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Last month, the environmental news site Public Domain broke a big story: Karen Budd-Falen, the No. 3 official at the Department of the Interior, has extensive financial ties to the controversial Thacker Pass lithium mine in northern Nevada that the Trump administration is pushing to fast track. Now The New York Times is reporting that House Democrats are urging the Interior Department’s inspector general to open an investigation into the multimillion-dollar relationship Budd-Falen’s husband has with the mine’s developer. Frank Falen, her husband, sold water from a family ranch in northern Nevada to the subsidiary of Lithium Americas for $3.5 million in 2019, but the bulk of the money from the sale depended on permit approval for the project. Budd-Falen did not reveal the financial arrangement on any of her four financial disclosures submitted to the federal government when she worked for the Interior Department during President Donald Trump’s first term from 2018 to 2021.
House Republicans, meanwhile, are planning to vote this week to undo Biden-era restrictions on mining near more than a million acres of Minnesota wilderness. “Mining is huge in Minnesota. And all mining helps the school trust fund in Minnesota as well. So it benefits all schools in the state,” Representative Pete Stauber, a Minnesota Republican and the chair of the Natural Resources Subcommittee on Energy and Mineral Resources, said of the rule-killing bill he sponsored. While the vote is expected to draw blowback from environmentalists, E&E News noted that it could also agitate proceduralists who oppose the GOP’s continued “use of the rule-busting Congressional Review Act for actions that have not been traditionally seen as rules.” Still, the move is likely to fuel the dealmaking boom for critical minerals. As Heatmap’s Katie Brigham wrote in September, “everybody wants to invest” in startups promising to mine and refine the metals over which China has a near monopoly.
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A new United Nations report declares that the world has entered an era of “global water bankruptcy,” putting billions of people at risk. In an interview with The Guardian, Kaveh Madani, the report’s lead author, said that while not every basin and country is directly at risk, trade and migration are set to face calamity from water shortages. Upward of 75% of people live in countries classified as water insecure or critically water insecure, and 2 billion people live on land that is sinking as groundwater aquifers collapse. “This report tells an uncomfortable truth: Many critical water systems are already bankrupt,” Madani said. “It’s extremely urgent [because] no one knows exactly when the whole system would collapse.”
A young Congolese worker sifts through stones at a copper and cobalt mine.Michel Lunanga/Getty Images
The Democratic Republic of the Congo has given the U.S. government a vetted list of mining and processing projects open to American investment. The shortlist, which Mining.com said was delivered to U.S. officials last week, includes manganese, gold, and cassiterite licenses; a copper-cobalt project and a germanium-processing venture; four gold permits; a lithium license; and mines producing cobalt, gold, and tungsten. The potential deals are an outgrowth of the peace agreement Trump brokered between the DRC and Rwanda-backed rebels, and could offer Washington a foothold in a mineral-rich country whose resources China has long dominated. But establishing an American presence in an unstable African country is a risky investment. As I reported for Heatmap back in October, the Denver-based Energy Fuels’ $2 billion mining project in Madagascar was suddenly thrown into chaos when the island nation’s protests resulted in a coup, though the company has said recently it’s still moving forward.
The Tokyo Electric Power Company is delaying the restart of the Kashiwazaki Kariwa nuclear power station in western Japan after an alarm malfunction. The alarm system for the control rods that keep the fission reaction in check failed to sound during a test operation on Tuesday, Tepco said. The world’s largest nuclear plant had been scheduled to restart one of its seven reactors on Tuesday. Fuel loading for the reactor, known as Unit 6, was completed in June. It’s unclear when the restart will now take place.
The delay marks a setback for Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi, who has made restarting the reactors idled after the 2011 Fukushima disaster and expanding the nuclear industry a top priority, as I told you in October. But as I wrote last month in an exclusive about Japan’s would-be national small modular reactor champion, the country has a number of potential avenues to regain its nuclear prowess beyond just reviving its existing fleet.
As a fourth-generation New Yorker, I’m qualified to say something controversial: I love, and often even prefer, Montreal-style bagels. They’re smaller, more efficient, and don’t deliver the same carbohydrate bomb to my gut. Now the best-known Montreal-style bagel place in the five boroughs has found a way to use the energy needed to make their hand-rolled, wood-fired bagels more efficiently, too. Black Seed Bagels’ catering kitchen in northern Brooklyn is now part of a battery pilot program run by David Energy, a New York-based retail energy provider. The startup supplied suitcase-sized batteries for free last August, allowing Black Seed to disconnect from ConEdison’s grid during hours when electricity rates are particularly high. “We’re in the game of nickels and dimes,” Noah Bernamoff, Black Seed’s co-owner, told Canary Media. “So we’re always happy to save the money.” Wise words.
Over the weekend, President Donald Trump once again ratcheted up pressure on Denmark and the European Union to consider his bid to seize Greenland. In a post on Truth Social, the president announced punitive 10% tariffs on Denmark, Norway, Sweden, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and Finland starting on February 1, with plans to raise the levies to 25% by June. “We have subsidized Denmark, and all of the Countries of the European Union, and others, for many years by not charging them Tariffs, or any other forms of remuneration,” he wrote. “Now, after Centuries, it is time for Denmark to give back — World Peace is at stake!” In response, the EU has threatened to deploy its economic “big bazooka.” Known formally as the anti-coercion instrument, the policy came into force in 2023 to counter China’s attacks on Lithuania, and involves the imposition of sweeping trade sanctions, ousting the aggressor nation’s companies from the world’s second-largest market, and ending intellectual property protections. Economists told the Financial Times that a trade war over Greenland would risk sparking the worst financial crisis since the Great Recession.
If you look at the second chart, solar is on a clear incline.EIA
Electricity generation is set to grow 1.1% this year and 2.6% in 2027, according to the latest short-term energy outlook report from the federal Energy Information Administration. Despite the Trump administration’s attacks on the industry, solar power will provide the bulk of that growth. The U.S. is set to add 70 gigawatts of new utility-scale solar in 2026 and 2027, representing a 49% increase in operating solar capacity compared to the end of 2025. While natural gas, coal, and nuclear combined accounted for 75% of all generation last year, the trio’s share of power output in 2027 is on track to slip to 72%. Solar power and wind energy, meanwhile, are set to rise from about 18% in 2025 to 21% in 2027.
Still, the solar industry is struggling to fend off the Trump administration’s efforts to curb deployments of what its top energy officials call unreliable forms of renewable power. As Heatmap’s Jael Holzman wrote last month, the leading solar trade association is pleading with Congress for help fending off a “near complete moratorium on permitting.”
Everybody wants to invest in critical minerals — including the Western Hemisphere’s second center of power. Brazil is angling for a trade deal with the U.S. to mine what the Financial Times called its “abundant but largely untapped rare earth deposits.” With tensions thawing between Trump and the government of leftwinger Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, officials in the Brazilian administration see a chance to broker an agreement on the metals Washington needs for modern energy and defense technologies. “There’s nothing but opportunity here,” one official told the newspaper. “Brazil’s government is open to a deal on critical minerals.”
Northwest of Brazil, in Bolivia, the new center-right government is stepping up efforts to court foreign investors to develop its lithium resources. The country’s famous salt flats comprise the world’s largest known reserve of the key battery metal. But the leftist administration that ruled the Andean nation for much of the past two decades made little progress toward exploiting the resource under state-owned companies. The new pro-Washington government that took power after the October election has vowed to bring in the private sector. In what Energy Minister Mauricio Medinaceli last week called the government’s “first message to investors,” the administration vowed to honor all existing deals with Chinese and Russian companies, according to Mining.com.
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Last month, I told you about how swapping bunker fuel-burning engines for nuclear propulsion units in container ships could shave $68 million off annual shipping costs. That’s got real appeal to the British. Five industrial giants in the United Kingdom — Rolls-Royce, Babcock International Group, Global Nuclear Security Partners, Stephenson Harwood, and NorthStandard — have formed a new group called the Maritime Nuclear Consortium to boost British efforts to commercialize nuclear-powered cargo ships. “Without coordinated U.K. action, the chance to define the rules, create high-skilled jobs and anchor a global supply chain could be lost to faster competitors,” Lloyd's Register, a professional services company in London that provides maritime certifications, said in a statement to World Nuclear News. “Acting now would give the U.K. first-mover advantage, and ensure those standards, jobs and supply chains are built here.”
On the more standard atomic power front, the U.S. has officially inked its nuclear partnership deal with Slovakia, which I wrote about last week.
Sunrun has come out against the nascent effort to harvest the minerals needed for panels and batteries from metal-rich nodules in the pristine depths of the ocean. Last week, America’s largest residential solar and storage company signed onto a petition calling for a moratorium on deep-sea mining. The San Francisco-based giant joins Google, Apple, Samsung, BMW, Volvo, Salesforce, and nearly 70 other corporations in calling for a halt to the ongoing push at a little-known United Nations maritime regulator to establish permitting rules for mining in international waters. As Heatmap’s Jeva Lange has written, there are real questions about whether the potential damage to one of the few ecosystems on Earth left untouched by human development is really worth it. Trump has vowed to go it alone on deep-sea mining if global regulators can’t come to agreement, as I wrote last year. But it’s unclear how quickly the biggest developer in the space, The Metals Company, could get the industry started. As You Sow, the advocacy group promoting the moratorium, said Sunrun’s signature “brings an important voice from the clean energy sector.”
The home electrification company Jetson, which makes smart thermostats and heat pumps, has raised $50 million in a Series A round. Founded less than two years ago, the company pulled in first-time funding from venture firms including Eclipse, 8VC, and Activate Capital, and saw at least two existing investors put in more money. “Heat pumps have worked for decades, but their cost and complexity have put them out of reach of most homeowners,” Stephen Lake, Jetson’s co-founder and chief executive, said in a statement. “We’re removing the friction by making the process digital, fast, and affordable while fully managing the purchase from start to finish. This funding will help us quickly bring this experience to more homeowners across the U.S. and Canada.”
