What We’re Tracking for the Rest of 2026

This is an edition of Heatmap Daily, an evening review of the day’s news written by our executive editor. Sign up for it here.

The Labor Day weekend is over, so today marks the unofficial start of fall in the United States — and my return to writing Heatmap Daily. Many thanks to Emily Pontecorvo for holding down the fort while I was on vacation.

As the seasons change (at least in a non-meteorological, non-astronomical capacity), I’ve been thinking about what the rest of the year might look like. Only 114 days separate us from the end of 2026, and between now and then, we're going to get answers about some of the country’s — and world’s — biggest ongoing climate and energy questions. By December 31, for instance, we’ll almost certainly know whether Congress has reached a deal on bipartisan permitting reform, and we’ll be watching a likely record-breaking El Niño kick into high gear around the world. The U.S. political system will also be gearing up for the next presidential election.

I’ll have more on some of the biggest questions I’m thinking about later this week, but first I wanted to lay out the map. Here’s a guide to the biggest remaining dates on the climate and energy calendar in 2026.

September 22 to September 28

Every year, world leaders descend on New York City for the UN General Assembly’s week of high-level meetings … at the same time that climate and energy wonks try to scrounge hotel rooms for New York Climate Week, the closest thing that the climate and decarbonization industrial-advocacy complex has to an annual confab.

This year, another event will be added to the mix. President Xi Jinping of China is supposedly skipping the UN meeting this year, but he will be staying just a few hundred miles away on the same exact days for what seems to be a Trump-hosted state visit in Washington, D.C. This will be the Chinese leader’s first state visit to America in more than a decade, and it will come, presumably, as U.S. relations with its neighbors and allies reach a recent nadir. Given the host country here, I wouldn’t expect to hear too much about climate change, but AI, trade, and Taiwan will all likely be on the schedule.

You can expect to hear a lot about climate change (and national energy policy, and the data center boom, and much more besides) at Heatmap House, our all-day gathering at New York Climate Week on September 23. Subscribers can register now, and speakers include former Vice President Al Gore, Secretary of Energy Chris Wright, and more.

October 4, 2026

Voters in Brazil will elect the country’s president, vice president, and members of its National Congress for the first time since former President Jair Bolsonaro attempted a military coup in 2022. Bolsonaro is under house arrest for his role in the attempted autogolpe, so he can’t run; instead, his son Flávio Bolsonaro is standing. The incumbent President Lula da Silva leads in the polls. Under Lula, Brazil has pledged to cut its greenhouse gas emissions by roughly two-thirds below their all-time high by 2035.

November 3, 2026

On the first Tuesday in November, Americans will vote for the full membership of the House of Representatives as well as one-third of the Senate. Democrats are expected to retake the House — it would, at this point, be a shock if they didn’t — but the president’s polling has become so dire that they’re hoping to beat the odds and take the upper chamber, too. If Democrats succeed in winning Congress outright, expect the second half of President Trump’s term to look quite different, with liberal lawmakers running aggressive oversight campaigns in the run-up to the 2028 presidential election. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum’s plan to overhaul the National Parks Service, for instance, seems like just the kind of effort that could falter in a more scrutinized environment; the Trump administration’s extrajudicial war on wind will also likely face more oversight than it has so far. Trump would also presumably have a much harder time making judicial and Executive Branch appointments.

Even though Election Day isn’t until November, early voting starts in less than a month in some states. Expect to hear a lot more about data centers and electricity bills between now and then. Some state-level races — particularly those in Michigan, Georgia, and Pennsylvania — could also shape the field for the upcoming 2028 presidential election. (Whether Senator Jon Ossoff of Georgia runs for president, for instance, will depend heavily on who wins that state’s governor’s race — and could appoint his successor.)

November 9 to November 20, 2026

The UN’s annual climate conference will be in Antalya, Turkey, this year and begin just a few days after the U.S. midterms. This is going to be a weird summit: Turkey is hosting the physical meeting, but Australia is nominally the “political” host. The conference is supposed to focus on clean energy, zeroing waste, and methane reduction. This will be the 31st meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, and it may offer a look at what a post-Trump, post-1.5 degree Celsius UN meeting could look like.