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Solar Outshines Coal
On Texas data centers, Holtec’s New Jersey plans, and Polish renewables
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On Texas data centers, Holtec’s New Jersey plans, and Polish renewables
Seattle practiced responding to a heat dome during the international soccer tournament. It didn’t go well.
On Chinese nuclear, Mongolian uranium, and screwworm spreading
On flesh-eating parasites, Italian nuclear, and China’s “wasted” renewables
Current conditions: The southwest monsoon known as “hagabat” has started in the Philippines, dumping up to 4 inches of rain on the archipelago • A strong geomagnetic storm, ranked just two levels below the most powerful type of event of this kind, is underway, threatening radio signals, GPS, and other human instruments that are sensitive to shifts in the Earth’s magnetic fields • San Antonio, where the glorious New York Knicks defeated the Spurs last night, is bracing for rain through the weekend.
To put it in terms a movie lover could understand, President Donald Trump’s Iran War is drinking the U.S. government’s milkshake. Federal stocks of oil have dropped to their lowest level since 2004. Commercial crude stocks fell by 8 million barrels to 433.7 million last week, according to The Wall Street Journal. Unless the Strait of Hormuz reopens soon — which looks less likely now that Iran has called off negotiations with the U.S. and Israel — prices could hit $200 per barrel by summer, said Bob McNally, president of the Rapidan Energy Group consultancy and a former White House adviser. “You start to raise the risk of spillover into other sectors, the economy and financial system … it detonates fragilities in the broader economy and financial system,” he told the Financial Times.
Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond has filed a lawsuit to block construction of the United States’ first new aluminum smelter in half a century over concerns about the project’s ties to the United Arab Emirates and risks it poses to the state’s cattle industry. Century Aluminum had planned to build the smelter with $500 million from the Biden administration. But in January, as I told you at the time, the company overhauled the deal to partner instead with the Abu Dhabi-based Emirates Global Aluminum, which said it became interested in the project after Trump slapped 50% tariffs on the metal. The move comes after Trump endorsed Drummond’s opponent in this year’s Republican primary for Oklahoma governor.
In the 12-page litigation, the state’s top cop alleged that the smelter, planned for a site 30 miles east of Tulsa, would “leach air and water pollutants that would injure the health, comfort, repose, and safety of the people in the region,” Mining.com reported. “A primary aluminum smelter does not belong in a community’s backyard and its emissions do not respect property lines,” Drummond wrote in the lawsuit, which asks the court to block the project. His lawsuit also refers to the UAE, a close ally of the U.S. and by far the most liberal of the Gulf Arab kingdoms, as an “Islamic foreign monarchy.”
The Electric Reliability Council of Texas, the state’s grid operator, approved what E&E News called two “landmark sets of rules of rules” this week that would “shape the future of data centers in the state if finalized.” One package sets up new criteria and processes for bringing big electricity users onto the grid by reviewing them in batches. The other requires data centers and crypto mining operations to remain online during brief grid disruptions in a bid to avoid the cascading outages that downed the electrical system during 2021’s deadly Winter Storm Uri.
The changes come as opposition to data centers reaches critical new heights. Seven in 10 Americans now oppose server facilities built near their homes, according to a new Heatmap Pro released a poll this week that my colleague Robinson Meyer wrote up here. The backlash has grown so severe that former Representative Ben McAdams, a Republican from Utah, is facing serious pushback from his Democratic opponent for the state’s new 1st Congressional District over his small stake in the renewable energy component of a proposed data center in the area, according to the Salt Lake Tribune.
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Taiwan, if you’ll forgive the pun, is in dire straits. The self-governing republic that has functioned as an independent country since the losing side of the Chinese Civil War fled there in 1949, is almost entirely reliant on imported fossil fuels to keep the lights on and semiconductor fabricators churning out the hardware that makes the island so valuable to the global economy. That reliance only grew last year when the ruling Democratic Progressive Party, which has opposed atomic energy since its founding in the 1980s, completed the country’s nuclear phaseout, shutting the last of the island’s three functioning plants. The government in Taipei is now considering starting back up at least one of the old nuclear plants. But, as I told you earlier this year, it’s also looking to geothermal to make up the difference. On Wednesday, the Ministry of Economic Affairs announced the first government-led tender for geothermal, Think Geoenergy reported. The six-month process is meant to develop geothermal zones in Taitung County, on the island’s southeast coast.
The Iran War isn’t just draining America’s crude stockpiles. It’s also spiking gas prices — and spurring a hybrid boom. Sales of hybrid vehicles revved 33% in May compared to the same month last year, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of Motor Intelligence data. “The hybrids have been a godsend,” Mark Politte, the dealer principal at Stanley Subaru in Ellsworth, Maine, told the newspaper. They are “hotter than the non-hybrids.” While new vehicle sales are down 4.4% overall this year through May, hybrid sales are up 17% compared with 2025.
Meanwhile, autonomous electric vehicle company Waymo announced a deal on Thursday to recycle batteries from its nearly 4,000 operating robotaxis into battery storage for electric grids in California and Texas. Waymo’s fleet is made up mostly of Jaguar I-Pace EVs, which have 90-kilowatt-hour batteries. “Put a little haircut on that in terms of degradation and the effective capacity that would be left in those batteries when they’re suitable for repurposing, and we’re still talking about pretty significant capacity per battery,” Freeman Hall, CEO of B2U Storage Solutions, Waymo’s partner in the project, told Ars Technica.

The U.S. may be depleting its oil stockpiles, but it has increased its storage capacity for natural gas in the future. Underground storage capacity in the Lower 48 states increased slightly in 2025, growing mostly in the South Central and Mountain West regions, according to new data from the Energy Information Administration. “Underground natural gas storage provides a source of energy when demand increases, balancing U.S. energy needs,” analyst Jose Villar wrote. “We calculate natural gas storage capacity in two ways: demonstrated peak capacity and working gas design capacity. Both increased in 2025.”
It’s already been an historic year for wildfires. Even if your community doesn’t burn, you might still be in for hazy air.
The nation will mark an unhappy anniversary next week: the worst day for wildfire pollution exposure in U.S. history. On June 7, 2023, the skies over the Acela Corridor turned a sickly mustard yellow due to smoke pouring south from fires in northern Quebec; New York City recorded its unhealthiest ever score on the Air Quality Index at 484, more than 300 points above what’s considered healthy. In the years since, we’ve come to better understand the dangers of such “smoke events.” A study published earlier this year by researchers at UCLA was the first to estimate deaths specifically from long-term exposure to wildfire smoke, finding that it kills more than 24,000 people in the U.S. every year — more people than murderers.
The 2026 wildfire season is already one for the books. Fires had burned 2.4 million acres in the U.S. as of Monday, nearly double the 10-year average for the start of June. And the months ahead don’t look good — about 17% of the country is already in extreme drought, and an all-but-certain El Niño will bring warmer, drier conditions to the already volatile Northwest and suppress or delay monsoon precipitation elsewhere.
Where the smoke from any of the resulting fires actually goes is far less predictable, however, subject to impossible-to-forecast factors such as when there are human-caused ignitions, how big the fire is, what the winds are doing on a given day or even hour, and how much moisture is in the air, among other micro-factors. What’s actually burning makes a difference, too: trees, logs, and dense forest floor litter, called duff, have more mass than the flash-burning grasses of the Plains, meaning forest fires produce more soot and ash for distribution. “Literally, that is where the heavy emissions come from to get lofted with the intensity of a ground fire,” Pete Lahm, the branch chief for smoke at the U.S. Forest Service and the leader of the Interagency Wildlife Fire Air Quality Response Program, told me.
The current Fort Smith fire in the boreal forest of Canada is an example of how difficult it is to predict smoke exposure. Although northern Canada had a good snow year — which should in theory suppress major fires up there — there was a small pocket of dryness around Wood Buffalo National Park that ignited, ballooned into an almost 40,000-acre fire, and sent high-altitude smoke as far south as Chicago last week. Or take those wildfires in Quebec in 2023, which sent particulate matter as far south as Florida.
“The smoke went out to sea and came back in,” Lahm said of that event. “Who would have thought about that?”
As Will Barrett, the assistant vice president for nationwide clean air policy at the American Lung Association, told me, “No part of the country is immune from the impacts of climate change and the threat of increased pollution.” It’s always best to check your local air quality (which reflects a lot more than just wildfire particulates) and the national fire and smoke map when in doubt.
Much has already been said by now about the lack of snow in the Western U.S. “This year’s peak snowpack will be the new benchmark low for Wyoming, Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico,” reads the latest National Integrated Drought Information System report from the middle of May. “There are no comparable years.” Idaho, too, has “no historical comparison” for its lack of snow. In the Cascade Mountains and northern Sierras, where some of the country’s worst wildfires have historically occurred, many drought monitoring stations are likewise recording only trace amounts of snow.
Normally, melting snow helps stave off wildfire ignitions through the spring and early summer. When the snow melts too early — or isn’t there in the first place — the potential for explosive wildfires creeps higher much sooner. Forests also just have a lot of stuff — large trees, brushy undergrowth, forest floor leaf litter, homes and cars — which generates a lot of soot and ash.
In the southern half of Nevada and Utah, fuels are already “near or exceeding record dry levels,” per the latest National Significant Wildland Fire Potential Outlook, updated on Monday. What’s more, “Some of the fires are burning in the heavier fuels and timber of higher elevations, which is very unusual for late May” — and causes more smoke than grasses or chaparral.
The report also shows that above-average significant wildfire potential will consume almost the entire northwest corner of the U.S. — all of Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and southwest Montana — by August, and continue into September. The conditions resemble those of 2015, which turned out to be one of the worst fire seasons in Pacific Northwest history, the agency said. Everyone in the region is at risk from local wildfire smoke, regardless of what drifts in from other places.
“If California were to get active, Idaho and parts of Oregon can get slammed with that smoke,” Lahm told me. “Occasionally, with fires in the mid-Sierras, you’ll start to see impacts in Salt Lake City.” That’s especially true when there is above-normal plant growth in the Sacramento Valley and Sierra foothills, as there is this year. (“One sampling site in the Sierra Foothills,” the interagency report found, “recorded the second highest amount of growth in the 43-year period of record.”)
Lahm added a note of potential optimism to the smoke forecast in the West, pointing out that California is not in a severe drought at the moment. Southern California, home of the costliest fire in U.S. history last year, could be spared almost entirely thanks to the expected El Niño-induced above-average rainfall. “Maybe we won’t get the smoke from California this year,” Lahm allowed, before adding, “but California can get drier.”
The fire season is already well underway in the Southwest, with the airplane-crash-ignited Seven Cabins Fire in New Mexico the biggest active wildfire in the U.S. at 29,000 acres. Local air quality impacts are significant enough that the Forest Service already has air resource advisors involved, but Lahm told me long-range smoke impacts aren’t expected.
The southern and southeastern U.S. can sometimes feel repercussions from fires burning on the West Coast, though. “If we have a good Pacific Rim season, while really volume driven, there have actually been impacts in Louisiana, occasionally,” Lahm said.
Spring fires in Georgia and Florida have burned down into the duff, or “gone underground,” and could reemerge again in the coming months. Late May’s rainstorms could theoretically help curb fires in the Southeast, at least through the early summer. But forecasts show conditions drying out by late summer — El Niño increases wind shear, interrupting hurricane formation in the Atlantic basin and suppressing the tropical storms that normally keep the region wet through the hottest months of the year. Downed trees and brush from Hurricane Helene in 2024 remain an ongoing fire hazard, especially if they dry out.
The smoke in the Midwest isn’t usually of the homegrown variety, but being downwind of Canada and the western U.S. has made it no stranger to haze and red sunsets. According to the American Lung Association’s 2026 State of the Air report, which looks at the period from 2022-2024, “most of the Midwest” was “seriously impacted by high levels of ozone,” in part due to the “ozone-forming pollutants” generated when wildfire smoke interacts with urban air.
The snow conditions in Canada this year thankfully haven’t followed the pattern in the western U.S., and if things stay relatively wet up north, then it’s less likely the Midwest will experience the boreal wildfire smoke it may otherwise have grown accustomed to. But “say that smoke that came down from the [Fort Smith] fire decided to hit the ground in Chicago” last week, Lahm speculated to me. “It certainly would have probably contributed to [air quality] numbers above the standard, and if you’re sensitive and you’re not ready, then it’s a big deal.”
Because poor air quality often stems from fires burning in other places — which thus are often not top of mind — watching local air quality reports is especially important in the Midwest. No, the Fort Smith smoke didn’t hit Chicago last week, but it could have. More than any other region, the Midwest is a wildcard for smoke impacts.
Like the Midwest, the Northeast is often the victim of smoke from faraway fires. In 2025, for example, there were what Lahm described as “light impacts” in New York and Washington, D.C., from fires in Quebec, Ontario, and the Western U.S. “because of the volume of fire material being burned.” So far, though, the National Significant Wildland Fire Potential Outlook shows normal fire potential for the Mid-Atlantic region through September with “brief periods of elevated fire danger during windy days that follow dry periods.”
But as I’ve written before, the fire conditions in the East are also changing. The region has seen a 10-fold jump in the frequency of large burns over the past four decades. In fact, almost nowhere better represents the ability of local fires to cause unpredictable regional impacts than the East, where a likely human-caused fire in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park in 2024 sent particulate matter into surrounding neighborhoods.
If smoke defies long-range forecasts, then, the best method is to expect it and be pleasantly surprised if it doesn’t arrive. For most people, that means shaking off any leftover baggage you have around mask-wearing from the COVID-era and keeping a few N95s in the glove box. It also means knowing you’re at risk in the first place. Children under 18, adults over 65, and anyone who is pregnant or has a pre-existing respiratory or heart condition should be especially attuned to their local air quality. For those groups, having extra inhalers on hand or postponing a run could save a life.
“There are not a lot of places in the U.S. where being ready for some degree of smoke exposure, if you’re at risk, doesn’t make sense,” Lahm said. “It’s just good preparation. We keep a flashlight for when the lights go out in our homes — we need to look at smoke the same way.”