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Two days ago, I told you that the Trump administration planned to dismantle a decade-old U.S. monitoring system to track coastal environments and shifting ocean currents. Now the European Union is stepping up to fill the gap. Earlier this week, the European Commission announced plans to “position the EU as the world’s leading provider of ocean intelligence by contributing 35% of the global ocean observing system by 2035 and securing 35% of the market for ocean observation technologies.” In a statement, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said the program, called OceanEye Europe, will allow Europe to “lead the race to understand our ocean, to protect it, and to sustainably harness its potential.”
Cool, cool, cool: The U.S. just recorded its first case of flesh-eating New World screwworm in decades. Fun! On Wednesday, the U.S. Department of Agriculture confirmed that, for the first time in 60 years, the parasitic fly whose maggot larvae feed only on the flesh of warm-blooded animals had been detected in the umbilical area of a three-week-old calf at a ranch in South Texas. So far, the USDA said there are no additional cases. CNN outlined the stakes this way: “Although it is not a food safety issue, an infestation can be a food production issue. It could cost the economy billions and raise the price of beef at a time when Americans are already paying record high prices.” Not to mention, as Heatmap’s Robinson Meyer wrote last night, “the screwworm is a lesson about the reality of good governance. State capacity is not so different from managing the electricity system or, for that matter, cutting carbon emissions, in that there is little political reward for getting it right.”
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A view of the former Galileo Ferraris nuclear plant in Trino Vercellese, Italy. Stefano Guidi/Getty Images
In 1987, a year after the world’s only major deadly civilian nuclear accident at Chernobyl, Italians voted in a referendum to phase out its own atomic power stations. The last one shut down in 1990. Now Italy is once again looking to harness the power of fission. On Thursday, World Nuclear News reported that the lower house of the country’s parliament, the Chamber of Deputies, had approved a bill backed by Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni to restart the nation’s atomic power industry. A poll taken in 2024 found that nearly half of Italian voters supported construction of new reactors, with just 24% opposed. The bill that lawmakers just approved passed with 155 votes in favor, 86 against, and eight abstentions.
Meanwhile, yesterday afternoon the microreactor developer Antares — whose deal for TRISO fuel I broke news of back in February — split atoms for the first time in its test reactor built for the Energy Department’s reactor pilot program. When the administration announced the 10 companies selected for the program, the White House set a goal of at least three projects reaching “criticality,” meaning that they can demonstrate the ability to split atoms, for the first time by July 4. “Today’s achievement is a historic moment for American nuclear energy,” Energy Secretary Chris Wright said in a statement. “By bringing the first American non-light water privately developed reactor to criticality in more than four decades, Antares has shown what is possible when American innovation is unleashed.” Antares CEO Jordan Bramble said the company, which aims to sell its reactors primarily to the military and NASA, will produce electricity for the first time next year.
In January, the United Kingdom, Norway, and several major European Union nations including Germany and Denmark agreed to a pact to build out a sweeping array of wind turbines in the North Sea, turning the waterway into “the world’s largest clean energy reservoir.” If the pledge holds, roughly 11% of the 222,000-square-mile sea could be covered in turbines. That’s the finding of a new study from Heriot-Watt University in Scotland. Under the current target, the North Sea would host a total of about 19,400 turbines by the middle of this century. By 2030, the U.K. alone is on track to have roughly 4,200 turbines, followed by Germany with about 2,700, and the Netherlands with 1,700, according to Renewables Now. The Dutch would claim the highest offshore wind density, with wind farms covering around 19% of its North Sea waters by 2050, followed by Belgium at 18%.
China’s carbon dioxide emissions from its power sector increased 4% year over year in the first three months of 2026, despite surging deployments of renewables and nuclear power. Why? According to a new Carbon Brief analysis, it’s “wasted” wind and solar. With the grid in the People’s Republic unable to patch the new turbines and panels in, the capacity could not meet growing electricity demand. Had those units been online, the publication’s analysis determined, emissions from the power sector would have been flat in the first quarter of this year.
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.
Unsurprisingly, two regions with a lot of gas production and data center construction saw an increase.EIA
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.”
