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Current conditions: A polar vortex is sweeping frigid air back into the Northeast and bringing up to 6 inches of snow to northern parts of New England • Temperatures in the Southeast are set to plunge 25 degrees Fahrenheit below last week’s averages, with highs below freezing in Atlanta • Temperatures in the Nigerian capital of Abuja, meanwhile, are nearing 100 degrees.
A chart from the latest survey. Heatmap Pro
To comically understate the obvious, it’s been a big year for climate. So Heatmap called up 55 of the most discerning and disputatious experts — scientists, researchers, innovators, and reformers; some of whom led the Biden administration’s policy efforts, some of whom are harsh or heterodox critics of mainstream environmentalism. We asked them to take stock of everything going on now, from the Trump administration’s shifting policy landscape to China’s evolving place in the world.
The results of that inquiry are now out. You can check out everything on this homepage.
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Wyoming is inching closer to building what could be the United States’ largest data center after commissioners in Laramie County last week unanimously approved construction of a complex designed to scale from an initial 1.8 gigawatts to 10 gigawatts. The facility, called Project Jade, is set to be built by the data center giant Crusoe, with the neighboring gas turbines to power the plant provided by BFC Power and Cheyenne Power Hub. Crusoe’s chief real estate officer, Matt Field, told commissioners last week that the first phase would “leverage natural gas with a potential pathway for CO2 sequestration in the future” by tapping into developer Tallgrass Energy Partners’ existing carbon well hub, Inside Climate News wrote Wednesday.
While the potential for renewables is under discussion, a separate state hearing last week highlighted mounting opposition to the most prolific source of clean power in the state: Wind energy. Nearly two dozen residents from central and southeast Wyoming lambasted a growing “wall” of wind turbines in what Wyofile described as “emotional pleas.” One Cheyenne resident named Wendy Volk said: “This is no longer a series of isolated projects. It is a continuous, or near continuous, industrial corridor stretching across multiple counties and landscapes.”
A 2001 photo showing wind turbines in Wyoming. Michael Smith/Newsmakers
Global wind executives are warning of “negative spillover” effects on investor sentiment from the Trump administration’s suspended leases on all large U.S. offshore wind projects. In an interview with the Financial Times, Vestas CEO Henrik Andersen, who also serves as the president of the industry group WindEurope, called 2025 a “rollercaster” year. “When you have a 20- to 30-year investment program, the only way you can cover yourself for risk is to ask for a higher return,” he said. “When you get impairments in an industry, everyone would start saying, ‘could that hit us as well?’”
The British government seems willing to reduce that risk. On Wednesday, the United Kingdom handed out record subsidy contracts for offshore wind projects. At the same time, however, oil giant BP wrote down the value of its low-carbon business — which includes wind, solar, and hydrogen — by upward of $5 billion, according to The Wall Street Journal.
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Microsoft on Thursday announced one of the largest soil-based deals to remove carbon from the atmosphere. Under a 12-year agreement, the tech giant will purchase 2.85 million credits from the startup Indigo Carbon PBC, which sequesters carbon dioxide in soil through regenerative agricultural practices. It’s the third deal between Indigo and Microsoft, building on 40,000 metric tons in 2024 and 60,000 last year. “Microsoft is pleased by Indigo’s approach to regenerative agriculture that delivers measurable results through verified credits and payments to growers, while advancing soil carbon science with advanced modeling and academic partnerships,” Phillip Goodman, Microsoft’s director of carbon removal, said in a statement. Microsoft, as my colleague Emily Pontecorvo wrote recently, has “dominated” carbon removal over the past year, increasing its purchases more than fivefold in 2025 compared to 2024.
Despite major progress on clean energy, especially with solar and batteries, a new report by McKinsey & Company found big gaps between current deployments and 2030 goals. The analysis, the first from the megaconsultancy to include China and nuclear power, highlighted “notable discrepancies between announced projects and those with committed funding,” and warned that less than “15% of low-emissions technologies required to meet Paris-aligned goals have been deployed.” In a statement, Diego Hernandez Diaz, McKinsey partner and co-author of the report, said the “progress landscape is nuanced by region and technology and while achieving energy transition commitments remain paramount for countries and companies alike, recent announcements indicate that shifting priorities and slowing momentum have led to project pauses and cancellations across technologies.”
The findings come as emissions are rising. As I wrote in yesterday’s newsletter, the latest Rhodium Group estimate of U.S. emissions notched a reversal of the last two years of declines. In a new Carbon Brief analysis, climate scientist Zeke Hausfather found that 2025 was in the top-three warmest years on record with average surface temperatures reaching 1.44 Celsius above pre-industrial averages across eight independent datasets.
China just installed the most powerful turbine ever built offshore. The 20-megawatt turbine off the coast of Fujian Province set a record for both capacity and rotor diameter, 300 meters from its 147-meter blades. “Compared with offshore wind farms with 16-megawatt units, 20-megawatt units can help wind farms reduce the number of units by 25%, save sea area, dilute development costs, and open up economic blockages for the large-scale development of deep-sea wind power,” the manufacturer, Goldwind, said in a statement.
The PJM Interconnection, the nation’s largest grid operator, made a rare foray into a hotly political lawsuit Tuesday, filing an amicus brief in defense of Dominion Energy’s offshore wind projects as the Virginia utility challenges the Trump administration’s blanket decision last month to halt construction on all seaborne turbines. “It is widely recognized, including by the current administration, that there is a pressing need for additional electric generation in PJM’s region to meet rising demand and ensure the reliability of the interstate transmission grid,” PJM’s lawyers wrote in the brief. The project Trump is trying to cancel “will provide such generation,” and “has been in planning and development for many years.” As such, PJM urged the court to grant the preliminary injunction Dominion requested.
That strategy is working elsewhere. On Monday, a federal court granted such an injunction to Orsted for its Revolution Wind project off New England, as I reported in yesterday’s newsletter.
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Just six months since the passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act through the reconciliation process, Republicans have their eyes on legislating more big energy changes through what they’re calling “reconciliation 2.0.” A framework for the bill released Tuesday “does not mention renewables or energy sources with broad bipartisan support, such as nuclear and geothermal,” E&E News noted. Instead, the bill focuses on streamlining permitting for fossil fuels, killing off energy efficiency programs, and implementing new fees on plaintiffs who sue the federal government for alleged violations of “procedural environmental laws.”
That comes despite the fact that U.S. emissions reversed their last two years of declines to rise 2.4% on the back of more coal-fired generation in 2025, according to new data from the Rhodium Group consultancy.
In yet another sign of the growing backlash against data centers, Arizona Governor Katie Hobbs called for curtailing her state’s lucrative tax incentives for server farms and imposing new water use fees on the industry. The Democrat, who is running for reelection in November, called the tax break a “$38 million corporate handout” and urged legislators to eliminate it. “It’s time we make the booming data center industry work for the people of our state, rather than the other way around,” she said in her state-of-the-state address opening the state legislature’s 2026 session, according to Politico.
Just 44% of Americans said they’d welcome a data center in their neighborhood in a Heatmap Pro poll from September. And as Heatmap’s Jael Holzman wrote in November, data center opposition is “swallowing American politics,” driving activists on both the left and right.
Slovakia's Mochovce nuclaer power plant.Janos Kummer/Getty Images
Nuclear developers of all kinds have promised to deploy new kinds of reactors by 2030. But the Department of Energy is now planning to build its first atomic generator on the moon in just four years. “History shows that when American science and innovation come together, from the Manhattan Project to the Apollo Mission, our nation leads the world to reach new frontiers once thought impossible,” Secretary of Energy Chris Wright said in a press release Tuesday evening. “This agreement continues that legacy.”
In a more conceivable near-term goal, the U.S. is also looking to broker a nuclear agreement with Slovakia, expanding Washington’s grip over Russia’s former sphere of atomic influence. The U.S. nuclear champion Westinghouse already produces American-made fuel for Slovakia’s Russian-made reactors. But NucNet reported this week that Prime Minister Robert Fico has confirmed the Central European nation is planning to sign a sweeping partnership deal with the U.S. that would clear the way for construction of new American-made reactors, likely Westinghouse AP1000s like those under construction in Poland.
When I first traveled to the Brazilian Amazon in 2019 to visit Indigenous villages affected by then-President Jair Bolsonaro’s efforts to encourage illegal mining in the rainforest, I found children with rashes from exposure to mercury dumped in the river they depended on for bathing and food by gold panners who used the toxic metal to sift through mud for precious metal. In a new analysis for the conservation site Mongabay, ecologist Timothy J. Killeen argues that finding a way to formalize the business could allow the industry to “finance its own remediation while creating more than 200,000 jobs that transform illegal extraction into a regulated industry.” While he admitted it’s a “substantial if,” failing to do something raises the risk that “the tailings will remain, mercury will continue leaching into watersheds, and another generation will ask why available solutions were not deployed to solve a problem that everybody agrees is intolerable and unnecessary.”
