Sign In or Create an Account.
By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy
About 85% of the federal government’s 25,000 disaster employees would be exempt from furloughs, according to a September 19 memo from the Department of Homeland Security. The National Weather Service, meanwhile, would continue to issue warnings even if Congress doesn’t approve new spending at the end of the fiscal year on Tuesday at midnight, E&E News reported. But a showdown could trigger a lapse in coverage under the National Flood Insurance Program, according to Fox News. That could pose a serious problem to South Carolina, which faces severe flooding if Imelda makes landfall later this week as expected.
A federal judge has blocked the Trump administration’s bid to condition access to disaster aid on whether states participated in immigration authorities’ crackdown, E&E News reported on Friday. In a decision handed down last week, Judge William Smith of the U.S. district court for the District of Rhode Island called the Department of Homeland Security policy threatening distribution of billions of dollars in funding “coercive,” “hopelessly vague,” and “unlawfully ambiguous.”
The effect of halting payments to states is severe. As Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo explained in March when states first sued over the Trump administration’s decision to hold up funding from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the consequences of losing access to money come swiftly. She wrote: “If Hawaii doesn’t start receiving reimbursements for its federally-funded case management program by March 31, for example, it will be forced to immediately discontinue its work helping more than 4,000 wildfire survivors create tailored disaster recovery plans and navigate recovery resources."
Niron Magnetics started construction on a new 1,500-ton-per-year permanent magnet factory in Sartell, Minnesota. The company, spun out of Department of Energy research, is among the first to move forward on new domestic manufacturing capacity of a product of which the U.S. wants to claw back control from China. The privately-held Niron already has commercial partners: Stellantis, Samsung, Allison Transmission, and Magma.
While Trump’s signature One Big Beautiful Bill Act killed off the electric vehicle tax credit that was widely seen as an important demand signal for critical minerals, the administration has sought to bolster production of both the metals and magnets. Over the summer, the Department of Defense bought a large stake in MP Materials, the only rare earths producers in the U.S., making the biggest intervention in a private market since the country’s railroads were nationalized in World War I. The boldness of the move made Biden administration officials jealous, as Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin reported in July.
China made history this summer by selling its first shipment of steel forged with green hydrogen to Europe, in a sign Beijing was vaulting ahead of the U.S. on overseas sales of zero-carbon steel. But China’s plans to clean up its steelmaking industry are faltering amid a shortage of the electric-arc furnaces needed to replace traditional coal-fired steel production, Bloomberg reported. New analysis by the Centre for Research and Clean Air found that China will generate roughly 10% of its total steel output this year from electric-arc furnaces. That’s far below the global average of 29%. By comparison, the U.S. — which reduced its coal-fired steel production over the past half century — uses electric-arc furnaces for 72% of steelmaking.
China’s solar installations, meanwhile, fell to a three-year low following electricity market reforms that reduced domestic demand, as this newsletter reported in July. The country added just 7.36 gigawatts of panels last month, down a third from July, before the policy changes kicked in.
Rosatom, Russia’s state-owned nuclear power company, is building the vast majority of newcomer countries’ debut atomic energy stations worldwide, from Egypt to Turkey to Bangladesh to Iran. Now the Kremlin has inked an even bigger deal to expand nuclear energy production in the Islamic Republic. The $25 billion deal announced last week came as the United Nations voted to reimpose sanctions on Iran.
Brazil's solar boom.EIA
Brazil has long benefited from an electrical system built around hydropower plants. But distributed solar is now the fastest-growing source of new generation in the South American country. Distributed solar capacity grew from less than 1 gigawatt in 2018 to 40 gigawatts this year as of June, according to data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
The Department of Justice first posted a call for comments in the Federal Register in August to find state climate policies that are “burdening” energy development. Already, the administration has filed lawsuits against Vermont and New York to challenge their climate Superfund laws, and sued Hawaii and Michigan to thwart those states’ plans to sue fossil fuel companies over the effects of global warming. This month, the administration urged the Supreme Court to side with industry and transfer climate lawsuits from state to federal courts.
Chinese President Xi Jinping. Suo Takekuma - Pool/Getty Images
When President Donald Trump shredded the United States’ climate goals and started the process to withdraw from the Paris climate accords on his first day in office, campaigners hoped China and the European Union would pursue more ambitious carbon-cutting targets to make up the difference. But that’s not what’s happening. On Wednesday, Chinese President Xi Jinping announced plans to cut emissions by just 7% to 10% by 2035. The European Union complained that Beijing’s new goal “falls well short.” But, as I reported in this newsletter, the EU failed to muster support across the bloc for its own new binding carbon targets ahead of the United Nations General Assembly this week.
Get Heatmap AM directly in your inbox every morning:
Centrus, the American uranium enrichment giant spun out from the federal government in 1998, announced on Thursday an expansion of its Piketon, Ohio, nuclear fuel facility. The new production line is expected to add 300 jobs at the plant and bolster output of both the low-enriched uranium used in traditional reactors and the High-Assay Low-Enriched Uranium, or HALEU, needed for many of the new next-generation small modular reactors under development. While the company said the size and scope of the expansion depend on federal funding decisions from the Department of Energy, the plans “would represent a multibillion-dollar private and public investment.” After decades of decline, the surge in electricity growth has spurred newfound interest in atomic energy. As Heatmap’s Katie Brigham wrote last month, “the nuclear power dealmaking boom is real.”
“The time has come to restore America’s ability to enrich uranium at scale,” Centrus CEO Amir Vexler said in a statement. “We are planning a historic, multi-billion-dollar investment right here in Ohio — supported by a nationwide supply chain to do just that. When it comes to powering our energy future, it’s time to stop relying on foreign, state-owned corporations and start investing in American technology, built by American workers.”
Microsoft this week inked a deal to buy green steel from a first-of-a-kind facility in northern Sweden, Canary Media’s Maria Gallucci reported Thursday. While the tech giant doesn’t directly buy construction materials itself for its data centers, Microsoft agreed to work with its equipment suppliers to ensure that Stegra’s green steel is used in some of its server farms in Europe. As part of the deal, Microsoft will also buy “environmental attribute certificates” that represent the emissions reductions provided by Stegra’s steel and allow the steelmaker to sell its “near-zero emission” metal into the European market at a significant markdown, putting the more expensive green steel in line with the prices of fossil-fueled steel. Efforts to green the U.S. steel industry have stalled out since Trump returned to office. But the White House’s decision to claim a “golden share” of steelmaker U.S. Steel as part of its approval of Japanese rival Nippon Steel’s takeover earlier this year could, as Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin wrote this summer, give a future administration the leverage to push greening the supply in the future.
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People came out against a proposal for a 4.5 million-square-foot data center campus in Bessemer, Alabama, on the grounds that the 70% Black city is already home to major emitters of greenhouse gases and an energy-hungry server farm would make that worse. In an open letter cited in Inside Climate News on Thursday, the state chapter of the NAACP said “the impacts of the data center do not justify its construction.” Residents “are fighting for cleaner air as these plants contribute significantly to the current climate crisis and health issues in the county.” It’s part of a mounting backlash to the growth of data centers. Earlier this month, a Heatmap Pro survey found that only 44% of Americans would welcome a data center in their neighborhood, making them significantly less popular than even a gas-fired power station.
A new analysis of a million-year-old human skull discovered in China could radically upend the scientific consensus on the origins of Homo sapiens, raising the possibility that our species developed in Asia rather than Africa. “This changes a lot of thinking because it suggests that by one million years ago our ancestors had already split into distinct groups, pointing to a much earlier and more complex human evolutionary split than previously believed,” Chris Stringer, an anthropologist and research leader in human evolution at the Natural History Museum in London, told The Guardian. “It more or less doubles the time of origin of Homo sapiens.”
