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Forever chemicals are very good at fighting fires.
Hindsight is 20-20, but boy have we had a lot of bad ideas.
We laid lead pipes to transport our drinking water. We let our kids play in clouds of DDT. We textured our ceilings with asbestos fibers. And until this week, nothing prevented municipalities across the country from allowing cancer-causing chemicals into the water that flows from the kitchen sinks of nearly half of Americans.
On Wednesday, the Environmental Protection Agency announced it would tolerate only exceptionally low levels of six perfluoroalkyls and polyfluoroalkyls — a group collectively known as PFAS, or “forever chemicals” — in U.S. drinking water. The chemicals, which are used for everything from waterproofing raincoats to making stain-resistant rugs, have been linked to severe health problems such as kidney, testicular, prostate, and colorectal cancers, of which diagnoses have been on the rise. An estimated 98% of us have traces of PFAS in our bodies, which often got there in the first place because of something we drank.
Environmental groups were quick to applaud the decision, calling it “overdue” and a “huge victory.” But despite being a huge step toward improving public health, the EPA’s action does not stop PFAS from entering America’s groundwater in the first place. One of the most pernicious sources is also one of the most useful: firefighting foam.
“Aqueous film forming foam,” or AFFF (“A-triple-F”), is highly effective at putting out oil and gasoline fires, which is why commercial airports, refineries, the military, and large ships keep it ready to hand. “When you take a shower, the soap and the shampoo you use spreads out the water into a foam — it suds,” David Trueba, the CEO of Revive Environmental, a company that has developed a method of breaking down PFAS that meets the EPA’s standards, told me. “AFFF does the same thing, but it prevents oxygen from getting to a grease or an oil fire. The PFAS molecules do an excellent job of creating bubbles and foam.”
The specific PFAS chemicals used in the foam are perfluorooctanesulfonic acid or perluorooctanoic acid, both newly restricted under the EPA’s drinking water guidance — but again, nothing prevents companies from continuing to manufacture them. The somewhat limited and specific uses of AFFF might make it seem like a threat mainly to firefighters and aviation professionals, rather than the general public. But in fact, the foam is one of the primary ways PFAS gets into drinking water because it is “directly applied to the environment when conducting training and responding to fires,” Shalene Thomas, the senior emerging contaminants program manager at Battelle, Revive Environmental’s parent company, told me. To add insult to injury, airports are required to test their foam annually, for safety reasons.
Even with the EPA’s new regulations, Thomas said, “until these releases are fully delineated, sources removed, and treatment installed, the risk of exposure from drinking water remains.”
Airports, municipal fire departments, and the military are all moving away from using AFFF to fight liquid fires, but that leaves an estimated 10 to 15 million gallons of the foam in the United States alone, which will have to be carefully processed to neutralize their danger, lest they end up in landfills where they might, of course, leech into the groundwater. Their persistence in the environment is a side effect of the strong bonds that make PFAS so effective — and what makes industry so reluctant to give them up — but it’s also what makes them incredibly difficult to abate. “If you’re playing Red Rover, normal molecules look like you and I — we can lock arms, and they can break through,” Trueba explained. But with PFAS, “We’re playing against The Rock and John Cena. That’s how strong the bond is.”
This conundrum has led some water utilities to complain about costs from a problem they say is not of their own making and is often prohibitively expensive to address. Large water utilities that serve populations of more than 10,000 people may only have a budget of $10 million for everything they do. “Having a $3 to $5 million bogey put on top of that” to treat water for PFAS, as directed by the EPA — “that’s where the comments usually come from,” Trueba said. While the Biden administration allotted an additional $1 billion in its drinking water plan on top of the nearly $4 billion set aside to address PFAS and other contaminants in the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, $5 billion is still “going to go not very far,” Trueba said. For example, Washington state’s public water utilities alone have said they’d need $1.6 billion for their initial PFAS cleanup.
John Rumpler, the clean water director at Environment America, is less tolerant of complaints from utilities. “For the public water utilities to be sitting there playing the victim and saying, ‘Oh my gosh, the EPA is imposing all these terrible costs on us’ — what do we tell our kids? Do something to help yourself,” he told me. “The part of the problem that utilities can clearly control is to shut off the tap on those industrial wastewater sources that are sending their PFAS to you.” State officials can also set pretreatment standards for industrial dischargers so PFAS are removed before they ever end up in waste sewage plants.
So far, this is how action against AFFF has come about — from individual state lawsuits and takeback programs. Back in 2018, the city of Stewart, Florida, sued chemical manufacturer 3M over the firefighting foam that had contaminated its water table, a suit that was eventually joined by 4,000 cities around the country. The eventual settlement totaled more than $10 billion and sparked the race to create technologies like Revive’s PFAS Annihilator, which uses intense heat and pressure to break the molecule’s stubborn chemical bonds. Other users of AFFF started to look closer at the foam, too; the Pentagon plans to phase out its use this year after an investigation by the Defense Department, and a spokeswoman for the National Fire Protection Association pointed me toward the organization’s ongoing workshops aimed at mitigating health risks to its members from fire-suppressing foams.
If these efforts keep up, it’s possible that in the future PFAS will become another bad idea we disbelievingly shake our heads at when we remember how things used to be. “Our parents and our grandparents seem to have pans and rugs from before these chemicals, so I’m pretty sure that we can do without them,” Rumpler pointed out.
But until chemical manufacturers stop making substances like AFFF, the EPA has only really given the faucet one good turn toward the off position. It still continues to drip.
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On a new plan for an old site, tariffs on Canada, and the Grain Belt Express
Current conditions: Phoenix will “cool” to 108 degrees Fahrenheit today after hitting 118 degrees on Thursday, its hottest day of the year so far • An extreme wildfire warning is in place through the weekend in Scotland • University of Colorado forecasters decreased their outlook for the 2025 hurricane season to 16 named storms, eight hurricanes, and three major hurricanes after a quiet June and July.
President Trump threatened a 35% tariff on Canadian imports on Thursday, giving Prime Minister Mark Carney a deadline of August 1 before the levies would go into effect. The move follows months of on-again, off-again threats against Canada, with former Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau having successfully staved off the tariffs during talks in February. Despite those earlier negotiations, Trump held firm on his 50% tariff on steel and aluminum, which will have significant implications for green manufacturing.
As my colleagues Matthew Zeitlin and Robinson Meyer have written, tariffs on Canadian imports will affect the flow of oil, minerals, and lumber, as well as possibly break automobile supply chains in the United States. It was unclear as of Thursday, however, whether Trump’s tariffs “would affect all Canadian goods, or if he would follow through,” The New York Times reports. The move follows Trump’s announcement this week of tariffs on several other significant trade partners like Japan and South Korea, as well as a 50% tariff on copper.
The long beleaguered Lava Ridge Wind Project, formally halted earlier this year by an executive order from President Trump, might have a second life as the site for small modular reactors, Idaho News 6 reports. Sawtooth Energy Development Corporation has proposed installing six small nuclear power generators on the former Lava Ridge grounds in Jerome County, Idaho, drawn to the site by the power transmission infrastructure that could connect the region to the Midpoint Substation and onto the rest of the Western U.S. The proposed SMR project would be significantly smaller in scale than Lava Ridge, which would have produced 1,000 megawatts of electricity on a 200,000-acre footprint, sitting instead on 40 acres and generating 462 megawatts, enough to power 400,000 homes.
Sawtooth Energy plans to hold four public meetings on the proposal beginning July 21. The Lava Ridge Wind Project had faced strong local opposition — we named it the No. 1 most at-risk project of the energy transition last fall — due in part to concerns about the visibility of the turbines from the Minidoka National Historic Site, the site of a Japanese internment camp.
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Republican Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri said on social media Thursday that Energy Secretary Chris Wright had assured him that he will be “putting a stop to the Grain Belt Express green scam.” The Grain Belt Express is an 804-mile-long, $11 billion planned transmission line that would connect wind farms in Kansas to energy consumers in Missouri, Illinois, and Indiana, which has been nearing construction after “more than a decade of delays,” The New York Times reports. But earlier this month, Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey, a Republican, put in a request for the local public service commission to reconsider its approval, claiming that the project had overstated the number of jobs it would create and the cost savings for customers. Hawley has also been a vocal critic of the project and had asked the Energy Department to cancel its conditional loan guarantee for the transmission project.
New electric vehicles sold in Europe are significantly more environmentally friendly than gas cars, even when battery production is taken into consideration, according to a new study by the International Council on Clean Transportation. Per the report, EVs produce 73% less life-cycle greenhouse gas emissions than combustion engine cars, even considering production — a 24% improvement over 2021 estimates. The gains are also owed to the large share of renewable energy sources in Europe, and factor in that “cars sold today typically remain on the road for about 20 years, [and] continued improvement of the electricity mix will only widen the climate benefits of battery electric cars.” The gains are exclusive to battery electric cars, however; “other powertrains, including hybrids and plug-in hybrids, show only marginal or no progress in reducing their climate impacts,” the report found.
Aryna Sabalenka attempts to cool down during her Ladies' Singles semi-final at Wimbledon on Thursday.Julian Finney/Getty Images
With the United Kingdom staring down its third heatwave in a month this week, a new study warns of dire consequences if homes and cities do not adapt to the new climate reality. According to researchers at the University College London and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, heat-related deaths in England and Wales could rise 50-fold by the 2070s, jumping from a baseline of 634 deaths to 34,027 in a worst-case scenario of 4.3 degrees Celsius warming, a high-emissions pathway.
The report specifically cited the aging populations of England and Wales, as older people become more vulnerable to the impacts of extreme heat. Low adoption of air conditioning is also a factor: only 2% to 5% of English households use air conditioning, although that number may grow to 32% by 2050. “We can mitigate [the] severity” of the health impacts of heat “by reducing greenhouse gas emissions and with carefully planned adaptations, but we have to start now,” UCL researcher Clare Heaviside told Sky News.
This week, Centerville, Ohio, rolled out high-tech recycling trucks that will use AI to scan the contents of residents’ bins and flag when items have been improperly sorted. “Reducing contamination in our recycling system lowers processing costs and improves the overall efficiency of our collection,” City Manager Wayne Davis said in a statement about the AI pilot program, per the Dayton Daily News.
Or at least the team at Emerald AI is going to try.
Everyone’s worried about the ravenous energy needs of AI data centers, which the International Energy Agency projects will help catalyze nearly 4% growth in global electricity demand this year and next, hitting the U.S. power sector particularly hard. On Monday, the Department of Energy released a report adding fuel to that fire, warning that blackouts in the U.S. could become 100 times more common by 2030 in large part due to data centers for AI.
The report stirred controversy among clean energy advocates, who cast doubt on that topline number and thus the paper’s justification for a significant fossil fuel buildout. But no matter how the AI revolution is powered, there’s widespread agreement that it’s going to require major infrastructure development of some form or another.
Not so fast, says Emerald AI, which emerged from stealth last week with $24.5 million in seed funding led by Radical Ventures along with a slew of other big name backers, including Nvidia’s venture arm as well as former Secretary of State John Kerry, Google’s chief scientist Jeff Dean, and Kleiner Perkins chair John Doerr. The startup, founded and led by Orsted’s former chief strategy and innovation officer Varun Sivaram, was built to turn data centers from “grid liabilities into flexible assets” by slowing, pausing, or redirecting AI workloads during times of peak energy demand.
Research shows this type of data center load flexibility could unleash nearly 100 gigawatts of grid capacity — the equivalent of four or five Project Stargates and enough to power about 83 million U.S. homes for a year. Such adjustments, Sivaram told me, would be necessary for only about 0.5% of a data center’s total operating time, a fragment so tiny that he says it renders any resulting training or operating performance dips for AI models essentially negligible.
As impressive as that hypothetical potential is, whether a software product can actually reduce the pressures facing the grid is a high stakes question. The U.S. urgently needs enough energy to serve that data center growth, both to ensure its economic competitiveness and to keep electricity bills affordable for Americans. If an algorithm could help alleviate even some of the urgency of an unprecedented buildout of power plants and transmission infrastructure, well, that’d be a big deal.
While Emerald AI will by no means negate the need to expand and upgrade our energy system, Sivaram told me, the software alone “materially changes the build out needs to meet massive demand expansion,” he said. “It unleashes energy abundance using our existing system.”
Grand as that sounds, the fundamental idea is nothing new. It’s the same concept as a virtual power plant, which coordinates distributed energy resources such as rooftop solar panels, smart thermostats, and electric vehicles to ramp energy supply either up or down in accordance with the grid’s needs.
Adoption of VPPs has lagged far behind their technical potential, however. That’s due to a whole host of policy, regulatory, and market barriers such as a lack of state and utility-level rules around payment structures, insufficient participation incentives for customers and utilities, and limited access to wholesale electricity markets. These programs also depend on widespread customer opt-in to make a real impact on the grid.
“It’s really hard to aggregate enough Nest thermostats to make any kind of dent,”” Sivaram told me. Data centers are different, he said, simply because “they’re enormous, they’re a small city.” They’re also, by nature, virtually controllable and often already interconnected if they’re owned by the same company. Sivaram thinks the potential of flexible data center loads is so promising and the assets themselves so valuable that governments and utilities will opt to organize “bespoke arrangements for data centers to provide their services.”
Sivaram told me he’s also optimistic that utilities will offer data center operators with flexible loads the option to skip the ever-growing interconnection queue, helping hyperscalers get online and turn a profit more quickly.
The potential to jump the queue is not something that utilities have formally advertised as an option, however, although there appears to be growing interest in the idea. An incentive like this will be core to making Emerald AI’s business case work, transmission advocate and president of Grid Strategies Rob Gramlich told me.
Data center developers are spending billions every year on the semiconductor chips powering their AI models, so the typical demand response value proposition — earn a small sum by turning off appliances when the grid is strained — doesn’t apply here. “There’s just not anywhere near enough money in that for a hyperscaler to say, Oh yeah, I’m gonna not run my Nvidia chips for a while to make $200 a megawatt hour. That’s peanuts compared to the bazillions [they] just spent,” Gramlich explained.
For Emerald AI to make a real dent in energy supply and blunt the need for an immediate and enormous grid buildout, a significant number of data center operators will have to adopt the platform. That’s where the partnership with Nvidia comes in handy, Sivaram told me, as the startup is “working with them on the reference architecture” for future AI data centers. “The goal is for all [data centers] to be potentially flexible in the future because there will be a standard reference design,” Sivaram said.
Whether or not data centers will go all in on Nvidia’s design remains to be seen, of course. Hyperscalers have not typically thought of data centers as a flexible asset. Right now, Gramlich said, most are still in the mindset that they need to be operating all 8,760 hours of the year to reach their performance targets.
“Two or three years ago, when we first noticed the surge in AI-driven demand, I talked to every hyperscaler about how flexible they thought they could be, because it seemed intuitive that machine learning might be more flexible than search and streaming,” Gramlich told me. By and large, the response was that while these companies might be interested in exploring flexibility “potentially, maybe, someday,” they were mostly focused on their mandate to get huge amounts of gigawatts online, with little time to explore new data center models.
“Even the ones that are talking about flexibility now, in terms of what they’re actually doing in the market today, they all are demanding 8,760 [hours of operation per year],” Gramlich told me.
Emerald AI is well aware that its business depends on proving to hyperscalers that a degree of flexibility won’t materially impact their operations. Last week, the startup released the results of a pilot demonstration that it ran at an Oracle data center in Phoenix, which proved it was able to reduce power consumption by 25% for three hours during a period of grid stress while still “assuring acceptable customer performance for AI workloads.”
It achieved this by categorizing specific AI tasks — think everything from model training and fine tuning to conversations with chatbots — from high to low priority, indicating the degree to which operations could be slowed while still meeting Oracle’s performance targets. Now, Emerald AI is planning additional, larger-scale demonstrations to showcase its capacity to handle more complex scenarios, such as responding to unexpected grid emergencies.
As transmission planners and hyperscalers alike wait to see more proof validating Emerald AI’s vision of the future, Sivaram is careful to note that his company is not advocating for a halt to energy system expansion. In an increasingly electrified economy, expanding and upgrading the grid will be essential — even if every data center in the world has a flexible load profile.
’We should be building a nationwide transmission system. We should be building out generation. We should be doing grid modernization with grid enhancing technologies,” Sivaram told me. “We just don’t need to overdo it. We don’t need the particularly massive projections that you’re seeing that are going to cause your grandmother’s electricity rates to spike. We can avoid that.”
The saga of the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund takes another turn.
On July 3, just after the House voted to send the reconciliation bill to Trump’s desk, a lawyer for the Department of Justice swiftly sent a letter to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. Once Trump signed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act into law, the letter said, the group of nonprofits suing the government for canceling the biggest clean energy program in the country’s history would no longer have a case.
It was the latest salvo in the saga of the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, former President Joe Biden’s green bank program, which current Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin has made the target of his “gold bar” scandal. At stake is nearly $20 billion to fight climate change.
Congress created the program as part of the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022. It authorized Biden’s EPA to award that $20 billion to a handful of nonprofits that would then offer low-cost loans to individuals and organizations for solar installations, building efficiency upgrades, and other efforts to reduce emissions. The agency announced the recipients last summer, before its September deadline to get the funds out.
Then Trump took office and ordered his agency heads to pause and review all funding for Inflation Reduction Act programs.
In early March, buoyed by a covert video of a former EPA employee making an unfortunate and widely misunderstood comparison of the effort to award the funding to “throwing gold bars off the edge” of the Titanic, Zeldin notified the recipients that he was terminating their grant agreements. He cited “substantial concerns” regarding “program integrity, the award process, programmatic fraud, waste, and abuse, and misalignment with agency’s priorities.”
In court proceedings over the decision, the government has yet to cite any specific acts of fraud, waste, or abuse that justified the termination — a fact that the initial judge overseeing the case pointed out in mid-April when she ordered a preliminary injunction blocking the EPA from canceling the grants. But the EPA quickly appealed to the D.C. Circuit Court, which stayed the lower court’s injunction. The money remains frozen at Citibank, which had been overseeing its disbursement, as the parties await the appeals court’s decision.
As all of this was playing out, Congress wrote and passed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. The new law rescinds the “unobligated” funding — money that hasn’t yet been spent or contracted out — from nearly 50 Inflation Reduction Act programs, including the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund. According to an estimate from the Congressional Budget Office, the remaining balance in the fund was just $19 million.
The Trump administration, however, is arguing in court that the OBBBA doesn’t just recoup that $19 million, but also the billions in awards at issue in the lawsuit. Congress has rescinded “the appropriated funds that plaintiffs sought to reinstate through this action,” Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Yaakov Roth wrote in his July 3 letter, implying that the awards were no longer officially “obligated” and that all of the money would have to be returned. Therefore, “it is more clear than ever that the district court’s preliminary injunction must be reversed,” he wrote.
Roth cited a statement that Shelley Moore Capito, chair of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, made on the floor of the Senate in June. She said she agreed with Zeldin’s decision to cancel the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund grants, and that it was Congress’ intent to rescind the funds that “had been obligated but were subsequently de-obligated” — about $17 billion in total. She did not acknowledge that Zeldin’s decision was being actively litigated in court.
On Monday, attorneys for the plaintiffs fired back with a message to the court that the reconciliation bill does not, in fact, change anything about the case. They argued that the EPA broke the law by canceling the grants, and that the OBBBA can’t retroactively absolve the agency. They also served up a conflicting statement that Capito made about the fund to Politico in November. “We’re not gonna go claw back money,” she said. “That’s a ridiculous thought.”
Capito’s colleague Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democrat, offered additional evidence on the floor of the Senate Wednesday. He cited the Congressional Budget Office’s score of the repeal of the program of $19 million, noting that it was the amount “EPA had remaining to oversee the program” and that “at no point in our discussions with the majority, directly or in our several conversations with the Parliamentarian, was this score disputed.” Whitehouse also called up a previous statement made by Republican Representative Morgan Griffith, a member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, during a markup of the bill. “I just want to point out that these provisions that we are talking about only apply as far, as this bill is concerned, to the unobligated balances,” Griffith said.
Regardless, it will be up to the D.C. Circuit Court as to whether the lower court’s injunction was warranted. If it agrees, the nonprofit awardees may still, in fact, be able to get the money flowing for clean energy projects.
“Wishful thinking on the part of DOJ does not moot the ongoing litigation,” Whitehouse said.