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The West loves its wide open spaces. Utah, though, is something else.
Every state would like to think itself singular but, truly, there is no place like Utah. The Beehive State has long fascinated outsiders; today, that attention is largely trained on Netflix exposés about the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, ballerina farmers, and Crumbl cookies, but historically, the obsession has been with its land. Utah has the nation’s highest density of National Parks; its rivers, canyons, mountains, and deserts have stirred Mark Twain, John Wesley Powell, John Muir, and Edward Abbey. To quote a more contemporary literary conduit, Post Malone: “It’s a free country out there. You can buy suppressors in Utah. You can … walk into the grocery store with a handgun on your hip. Cowboy shit.”
More recently, Utah has sought out a different source of outsider attention — that of the United States Supreme Court. Two lawsuits that originated in the state are currently under consideration by the justices. The first, Seven County Infrastructure Coalition v. Eagle County, Colorado, concerns the scope of the National Environmental Policy Act with regard to the construction of a railroad spur that would link Utah’s oil fields to the national rail lines. (Though the tracks would be in Utah, the connection would ultimately increase hazardous waxy crude oil shipments through the Colorado county in the case citation.) The second lawsuit, Utah v. the United States — which the court has yet to decide whether or not it will hear — involves the state suing the federal government over its allegedly unconstitutional control of “unused” lands by the Bureau of Land Management. If Utah prevails in the case, it could mean the vast reshaping of the American West, about 47% of which is federal land.
“Utah is all crazy, all the time right now,” Stephen Bloch, the legal director of the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, a conservation nonprofit opposing Utah v. the U.S., told me.
While not immediately apparent, there is nevertheless a strange logic to the two lawsuits that otherwise appear to have little to do with one another beyond the fact of their geography. At their core, both cases are ultimately about who gets to decide to do what with Utah’s land.
To anyone familiar with land use issues in the Mountain West, all of this is fairly routine. A strain of libertarianism and anti-government individualism runs through the more conservative inland Western states, coloring everything from the gun ownership policies so colorfully observed by Post Malone to whom the states back for president. Yet in the extent to which it is willing to pursue this common ideal, Utah is still an outlier.
“Westerners revere their public lands,” Betsy Gaines Quammen, a historian and author of American Zion: Cliven Bundy, God & Public Lands in the West, told me. “This is what makes the West the West — that you can come out and just go hiking, and you’re not trespassing.” Take the recent Montana Senate race, in which incumbent Democrat Jon Tester wielded his opponent Tim Sheehy’s comparatively mild comments about privatizing public lands as a cudgel in a deep red state. (Tester, it must be added, lost his reelection bid.) But in Utah, instead of celebrating federal land as the embodiment of this Western inheritance, its politicians are trying to eliminate them.
In the case of Utah, this goal is immediate and obvious. State officials claim that the 18.5 million acres of “unappropriated” BLM land in the state — that is, public lands not already designated as national parks, monuments, wilderness areas, national forests and conservation areas, or Tribal lands — are held in violation of the U.S. Constitution, which doesn’t explicitly authorize the federal government to hold land indefinitely. “Utah deserves priority when it comes to managing this land,” the state’s Republican Governor Spencer Cox said at a news conference in August, adding, “Utah is in the best position to understand and respond to the unique needs of our environment and communities.”
While Utah’s crown jewel, its “Mighty Five” National Parks, would remain under federal management, the state of Wyoming — which has backed Utah’s lawsuit in an amicus brief along with Idaho, Alaska, and the Arizona legislature — wants even more. “In Wyoming’s filing, they’re like, ‘Oh no, we’re in for everything,” Bloch said. “‘There shouldn’t be any federal land in Wyoming’ — including national parks.” More than 95% of Yellowstone National Park — the nation’s first national park, designated in 1872 — sits within Wyoming’s borders.
It seems doubtful that the Supreme Court will take up this case. For one thing, Utah is attempting to leapfrog the lower courts by taking its complaints directly to SCOTUS, a shortcut it says is justified by its concerns being “of profound importance not just to Utah, but to all the States in the Nation.” For another, President Biden’s Department of Justice has pointed out that what Utah seeks is outside the powers vested in the judicial branch; only Congress has decision-making authority over public lands. On the other hand, “Anyone right now, I think, would hesitate to say definitively, ‘Here’s what the Supreme Court will do,’” Aaron Weiss, the deputy director of the Center for Western Priorities, a nonpartisan conservation advocacy group, told me.
Seven County Infrastructure Coalition is a different story. Opponents of the railway claim that the government’s environmental review took into account the remote economic benefits of the railway — including induced employment, a notoriously inexact projection — while not equally weighing the indirect health impacts of the rail line, such as the pollution of additional fracking wells in the Uinta Basin or frontline communities near the refineries on the Gulf, where the crude oil is ultimately headed. The Supreme Court (minus Neil Gorsuch, who recused himself at the 11th hour) heard oral arguments in the case this week, however, and appears on track to rule that the government’s NEPA review for the railroad was sufficient. That would ultimately be a win for the Uinta Basin Railway and the business coalition that brought the suit after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled there were flaws in the upstream and downstream analyses.
“I’m really worried that the court could end up inadvertently blessing this fundamentally arbitrary, imbalanced result, where an agency is allowed to talk about all the indirect benefits that they want — to go as far down the line, as far upstream, to the ends of the Earth chasing these indirect benefits — but not bother talking about the corresponding costs,” Jason Schwartz, the legal director at the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University’s School of Law, told me. “That undermines the very purpose of NEPA, which was to present the public and decision-makers with a full and balanced view of both the economic and environmental perspectives.” (Schwartz authored an amicus brief for the Institute of Policy Integrity against the government’s NEPA review.)
A ruling that reaffirms the current scope of NEPA wouldn’t be a shock — the court has always sided with the government in such cases, E&E News notes. What’s different this time is that the plaintiffs presented the court with a third option, an avenue that would severely limit the scope of the NEPA’s environmental review process going forward by restraining agency considerations only to what falls under their immediate purview. Chief Justice John Roberts has sounded skeptical of this pitch so far; it’s this third path, however, that the oil and gas producer Anschutz submitted an amicus brief to the court to support, drawing attention to the fact that “far more is at stake … than the 88-mile rail line in rural Utah.” (The company’s owner, Philip Anchutz, has close ties to Gorsuch.)
“There are so many ways to make NEPA more efficient without arbitrarily decreasing the sometimes crucial information related to indirect effects that NEPA currently provides,” Schwartz told me. Sam Sankar, the senior vice president for programs at Earthjustice, which is supporting the defense, added to me that his read on Seven County Infrastructure Coalition case is that it proves how this Supreme Court has “a pretty aggressive deregulatory, anti-environmental agenda.” The Seven County Infrastructure Coalition told Heatmap in a statement that with regards to the railroad, “we remain committed to advancing this critical infrastructure, which aims to unlock economic opportunities and support the region’s long-term development,” but that it could not comment further as the case remains under deliberation.
A threat to NEPA is also a challenge to who gets a say in what Utah does with its land, of course. Like Utah v. the U.S., the filing for Seven County Infrastructure Coalition bristles with indignation over the government’s determinations about how things should be done or what impacts should be considered, even if the Surface Transportation Board ultimately gave the railroad the green light. Utah, meanwhile, originated as a reaction to the BLM’s Public Lands Rule, in which the agency considers conservation as a land use on equal footing with those of energy development, mining, or grazing. (Specifically, Utah lawmakers were furious about the BLM closing some roads to motorized vehicles. “That’s something that Utah gets very worked up about,” Bloch, the legal director at SUWA, told me.)
There is always a risk of overascribing the state of Utah’s otherwise seemingly inexplicable actions to Mormonism — a religion that is far from monolithic and is often the subject of derision from outsiders. But Quammen, the historian, told me that you can’t separate today’s public land policies from the cultural and theological inheritances and beliefs reinforced over generations of Mormon tradition. “A lot of the people taking these stands [over public lands] come from families that have been in that area for generations, so they have stories and ideologies that have been passed down — as has their relationship with the land,” Quammen explained.
Weiss, of Western Priorities, concurred. “There are some folks in Utah who truly believe that this land belongs to them,” he said.
Quammen noted by way of example that Cliven Bundy, who led a standoff at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon in 2016 over the demand that the BLM cede its land to the states, told her his legal right to the public lands where he grazes his cattle in Nevada started when his ancestor’s horse drank from its Virgin River — although in fact it was a Southern Paiute river before that. (That’s not the only historically inaccurate ownership claim that might be at play in Utah; Bloch of SUWA noted that the lands within the exterior boundaries of the state were ceded to the federal government in 1848 through the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo at the end of the U.S.-Mexico War, and in that sense, “they’ve never been ‘Utah lands’ so there’s nothing to ‘give back’ to Utah.”)
Preservationists and conservationists during the settlement era saw Utah’s landscape as untrammeled (“also not true, because it was Indigenous land,” Quammen added) and in need of protection, but early church belief viewed it differently. “They thought that the land being utilized, built, and made productive was pleasing to the eye of God,” Quammen said. Finally, Joseph Smith, the founder of LDS, emphasized the importance of his adherents understanding the U.S. Constitution inside and out. In the case of public lands disputes, this resurfaces in the claim that the federal government can’t own land indefinitely, Quammen told me. “That’s the piece about understanding the Constitution better than constitutional scholars.” Ironically, it disregards the state’s constitution, in which Utah explicitly agreed in 1894 to “forever disclaim[s] all right and title to the unappropriated public lands” in order to be granted statehood.
There is, of course, a significant small-government push in the Republican Party, too; privatizing land was part of the party’s presidential platform this year. It can be hard to tell, however, where one influence ends and another begins: William Perry Pendley, a key figure in the Reagan administration during the Sagebrush Rebellion fight over public lands in the 1970s and 1980s, authored the Project 2025 chapter on the Department of the Interior. Doug Burgum, Trump’s nominee for the head of the department, recently met with Utah’s Republican Senator Mike Lee, a devout Latter-Day Saint, who afterward posted, “Great meeting with @dougburgum and planning the return of American lands to the American people.” And if Trump attempts to walk back protections of Bears Ears and Grand Staircase Escalante National Monuments again, that land would be added to the pot of what Utah is seeking to acquire.
Utah’s organizers seem prepared to make an appeal to Congress or the Trump administration if the Supreme Court doesn’t make a move in their favor; funding for the messaging for Stand for Our Land, the publicity arm of the lawsuit, has reportedly outpaced the spending on lawyers. (A request for comment to the Utah Attorney General’s Office and Gov. Spencer J. Cox went unanswered.)
The implications of the Supreme Court’s decisions on limiting the scope of NEPA or hearing the public lands lawsuit are vast in both cases. The former could ease the way for expansive oil and gas development in Utah, which would be “a bona fide public health nightmare,” according to Brian Moench, an anesthesiologist on the board of Utah Physicians for a Healthy Environment, which is opposing the railroad, due to all the additional pollution. “If they’re allowed to do this and increase the oil and gas drilling production by 500% — I don't know what you would call the end result. Unlivable, as far as I’m concerned.”
In the case of the public lands, meanwhile, “I think [Utah is] trying to give the impression that these are scrubby lands that nobody cares about when, in fact, it concerns landscapes like Labyrinth Canyon or the Dirty Devil or the Fisher Towers — these very iconic red rock landscapes that Americans think about when they think about visiting the state,” Bloch told me. “Those are the types of places in the crosshairs with this lawsuit.”
Ironically, it’s doubtful that a transfer of public lands would even benefit most Utahns. Because states can’t run deficits, a disaster like a bad wildfire would drain the Utah budget. Additionally, ranchers would pay far more for grazing their cattle on state lands (as high as $19.50 per animal unit per month, per the BLM) than on federal lands, where the fee is a dirt-cheap $1.35. Ultimately, the state likely wouldn’t even possess much of the land it claims to want so badly.
Utah’s politicians “would much prefer to be able to sell off any lands that they want — whether it’s for oil and gas leasing, whether it’s for mansions near national parks. This is very valuable land and a very valuable resource that belongs to all Americans,” Weiss of Western Priorities said. “And Utah would prefer if it belonged to them.”
Public lands and pride in the natural environment are fundamental to many Westerners’ beliefs and identities. By that token, it would seem Utah has made a miscalculation that only an insider could truly appreciate the cost of; by taking over control of portions of its territory from the federal government, it would be, in effect, boxing Utahns out of their own lands —a craven, modern twist if ever there was one.
But to be able to hike or hunt, to pitch a tent, to fish, to stargaze, to graze one’s cattle on nearly 70% of the land in Utah, because it belongs to us, the public?
Now that’s cowboy shit.
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On a billion-dollar mineral push, the north’s grim milestones, and EV charging’s comeback
Current conditions: The Southeastern U.S. is facing flash floods through the end of Thursday • Temperatures in Fez, Morocco, are forecast to hit 108 degrees Fahrenheit • Wildfires continue to rage across southern Europe, sending what Spain’s environment minister called a “clear warning” of the effects of climate change.
President Donald Trump on Wednesday named David Rosner, a centrist Democrat, as the new chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. Since joining the commission in June 2024, Rosner focused the panel on the nation’s growing electricity demand from data centers and pushed for greater automation of the engineering process to connect power plants to the continent’s various grid systems. “Getting grid interconnection moving faster is essential to ensuring reliability,” Rosner told E&E News in March. “We’re starting to learn about these new tools and platforms that just make this work faster, smarter, saves us time, solves the reliability and affordability problems that are facing the country.”
The Bipartisan Policy Center, where Rosner previously worked as a staffer, hailed his promotion as a positive step. “Chairman Rosner’s strong understanding of the energy challenges facing our country, and demonstrated record of bipartisan work to address those challenges, make him well-suited to carry out the responsibilities of FERC chairman,” David R. Hill, the executive vice president of the group’s energy program, said in a statement.
Lithium production in Chile's Atacama Desert, one of the world's main sources.John Moore/Getty Images
The Energy Department announced at least $925 million in funding for five proposed programs to bolster the country’s domestic supply of minerals. “For too long, the United States has relied on foreign actors to supply and process the critical materials that are essential to modern life and our national security,” Secretary of Energy Chris Wright said in a press release. “The Energy Department will play a leading role in reshoring the processing of critical materials and expanding our domestic supply of these indispensable resources.”
That funding includes:
The Trump administration has made bolstering America’s critical minerals industry one of its signature energy policy priorities. Though as Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin has written, it has also gone out of its way to annihilate sources of domestic demand for these minerals, especially in the wind energy and electric vehicle industries.
In Alaska, an overflowing glacial lake north of Juneau triggered the Mendenhall River to surge to a record height, flooding the state’s capital city. The problem has been growing for years as climate change in the nation’s most rapidly-warming state accelerates the volume of ice melt. In 2023, floodwaters eroded Mendenhall’s banks, causing homes to collapse, according to the Alaska Beacon. In 2024, the news outlet reported, “the flood was the worst yet.” The flood peaked Wednesday afternoon at nearly 17 feet, damaging hundreds of homes.
Across the border, meanwhile, the more than 700 active fires blazing in Canada have already made this the country’s second-worst fire season on record. The largest fire, the Shoe fire in Saskatchewan, has been burning across 1.4 million acres — an area larger than the Grand Canyon National Park in Arizona — since May 7, The New York Times reported.
In an executive order on his first day back in office, Trump singled out the $5 billion National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure program, directing his Department of Transportation to pause and review the funding, with an eye toward cutting it entirely. Earlier this week, the Federal High Administration completed its review and issued a new guidance that, as my colleague Emily Pontecorvo wrote yesterday, “not only preserves it, but also purports to ‘streamline applications,’ ‘slash red tape,’ and ‘ensure charging stations are actually built.’”
“If Congress is requiring the federal government to support charging stations, let’s cut the waste and do it right,” Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said in a press release. “While I don’t agree with subsidizing green energy, we will respect Congress’ will and make sure this program uses federal resources efficiently.” The statement, Emily noted, is out of sync with the administration’s other actions to throttle the adoption of EVs: “Only time will tell whether the new guidance is truly a win for EV charging, however. It’s a win in the sense that many EV advocates feared the agency would try to kill the program or insert poison pills into the guidance. But it’s unclear whether the changes will speed up NEVI deployment beyond what might have happened had it not been paused.”
A researcher has designed a new centimeter-square device that could help probe the “ignorosphere,” a layer of ultra-thin air that has largely escaped exploration by balloons, aircraft and satellites. The contraption uses technology similar to a weathervane encased in a low-pressure chamber that will spin when exposed to light. “You don’t really believe it until you see it,” Ben Schafer, a physicist at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, told Nature.
President Trump has had it in for electric vehicle charging since day one. His January 20 executive order “Unleashing American Energy” singled out the $5 billion National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure program by name, directing the Department of Transportation to pause and review the funding as part of his mission to “eliminate” the so-called “electric vehicle mandate.”
With the review now complete, the agency has concluded that canceling NEVI is not an option. In an ironic twist, the Federal Highway Administration issued new guidance for the program on Monday that not only preserves it, but also purports to “streamline applications,” “slash red tape,” and “ensure charging stations are actually built.”
“If Congress is requiring the federal government to support charging stations, let’s cut the waste and do it right,” Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said in a press release. “While I don’t agree with subsidizing green energy, we will respect Congress’ will and make sure this program uses federal resources efficiently.”
Duffy’s statement stands in sharp contrast to the stance of other federal agencies, including the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Energy, which continue to block congressionally-mandated spending programs.
Only time will tell whether the new guidance is truly a win for EV charging, however. It’s a win in the sense that many EV advocates feared the agency would try to kill the program or insert poison pills into the guidance. But it’s unclear whether the changes will speed up NEVI deployment beyond what might have happened had it not been paused.
“The real story to me is the needless delay,” Joe Halso, a senior attorney for Sierra Club, told me. “They took six months to produce something that they could have done in an afternoon, and that didn’t require them to halt the program in the first place. Every day of that delay stalled critical EV charging projects.”
The goal of the NEVI program was to help states install charging stations in areas that the market, on its own, was not serving. States had to submit annual plans to the FHWA for how they would deploy the funds to fill gaps in regional EV charging networks. Once those plans are approved, states could issue requests for proposals from EV charging companies to build the new charging stations and award grants to help get them financed.
In February, Duffy issued a letter to state Departments of Transportation suspending approval of their plans for all fiscal years, pending forthcoming new guidance from the agency. That meant states would not be able to issue new awards, essentially freezing the program. At the time, the agency had approved state spending plans totaling more than $3.2 billion for fiscal years 2022 through 2025. Of that money, states had committed only about $526 million to specific projects.
In early May, 16 states plus the District of Columbia challenged the DOT’s actions in court, winning a preliminary injunction that prevented the agency from suspending or revoking their previously-approved plans. While the injunction unfroze the program in the plaintiff states, about $1.8 billion for the rest of the country was still locked up. But the judge allowed a coalition of national, regional, and community groups, including the Sierra Club, to become parties in the case and fight for the funding to be restored across the board. That means that if the plaintiffs are ultimately successful, the verdict will apply to every state, not just those 16 that filed the case.
The fact that the DOT issued new guidance this week doesn’t change anything about the case, Halso of the Sierra Club told me. The move could wind up delaying the program further.
“This new guidance prolongs the freeze by forcing states to resubmit already approved plans to access money they’re already entitled to,” Halso explained. “And we don’t know if or when federal highways will approve those plans and restore states’ access to money.” The guidance gives states 30 days to submit their plans, though it does allow them to simply re-submit previously-approved versions.
In Monday’s press release, Duffy declared the program’s implementation to date a “failure,” citing the fact that only 16% of the funds had been obligated so far. It’s true that the program has been slow in getting underway. As of this week, there are at least 106 NEVI-funded charging stations with 537 ports across 17 states, Loren McDonald, the chief analyst for the EV charging data analytics firm Paren, told me. That’s a long way off pace to achieve President Biden’s stated goal of installing 500,000 by 2030.
It’s also true that the new rules are simpler. The previous guidance, which was 30 pages long, contained more than five pages of detailed “considerations” states had to follow in developing their plans, which designated specific distances between chargers, required projects to mitigate adverse impacts to the electric grid, and mandated that States target “rural areas, underserved and overburdened communities, and disadvantaged communities,” among other rules. The new guidance, by contrast, is a tight seven pages devoid of almost any obligations not explicitly required by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, which created the program.
Under the previous guidance, for example, NEVI-funded stations had to be built within one mile of a federally-designated EV corridor and at no greater than 50-mile increments along those corridors. The new guidance simply says that states should “consider the appropriate distance between stations to allow for reasonable travel and certainty that charging will be available to corridor travelers when needed.”
McDonald told me that some states had been frustrated with the 50-mile siting requirement and would likely welcome that change. NATSO and SIGMA, two industry associations that represent rest stops, travel centers, and fuel marketers, issued a joint statement praising the “flexible, consumer-oriented approach.” They also specifically applauded the guidance for encouraging states to prioritize projects that are built and operated by the site owner. Some NEVI projects were being developed by a third party, such as Tesla, which had to sign a long-term lease with the site owner, like a grocery store or hotel. These agreements took time to work out, and would sometimes fall apart, McDonald told me.
But from McDonald’s vantage point, what was slowing down the program most was the fact that every state had different requirements and a different process for soliciting and scoring proposals from developers. Also, while a few states already had previous experience administering EV charging grant programs, many lacked staff and expertise in the subject. “I don’t mean this the way it’s going to come out,” McDonald said. “But they barely knew how to spell EV charging. A lot of the state DOTs really just were about building roads and bridges, and they had never had to deal with any charging.”
The new DOT guidance doesn’t seek to address either of those issues. “I’m not seeing anything in here that’s going to lead to a significant reduction in time,” McDonald said. “It seems to sort of miss where the lengthy processes were.”
The Zero Emission Transportation Association, an industry group, had a more positive outlook. Research associate Corey Cantor told me the new guidance is “workable” for the industry and provides regulatory certainty. When I asked Cantor if the changes the agency made to the guidance would help get more money out the door, he said it “remains to be seen on the implementation side,” but that states had been asking for more flexibility.
Cantor emphasized that it was important for state DOTs to have regulatory certainty and to get the funds flowing again. “Charging anxiety, after the upfront cost of EVs, is one of the highest cited barriers for entry for new adopters of electric vehicles,” he said. “And so getting the charging network filled out is key to helping us move to this next stage of the transition.”
On Sierra Club drama, OBBB’s price hike, and deep-sea mining blowback
Current conditions: Tropical Erin is expected to gain strength and make landfall in the Caribbean as the first major hurricane of the season, lashing islands with winds of up to 80 miles per hour and 7 inches of rain • More than 152 fires have broken out across Greece in the past 24 hours alone as Europe battles a heatwave • Typhoon Podul is expected to make landfall over southeastern Taiwan on Wednesday morning, lashing the island with winds of up to 96 miles per hour.
The Department of Energy selected 11 nuclear projects from 10 reactor startups on Tuesday for a pilot program “with the goal to construct, operate, and achieve criticality of at least three test reactors” by next July 4. The Trump administration then plans to fast-track the successful technologies for commercial licensing. The effort is part of the United States’ attempt at catching up with China, which last year connected its first high-temperature gas-cooled reactor to the grid. The technologies in the program vary among the reactors selected for the program, with some reactors based on Generation IV designs using coolants other than water and others pitching smaller but otherwise traditional light water reactors. None of the selected models will produce more than 300 megawatts of power. The U.S. hopes these smaller machines can be mass produced to bring down the cost of nuclear construction and deploy atomic energy in more applications, including on remote military bases, and even, as NASA announced last week, the moon.
Here are the companies:
The Sierra Club terminated executive director Ben Jealous this week, ending a rocky tenure that culminated earlier this summer in votes of no confidence among statewide chapters, Inside Climate News’ Lee Hedgepeth reported. A former chief executive of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the 2018 Democratic nominee for Maryland governor, Jealous’ rise to the green group’s top job in November 2022 seemed like a watershed moment for what is arguably the nation's most prominent environmental groups. The first non-white leader of the 133-year-old organization promised to close the book on the Sierra Club’s internal wrestling with the racist legacy of its founder, John Muir.
But budget cuts, layoffs, and fights with the group’s union marred his time at the helm. In June, the executive committee of the Sierra Club’s Oregon Chapter voted unanimously to request a vote of no-confidence in Jealous from the national organization’s board, citing his hiring of a senior staff member who was registered as lobbyist for the cryptocurrency exchange Crypto.com, The New York Times’ Claire Brown reported. Weeks later, the Missouri Chapter voted unanimously to make the same request. Allies on the board accused Jealous’ critics of a racist “pattern of misinformation, character assassination, and discrimination” against the first Black man to hold the top job. But the board placed Jealous on leave last month and, on Monday, said in a statement that it had “unanimously voted to terminate Ben Jealous’ employment for cause.”
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The price of power purchase agreements in the U.S. has increased by 4% on average since the passage of President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill. That’s according to data released this morning by the industry group LevelTen Energy, which called the calculations “the clearest signal yet that the market has already begun to reprice in light of these new risks and headwinds.”
Of the 86 U.S. developers surveyed from the LevelTen Marketplace, 86% said “they are now adapting their approach — either by accelerating construction timelines, reprioritizing project pipelines, or both.” Next Monday, the Treasury Department is due to issue guidance for renewable energy projects accessing federal tax credits, following Trump’s executive order directing the Internal Revenue Service to place new restrictions on solar and wind developers. Industry groups have been “circling the wagons” since the orders release, according to Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo, bracing for restrictions that will push up prices for renewables.
The United States is the only major country that hasn’t ratified the United Nations’ 1994 Law of the Sea treaty. Yet the Trump administration has used the country’s “observer” status to push for finalizing a code under the UN-affiliated International Seabed Authority that would allow for permitting commercial mining on the ocean floor. Trump also signed an executive order in April to unilaterally license deep-sea mining if global rules don’t come into effect. At the center of the effort is the Canadian startup The Metals Company, which has designed special machines to harvest mineral-rich nodules on the deep-sea floor. The company and its backers say it’s a cleaner, faster way to increase global mineral supplies than opening more mines on land. But skeptics — including France and China — warn that the rush to industrialize one of the planet’s last untouched wildernesses risks harming fragile and scarcely understood ecosystems, and criticized Washington for threatening to go it alone without international regulations in place.
China was the first country to publicly condemn Trump’s order in April, but Brazil and Panama spoke at last month’s ISA meeting in Kingston, Jamaica, to express support for Beijing’s position, Canary Media’s Clare Fieseler reported from the Caribbean capital.
The sweltering streets of Midtown Manhattan on July 29, 2025. Spencer Platt/Getty Images
Great news for anyone who, like me, is getting increasingly spooked about microplastics: New research in the journal Sustainable Food Technology found that grapevine cane films could be a great alternative to petrochemical plastics. They’re transparent, leave behind no harmful residues, and biodegrade into soil within 17 days. “These films demonstrate outstanding potential for food packaging applications,” Srinivas Janaswamy, an associate professor in South Dakota State University's Department of Dairy and Food Science, said in a press release. “That is my dream.”
Editor’s note: This story has been corrected to reflect the fact that, at the time of publication, Tropical Storm Erin was not yet a hurricane.