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“Somehow the reduction in enthusiasm of the Global North is showing that the Global South is moving,” Corrêa do Lago told reporters in Belém, according to The Guardian. “It is not just this year, it has been moving for years, but it did not have the exposure that it has now.”
New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani and Governor Kathy Hochul.Andres Kudacki/Getty Images
New York regulators approved an underwater gas pipeline, reversing past decisions and teeing up what could be the first big policy fight between Governor Kathy Hochul and New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani. The state Department of Environmental Conservation issued what New York Focus described as crucial water permits for the Northeast Supply Enhancement project, a line connecting New York’s outer borough gas network to the fracking fields of Pennsylvania. The agency had previously rejected the project three times. The regulators also announced that the even larger Constitution pipeline between New York and New England would not go ahead. “We need to govern in reality,” Hochul said in a statement. “We are facing war against clean energy from Washington Republicans, including our New York delegation, which is why we have adopted an all-of-the-above approach that includes a continued commitment to renewables and nuclear power to ensure grid reliability and affordability.”
Mamdani stayed mostly mum on climate and energy policy during the campaign, as Heatmap’s Robinson Meyer wrote, though he did propose putting solar panels on school roofs and came out against the pipeline. While Mamdani seems unlikely to back the pipeline Hochul and President Donald Trump have championed, during a mayoral debate he expressed support for the governor’s plan to build a new nuclear plant upstate.
Late last week, Pine Gate Renewables became the largest clean energy developer yet to declare bankruptcy since Trump and Congress overhauled federal policy to quickly phase out tax credits for wind and solar projects. In its Chapter 11 filings, the North Carolina-based company blamed provisions in Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act that put strict limits on the use of equipment from “foreign entities of concern,” such as China. “During the [Inflation Reduction Act] days, pretty much anyone was willing to lend capital against anyone building projects,” Pol Lezcano, director of energy and renewables at the real estate services and investment firm CBRE, told the Financial Times. “That results in developer pipelines that may or may not be realistic.”
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The Southwest Power Pool’s board of directors approved an $8.6 billion slate of 50 transmission projects across the grid system’s 14 states. The improvements are set to help the grid meet what it expects to be doubled demand in the next 10 years. The investments are meant to harden the “backbone” of the grid, which the operator said “is at capacity and forecasted load growth will only exacerbate the existing strain,” Utility Dive reported. The grid operator also warned that “simply adding new generation will not resolve the challenges.”
Oil giant Shell and the industrial behemoth Mitsubishi agreed to provide up to $17 million to a startup that plans to build a pilot plant capable of pulling both carbon dioxide and water from the atmosphere. The funding would cover the direct air capture startup Avnos’ Project Cedar. The project could remove 3,000 metric tons of carbon from the atmosphere every year, along with 6,000 tons of clean freshwater. “What you’re seeing in Shell and Mitsubishi investing here is the opportunity to grow with us, to sort of come on this commercialization journey with us, to ultimately get to a place where we’re offering highly cost competitive CO2 removal credits in the market,” Will Kain, CEO of Avnos, told E&E News.
The private capital helps make up for some of the federal funding the Trump administration is expected to cut as part of broad slashes to climate-tech investments. But as Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo reported last month from north of the border, Canada is developing into a hot zone of DAC development.
The future of remote sensing will belong to China. At least, that’s what the research suggests. This broad category involves the use of technologies such as lasers, imagery, and hyperspectral imagery, and is key to everything from autonomous driving to climate monitoring. At least 47% of studies in peer-reviewed publications on remote sensing now originate in China, while just 9% come from the United States, according to the New York University paper. That research clout is turning into an economic advantage. China now accounts for the majority of remote sensing patents filed worldwide. “This represents one of the most significant shifts in global technological leadership in recent history,” Debra Laefer, a professor in the NYU Tandon Civil and Urban Engineering program and the lead author, said in a statement.
The mood is rosier over at the nation’s electric vehicle champion. Despite slipping market share and plunging profits, Tesla shareholders overwhelmingly approved a new pay package for chief executive Elon Musk worth upward of $1 trillion over 10 years if the company manages to hit certain benchmarks, such as selling 1 million humanoid robots.
The Department of the Interior has halted plans to “imminently” pink slip as many as 2,000 agency staffers for the duration of the federal government shutdown, court documents E&E News published Thursday revealed. In a statement to the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, the agency’s chief human resources official said Interior “has no plans” for imminent layoffs.
White House budget chief Russ Vought has sought to use the shutdown as a tool to slash funding or personnel in vast swaths of the federal bureaucracy, as Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin wrote. But unions sued and, last month, a federal judge temporarily blocked the cuts from beginning.
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Take a look at this Google Trends graph charting out the popularity of “critical minerals.” The term historically applied to the metals such as lithium, rare earths, and cobalt that were needed for modern energy and weapons manufacturing shot up in usage after 2023.
A chart showing the popularity of "critical minerals" as a Google search term. Google Trends
Now, the Trump administration wants to broaden its definition to include a commodity that, unlike those other rocks, plays a necessarily vanishing role in the transition to cleaner energy. The U.S. Geological Survey added metallurgical coal along with potash, rhenium, silicon, and lead to the federal government’s list of critical minerals, alongside more predictable additions such as uranium, copper, and silver. The list, as Bloomberg noted, “dictates what commodities are included” in trade probes the Trump administration is carrying out. The administration has taken an aggressive approach toward securing new sources of minerals China controls, including signing a landmark deal with Australia last month.
The Michigan Public Service Commission greenlit new levies on data centers to avoid saddling ratepayers with the cost of supplying energy-thirsty server farms with enough electricity. The ruling came in response to a petition from the utility Consumers Energy requesting permission to implement tariffs on large-load customers such as the server farms providing the computing for artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency mining. Environmental groups, including the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Sierra Club, argued on behalf of stronger protections for consumers against paying for tech giants’ computing centers. It’s part of what Heatmap’s Jael Holzman described as “the techlash,” blowback to tech infrastructure that’s so widespread at the moment, polling Heatmap’s Pro service conducted found more than half the country considered data centers unwelcome near their homes.
Redwood Materials has started up its $3.5 billion South Carolina factory capable of recycling 20,000 metric tons of critical minerals (not coal, though) from old electric vehicle batteries, Bloomberg reported. The move comes as the company, founded by Tesla cofounder JB Straubel, opened a recycling plant in Sparks, Nevada, which collects 60,000 tons of minerals annually, including rare metals such as cobalt.
Three new species of an unusual group of African toads skip the tadpole phase and give birth to live, squirming babies. “It’s common knowledge that frogs grow from tadpoles — it’s one of the classic metamorphosis paradigms in biology. But the nearly 8,000 frog species actually have a wide variety of reproductive modes, many of which don’t closely resemble that famous story,” said Mark D. Scherz, an associate professor and co-author of the study from Natural History Museum Denmark, a coauthor on the study.
