Carbon Removal
The Great Canadian DAC-Off
Deep Sky is running a carbon removal bake-off on the plains of Alberta.
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Deep Sky is running a carbon removal bake-off on the plains of Alberta.
On permitting reform optimism, GM layoffs, and LA’s H2 conversion
On global emissions, Bill Gates on Chinese nuclear, and a geothermal breakthrough
With Trump turning the might of the federal government against the decarbonization economy, these investors are getting ready to consolidate — and, hopefully, profit.
“I mean, God bless the Europeans for caring about climate.”
On EV investments hitting the brakes, Google’s nuclear restart, and a new data center consensus
On China’s rare earths, Bill Gates’ nuclear dream, and Texas renewables
Current conditions: Hurricane Melissa exploded in intensity over the warm Caribbean waters and has now strengthened into a major storm, potentially slamming into Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and Jamaica as a Category 5 in the coming days • The Northeast is bracing for a potential nor’easter, which will be followed by a plunge in temperatures of as much as 15 degrees Fahrenheit lower than average • The northern Australian town of Julia Creek saw temperatures soar as high as 106 degrees.
Exxon Mobil filed a lawsuit against California late Friday on the grounds that two landmark new climate laws violate the oil giant’s free speech rights, The New York Times reported. The two laws would require thousands of large companies doing business in the state to calculate and report the greenhouse gas pollution created by the use of their products, so-called Scope 3 emissions. “The statutes compel Exxon Mobil to trumpet California’s preferred message even though Exxon Mobil believes the speech is misleading and misguided,” Exxon complained through its lawyers. California Governor Gavin Newsom’s office said the statutes “have already been upheld in court and we continue to have confidence in them.” He condemned the lawsuit, calling it “truly shocking that one of the biggest polluters on the planet would be opposed to transparency.”
China will delay introducing export controls on rare earths, an unnamed U.S. official told the Financial Times following two days of talks in Malaysia. For years, Beijing has been ratcheting up trade restrictions on the global supply of metals its industry dominates. But this month, China slapped the harshest controls yet on rare earths. In response, stocks in rare earth mining and refining companies soared. Despite what Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin called the “paradox of Trump’s critical mineral crusade” to mine even as he reduced demand from electric vehicle factories, “everybody wants to invest in critical minerals startups,” Heatmap’s Katie Brigham wrote. That — as frequent readers of this newsletter will recall — includes the federal government, which under the Trump administration has been taking equity stakes in major projects as part of deals for federal funding.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission rewarded Bill Gates’ next-generation reactor company, TerraPower, with its final environment impact statement last week. The next step in the construction permit process is a final safety evaluation that the company expects to receive by the end of this year. If everything goes according to plan, TerraPower could end up winning the race to build the nation’s first commercial reactor to use a coolant other than water, and do so at a former coal-fired plant in the country’s top coal-producing state. “The Natrium plant in Wyoming, Kemmerer Unit 1, is now the first advanced reactor technology to successfully complete an environmental impact statement for the NRC, bringing us another step closer to delivering America’s next nuclear power plant,” said TerraPower president and CEO Chris Levesque.
A judge gave New York Governor Kathy Hochul’s administration until February 6 to issue rules for its long-delayed cap-and-invest program, the Albany Times-Union reported. The government was supposed to issue the guidelines that would launch the program as early as 2024, but continuously pushed back the release. “Early outlines of New York’s cap and invest program indicate that regulators were considering a relatively low price ceiling on pollution, making it easier for companies to buy their way out of compliance with the cap,” Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo wrote in January.
 
The Texas data center boom is being powered primarily with new wind, solar, and batteries, according to new analysis by the Energy Information Administration. Since 2021, electricity demand on the independent statewide grid operated by the Electric Reliability Council of Texas has soared. Over the past year, wind, solar, and batteries have been supplying that rising demand. Utility-scale solar generated 45 terawatt-hours of electricity in the first nine months of 2025. That’s 50% more than the same period in 2024 and nearly four times more than the same period in 2021. Wind generation, meanwhile, totaled 87 terawatt-hours for the first nine months of this year, up 4% from last year and 36% since 2021. “Together,” the analysis stated, “wind and solar generation met 36% of ERCOT’s electricity demand in the first nine months of 2025.”
On geoengineering inching closer, Rivian writhes, and endless VC Summer
Current conditions: Tropical Storm Melissa is gathering enough strength to potentially reach Category 5 status as the cyclone tracks northward toward Florida and the Bahamas • Up to six storms are barreling toward the Pacific Northwest, threatening flooding from up to six inches of rain on Saturday • Parts of South Africa’s coast are roasting in temperatures above 109 degrees Fahrenheit.
 
The Department of the Interior unveiled a package of executive actions opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling and mining exploration, a controversial move that fulfills a decades-long ambition for industry. The decision marks what The New York Times described as “the latest twist in a long-running fight over the fate of the refuge’s coastal plain, an unspoiled expanse of 1.56 million acres that is believed to sit atop billions of barrels of oil but is also a critical habitat for polar bears, caribou, migratory birds, and other wildlife.” During his first term, in 2017, President Donald Trump signed a tax bill that required two oil and gas leases in the area, but the Biden administration later blocked those leases. “From day one, President Trump directed us to unlock Alaska’s energy and resource potential while honoring commitments to the state and local communities,” Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum said in a statement. “By reopening the Coastal Plain and advancing key infrastructure, we are strengthening energy independence, creating jobs and supporting Alaska’s communities while driving economic growth across the state.”
The Trump administration has made industrializing the northernmost frontier state a key priority, approving a mining road though pristine forested lands and taking an equity stake for the federal government in the company aiming to extract minerals in the region. But the Environmental Protection Agency also yanked funding meant to help reinforce infrastructure in Alaska Native villages against warming-fueled floods, dismissing the money as left-wing ideologically driven “diversity, equity, and inclusion” spending, as I wrote in this newsletter. Those very communities were devastated by a typhoon earlier this month, displacing residents, with evacuees struggling to adjust to life in Alaska’s “concrete jungles,” the Northern Journal reported.
Heatmap’s Robinson Meyer has a big scoop this morning: Geoengineering startup Stardust Solutions is set to announce that it has raised $60 million in venture capital to develop the tools needed to artificially cool the planet by reflecting sunlight away from Earth. The company, led by a team of Israeli physicists, aims to spray aerosols into the atmosphere that will bounce energy from the sun back into space to balance out the effects of greenhouse gases. The technology is on track to be ready by the end of the decade. Lowercarbon Capital led the funding round, which is the company’s second, following a $15 million seed round in 2024. Rob’s story offers a measured assessment of the dangers of potentially geoengineering the atmosphere — and the threat of failing to do so when efforts to mitigate emissions are so far from where they need to be to preserve the climate norms in which humans evolved as a species. In a line that harkens to one of my favorite books, journalist Charles C. Mann’s environmental history of the global trade network that developed after Christopher Columbus’ arrival in the Americas called 1493, Rob notes that “the Earth has not been free of human influence for millennia,” and that “the world has over and over again been remade by human hands.”
“Stardust may not play the Prometheus here and bring this particular capability into humanity’s hands,” Rob writes. “But I have never been so certain that someone will try in our lifetimes. We find ourselves, once again, in the middle of things.”
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Rivian, the maker of luxury electric trucks and SUVs, slashed more than 600 employees, representing nearly 4.5% of its roughly 15,000-person workforce, The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday. “These are not changes that were made lightly,” Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe said in an email to staff. “With the changing operating backdrop, we had to rethink how we are scaling our go-to-market functions.” The cuts were meant to help “profitably scale” the business as it prepares to launch its new R2 midsize SUV.
The move comes as electric automakers reel from the Trump administration’s elimination of the federal electric vehicle tax credit. Tesla, as I reported here yesterday, posted a nearly 40% drop in profits on Wednesday afternoon as the company lowered prices to keep costs to customers in line with what federal write-offs previously made possible. But as Andrew Moseman wrote in Heatmap, the lower prices came with stripped-down features.
The U.S. government has backed a new billion-dollar fund to invest in critical minerals along with the New York-based Orion Resource Partners and Abu Dhabi’s ADQ. The investment vehicle, dubbed the Orion Critical Mineral Consortium, was announced Thursday with support from the federal International Development Finance Corp. The funding totals more than $1.8 billion, Bloomberg reported.
This is just the Trump administration’s latest foray into mining. The Department of Defense took the largest stake earlier this year in MP Materials, the only active rare earths producer in the U.S. Since then, the administration has taken stakes in other critical minerals projects, and considered similar ownership positions in companies developing rare earths in Greenland.
VC Summer, the project to build Westinghouse’s state-of-the-art AP1000 reactor in South Carolina, became such a financial boondoggle, utility executives went to jail; The final defendant was sentenced just last year. Yet the project — widely mocked as a billion-dollar hole in the ground — may end up built after all. Utility Santee Cooper officially notified regulators this week that it plans to execute a contract to restart the project.
The announcement, part of what Heatmap’s Katie Brigham called the “nuclear dealmaking boom,” came the same day Canada’s government put up $2 billion to back a small modular reactor project in Bowmanville, Ontario. The progress north of America’s border on new reactor technologies has drawn attention from potential Democratic presidential candidates in the U.S. When New York City mayoral contender Zohran Mamdani expressed support for building new reactors in the state during this week’s debate, Arizona Senator Ruben Gallego — widely discussed as a possible White House seeker — responded to the news in a post on X: “I am all for Nuclear power in this country but it would be quicker and cheaper to buy into the Ontario plant being built and coming online by 2030.”
Mining giant Fortescue has made a breakthrough. In its latest earnings call with investors Thursday, the Australian giant said it planned to replace the trucks that carry its ore with electric alternatives. “We’re not doing this because we don’t think our total cost of ownership is going to be less,” Fortescue CEO Dino Otranto said in a statement. “Of course, we’re doing it because of that.”