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The water levels in Lake Mead, meanwhile, have dropped to a record low as drought parches the American West. “This is a significant wake-up call,” J.B. Hamby, chairman of the Colorado River Board of California and the state’s lead negotiator, told The New York Times. “We need to have long-term solutions that are going to get us away from the precipice.”
For years, the world’s great powers have jockeyed for control of the Arctic as climate change thawed sea ice enough to open new shipping routes across the frigid polar region. Now China is poised to launch its first regular container shipping service through the frigid North. On Monday, the Financial Times reported that Sea Legend, a Chinese cargo vessel that delivers to ports in Turkey and North Africa, will begin weekly service through the Arctic with a route following Russia’s northern coastline. Beijing is calling the approach its “Ice Silk Road.”
The Trump administration, meanwhile, told researchers Monday that it would stop funding the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's lead report on how climate change is affecting the Arctic, Politico reported.
The Trump administration won federal approval to reconsider the environmental review for the stalled Atlantic Shores offshore wind project off Atlantic City, New Jersey. Previously a joint venture between the French energy giant EDF and the oil behemoth Shell until the latter company pulled out following Trump’s reelection, the remaining developer had argued in court that the approval process completed under the Biden administration could not be reopened. While the company “points to various ways that it believes that Congress has limited” the Department of the Interior’s authority to reconsider a review, “none speak with the exquisite specificity to undercut” the government’s right to remand the approval, according to court documents Heatmap obtained last night. Acknowledging the potential for the White House to bog down the procedure in bureaucracy, the court said it will require the Trump administration to provide a status report for why a 120-day deadline for revisiting the review would not be possible. My colleague Jael Holzman had put the project on death watch last year.
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If you listened to any of Tesla’s recent earnings calls, you know that Elon Musk has a lot of big plans for the company that don’t involve luxury electric vehicles with large in-dash homescreens. The company wants to mass produce humanoid robots. It’s promised to basically double America’s output of solar panels. And it’s aiming to build a $16.8 billion chip factory to rival Taiwan’s semiconductor industry. Yet that facility won’t be powered by Tesla’s solar. Instead, Musk said that his other company, SpaceX, will set up batteries and natural gas to keep the lights on for the plant. “The plant sits on the site of a former coal-fired power plant, and SpaceX plans to power it with newly built natural gas plants and batteries,” Electrek reporter Fred Lambert wrote. “So the compute future gets built on the same fossil ground as the past. Just swap coal for gas.”
At the start of the Iran War, a four-dimensional chess interpretation of President Donald Trump’s motivations posited that the conflict was actually about asserting control over China’s supply of hydrocarbons. Six months into the war, The Economist has declared China “the world’s great oil power.” Despite relatively limited domestic supplies, the People’s Republic managed to seize control over its energy fate through stockpiling, restricting exports, and curbing domestic demand by, for example, encouraging city dwellers to take mass transit and or cycle over driving. Among the other ways Beijing is limiting demand, as I have written previously: It’s pouring money into green hydrogen, ammonia, and methanol.
An unnatural disaster. EIA
Puerto Rico’s blackouts got worse last year without extreme weather bringing on the outages. The latest data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration shows that the island’s beleaguered ratepayers suffered an average of 36 hours of power interrupts that were not caused by major events such as hurricanes. That’s 19% more than in 2024. Between 2021 and 2025, Puerto Ricans experienced a combined average of 29 hours of power loss each year.
Trump isn’t the only one throwing money at minerals. The world’s top 50 mining stocks are now worth $2.3 trillion, up $18 billion for the month, according to a Mining.com analysis.
Amazon is reportedly behind plans to build a data center campus powered by a 7.7-gigawatt gas plant in Texas. In January, the project, known as GW Ranch, received a permit to build a gas plant with a pollution output of 33 million tons of carbon dioxide. While the developer behind the facility had been secret, the clean energy consultancy Cleanview reviewed satellite imagery that identified how much land the project was clearing and matched that to public filings for permits. In a post on X, Michael Thomas, the company’s founder, wrote that he confirmed with Amazon that it had acquired the site and planned to buy power from the plant, which is being developed by Pacifico Energy. “Partnering with GW Ranch marks Amazon’s first major investment in an off-grid data center,” Thomas wrote. “In doing so, the company joins Microsoft, Google, and Meta who have all invested significantly in natural gas power this year.”
The U.S. is facing its most brutal wildfire season in years, with blazes “scorching millions of acres.” That’s according to a new analysis by Bloomberg, which found that the 17 fires raging across Washington State have now displaced more than 60,000 people — roughly 10% of the Spokane area’s population. Across the U.S., there are at least 44,722 fires raging across about 5.2 million acres, data from the National Interagency Fire Center shows.
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Ah, the electric minivan. The dream of every emissions-conscious parent or hauler of large things. Rare in America, but taking over Europe. That is, of course, what’s happening with Kia’s PV5. The small electric van now accounts for a third of Europe’s market for similar vehicles. Kia’s first electric van, according to Electrek, is the most popular electric light commercial vehicle on the continent and the United Kingdom.
Under Colombia’s last president, the far-left Gustavo Petro, the country moved to quash its oil drilling industry and embrace green energy. The new right-wing government of President Abelardo de la Espriella isn’t abandoning the effort. Edwin Palma, the minister of mines and energy, just approved a new National Hydrogen Policy that establishes a roadmap for $5 billion in investments into electrolyzers and other infrastructure through 2031, according to Hydrogen Insight.
The Mochovce nuclear plant. Janos Kummer/Getty Images
Europe just got another new nuclear reactor. Slovakia split atoms for the first time at its Mochovce-4 nuclear plant after nearly 40 years of on-again, off-again construction, NucNet reported. The Russian-designed reactor could be among the country’s last purchases from the Kremlin-owned Rosatom as the conservative European Union nation embraces U.S. nuclear technology.
