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The authors are taking some big swings. What makes it to the final draft will be anyone’s guess.
By the 28th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, you’d think we’d have done it all before — but if you did, you’d be wrong. This year, for the first time, negotiators at the conference will produce what’s called a global stocktake report, summarizing the past five years of climate progress and setting the agenda for the next five years and beyond.
The stocktake goes all the way back to the Paris Agreement; if countries have to report on their progress toward meeting their climate goals, the thinking goes, they’ll take the agreement more seriously. This is the closest thing the Paris Agreement has to an enforcement mechanism — naming and shaming — and we’re about to see how well it works.
The stocktake report is more than 18 months in the making, although the first time most of the world may have become aware of it was in September, when the UN released a technical report on how things are going. TL;DR: They’re not going great, an impression further bolstered by another report released just before the start of COP28 in Dubai, which showed that the world is nowhere near meeting its Paris goals.
All that is to say that the authors of the final stocktake report, due at the conclusion of the conference, have a high bar to clear. Drafts of the report that have come out so far offer a window into their thinking — and a sense of how hard their job is. Keeping in mind that none of this language is final and that the report could still change radically between now and its official adoption, here are a few features to highlight:
The most helpful part: If you want a quick summary of the latest climate science, check out the draft’s opening sections, which lean heavily on UN scientific publications from the past two years, including the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Sixth Assessment Report.
The most controversial part: Given the headlines that have come out of COP28 thus far, the future of fossil fuels is likely to draw the most attention in the final text. On that front, the draft lists three options for negotiators — one recommending “an orderly and just phase out of fossil fuels,” one calling for “accelerating efforts towards phasing out unabated fossil fuels,” and one … saying nothing at all.
The most on-theme part: The same section of the report also has optional language around tripling renewables capacity, phasing out coal, and getting rid of “inefficient” fossil fuel subsidies. A couple paragraphs later, there’s an optional section calling for parties to the Paris Agreement to reduce global methane emissions by at least 30% by 2030 and 40% by 2035. Again, whether any of this winds up in the final agreement is a big unknown. But if those methane targets make it into the final version, it’ll mark a substantial expansion of the Global Methane Pledge first launched at COP26.
The most David-and-Goliath part: The adaptation section of the draft seems like it’s been heavily influenced by the Bridgetown Initiative crew.
To take a step back for a second: The Bridgetown Initiative is named after the capital city of Barbados, is championed by the island’s prime minister, Mia Mottley, and calls for rich countries to throw far more support to the most vulnerable nations using various forms of international financing, from World Bank programs to mobilizing private investment.
A lot of those ideas made their way into this draft. For instance, it has an optional paragraph that proposes a doubling of international adaptation financing and a variety of options calling for more grants and other financing mechanisms that won’t add to developing countries’ already groaning debt burdens. On the subtler side of things, one revision from an earlier draft throws the word “highly” in front of verbiage calling current climate finance efforts “insufficient to respond to worsening climate change impacts” in developing countries.
The trendiest part: COP28 has thrown its arms around AI. One section of the latest draft bids welcome to what’s called the Technology Mechanism on Artificial Intelligence for Climate Action, “which explores the role of artificial intelligence as potentially powerful tools for advancing and scaling up transformative adaptation and mitigation actions,” with a focus on developing countries.
What’s not in this draft: much of anything about carbon pricing. The notion of monetary penalties for climate-polluting appears just a few times in the draft’s 24 pages, and all in optional sections. The word “offset” doesn’t appear at all.
Read more about COP28:
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The Department of Energy announced Wednesday that it was scrapping the loan guarantee.
The Department of Energy canceled a nearly $5 billion loan guarantee for the Grain Belt Express, a transmission project intended to connect wind power in Kansas with demand in Illinois that would eventually stretch all the way to Indiana.
“After a thorough review of the project’s financials, DOE found that the conditions necessary to issue the guarantee are unlikely to be met and it is not critical for the federal government to have a role in supporting this project. To ensure more responsible stewardship of taxpayer resources, DOE has terminated its conditional commitment,” the Department of Energy said in a statement Wednesday.
The $11 billion project had been in the works for more than a decade and had won bipartisan approval from state governments and regulators across the Midwest. The conditional loan guarantee announced in November 2024 would have secured up to $4.9 billion in financing to fund phase one of the project, which would run from Ford County in Kansas to Callaway County in Missouri.
Invenergy, the developer behind the Grain Belt Express, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The project had long been the object of ire from Missouri Senator Josh Hawley, who recently stepped up his attacks in the hopes that a more friendly administration could help scrap the project. Two weeks ago, Hawley posted on X that he’d had “a great conversation today with @realDonaldTrump and Energy Secretary Chris Wright. Wright said he will be putting a stop to the Grain Belt Express green scam. It’s costing taxpayers BILLIONS! Thank you, President Trump.” The New York Times later reported that Trump had made a call to Wright on the issue with Hawley in the Oval Office.
Hawley celebrated the Grain Belt Express decision, writing on X, “It’s done. Thank you, President Trump,” and exulting in a separate post that “Department of Energy officially TERMINATES taxpayer funding for Green New Deal ‘grain belt express.’”
The senator had claimed that the plan would hurt Missouri farmers due to the use of eminent domain to acquire land for the project. In 2023, Hawley wrote a letter to Invenergy chief executive Michael Polsky claiming that “your company’s Grain Belt Express construction campaign has hurt Missouri’s farmers,” and that “they have lost the use of arable land, seen their property values decline, and been forced to operate under a cloud of uncertainty.”
Controversy over eminent domain and the use of agricultural land by transmission lines illustrates the difficulties in building the long-distance energy infrastructure necessary to decarbonize the grid.
Opposition to the project had been gestating for years but picked up steam in recent weeks. Earlier this month, Andrew Bailey, the Republican attorney general of Missouri, announced an investigation into the project. “This is a HUGE win for Missouri landowners and taxpayers who should not have to fund these green energy scams,” he wrote on X Wednesday following the DOE’s announcement.
As the project appeared to be more imminently imperiled, Invenergy scrambled to preserve its future, including making plans to connect gas to the transmission line. In a letter to Secretary of Energy Chris Wright written earlier this month, the Invenergy vice president overseeing the project wrote that the Grain Belt Express “has been the target of egregious politically motivated lawfare,” echoing language President Trump has used to describe his own travails.
If the author’s intent was to generate sympathy from the administration, it didn’t work. The end of the loan guarantee could be a death blow to the project, and will at the very least force Invenergy into a mad dash to try to match the lost capital.
The grant from Washington State will fund a facility where all kinds of fusion labs can run tests of their own.
Flash back to four summers ago, when aspiring fusion pioneers Robin Langtry and Brian Riordan were stuck designing rockets at Blue Origin, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’ aerospace and space tourism company. More specifically, they were ruminating on how their engine’s large size was preventing the team from iterating quickly.
“If your rocket engine is 12 feet tall, there’s like, three places in the country where you can get castings,” Langtry told me. One simple design change could mean another eight to nine months before the redesigned part came in. Smaller designs, they hypothesized, would lead to faster development cycles.
They decided to quit their jobs in June of 2021 and put their thesis to the test with what would become Avalanche Energy, a fusion startup aiming to commercialize tabletop-sized reactors via magneto-electrostatic fusion, a nascent technology that’s far less well-understood than even still-experimental large-scale fusion machines like tokamaks and stellarators. Today, though, Washington State is giving this emergent tech a big vote of confidence by announcing one of the largest government-led fusion investments to date: A $10 million grant for Avalanche to build out a commercial-scale test facility for fusion technologies.
This facility, called FusionWERX, is where Avalanche will test its own prototypes with the goal of achieving scientific breakeven — the point at which a fusion reaction produces more energy than the energy used to initiate the reaction. But as Langtry, the company’s CEO, explained to me, it will also be a hub where other fusion companies, universities, and national labs can come test their own proprietary technologies while keeping their intellectual property intact.
“It’s almost like a commercial wind tunnel test facility, but for fusion,” Langtry told me. For example, Avalanche’s early-stage reactors will produce neutrons that researchers can use to test novel materials and ensure they can withstand the extreme conditions found inside fusion reactors. Organizations can also test their own neutron capture methods, often referred to as "neutron blankets,” which are critical for producing the tritium fuel that’s needed for a sustained fusion reaction.
Thus, Avalanche will earn revenue from the groups using the FusionWERX facility well before it makes any money from commercial energy production. The startup also plans to bring in additional income by making and selling radioisotopes — atoms that emit radiation as they decay — for medical and energy applications such as diagnostic imaging, radiation therapy, and nuclear batteries that can generate electricity in space or remote areas like the deep ocean.
Langtry told me these additional opportunities make Avalanche attractive to a wider variety of investors than simply climate tech venture capitalists interested in fusion’s potential for utility-scale power generation. “There’s much bigger sources of capital if you can build a true business that commercializes this technology and generates revenue and scales it,” Langtry told me. “That’s really what we’re about.”
Prior to the $10 million grant, Avalanche had raised a total of $50 million from investors such as Lowercarbon Capital, Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, and Toyota Ventures. And while the startup’s lineup of near-term use cases sets it apart, Avalanche too is ultimately aiming to produce commercially-relevant energy, with an eye towards replacing diesel generators for data center backup power or for use in remote communities or military outposts.
Avalanche’s chosen method, magneto-electrostatic fusion, uses ions that are injected into the reactor’s chamber and confined with extremely high voltage. This strong electric field accelerates the ions towards the center of the reactor, where they collide to produce a fusion reaction. Magnets surrounding the chamber also work to trap electrons alongside the ions, increasing the density of the plasma to achieve high fusion rates.
Avalanche announced today that it has successfully operated its machine at 300 kilovolts for multiple hours. When adjusted for size, this equates to 6 megavolts per meter, twice the voltage density of lightning. To reach breakeven, the company will need to operate its machine at about 700 kilovolts, which Langtry told me can be done by doubling the size of the reactor’s radius from 6 centimeters to 12 centimeters. Avalanche said in a follow up email that the company is waiting to gain operational experience at its current scale before raising the capital it will take to build a larger reactor.
The magneto-electrostatic method is well-suited to micro reactors as it doesn’t rely on giant magnets or lasers to create the fusion reaction. Ultimately, Avalanche plans to produce modular reactors from 5 kilowatts to 1 megawatt in size — enough to power just a couple homes at the least, and about 1,000 homes at the most.
But powering homes isn’t what Avalanche will actually do. Before energy dominance was even in vogue, the company was already focused on military applications for its tech. It received a contract from the Department of Defense’s Defense Innovation Unit in 2022 to develop technology for a nuclear-powered spacecraft by 2027. Avalanche did not elaborate on what its initial prototype might look like or be used for, only writing in a follow-up email that it’s “in active discussions about next steps for maturing this technology with DOD.”
“We were sort of contrarian, in that we always thought our path to commercial operations was through DOD and space, whereas most of the fusion companies were raising on climate and clean energy and building massive clean energy power plants,” Langtry told me. He cited support from Thiel, perhaps Silicon Valley’s most influential conservative voice, as helping influence the company’s direction.
At this moment, Langtry told me, there’s excitement around using Avalanche’s tech to make President Trump’s vision of a so-called “Golden Dome” missile defense system a reality. This would involve using satellites — theoretically powered by Avalanche — that could track and shoot down ballistic missiles fired at the U.S. “Right now, with solar, [satellites] could probably only take one shot during an engagement. But if you had 100 kilowatts or a megawatt, you could shoot continuously, and that system would be a lot more capable,” Langtry explained to me.
Depending on your feelings about nuclear war, this vision may bring more anxiety than comfort. It’s also a far cry from the more typical — and endlessly more idyllic — narrative of limitless clean energy and unprecedented prosperity that I’m used to hearing fusion enthusiasts promote. But such is the moment. And if the path to commercial fusion ends up running through a satellite-powered missile defense system, it probably won’t be the weirdest clean energy story of the Trump era.
On House drama, the good and bad of solar, and earnings season
Current conditions: Djibouti, eastern Ethiopia, and southern Eritrea are roasting in higher-than-average triple-digit temperatures • Argentina’s brutal cold snap is back after a brief pause, threatening gas infrastructure and freezing crops • Millions of Americans are facing a new round of heat waves from the upper Midwest down to the Gulf.
The Environmental Protection Agency is days away from proposing a rule to rescind the endangerment finding, the 2009 decision that established the federal government’s legal right to regulate greenhouse gas emissions under the Clean Air Act. That’s according to a scoop late last night in The New York Times, confirmed hours later by The Washington Post. The finding came in response to the 2007 Supreme Court case Massachusetts v. EPA, in which the nation’s highest court ruled that the danger planet-heating emissions posed to human health made them subject to limits under the same law that restricts other forms of air pollution. The endangerment finding was previously considered so untouchable that the first Trump administration tried to work within the parameters of the rule rather than eliminate it outright.
Revoking the endangerment finding would undo all federal greenhouse gas rules on automobiles, factories, and power plants, fundamentally ending any national policy designed to curb emissions. The proposal will almost certainly face political challenges. It’s unclear how the Supreme Court — now overwhelmingly conservative compared to the bench of 18 years ago — would decide the case today. One “highly unusual” wrinkle in the story: E&E News reports that EPA has been absent from recent meetings the White House has held with industry and environmental groups on the endangerment finding, which “raises questions about who within the Trump administration is leading the effort.”
House Speaker Mike Johnson closed up shop early this week, sending Congress’ lower chamber home until September. In so doing, the Republican leader hoped to halt a push to investigate President Donald Trump’s connections to the disgraced financier and accused sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.
The move effectively pauses negotiations over energy policy, too. Both chambers of Congress are in the process of setting their budget priorities for the coming year, and President Trump has called for major cuts to programs overseeing clean energy development and deployment. Talks are also set to begin soon over the reauthorization of the Energy Act of 2020, the programs of which largely expire this year, and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, which is scheduled to expire next year. The House going into recess early will shift attention to the Senate, where eyes will be on Republican moderates such as Senators Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, both of whom defended clean energy programs in negotiations over the One Big Beautiful Bill.
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Even before Trump took office, the U.S. electric vehicle revolution appeared to be stalling. Now the elimination of the main tax credit to encourage EV sales threatens to zap any remaining momentum. So far at least, that hasn’t halted GM’s EV sales. In its latest quarterly earnings announced Tuesday, the Detroit auto giant reported its EV sales had doubled over the previous three months, thanks in part to the launch of the battery-powered version of the Chevrolet Equinox, an SUV with a starting price of $35,000. GM now claims 16% of the American EV market, placing the company second behind Tesla, which reports its earnings today.
With earnings season is upon us, and dramatic shifts in federal policy and geopolitics promising some notable results, I went through all the companies reporting financial results to Wall Street this week and rounded up the big ones:
On Wednesday:
On Thursday:
On Friday:
The consultancy McKinsey is out with a new report on the effect of varying degrees of tariffs on the energy transition. The results are mixed. The good news: Solar capacity could more than double in the U.S. and the European Union by 2035 under any tariff scenario. The bad news: Strict tariffs could mean 9% less solar installed in the U.S. by 2035, and 7% less in the European Union.
In reality, the outcomes could be even worse. The report did not take into account how Republicans’ One Big Beautiful Bill pared down tax credits, or how the Trump administration may further limit access to federal incentives through the president’s executive order directing the Internal Revenue Service to restrict eligibility for wind and solar projects.
The Trump administration’s attacks on solar power aren’t changing the favorable economics for photovoltaics just yet. Facebook-owner Meta just inked a deal with energy developer Enbridge to build a 600-megawatt solar farm in Texas to power its data centers. Construction is already underway on the nearly $1 billion facility near San Antonio.
A fire in Oregon. FireSat
A new satellite project resulting from a collaboration between Google, the satellite company Muon Space, and the nonprofit Earth Fire Alliance can detect wildfires as small as 5 meters squared in size, giving firefighters a new tool to identify and potentially contain blazes before they erupt into conflagrations. The companies released the first images from the project this morning.
A fire in Ontario, Canada. FireSat