdom, has vowed to uphold a contentious ban on exploration licenses for oil and gas drilling in the North Sea. While deputy party leader Lucy Powell told the BBC on Sunday that fossil fuels from the North Sea would remain part of Britain's energy mix, the so-called “king of the north,” who previously led the industrial metropolis of Manchester as its mayor, has instead stuck by the party’s original plan. “If they don’t reverse the ban on new exploration then the industry will be very unhappy indeed,” one industry source told the Financial Times. The decision comes after rumors had swirled that Burnham may support increasing domestic fossil fuel production in a bid to bring down energy prices. In a post on his Truth Social network, Trump wrote: “The People of Aberdeen, in Scotland, are dancing in the streets because the new Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, has stated that he will be opening up, all the way, the invaluable North Sea Oil!”
Scotland is, on the other hand, getting more of Trump’s least favorite energy source. The American president’s antipathy toward offshore turbines, so goes the lore, began with an unsuccessful bid to block a project he considered unsightly off the coast of his golf course there. Last week, Renewables Now reported that offshore wind developer Ocean Winds secured the Scottish government’s approval for a 2-gigawatt offshore wind farm called Caledonia, the name Romans gave the area of Britain that ultimately became Scotland and its frontier with England. Located 25 miles off Moray Firth, the project is poised to begin construction in 2030.
In the U.S., the Trump administration has limited plans for carbon removal facilities. In Canada, as Emily has written, Prime Minister Mark Carney has opened the door to direct air capture companies looking for a new home base. But in the European Union, Brussels is already weaving carbon removal into the bloc's carbon-trading market. The EU’s highest governing body, the European Commission, proposed allowing carbon removal into its EU Emissions Trading System for the first time. “Under the current rules, companies cannot use carbon credits of any kind to comply with the regulations,” Emily wrote last week in a piece previewing the proposal. “But as 2040 grows closer, the EU plans to rely on carbon removal to offset some of the residual emissions from industries that are the most difficult to decarbonize.” For now, the scheme will be limited to direct air capture and bioenergy with carbon capture and sequestration.
Last month, New York Attorney General Letitia James headed a group of Democratic-led states in a lawsuit challenging the Trump administration’s deals to kill offshore wind projects, as my colleague Emily Pontecorvo has written. Now many of those same blue states are seeking to join private developers’ litigation seeking to thaw President Donald Trump’s freeze on approving wind projects. Last week, the states filed a motion to intervene on behalf of wind companies that accuse the administration of unfairly targeting their businesses. The states argue, according to Bloomberg Law, that the halt to federal permitting “pushes up electricity costs” and “hurts their attempts to curb fossil fuel emissions.”
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Claude-maker Anthropic is set to lease computing power for its artificial intelligence data centers from Meta, making what The New York Times described as “a potential step toward a new AI for the social networking company.” Under the deal, Anthropic would pay the Facebook parent company $10 billion over two years, in monthly increments. The agreement is roughly a third the size of the deal that the AI giant signed with Elon Musk’s xAI in May for $45 billion of computing power over three years. That deal has drawn blowback given the vast arrays of gas turbines that power xAI’s biggest data center, Colossus, which is the subject of an air pollution lawsuit filed by the NAACP. As for Meta, insiders Heatmap talked to at the end of last year put it in the bottom of hyperscalers based on its decarbonization efforts. One social scientist told us, “Google is the best, Meta is the worst. Evil corporation.”
Russia’s state-owned nuclear company has at least 18 new nuclear projects underway at home, Rosatom announced. The Kremlin-owned company said the projects are in “various stages of implementation” throughout Russia, and don’t count the more than two dozen under construction overseas in places such as Bangladesh, India, and Turkey. In a speech published in the company’s in-house magazine and shared with World Nuclear News, Rosatom Director General Alexei Likhachev said the firm aims to increase revenues to $51.3 billion by 2028 — a nearly 18% increase from this year. Improving profits, however, means reducing costs by 5% that same year.
Meanwhile, the Kremlin’s nuclear regulator, Rostekhnadzor, has issued licenses for the first two proposed units of the new Kola nuclear station in northwest Russia, near Finland. The plant is expected to begin construction next year, NucNet reported, and ultimately include four VVER-S medium-capacity pressurized water reactors.
Tesla has a fierce new competitor in the European market. The Chinese automaker Xpeng just released its compact L03 crossover. The starting price in the German market, $40,700, undercuts the Tesla Model Y’s $44,480. The vehicle, per InsideEVs, is the first Chinese car to be fully integrated with Google Maps.
We didn’t know days like this could happen. Then we learned how bad they really are.
When I woke up this morning in Chicago, the Air Quality Index was in the 300s, and I could barely see the top of the skyscraper across the street. The weather app on my phone featured a little image of a man wearing a World War I-style full-face gas mask. That’s fun, I thought. I didn’t know it could do that.
I went downstairs. Old photographs of the city were hanging in the hotel lobby — girls playing in bathing suits next to the lake — and I realized that the haze shrouding the old Lakeshore Drive condos was in fact haze, smoke, particulate matter, and not a lens artifact. It really used to be that smoky all the time, back before the Clean Air Act. Then I glanced up and saw that the haze out the window was far worse than the century-old pollution in the picture.
It’s significant, I think, that a mass smoke-out like this has now happened to the eastern U.S. for a second time. Second times matter. When exhaust from Canadian wildfires blanketed the Northeast and parts of the Midwest in June 2023, exposing more Americans to wildfire smoke than on any previous day in history, one could almost write it off as a freak occurrence. It was upsetting, sure, and reminiscent of California’s climate-addled amber skies. But didn’t wildfire smoke also descend on New England once in the 1780s? Even on a warmer planet, couldn’t this remain a once-in-a-century blip?
Twice in just over three years, though — that‘s more than a hiccup. That’s almost a trend. To get smoked out once may be regarded as a misfortune; for it to recur again, without any plan to respond, starts to look like carelessness. The federal government is doing roughly diddly squat about adaptation — President Trump can build a fan on the border and make Canada pay for it — but state and local governments across the eastern U.S. will now need to reckon with a new form of extreme weather. You grew up with snow days, but now we’ll have smoke days — and schools and sports leagues and concert venues will need rules about how to deal with them. When should games be canceled, tickets refunded? Is smoke more like a heat wave or a hurricane? Hotels and office buildings will need to review their ventilation policies and possibly upgrade their equipment; municipal emergency response plans will be revised and printed in triplicate.
All this will happen because the smoke has invaded a second time — and arguably a third, if you count last year’s minor episode — and that means it could come back again. For that reason, this event strikes me as a much bigger deal than what happened in 2023. The smoke is now a fact of life; institutions will need a policy about it. The tortious creep of litigation risk will enforce that outcome, even if no federal official enforces it.
So it goes. But to be clear, this new inconvenience is not what worries me most about today’s events. No, what frightens me instead is that today’s airborne toxic event is not something that was supposed to happen. Until a few years ago, we had not thought too hard about whether a major smoke exposure event like this could happen on the East Coast at all. It had not seemed possible.
For years, economists and climate scientists have simulated how global warming might affect the U.S. and global economies. They poured years of careful work into this modeling, and they simulated — with ever-increasing levels of statistical persnicketiness — what extreme heat and sea-level rise might do to agricultural yield, labor productivity, energy demand, heat mortality, and real estate values, among other potential sources of damage. This work was useful; it improved our practical understanding of coastal flooding, to name one example. It also helped calibrate U.S. regulatory policy, even if it never achieved the crowning heights of helping to set a national carbon tax.
Yet these careful models almost never accounted for mass smoke exposure days. Indeed, the kind of thing that happened this week — when heavy haze blows down from Canada and exposes more than 100 million people to hazardous air — was not countenanced by the simulations at all. Only in recent years did economists begin to study events like these, and only because mass exposure events like 2023’s happened first.
We’ve long known that the tiny shreds of particulate matter in wildfire smoke dance across the body’s barriers and penetrate its deep places, etching their way into lung, heart, and brain tissue. Inflammation follows. What makes days like today unique is the scale: Tens of millions of Americans inhaling wildfire smoke at the same time. As we’ve started studying this phenomenon, it’s become clear that the mortality effects of days like today, the deaths elevated above what you’d otherwise expect, can persist for years. That becomes extraordinarily expensive for society.
How costly? “When monetized,” a group of Stanford and Princeton economists wrote in Nature last year, in the first major study on the topic, “the climate-driven smoke deaths result in economic damages that exceed existing estimates of climate-driven damages from all other causes combined in the U.S.A.”
You read that right: The cost of climate-worsened wildfire smoke alone is larger than what earlier studies said every other estimated cost of climate change would be, combined.
To summarize, wildfire smoke did not appear in our economic simulations of climate change. As recently as a few years ago, we did not really know that days like today — or June 7, 2023; or September 15, 2020; or September 9, 2020 — could occur. Then they happened. And happened again. And then we studied them and discovered that, in fact, they may be more expensive for the U.S. economy than we once thought climate change itself would be.
That worries me. Now we know these smoke-out days can happen; now they are fast becoming a rare but predictable feature of summer life. But until recently they were unimaginable. What other ignominies, what other tail risks and airborne surprises, are lurking in the uncontrolled experiment we’re running on the biosphere? What else — unforecast, unmodeled, unstudied, unthought of — lies ahead? After 10 years of covering the climate system, I am not someone who lies sleepless fretting about atmospheric CO2. But I do wonder what else we don’t know enough about to ask.
