Senate Republicans plan to vote this week on California’s ability to set its own emissions standards, Majority Leader John Thune said on the Senate floor Tuesday. Since 1967, the Environmental Protection Agency has granted California a waiver to set stricter-than-federal restrictions on emissions in acknowledgment of the state’s unique air pollution challenges, including smog; due to the state’s size, however, those standards have largely been adhered to by automakers nationally. The House voted earlier this month to end California’s waiver — which has long been opposed by Republicans, who’ve called it, erroneously, an “electric vehicle mandate” — although there had been some uncertainty over whether the Senate would take up the vote, since Senate parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough and the Government Accountability Office had both ruled that the EPA waiver is not subject to the Congressional Review Act, which is what Republicans have called upon to attempt to overturn it.
Thune confirmed that the chamber would take up the three House resolutions unwinding the California waiver, claiming Democrats were “attempting to derail a repeal by throwing a tantrum over a supposed procedural problem.” In response, Senator Alex Padilla of California, a Democrat, said, “If this attempt is successful, the consequences will be far-reaching, not only for our clean energy economy, the air our children breathe, and for our climate, but for the future of the CRA and for the Senate as an institution.”
2. For the first time, U.S. utility seeks permit for an SMR
The Tennessee Valley Authority is seeking a permit to build a small modular reactor, the Journal-News reports, the first utility to do so. On Tuesday, the TVA — the nation’s largest public power provider — took another step toward adding an SMR to its nuclear fleet by applying for a construction permit from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to build a site on Tennessee’s Clinch River.
While the project had previously been touted by the Biden administration as helping advance the nation toward “a clean energy future,” my colleague Matthew Zeitlin noted that language has vanished from the construction application, which now argues the SMR is the next step in “establishing America’s energy dominance to power artificial intelligence, quantum computing, and advanced manufacturing.” Regardless of spin, the fastest Clinch River could go into operation is about five years, Adam Stein, the director of the nuclear energy innovation program of the Breakthrough Institute, told Matthew.
3. CATL goes public — with no onshore American investors
The world’s biggest manufacturer of electric vehicle batteries, CATL, raised $4.6 billion in its debut on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange Tuesday, making it the largest share offering of 2025 to date. The stock surged 16% over the subscription price, although onshore U.S. investors were largely shut out by the company in order to “limit its exposure to U.S. legal liability,” with the Pentagon having put the Fujian province-based company on a blacklist earlier this year for its alleged links to China’s military, Bloomberg writes.
CATL’s manufacturing is done almost entirely within China, although the company has said it will use 90% of its proceeds from the Hong Kong offering on the construction of a new factory in Hungary, The Economist reports. Though the company faces an uphill battle making inroads in the U.S. due to slowing demand for electric vehicles and scrutiny of Chinese companies by American politicians, The Economist adds that CATL also has “plenty of room for further expansion,” including growing its “higher-margin energy-storage business.”
4. Honda to pivot from EVs to focus on hybrids
Japanese automaker Honda announced Tuesday that it will pivot away from its investment in electric vehicles in order to focus on growing demand for hybrids, Reuters reports. The company revised its electrification investment from about $69 billion to $48 billion, while at the same time planning 13 hybrid models between 2027 and 2031.
Honda cited a slowdown in EV sales as justification for its decision, though as Electrek points out, “It’s estimated that this year – not 2030 – 25% of cars sold globally will be EVs,” and that “any company that sells less than that is lagging behind the curve, losing ground to companies that are ready for the transition that is already happening.” Electrek adds that Honda’s profits have largely slipped due to competition in the Chinese auto market from domestic EVs.
5. Even 1.2 degrees of warming could ‘profoundly alter’ world’s coastlines: report
If the world merely sustains the current level of warming, at 1.2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, ice melt off of Greenland and Antarctica could still “profoundly alter coastlines around the world, displacing hundreds of millions of people, and causing loss and damage well beyond the limits of adaptation,” a grim new study published in Nature has found. Even keeping global temperature rise beneath the 1.5 degrees Celsius threshold established in the Paris Climate Agreement could result in “catastrophic inland migration and forced migration,” the University of Bristol’s Jonathan Bamber, one of the authors of the report, told The Guardian. In fact, “you don’t slow sea level rise at 1.5,” lead author Chris Stokes of Durham University told CNN. Rather, “you see quite a rapid acceleration.”
Around 230 million people live less than a meter, or 3.2 feet, above sea level, including many residents of Miami. The researchers estimated that due to ice melt, seas could rise 40 inches by the end of the century, requiring “massive land migration on scales that we’ve never witnessed since modern civilization,” Bamber told CNN. As Stokes added, “There’s very little that we’re observing that gives us hope here.”
THE KICKER
Svea Solar
Ikea has begun selling air-to-water heat pumps in Germany, in partnership with Svea Solar. “Sustainable living should be accessible to the masses,” Jacqueline Polak of Ikea Germany said in a statement.
California Air Resources Board
Svea Solar
