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EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin. Kevin Lamarque-Pool/Getty Images
The Environmental Protection Agency is preparing this week to repeal the Obama-era scientific finding that provides the legal basis for virtually all federal regulations of planet-heating emissions, marking what The Wall Street Journal called “the most far-reaching rollback of U.S. climate policy to date.” The 2009 “endangerment finding” concluded that greenhouse gases pose a threat to public health and welfare, calling for cuts to emissions from power plants and vehicle tailpipes. EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin told the newspaper the move “amounts to the largest act of deregulation in the history of the United States.” In an interview with my colleague Emily Pontecorvo last year, Harvard Law School’s Jody Freeman said rescinding the endangerment finding would do “more serious and more long term damage” and “could knock out a future administration from trying to” bring back climate policy. But that, Freeman said, would depend on the Supreme Court backing the administration. “I don’t think that’s likely, but it’s possible,” she said.
At issue is the 2007 case Massachusetts v. EPA, which determined that greenhouse gases qualified as pollutants under the Clean Air Act. As Emily wrote last week, “the agency claims that its previous read of Massachusetts v. EPA was wrong, especially in light of subsequent Supreme Court decisions, such as West Virginia v. EPA and Loper Bright v. Raimondo. The former limited the EPA's toolbox for regulating power plants, and the latter ended a requirement that courts defer to agency expertise in cases where the law is vague.” An earlier report in The Washington Post questioned whether the agency would proceed with the repeal at all, fearing these arguments would pass muster in the nation’s highest court.
BYD has sued the United States government over the 100% tariff on Chinese electrics that serves as an effective ban on Beijing’s booming auto exports. Four U.S.-based subsidiaries of the world’s largest manufacturer of electric vehicles filed a lawsuit in the U.S. Court of International Trade challenging the legality of the Trump administration’s trade levies. The litigation marks what the state-backed tabloid Global Times called “the first instance of a Chinese automaker directly and actively challenging U.S. tariffs, setting a precedent and carrying significance for Chinese enterprises to protect their legitimate rights and interests through legal means.”
Outside the U.S., BYD is booming. China’s cheap electric cars are popular all over the world, as Heatmap’s Shift Key podcast covered in December. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s deal to increase trade with China will bring the battery-powered vehicles to North American roads. And the Chinese edition of the trade publication Automotive News just reported that BYD is planning a factory expansion in Europe and Canada.
Hot off last month’s news that it plans to go public, Fervo Energy has drilled its highest-temperature well yet. The drilling results confirm that the next-generation geothermal startup tapped into a resource with temperatures above 555 degrees Fahrenheit at approximately 11,200 feet deep. The company announced the findings Monday of an independent assessment using appraisal data from the drilling. The analysis found that the Project Blanford site in Millard County, Utah, has multiple gigawatts of heat that can be harnessed. Its completion will be a breakthrough for enhanced geothermal systems, one of two leading approaches to the next-generation geothermal sector that Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin outlined here. “This latest ultra-high temperature discovery highlights our team’s ability to detect and develop EGS sweet spots using AI-enhanced geophysical techniques,” Jack Norbeck, Fervo’s co-founder and chief technology officer, said in a statement.
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Chinese scientists have for the first time discovered natural hydrogen sealed in microscopic inclusions near Tibet. The finding, which the Xinhua news agency called “groundbreaking,” fills what the China Hydrogen Bulletin called “a major domestic research gap and points to a new geological pathway for identifying China’s next generation of clean energy resources.” Natural, or geological, hydrogen could provide a cheap source of the zero-carbon fuel and give oil and gas drillers a natural foothold in a new, clean industry. In the color spectrum associated with hydrogen, the rare, naturally formed stuff is called white hydrogen. But as Heatmap’s Katie Brigham wrote in December, a new color has joined the rainbow. Orange hydrogen refers to a family of technologies that naturally spur production of the gas, as the startup Vema is now attempting to do.
China’s coal-fired power generation decreased 1.9% last year, marking what the consultancy Wood Mackenzie called “a historic shift driven by new non-fossil generation that has finally outpaced demand growth.” Power demand surged 5% in China last year, but for the first time in a decade that wasn’t propelled by coal plants. Instead, that new demand was supplied by renewables, nuclear, and hydro, all of which Beijing has rapidly deployed. Over that time, the levelized cost of energy — a widely used though, as Matthew wrote last year, far-from-perfect metric — fell 77% for utility-scale solar and 73% for onshore wind. “At the heart of this transformation is the unprecedented expansion of renewable energy capacity,” Sharon Feng, a senior research analyst for Wood Mackenzie, said in a statement. “China’s wind and solar capacity had risen more than ten-fold to 1,842 gigawatts over the past decade.”
Gone are the days when the oil industry seemed to be on track for a lucrative decline. Demand for crude will take longer to peak than previously estimated as governments prioritize growth and energy security over efforts to curb consumption. That’s according to a report issued Sunday by Vitol Group, the world’s largest independent oil trader. “Over the past year, decarbonisation policies have become a less decisive driver of efforts to curb oil consumption and reduce carbon dioxide emissions,” the report stated, according to Bloomberg. “Policy priorities have increasingly been reframed around economic competitiveness and geopolitical strategy.”
The race for a long-duration energy storage solution has a new competitor. The Dutch startup Ore Energy has deployed its iron-air storage technology successfully on the grid for a technical pilot of its system that can store for 100 hours of power. The pilot, the first of its kind in Europe, demonstrated that the company’s technology can store and discharge energy for up to four days. “This pilot allowed us to evaluate iron-air performance under European operating profiles and real-world grid conditions,” Aytaç Yilmaz, co-founder and CEO of Ore Energy, said in a statement.
Things may be looking up for embattled renewables. Offshore wind companies have, so far, won every challenge to President Donald Trump’s orders to halt construction. As I wrote in yesterday’s newsletter, Katie Miller, the right-wing influencer and wife of Trump adviser Stephen Miller, has for the past two days promoted the value of solar and batteries in posts on X. Another data point: The Wall Street Journal just reported that the chief financial officer of the posh home-exercise bike company Peloton is jumping ship to the solar company Palmetto.
A federal judge in Texas struck down a 2021 law barring state agencies from investing in firms accused of boycotting fossil fuel companies, ruling that the statute was unconstitutional. In his decision, Judge Alan D. Albright of the U.S. District Court in Austin blocked the state from enforcing the law, known as SB 13, which he ruled was targeting activities protected by free speech rights. “SB 13 is impermissibly vague in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment because it fails to provide persons of ordinary intelligence a reasonable opportunity to know what conduct is prohibited and does not provide explicit standards for determining compliance with the law,” Albright wrote in a 12-page decision. “Thus, the law is unconstitutional and unenforceable.” The decision, The New York Times reported, was part of a lawsuit filed in 2024 by the American Sustainable Business Council on behalf of two companies, Ethos Capital and Sphere, which claimed they were put on a blacklist.
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Spent nuclear fuel stored in dry casks and in-ground vaults at the Idaho National Laboratory. DOE
For France, Russia, and Japan, nuclear waste isn’t waste at all — spent fuel is reprocessed to separate out the harmful byproducts caused by fission and extract some of the roughly 95% of uranium left behind after a used fuel assembly comes out of a reactor. The U.S., too, would be in that club of nations were it not for former President Jimmy Carter’s decision to kill off what was supposed to be America’s first commercial recycling plant for nuclear waste back in the 1970s. Since then, no one has seriously attempted to revive the industry. That is, until now. Last month, as I reported here, the Department of Energy announced plans to set up nuclear fuel campuses where startups could test out recycling technology. On Thursday, the agency awarded $19 million to five startups to hasten development of recycling technology. “Used nuclear fuel is an incredible untapped resource in the United States,” Assistant Secretary for Nuclear Energy Ted Garrish said in a statement. “The Trump Administration is taking a common-sense approach to making sure we’re using our resources in the most efficient ways possible to secure American energy independence and fuel our economic growth.” One of those companies, Curio Solutions, told me the funding shows the technology is “now moving decisively toward scaling up for ultimate full commercialization.”
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Amazon outbid Puget Sound Energy last month in an auction for a 1.2-gigawatt solar farm in Oregon in a move the Seattle Times warned left “the utility concerned about a larger competition for resources with energy-hungry artificial intelligence companies.” The tech giant agreed to pay $83 million for the facility, which could end up as one of the largest solar projects in the U.S. The project, which would span 9,442 acres, plans to build an equal amount of battery storage capacity. The bidding war was close. PSE’s final offer was $82 million. “We are used to being kind of the only buyers for these things as utilities, and now there are other buyers who are a little bigger than we are,” Matt Steuerwalt, senior vice president of external affairs at PSE, told the newspaper Thursday.
Amazon said Thursday it plans to spend an eye-popping $200 billion — with a B — on AI infrastructure this year alone. It’s not alone in the big spending. Alphabet, Google’s parent company, announced Wednesday that it expects to spend between $175 billion to $185 billion on data centers, energy, and other AI investments this year, roughly double what it paid in 2025. But as Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin noted, Google’s spending spree is “fabulous news for utilities.” Just last week, utility and renewable developer NextEra told investors on its quarterly earnings call that it expects to bring 15 gigawatts of power to serve data centers over the next decade. “But I’ll be disappointed if we don’t double our goal and deliver at least 30 gigawatts through this channel by 2035, NextEra chief executive John Ketchum said.
Chronic exposure to fine particulate matter from wildfires is killing an average of 24,100 people in America’s lower 48 states each year, according to a new study. The paper, published Wednesday in the journal Science Advances, examined the period from 2006 to 2020 and found that long-term exposure to the tiny particulates from the blaze is linked to at least that many deaths. “Our message is: Wildfire smoke is very dangerous. It is an increasing threat to human health,” Yaguang Wei, a study author and assistant professor in the department of environmental medicine at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, told the Associated Press. A scientist at the University of California at Los Angeles who was not involved in the study described the findings as “reasonable” and called for further research. A paper from 2024, which Heatmap’s Jeva Lange covered at the time, found a 10-fold increase in deaths from wildfire smoke from the 1960s to the 2010s.
Much like the classic animated movie about a bunch of zoo animals from New York City that end up stranded on Africa’s largest island, a non-native species is messing with Madagascar’s lemurs. New research from Rice University found that strawberry guava, an invasive plant from Brazil, can prevent forests from naturally regenerating. The plant, whose fruit lemurs often eat, was introduced to Madagascar during the colonial era in the 1800s and tends to take hold in areas where the rainforest canopy is damaged. Once established, the strawberry guava can stall native trees’ regrowth by decades.
