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Climate

Exxon Triumphs Over Activists

On shareholder proposals, ex-Tesla employees, and extra-hot days.

Sunrise over a field.

Thursday

Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

Current conditions:More than 400,000 households are currently without power in storm-battered Texas and the southern Plains • Southeast Louisiana tied a century-old temperature record on Memorial Day, recording a high of 98 degrees Fahrenheit in Baton Rouge • India may have broken its own heat record with a preliminary reading of about 126 degrees Fahrenheit near New Delhi.

THE TOP FIVE

1. Exxon board members clinch reelection

ExxonMobil Chairman Darren Woods and Lead Director Joseph Hooley easily won reelection at the company’s annual general meeting on Wednesday, neutralizing a threatened shareholder uprising over its climate policies. Several major pension funds said ahead of the meeting that they would vote to remove most of Exxon’s board after the company sued activist shareholders pushing for stronger emissions reduction targets. Though most of its petrochemical peers have similar targets, the company argued that the activists’ true goal was to “interfere with ExxonMobil’s business and to promote their own interests over those of ExxonMobil’s shareholders.”

The resistance effort “amounted to a test of whether top fund firms would rally to defend the small shareholders whose resolutions have put topics like the environment and workforce diversity at the center of many corporate annual meetings,” Reuters said. “Wednesday’s results suggested the answer was no.” All 12 of Exxon’s director nominees received between 87% and 98% support at the meeting, the company reported. The activists, meanwhile, withdrew their proposal in February, but Exxon is still pursuing the matter in court.

2. EV charging companies hire former Tesla employees

The U.S. electric vehicle sector is snapping up Tesla employees who were laid off when the company gutted its charging team last month. Atlanta-based charging provider EnviroSpark Energy Solutions has hired a dozen of them, E&E News reported, while other charging companies have landed high-profile hires let go by Tesla or are in talks to do so. “It does present an awesome opportunity for other charging operators like us to fill in the gap,” David Jankowsky, CEO of Francis Energy, told E&E News. There is still some trepidation, however, over how Tesla’s tribulations could affect the broader industry’s future. Despite its poor recent performance, Tesla still dominates the U.S. EV market, so a dip in consumer confidence could have negative ripple effects on EV uptake.

3. Rich countries meet $100 billion aid target two years late

The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development announced Wednesday that the world’s rich countries had met their goal of delivering $100 billion in annual climate finance to poorer countries in 2022 — two years after their self-imposed deadline, the group said. The 2020 target was first set at the 2009 United Nations climate change conference in Copenhagen, and the delay in meeting it had strained recent climate talks. Developed countries came up with $115.9 billion in climate finance in 2022, OECD data shows, an increase of 30% from 2021. That’s the biggest year-on-year jump so far. “Exceeding this annual commitment materially by more than 15% is an important and symbolic achievement which goes some way towards making up for the two-year delay, which should help build trust,” OECD Secretary-General Mathias Cormann said in a statement.

Climate advocates warned, however, that achieving this aim is not an end point in itself. Transitioning to clean energy and adapting to new climate realities are both expensive processes. “While domestic finance, strong policies and private finance are important, for these countries, international public finance needs to play a lynchpin role,” Melanie Robinson, global climate, economics and finance director at the World Resources Institute, said in a statement. Discussions about setting a new climate finance goal will be a centerpiece of COP29 in Azerbaijan.

4. An IRA rebate roll-out

New York will be the first state to launch home energy rebates created by the Inflation Reduction Act, the Biden administration announced Thursday. The initial phase of New York’s $158 million rebate program will be aimed at single-family homes and multifamily properties with up to four units, while later phases will expand to larger buildings and retailers. It will provide up to $14,000 per housing unit for upgrades such as better insulation, heat pumps, and heat pump water heaters. A separate, $159 million IRA home efficiency rebate program is expected to follow. Massachusetts, Michigan and Rhode Island have all applied for the funding to establish their own home energy rebate programs under the IRA — a process that’s turned out to be messier than some had hoped, according to Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo.

5. Study: Extra-hot days are on the rise

The average American experienced 20 more extra-hot days over the past year than would have been expected without climate change, a new scientific analysis found. Globally, the average person experienced 26 more extra-hot days due to climate change, while in a few countries, that number exceeded 120, according to the report by Climate Central, the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre, and World Weather Attribution. The researchers considered temperatures abnormal when they exceeded 90% of a location’s daily readings recorded between 1991 and 2020. Americans experienced 39 such days in total over the last 12 months. Almost 80% of the world’s population experienced 31 or more.

Manila residents swelter during a May heat wave. Manila residents swelter during a May heat wave. Ezra Acayan/Getty Images

THE KICKER

The National Weather Service issued its first-ever warning for hail the size of a DVD — that is, a diameter of approximately 5 inches — in northern Texas on Tuesday.

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Economy

Trump Is Disabling the Agency That Could Fight China’s Rare Earths Embargo

The Loan Programs Office is good for more than just nuclear funding.

Xi Jinping and Donald Trump.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

That China has a whip hand over the rare earths mining and refining industry is one of the few things Washington can agree on.

That’s why Alex Jacquez, who worked on industrial policy for Joe Biden’s National Economic Council, found it “astounding”when he read in the Washington Post this week that the White House was trying to figure out on the fly what to do about China restricting exports of rare earth metals in response to President Trump’s massive tariffs on the country’s imports.

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Q&A

You, Too, Can Protect Solar Panels Against Hail

A conversation with VDE Americas CEO Brian Grenko.

This week's interview subject.
Heatmap Illustration

This week’s Q&A is about hail. Last week, we explained how and why hail storm damage in Texas may have helped galvanize opposition to renewable energy there. So I decided to reach out to Brian Grenko, CEO of renewables engineering advisory firm VDE Americas, to talk about how developers can make sure their projects are not only resistant to hail but also prevent that sort of pushback.

The following conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.

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Hotspots

The Pro-Renewables Crowd Gets Riled Up

And more of the week’s big fights around renewable energy.

The United States.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

1. Long Island, New York – We saw the face of the resistance to the war on renewable energy in the Big Apple this week, as protestors rallied in support of offshore wind for a change.

  • Activists came together on Earth Day to protest the Trump administration’s decision to issue a stop work order on Equinor’s Empire Wind project. It’s the most notable rally for offshore wind I’ve seen since September, when wind advocates protested offshore opponents at the Preservation Society of Newport County, Rhode Island.
  • Esther Rosario, executive director of Climate Jobs New York, told me the rally was intended to focus on the jobs that will be impacted by halting construction and that about a hundred people were at the rally – “a good half of them” union members or representing their unions.
  • “I think it’s important that the elected officials that are in both the area and at the federal level understand the humans behind what it means to issue a stop-work order,” she said.

2. Elsewhere on Long Island – The city of Glen Cove is on the verge of being the next New York City-area community with a battery storage ban, discussing this week whether to ban BESS for at least one year amid fire fears.

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