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On America’s climate ‘own goal,’ New York’s pullback, and Constellation’s demand response embrace
On Trump's global gas up, a Garden State wind flub, and Colorado coal
On partisan cuts, an atomic LPO, and the left’s data center fight
With policy chaos and disappearing subsidies in the U.S., suddenly the continent is looking like a great place to build.
The company is betting its unique vanadium-free electrolyte will make it cost-competitive with lithium-ion.
On geoengineering consent, Taiwan’s nuclear hopes, and a spider ‘megacity’
Current conditions: A sharp dip in the jet stream will channel Arctic air from the Plains to the Northeast, with snow expected this weekend in Minneapolis, Chicago, and Detroit • Northern California is bracing for potential power outages amid winds of up to 90 miles per hour • Temperatures of about 91 degrees Fahrenheit in Jerusalem just broke records for November temperatures dating back nearly 150 years.
Here's to a not-so-dirty 30? Wagner Meier/Getty Images
The world’s most important climate summit is set to begin. The first phase of the 30th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change — better known as COP30 — is slated to kick off this morning with a Leaders’ Summit that will bring together 143 delegations, including 57 heads of state and 39 ministers in Belém, a bayside city near Brazil’s northern coast. Negotiations over how to tighten ways to implement global emissions rules and hasten the speed of cuts are set to begin officially on Monday. COP30 President André Corrêa do Lago on Wednesday unveiled a $1.3 trillion climate finance roadmap to fulfill promises made at last year’s meeting in Azerbaijan, but told reporters that “there is no plan” for the roadmap even to be discussed at the summit, let alone formally adopted, according to Climate Home News.
Taking place against the backdrop of the United States’ withdrawal from climate negotiations and pullback of ambition from many other countries, the confab comes as the latest modeling from Rhodium Group consultancy shows the world is now on track to blow past the Paris Agreement’s 2-degree Celsius target but avoid the cataclysmic warming once forecast. The data projects the world will warm between 2 and 3.9 degrees above pre-industrial averages by the end of the century. As Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo wrote this week, that range is largely unchanged from Rhodium’s 2023 forecasts, suggesting that, “in the long run,” the Trump administration’s policies “might not mean much for the climate’s trajectory.”
Stardust Solutions, the U.S.-based, Israeli-led geoengineering startup just raised $60 million to commercialize technology to reflect the sun’s heat back into space, has quietly begun lobbying the U.S. government for contracts. In the first quarter of this year, the company hired law firm Holland & Knight to start appealing to Congress, but didn’t disclose its efforts “due to a clerical error,” the lobbyist told E&E News on Wednesday.
To many scientists, geoengineering is too dangerous to even study, posing a moral hazard to decarbonization by offering a temporary solution to the effects of warming. But, as I reported exclusively in this newsletter in September, more than 100 scientists — including former President Joe Biden’s science adviser — signed onto a public letter calling for a publicly-accountable research program to start now in case global warming gets bad enough that a country or corporation tries to unilaterally carry out geoengineering before it’s fully understood. The emergence of a major commercial contender such as Stardust suggests the tides are turning in favor of the technology. As Heatmap’s Robinson Meyer reported last month in a scoop about Stardust’s fundraising, the company claims its technology will be ready to go by the start of the next decade.
Meanwhile, data center companies are sparking a boom in Beltway influence-peddling. The four largest cloud providers — Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Meta — have all “reported tens of millions of dollars in federal lobbying in 2025 alone,” according to a new analysis from the federal records nonprofit OpenSecrets. The number of lobbyists per data center has also increased. Meta hired 21 more lobbyists this year than last year, and ChatGPT-maker OpenAI increased its stable of lobbyists nearly sevenfold since 2023.
The lobbying push comes amid mounting backlash. A Heatmap poll published in September found that only 44% of Americans would welcome a data center near their homes.
Taiwan this week took what may be its most significant step yet toward restarting its nuclear reactors. In May, the island became one of the only countries in world history to abandon nuclear power entirely after shutting down its final reactor. The move rendered the self-governing republic, which China claims as a breakaway territory despite the Communist Party never ruling there, almost entirely dependent on imported fossil fuels for its energy. Electricity prices are soaring — the domestic rates the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, the country’s national industrial champion, now pays are the highest of any of its global operations — and outages have grown. Worse yet, Taiwan is now vulnerable to blockades by the Chinese military that could weaponize blackouts in much the same way Russia has against Ukraine. Despite this, the ruling Democratic Progressive Party in Taiwan, which nominally supports independence from China, has opposed nuclear power since its inception. While Taiwanese President Lai Ching-te struggled to halt the final shutdown in the year after he took office, his administration has expressed an openness to nuclear power again.
On Wednesday, the state-owned utility Taipower submitted its assessment of how to restart shuttered reactors to the Ministry of Economic Affairs. In a referendum in August on whether Taiwan should restart its most recently closed plant, a majority of voters who cast ballots approved the measure, yet the plebiscite failed because it did not attract a large enough share of eligible voters. But the United Daily News reported that Taipower’s top boss said “there are opportunities and conditions” for restarting not just that last plant but the country’s second station, too. The news comes just days after Spain, the only country still pursuing a nuclear phaseout plan, officially started the paperwork to reconsider the policy, as I reported in Monday’s newsletter.
The new generation of geothermal startups promising to use novel drilling techniques to expand the energy source’s footprint get a lot of attention. But Ormat Technologies dominates the U.S. industry with conventional operations. In August, Ormat entered a strategic partnership with one of the next-generation companies, Sage Geosystems, in a move analysts told me at the time amounted to the giant in the space picking a “winner” among the newcomers. Yet Ormat’s latest earnings suggest it’s found a new area for growth: storage. Revenue from energy storage deals skyrocketed 108% year over year thanks to good weather conditions and higher capacity prices in the PJM Interconnection, the nation’s largest grid. The company said it expects annual growth in the sector of up to 17% over the next three years, Utility Dive reported.
Depending on how you feel about arachnids, this will either horrify you or delight you. Scientists just discovered the world’s biggest spider web, a subterranean “megacity” spanning nearly 1,080 square feet in a sulfur cave on the Albania-Greece border. Attached to a wall near the cave’s entrance, the colony — much like our own urban dwellings — has a large and diverse population. Roughly 69,000 Tegenaria domestica, known as the domestic house spider, call the web network home, along with 42,000 Prinerigone vagans spiders. Researchers believe this to be the first documented case of a colonial web formation for both species.
On Massachusetts’ offshore headwinds, Biden’s gas rules, and Australia’s free power
Current conditions: The Pacific Northwest is getting blasted with winds of up to 70 miles per hour • Heavy snow is coming this week for the higher elevations in New England and upstate New York • San Cristóbal de La Laguna in the Canary Islands saw temperatures surge to 95 degrees Fahrenheit.
New Jersey Governor-elect Mikie Sherrill. Kena Betancur/Getty Images
Democratic candidates swept to victory in key races with implications for climate change on Tuesday night. In Virginia, Democrat Abigail Spanberger — who vowed to push forward with offshore wind, new nuclear reactors, and fusion energy — seized the governor’s mansion in the first major race to be called after polls closed. In New Jersey, Democrat Mikie Sherrill, who campaigned on building new nuclear plants and pressing the state’s grid operator, PJM Interconnection, to cut electricity prices, trounced her Republican opponent. In New York City, Democrat Zohran Mamdani, who said little about energy during his campaign but came out in the last debate in favor of nuclear power, easily beat back his two rivals for Gracie Mansion. Yet the Georgia Public Service Commission's incumbent Republican Tim Echols lost his race against Democrat Alicia Johnson, a defeat for a conservative who championed construction of the only two nuclear reactors built from scratch in modern U.S. history. In what one expert called a sign of a “seismic shift” on the commission, Peter Hubbard, another Democrat running to flip a seat on the commission, also won.
At a moment when the Trump administration is “disassembling climate policy across the federal government,” Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo wrote, “state elections are arguably more important to climate action than ever.”
A federal judge in Washington ruled Tuesday that the Trump administration can reconsider the Biden-era approval of SouthCoast Wind off the coast of Nantucket, Massachusetts. The decision, reported in The New York Times, is a setback for the joint venture between EDP Renewables and Engie, and handed the White House a victory in what we’ve called here the administration’s “total war on wind.” Judge Tanya S. Chutkan of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia ruled that the project developers would not “suffer immediate and significant hardship” if the Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management were allowed to reevaluate the project’s construction and operation permits.
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Meanwhile, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit upheld Biden-era Department of Energy efficiency rules for gas-fired residential furnaces and commercial water heaters in a ruling that rejected the gas industry’s challenge on Tuesday. “Overall, we find that DOE’s economic justification analysis and conclusions were robust,” the panel ruled, according to Bloomberg Law. The decision will maintain the status quo of how the agency enforces energy efficiency rules for the appliances. Under standards updated in 2021 and 2023, the Biden-era bureaucrats proposed raising efficiency levels to 95% for furnaces and using condensing model designs to heat water.
White House budget officials pressed the Environmental Protection Agency to expand its rollback of tailpipe regulations this summer as the agency sought to repeal the foundational policy that undergirds federal climate rules, E&E News reported. Documents the green newswire service obtained showed the White House Office of Management and Budget pushed the environmental regulator to weaken limits on vehicular pollution, including soot and smog-forming compounds in addition to planet-heating carbon. The EPA initially pushed back, but the documents revealed the staffers at OMB demanded the agency pursue a more aggressive rollback.
Australia launched a new plan to force energy companies to offer free electricity to households during the day to use excess solar power and push the grid away from coal and gas. The policy, called the “Solar Sharer” plan, aims to take advantage of the country’s vast rooftop solar panels. More than 4 million of Australia’s 10.9 million households have panels, and the capacity has overtaken the nation’s remaining coal-fired power stations. The proposal, the Financial Times reported, would also extend the benefits of distributed solar resources to the country’s renters and apartment dwellers.
For years, nuclear scientists have dreamed of harnessing atomic energy from thorium, potentially shrinking radioactive waste and reducing the risk of weapons proliferation compared to uranium. In the West, that has remained largely a dream. In China, however, researchers are vaulting ahead. This week, Chinese scientists announced a major breakthrough in converting thorium to uranium in a reactor. “This marks the first time international experimental data has been obtained after thorium was introduced into a molten salt reactor, making it the only operational molten salt reactor in the world to have successfully incorporated thorium fuel,” Shanghai Institute of Applied Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences said in a statement.
