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The new push comes a day after Customs and Border Protection paused work on a border barrier in Big Bend National Park after a flurry of videos showing bulldozers marring the protected landscape drove what the public lands-focused news site Public Domain called “a furious backlash.”
You know those thin white lines that trail behind airplanes? If you’re among the hordes of internet-poisoned conspiracy theorists, you may be certain these are called chemtrails, deliberately sprayed aerosols containing some secret mind control substance. In reality, these are condensation trails, or “contrails,” clouds of vapor that condense around soot particles from jet engine exhaust. Though they are not spreading any nefarious biochemical agents, contrails do take a climate toll, trapping outgoing infrared radiation like a blanket and adding to the greenhouse gas effect. Now Google is stepping in with a new program called Operation Blue Skies, in which the tech giant will partner with the British government and airlines to deploy its artificial intelligence technology to help create a zone in the North Atlantic free of any contrails. “While they may seem harmless, these warming contrails account for roughly one third of aviation’s total climate impact,” the two program managers in charge of effort, Paul Hodgson and Chaim Langermann, wrote in a blog post. “Our AI-powered forecasts have enabled flight crews and air traffic controllers to make targeted adjustments that avoid contrail-sensitive regions while remaining within normal flight operations. Now, we’re taking the next major step: expanding beyond individual airline trials to coordinated contrail mitigation across an entire flight corridor.”
The technology could, in theory, lay the groundwork for solar radiation management. Some conspiracists, without real evidence, suggest that contrails are, in fact, already a furtive government experiment to modify the atmosphere with aerosols that reflect the sun’s light back into space, a leading concept for how to artificially cool the planet and buy more time to tackle the causes of climate change. Those efforts are inching closer to reality — just read my colleague Robinson Meyer’s reporting on the world’s first major private geoengineering company’s fundraising or my reporting on when the startup revealed its proprietary reflective particle. Technology that could help coordinate flights to spray aerosols in the atmosphere, or can deliberately keep planes out of certain airspace, may prove central to deploying geoengineering at any real scale. Perhaps a public effort to explain contrails and deal with their actual downsides will earn more trust to experiment with things like solar radiation management. I wouldn’t hold my breath.
Solid-state technology could revolutionize batteries by making them charge faster, last longer, and pack more energy into less space. But the electrolytes needed for the ceramic or polymer interior that store and deliver the battery’s charge are not widely produced in the U.S. On Tuesday, the startup Anthro Energy broke ground on a new factory in Louisville, Kentucky, that is designed to produce enough battery materials for more than 300,000 electric vehicles. The facility is scheduled to start production in 2028, and will provide a definitive domestic source of materials that are otherwise largely sold by Chinese companies, David Mackanic, co-founder and CEO of Anthro Energy, told TechCrunch. The plant itself is a testament to the success of the Biden administration’s two landmark laws. It received $24.9 million from the Department of Energy under the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, and another $18.4 million in investment tax credits under the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act.
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Back in February, I told you about Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro’s middleground approach on data centers. Instead of advocating a full-on moratorium on building the facilities, as progressives Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont and New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez proposed a month later, the centrist Democrat laid out “selective” new conditions for large data centers seeking Harrisburg’s approval, including recycling of cooling water, as the state became a hotbed for projects. Now Shapiro is making an about face. In what The Philadelphia Inquirer called “a major shift from his initial embrace of the increasingly unpopular projects,” the governor signed a sweeping executive order Tuesday requiring local approval for data centers to receive state permits. The move is not a moratorium. But the extent of the backlash — seven in 10 Americans now oppose data centers in their backyards, per Heatmap Pro’s polling — may mean the need for a local green light serves as an effective ban. The order also removes Amazon’s controversial $20 billion data center complex between Luzerne and Bucks counties from the state’s fast-track permitting program, which is now unavailable to any such projects. “I have no other choice than but to take this executive action to protect the good people of Pennsylvania from these predatory developers and from these projects that would negatively impact our communities,” Shapiro said after signing the order.
Seeking Canadian energy dominance.ANTHONY WALLACE/AFP via Getty Images
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney announced plans Monday to invest roughly $50.2 billion into upgrading the nation’s hydroelectric fleet and building new wind turbines, part of the Liberal government’s effort to build “a stronger, more independent, and more sustainable country.” Under the pact with provincial governments, Ottawa will upgrade and expand the behemoth hydroelectric Churchill Falls Generating Station, develop another hydroelectric project on Gull Island in Labrador, build onshore wind turbines, and construct new transmission lines. “Canada is extending its unique advantage in clean, reliable, and affordable power. Because when we master energy, we master our destiny,” Carney said in a statement. The investment comes as Canada is refurbishing and expanding its fleet of CANDUs, a natively-designed type of pressurized heavy water reactor that can run on raw uranium, as I previously reported here.
Romania, one of only seven countries with a pressurized heavy water reactor as part of its fleet, is struggling to generate electricity from its nuclear plants as the rivers Europe depends on for cooling water run low amid the latest heat wave. On Monday, the country’s Ministry of Energy brought a giant coal plant back online to meet surging demand as the nuclear stations idle, according to the Romanian news site Economedia.
Octopus Energy is, by its own press release’s pun, “stretching its tentacles beyond the home and onto the open road.” The U.S. subsidiary of the British renewable energy giant is making Octopus Charge, Europe’s largest electric vehicle charging platform, a public network in the U.S. The company’s app will allow drivers to chargers on the go. “Driving electric should be simple, wherever the journey leads,” Nick Chaset, chief executive of Octopus Energy U.S., said in a statement. “Drivers shouldn’t have to juggle multiple apps and accounts just to charge their cars.”
The biggest impediment, at least according to North America’s quasi-governmental grid watchdog, is power. “The only thing China is ahead of us in the AI race is power,” Jim Robb, the chief executive of the North American Electric Reliability Corporation, told reporter Arianna Skibell on the Politico Energy podcast episode that went live Monday. “We have better models, we have better engineers, we have better scientists — but we’re challenged in our society to build the infrastructure that’s going to be required to support the growth.”
Europe’s hellish summer continues to shatter records. Just weeks after wildfires scorched Spain and France in what the French president called the country’s “hardest” challenge “since World War II,” Belgium is now battling its biggest blaze in recorded history. Hundreds fled as the flames approached the German border, though rainfall on Monday helped slow the spread. But the High Fens fire has already exposed political fissures in the country. On Monday, Belgian Defense Minister Theo Francken blamed anti-American sentiment for preventing the government from purchasing Chinook helicopters that would have strengthened the country’s firefighting capacities, according to The Brussels Times, an English-language news website. In the Flemish-language Het Laatste Nieuws, the country’s most widely circulated newspaper, columnist Isolde Van den Eynde complained that the episode highlighted the gap between how much government infrastructure exists for climate policy and how little there is for actually dealing with warming-fueled disasters. “While quite a few citizens are wondering where our little army of climate ministers is,” she wrote, “soldiers are on the ground.”
Hawaii, meanwhile, was still reeling from the first hurricane to damage the Big Island in more than a century. Tropical Storm Lala, which strengthened into a Category 1 storm at its peak, knocked out power for nearly 200,000 homes and businesses across the state. As I told you yesterday, the utility that covers 95% of Hawaii has warned it could be months before power is restored. Today we got a clearer sense of the other damage. More than 100 homes were washed away in the storm, and the damage to roads and bridges, according to The New York Times, cut off access to a town with the only hospital in its region.
Rwandan peacekeepers in Cabo Delgado.CAMILLE LAFFONT/AFP via Getty Images
Exxon Mobil’s oil fields off the coast of Guyana are booming, generating nearly $5 billion in profit last year and only expanding. Chevron last summer spent $53 billion to buy Hess and gain a foothold in the once-poor nation on South America’s Caribbean shores. It’s no wonder The Economist declared South America “the world’s hottest oil patch” last summer.
Now America’s oil goliaths are looking across the Atlantic for their next windfall. On Monday, the Financial Times reported that Exxon had revived its plans to build a liquified natural gas plant in Mozambique’s restive Cabo Delgado, despite the threat of terrorism from an Islamist insurgency in the region. At the same time, Chevron confirmed to Reuters the discovery of new oil and gas deposits in one of its blocks off the coast of Angola, the second-largest producer in sub-Saharan Africa.
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Sunrun built America’s biggest business selling and leasing residential batteries and solar panels on the promise of going off-grid and helping homeowners produce enough power to pare down their utility bills. Now the company is doing the same for data centers. On Monday, the San Francisco-based giant announced a deal with the virtual power plant provider Voltus to provide access to its thousands of residential solar-plus-storage systems in the PJM Interconnection and Midcontinent Independent System Operator electrical grids, covering much of the eastern half of the lower 48 states. “We are providing critical capacity from home batteries supported by funding from hyperscalers,” Sunrun CEO Mary Powell said in a statement. “This is just the beginning of what distributed energy assets can achieve.”
Good news for some of my friends over at the farmer’s market in my neck of Brooklyn: New Jersey is preparing to allow farmers to harvest sunlight for crops and electricity. On Monday, the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities voted to award 16 projects totaling more than 52 megawatts for the state’s first agrivoltaics program. Over the next three years, the program will scale up to more than 200 megawatts of projects. “This pilot can help agriculture and the solar energy industry learn if active agriculture use can be a renewable energy partner in shaping New Jersey’s future,” New Jersey Secretary of Agriculture Ed Wengryn said in a statement. “Getting these projects operating is the best real-life laboratory to learn the challenges the two industries face.”
Manila is a striking metropolis with ancient-looking Chinese and Spanish colonial architecture, gleaming new towers, and vast new neighborhoods forming out of landfilled parts of its eponymous bay. When I visited for a reporting trip in 2024, I learned that the name of the Philippines’ capital comes from the Tagalog phrase meaning “where there is nilad,” a type of flowering mangrove shrub that historically blossomed along the city’s riverbanks. Today those channels that line that city’s streets and wind through the world’s oldest Chinatown are filled with trash. Plastic bottles and garbage are common sights in a fast-growing economy held back by its limited supply of mostly dirty electricity. President Ferdinand Marco Jr. now says there’s “only” one solution to the pollution crisis: Burn it. Last week, his administration told The Philippine Star that new waste-to-energy plants could come online in as little as a year. Environmentalists who say incinerators will only add to air pollution are already pushing back. The government has put out a tender for up to 400 megawatts of capacity, Renewables Now reported. Meanwhile, in a sign of just how much the energy market is heating up in the country, the Philippines’ biggest renewables installer, First Gen Corporation, just turned down a bid from the American investment giant KKR, saying the offer didn’t match the installer’s surging value.
Europe, on the other hand, is seeing its hydrogen ambitions stall out. New analysis by Hydrogen Insight found that project timelines across the continent are now being pushed past two years, “with the number of projects expected to begin commissioning by the end of 2029 falling by almost two thirds.”
Something you don’t see every day: The Trump administration is defending a climate policy imposed by the Biden administration that environmental groups like against Republican states. Last week, E&E News reported that the Department of Justice had asked a federal judge in Louisiana to dismiss a lawsuit brought by 10 GOP state attorneys general in a challenge to a Biden-era policy that stopped subsidizing flood insurance for properties in places increasingly at risk due to new climate extremes.
