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As I noted in yesterday’s newsletter, the longest government shutdown in U.S. history came with some climate casualties. As Heatmap reported throughout the funding lapse, the administration gutted a backup energy storage system at a children’s hospital, major infrastructure projects in New York City, and a bevy of grants for clean energy.
Speaking at the United Nations climate summit in Belém, Brazil, on Tuesday, California Governor Gavin Newsom accused Trump of scoring an economic “own goal” by abandoning federal climate policies and ceding dominance over clean energy to China. The Democrat, widely expected to run for his party’s presidential nod in 2028, is the highest-profile American politician to appear at the first conference in years where the sitting U.S. administration declined to send a high-level delegation. Reversing the Biden administration’s carbon-cutting policies amounted to “the own goal of the president of the United States who simply doesn’t understand how enthusiastic President Xi is that the Trump administration is nowhere at COP30,” Newsom told the audience at the Amazonian confab, according to the Financial Times. “The United States of America better wake up at that. It’s not about electric power. It’s about economic power.”
As I wrote in Tuesday’s newsletter, China is on a climate winning streak. New analysis published this week in Carbon Brief found that the country’s emissions stayed flat in the last quarter, extending a trend of flat or falling carbon pollution since March 2024. The biggest driver of power plant development in the U.S., meanwhile, appears to be on increasingly shaky footing. A new report from the Center for Public Enterprise found that data center companies are increasingly taking on debt and creating interlocking financing deals to pay for the rapid buildout of server farms.
Plug Power put plans to build as many as six new hydrogen production plants across the U.S. on hold as the Trump administration pares back its plans to support the zero-carbon fuel. The company, which has never turned a profit, said it has suspended its rollout of factories in Texas, New York, and other states, and, according to the Albany Times-Union, “will instead buy hydrogen from an existing supplier.” Plug Power had received funding not just from the Department of Energy, but also from the New York Power Authority, which awarded a large allocation of low-cost hydropower to support a $290 million green hydrogen facility in Genesee County, just east of Buffalo.
It’s part of a broader reshuffling of decarbonization priorities in the Empire State. New York agreed on Wednesday to suspend implementation of new statewide rules that would have banned all new low-rise buildings from establishing hookups to the gas system, effectively mandating the use of electric heating and cooking appliances. The move comes just weeks after the state lost its biggest battery project on Staten Island amid growing pushback from residents, as Heatmap’s Jael Holzman reported.
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Way more capable. Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
While New York City still has the West Coast handily beaten on public transit, the self-driving robotaxi company Waymo just rolled out rides on freeways for the first time. The Google-spinout startup, which uses all electric vehicles, announced plans on Wednesday to start offering rides on freeways in the Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Phoenix metropolitan areas. “We’re offering freeway access to a growing number of public riders and will introduce the service to more over time, including as we expand freeway capabilities to Austin, Atlanta, and beyond — always guided by our commitment to safety and service excellence,” the company said in a blog post. “Freeway trips make Waymo even more convenient and efficient, whether you’re headed to Sky Harbor International Airport, cruising from Downtown LA to Culver City, or commuting in our newly expanded Bay Area service.”"
Among the warring tribes of the energy transition, you often get so-called nuclear bros on one side calling for as much abundant clean power as possible, and renewables hardliners on the other demanding more judicious use of existing clean power by cutting back on wasted energy. The latest plan from the nation’s largest nuclear plant operator tries to have it both ways. In his utility giant’s latest earnings call, Constellation Energy CEO Joe Dominguez said the company is “seeing a lot of great capability to use backup generation and flex compute,” Utility Dive reported.
It’s a sign of the growing trend toward demand response, wherein large power uses such as data centers scale back when the grid is under particular stress, such as on a hot day when everyone is using air conditioning. “I don’t think we’re going to get to a point where we could flex on and off the full output of data centers,” Dominguez warned. But he said the company is exploring the potential for artificial intelligence software to “attract some of our customers to actually providing the relief or the slack on the system during the key hours.” Still, the idea is attracting attention. Regulators at the state and federal level are now considering what Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin called “one weird trick for getting more data centers on the grid.”
The first front of climate action, started in the 1900s, was conservation, figuring out how to use energy more efficiently. The second front was about cleaning up the toxic mess left behind by mid-20th century industry. The third front, now emerging, is about finding ways to support construction of more energy infrastructure in recognition of the fact that there’s no such thing as national prosperity in a low-energy economy. That’s the take from Aliya Haq, the president of the nonprofit Clean Energy Project, who called for a new approach to climate advocacy in a new Heatmap op-ed.
There were, however, some green shoots. A $730 million line item in the military’s budget could go to microgrids, renewables, or nuclear reactors. The bill also contains millions of dollars for the cleanup of so-called forever chemicals, which had stalled under the Trump administration. Still, the damage from the shutdown was severe. As Heatmap reported throughout the record-breaking funding lapse, the administration slashed funding for a backup energy storage system at a children’s hospital, major infrastructure projects in New York City, and droves of grants for clean energy.
Gassing up the planet. Montinique Monroe/Getty Images
Call it American exceptionalism. The effects of President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act and America’s world-leading artificial intelligence development “have meaningfully altered” the International Energy Agency’s forecasts of global fossil fuel usage and emissions, Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin wrote this morning. The trajectory of global temperature rise may be, as I have written in this newsletter, so far largely unaffected by the new American administration’s policies. But multiple scenarios outlined in the Paris-based IEA’s 2025 World Energy Outlook predict “gas demand continues growing into the 2030s, due mainly to changes in U.S. policies and lower gas prices.”
That stands in contrast to China, a comparison that was inevitable this week as the world gathers for the United Nations climate summit in Belém, Brazil — the first that Washington is all but ignoring as the Trump administration moves to withdraw the U.S. from the Paris Agreement. As I wrote here yesterday, China's emissions remained flat in the last quarter, extending a streak that began in March 2024.
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Heatmap’s Jael Holzman had a big scoop last night: Yet another offshore wind project on the East Coast is kaput. The lawyers representing the Leading Light Wind offshore project filed a letter on November 7 to the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities informing the regulator it “no longer sees any way to complete construction and wants to pull the plug,” Jael wrote. “The Board is well aware that the offshore wind industry has experienced economic and regulatory conditions that have made the development of new offshore wind projects extremely difficult,” counsel Colleen Foley wrote in the letter, a copy of which Jael got her hands on. The project was meant to be built 35 miles off New Jersey’s coast, and was expected to provide about 2.4 gigawatts of electricity to the power-starved state.
It’s the latest casualty of Trump’s “total war on wind,” and comes as other projects in Maryland and New England are fighting to retain permits amid the administration’s multi-agency onslaught.
Xcel Energy proposed extending the life of its Comanche 2 coal-fired power plant for 12 months past its shutdown date in December. The utility giant, backed by state officials and consumer advocates, told the Colorado Public Utilities Commission on Monday that maintaining power production from the 50-year-old unit was important as the power plant scrambled to maintain enough power generation following the breakdown of the coal plant's third unit. The 335-megawatt Comanche 2 generator in Pueblo is expected to get approval to keep running. “We need it for resource adequacy and reliability, underlining that need for reliability and resource adequacy are central issues,” Robert Kenney, CEO of Xcel Energy’s Colorado subsidiary, told The Colorado Sun. The move comes as Trump’s Department of Energy is ordering coal plants in states such as Michigan to keep operating months past closure deadlines at the cost of millions of dollars per month to ratepayers, as I have previously written.
Pennsylvania, meanwhile, may be preparing to withdraw from the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, the cap-and-trade market in which much of the Northeast’s biggest states partake. A state budget deal described by Spotlight PA reporter Stephen Caruso on X would remove the commonwealth from the market.
Germany and Spain vowed to give $100 million to the World Bank’s Climate Investment Funds, a $13 billion multilateral financing pool to help poor countries deal with the effects of climate change. The funding, announced Monday at an event at the U.N.’s Cop30 summit in Brazil, is “an opportunity too large to ignore,” Tariye Gbadegesin, chief executive officer of Climate Investment Funds, said in a statement. While mitigation work has long held priority in international lending, adaptation work to give some relief to the countries that contributed the least to climate change but pay the highest tolls from extreme weather has often received scant support. In his controversial memo calling for a sober, new direction for global funding, billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates called on countries to take adaptation more seriously. For more on what he said, read the rundown Heatmap’s Robinson Meyer wrote.
Right in time for the region’s most iconic season, when even celebrants in farflung parts of this country think of the old Puritan lands during Halloween and Thanksgiving, I bring to you what might be the most New England story ever. A blade broke off a wind turbine near Plymouth, Massachusetts, last week and landed in — get ready for it — a cranberry bog. The roughly 90-foot blade left behind debris, but “no one was hurt, and the turbine automatically shut itself down as designed,” the local fire chief said.
