Trump Schedules an Offshore Oil Bonanza After Killing Wind

Current conditions: Hurricane Erin is lashing Virginia Beach with winds up to 80 miles per hour, the Mid-Atlantic with light rain, and New York City with deadly riptides • Europe’s wildfires have now burned more land than any blazes in two decades • Catastrophic floods have killed more than 300 in Pakistan and at least 50 in Indian-administered Kashmir.

THE TOP FIVE

1. Trump schedules auctions of dozens of offshore oil and gas leases

Offshore oil rigs in California. Mario Tama/Getty Images

Two weeks after de-designating millions of acres of federal waters to offshore wind development, the Trump administration Tuesday set a new schedule for auctions of oil-and-gas leases in the Gulf of Mexico and Alaska’s Cook Inlet, stretching all the way out to 2040. In a press release, Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum cited the recently passed One Big Beautiful Bill Act as a “landmark step toward unleashing America’s energy potential” by “putting in place a bold, long-term program that strengthens American Energy Dominance, creates good-paying jobs and ensure we continue to responsibly develop our offshore resources.”

The lease plan may violate federal law, however, as the administration has not conducted environmental analyses or held public hearings before putting the auctions on the calendar. “There’s no world in which we will allow the Trump Administration to hold dozens of oil sales in public waters, putting Americans, wildlife, and the planet in harm’s way, without abiding by the law,” Brettny Hardy, an oceans attorney at the environmental group Earthjustice, said in a statement. “Even with its passage of the worst environmental bill in U.S. history, the Republican-led Congress did not exempt these offshore oil sales from needing to comply with our nation’s environmental statutes.”

2. COP30 president braces for contentious climate talks

In an open letter published Tuesday, André Corrêa do Lago, the veteran Brazilian diplomat leading the next United Nations climate summit, warned that “geopolitical and economic obstacles are raising new challenges to international cooperation — including under the climate regime.” The letter comes after UN-sponsored talks over a plastics treaty collapsed last week, with the U.S. joining fellow oil producers Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Iran in standing athwart more than 100 other countries that supported a deal to curb production of new disposable plastics.

The climate summit, known as COP30, is set to take place in the Brazilian Amazon city of Belém in November. It will be the first global climate confab since President Donald Trump returned to office and, on his first day back in the White House, kicked off the process to withdraw the U.S. from the 2015 Paris climate deal.

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3. A coal mega-merger collapses

Peabody Energy backed out of its $3.8 billion agreement to buy Anglo American’s coal mines following the unexpected closure of the deal’s flagship mine. On Tuesday, the largest U.S. coal producer said that an explosion last March at Anglo America’s Moranbah North mine in Australia resulted in a “material adverse change” to its deal. The move dealt a major blow to London-based Anglo American, which had planned to use the sale as part of a broader restructuring to fend off a hostile takeover attempt by rival BHP. Anglo American CEO Duncan Wanblad said he was “very disappointed,” according to the Financial Times, and the company said it would “seek damages for the wrongful termination.”

The deal comes amid a global comeback for the main fuel blamed for climate change. As my colleague Matthew Zeitlin wrote last month, “the evidence for coal’s stubborn persistence globally has been mounting for years. In 2021, the International Energy Agency forecast that by 2024, annual coal demand would hit an all-time high of just over 8,000 megatons. In 2024, it reported that coal demand in 2023 was already at 8,690 megatons, a new record; it also pushed out its prediction for a demand plateau to 2027, at which point it predicted annual demand would be 8,870 megatons.”

4. ChemFinity raises $7 million to recycle critical minerals

The California startup ChemFinity got a big boost on Tuesday, raising $7 million in a funding round led by At One Ventures and Overton Ventures. The company, spun out from the University of California, Berkeley, claims its critical mineral recovery system will be three times cheaper, 99% cleaner and 10 times faster than existing approaches currently found in the mining and recycling industries. “We basically act like a black box where recyclers or scrap yards or even other refiners can send their feedstock to us,” Adam Uliana, ChemFinity’s co-founder and CEO, told Heatmap’s Katie Brigham. “We act like a black box that spits out pure metal.”

5. NYC airport workers protest over a lack of heat protections

At a time when record heat is regularly halting flights on sweltering tarmacs, service workers at New York City’s LaGuardia and John F. Kennedy airports are slated to protest on Wednesday to demand new workplace protections from extreme heat. The workers, many of whom handle cargo and ramp services for major airlines, said in a press release that extreme heat and lack of access to water, rest breaks, and proper training threatened more incidents of heat illness. One worker claimed to have recently lost consciousness inside the cargo hold of a plane due to heat. The members of chapter 32BJ of the Service Employees International Union will be joined by State Assemblymembers Steven Raga and Catalina Cruz in their demonstration, which is scheduled to begin at 10 a.m. near LaGuardia’s Old Marine Terminal.

THE KICKER

I swear by the shvitz. My great grandfather, after whom I’m named, went to the same Russian bathhouse in Manhattan that my cousin, brother, and I visit regularly to enjoy the sauna and cold plunge. Turns out amphibians feel the same. A researcher at Macquarie University in Sydney found that frogs could fight off the deadly chytrid fungal infection plaguing the green and golden bell frog by sitting in “frog saunas.” Spending a few hours a day in warm enclosures that reach temperatures higher than 83 degrees Fahrenheit for a week or less is all that’s needed to kill off the fungus.