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The administration claimed the rollback would save Americans $109 billion over five years and shave $1,000 off the average cost of a new car. But as Rob noted in August, the administration’s fight against tailpipe emissions could actually end up raising the price of gasoline.
Secretary of Energy Chris Wright.Kayla Bartkowski/Getty Images
Secretary of Energy Chris Wright pitched tapping into backup generators at data centers, hospitals, and factories to augment the supply of power on the grid. Speaking at the North American Gas Forum on Tuesday, Wright said the generators — most of which run on diesel, natural gas, or fuels such as propane — could contribute roughly 35 gigawatts of electricity. “We have 35 gigawatts of backup generators that are sitting there today, and you can’t turn them on. That’s just nuts. Emissions rules or whatever … people, come on,” Wright said, according to E&E News. “If we just turn those generators on for a few hours a year, we’ve expanded the capacity of our grid by 35 gigawatts. That’s massive.”
In a post on X, Aaron Bryant, an energy markets analyst at the law firm White & Case, called the proposal “shortsighted at best,” since the generators expose load growth to some measure of commodity risk and “unworkable at worst” because zoning ordinances, air pollution, and noise restrictions may prohibit use of the generators.
The National Petroleum Council, an advisory panel at the Energy Department, submitted its recommendations Wednesday for how to reform federal permitting rules. Among the proposals was an endorsement of an idea to bar federal agencies from yanking already-granted permits. Democrats in Congress put forward the concept to prevent the Trump administration from reversing approvals for offshore turbines and other renewable projects targeted by the White House.
The proposal marks a significant step within the executive branch, given that Trump himself is “the biggest wild card in permitting reform,” as Heatmap’s Jael Holzman wrote last month. But legislation is moving in Congress. In the House, the SPEED Act overwhelmingly won a committee vote last month. Now Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton, a Republican, has introduced a new bill in the Senate with its own House version.
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Following a summit between Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping in October, Beijing agreed to overhaul its licensing regime for approving exports of rare earths to allow for streamlined permits to sell the metals overseas. At least three Chinese manufacturers of rare earth magnets have now secured new licenses to speed up exports to some customers, Reuters reported. It’s a sign of easing tensions between Washington and Beijing, offering some reprieve from the Chinese export restrictions that threatened to choke off the U.S. supply of key metals. But it’s still tenuous. China could ratchet up restrictions again, and the U.S. is still looking to increase domestic production of critical minerals to counter the leverage the People’s Republic wields through its near monopoly on the metals.
If there’s one thing Tim Latimer, the chief executive of the next-generation geothermal company Fervo Energy, wants to see in any permitting reform, it’s measures to making building new transmission lines easier. “The biggest threat to American global competitiveness, and it does not matter if your priorities are climate change, affordability, the AI race, national security or all of the above, is our country’s complete inability to build and upgrade transmission at any meaningful scale,” Latimer wrote in a post on X. Fervo is working on building the nation’s first full-scale next-generation geothermal plant in Utah, and running new transmission lines out to remote parts of the desert where it’s often best to drill for hot rocks is costly.
Fervo isn’t the only geothermal company making news. On Thursday morning, Zanskar, a geothermal startup that uses modern prospecting methods to find new conventional resources, announced that it had made the biggest “blind” discovery in the U.S. in more than 30 years. A “blind” find is a geothermal system that shows no visible signs of what’s below the surface, such as vents or geysers. While companies such as Fervo aim to use fracking technology to create reservoirs in hot rocks located where there aren’t underground aquatic formations to tap into, Zanskar is betting that using artificial intelligence to locate new conventional resources can result in faster, cheaper geothermal plants than next-generation technology can yield.
Here’s a little exclusive for you to end on: I got a copy of a letter signed by dozens of pro-nuclear advocates calling on New York state and local officials to kickstart an effort to rebuild the Indian Point nuclear plant just north of New York City. Describing the “forced premature closure” of the plant as “a major setback for New York,” the letter said the plant could be restored, noting that rising demand for clean, firm electricity has spurred utilities in Michigan, Iowa, and Pennsylvania to embark on historic restarts of decommissioned reactors. “Recommissioning Indian Point would stabilize electricity prices and deliver one of the fastest and largest returns of clean power available anywhere in the country,” the letter reads.
You know who also wants to see more investment in SMRs? Arizona senator and rumored Democratic presidential hopeful Ruben Gallego, who released an energy plan Wednesday calling on the Energy Department to ease the “regulatory, scaling, and supply chain challenges” new reactors still face.
Since he first emerged on the political scene a decade ago, President Donald Trump has made the proverbial forgotten coal miner a central theme of his anti-establishment campaigns, vowing to correct for urbanite elites’ neglect by putting workers’ concerns at the forefront. Yet his administration is now considering overhauling black lung protections that miners lobbied federal agencies to enact and enforce. Secretary of Labor Lori Chavez-DeRemer will “reconsider and seek comments” on parts of the Biden-era silica rule that mining companies and trade groups are challenging in court, the agency told E&E News. It’s unclear how the Trump administration may seek to alter the regulation. But the rule, finalized last year, reduced exposure limits for miners to airborne silica crystals that lodge deep inside lung tissue to 50 micrograms from the previous 100 microgram limit. The rule also required companies to provide expanded medical tests to workers. Dozens of miners and medical advocates protested outside the agency’s headquarters in Washington in October to request that the rule, expected to prevent more than 1,000 deaths and 3,700 cases of black lung per year, be saved.
Rolling back some of the protections would be just the latest effort to gut Biden-era policy. On Wednesday, the White House invited automotive executives to attend what’s expected to be an announcement to shred fuel-efficiency standards for new vehicles, The New York Times reported late on Tuesday.
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A chart showing last year's spike in blackouts from major weather events.EIA
The average American spent a combined 11 hours without electricity last year as a result of extreme weather, worse outages than during any previous year going back a decade. That’s according to the latest analysis by the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Blackouts attributed to major events averaged nearly nine hours in 2025, compared to an average of roughly four hours per year in 2014 through 2023. Major hurricanes accounted for 80% of the hours without electricity in 2024.
The latest federal grants may be good news for third-generation SMRs, but one of the leading fourth-generation projects — the Bill Gates-owned TerraPower’s bid to build a molten salt-cooled reactor at a former coal plant in Wyoming — just cleared the final safety hurdle for its construction permit. Calling the approval a “momentous occasion for TerraPower,” CEO Chris Levesque said the “favorable safety evaluation from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission reflects years of rigorous evaluation, thoughtful collaboration with the NRC, and an unwavering commitment to both safety and innovation.”
TerraPower’s project in Kemmerer, Wyoming, is meant to demonstrate the company’s reactors, which are designed to store power when it’s needed — making them uniquely complementary to grids with large amounts of wind and solar — to avoid the possibility of a meltdown. Still, at a private lunch I attended in October, Gates warned that the U.S. is falling behind China on nuclear power. China is charging ahead on all energy fronts. On Tuesday, Bloomberg reported that the Chinese had started up a domestically-produced gas turbine for the first time as the country seeks to compete with the U.S. on even the fossil fuels American producers dominate.
It’s been a rough year for green hydrogen projects as the high cost of producing the zero-carbon fuel from renewable electricity and water makes finding customers difficult for projects. Blue hydrogen, the version of the fuel made with natural gas equipped with carbon capture equipment, isn’t doing much better. Last month, Exxon Mobil Corp. abandoned plans to build what would have been one of the world’s largest hydrogen production plants in Baytown, Texas. This week, BP withdrew from a blue hydrogen project in England. At issue are strict new standards in the European Union for how much carbon blue hydrogen plants would need to capture to qualify as clean.
You’re not the only one accidentally ingesting loads of microplastics. New research suggests crickets can’t tell the difference between tiny bits of plastics and natural food sources. Evidence shows that crickets can break down microplastics into smaller nanoplastics — which may be even worse in the environment since they’re more easily eaten or absorbed by other lifeforms.
