In 2010, then-President Barack Obama introduced the term “shellacking” into the American political lexicon when he described the depth of Democrats’ loss in the midterm elections. Sixteen years later, Democrats are the ones doing the shellacking. The party surged to victory in places long considered deep-red GOP strongholds. Kansas elected Adam Hamilton as its first Democratic U.S. senator in 94 years. Texas hadn’t elected a Democrat statewide in 32 years, yet gave the party a U.S. Senate seat and the governor’s mansion. South Carolina’s incoming Democratic senator is its first since 1998. Hours before polls closed in the nation’s westernmost reaches, Democrats had won control over both the House of Representatives and the Senate.
Ahead of the vote, I spoke to half a dozen experts on what we should expect from the new Democratic Congress. Among the energy policies the party will want to enact: Restrictions on data centers, a restoration of renewable energy tax credits, and the creation of a new tax credit to support batteries. Among the issues expected to see congressional probes: Trump’s gutting of climate rules, funding cuts for clean energy, deals to kill offshore wind projects, and the redirection of Department of Energy funding from green projects to dirty ones. Aligning with Democrats on the need for clean energy tax credits wasn’t enough to save many Republicans in blue and purple states. At least nine Republicans who signed at least one public letter calling on the Trump administration to preserve tax credits for renewables lost reelection Tuesday night, including Jen Kiggans of Virginia, Juan Ciscomani of Arizona, Gabe Evans of Colorado, David Valadao of California, Mike Lawler of New York, Thomas Kean Jr. of New Jersey, Mariannette Miller-Meeks of Iowa, and Ryan Mackenzie and Rob Bresnahan, both of Pennsylvania.
2. What else to read on the election
To go deeper into the outcomes of the election, check out these stories by my colleagues:
3. Green groups are working with tech giants on data center standards
Strange bedfellows are coming together to form the Responsible Data Center Development Collaborative. In an election night scoop, The Hill reported that green groups such as the Sierra Club, the League of Conservation Voters, and the Natural Resources Defense Council were working with Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, and Google to develop “a common national framework for responsible data development.” The document, leaked to the publication, details the need for “durable economic development,” “more affordable, reliable, and emissions-free energy,” and “community agency and support for responsibly developed projects.” Other parties involved in the effort include the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Anthropic, Nvidia, and Oracle.
The world’s biggest banks, meanwhile, are once again making more money from green energy projects than fossil fuel ones. For a fifth straight year, according to a Bloomberg analysis published Tuesday, the 2025 revenue from servicing debt on climate-related financing topped $3 billion, eclipsing the $2.9 billion from deals for oil, gas, and coal producers.
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4. Russia is building a major new uranium fuel plant
The U.S. is racing to replace the Russian enriched uranium that fuels roughly a quarter of its fleet of civilian nuclear plants before federal law bans imports at the end of next year. Industry sources tell me that utilities have about enough fuel to get through the end of the decade before the absence of Russian uranium starts forcing reactors to shut down. Some still expect Trump to find a way to intervene, like when he unilaterally relaxed sanctions on Russian diesel last month. But the few U.S. uranium enrichers that survived the 1990s and 2000s, when cheap imports put much of the domestic industry out of business, are scrambling to erect new centrifuges and pump out more fuel. A new player, the Peter Thiel-backed General Matter, is on track to begin construction as early as next year, as I reported last week. On Monday, Urenco USA, the American subsidiary of the European enrichment giant, announced that it had churned out its first shipment of LEU+, the higher-enriched version of low-enrich uranium that U.S. utilities are pioneering. The Kremlin, however, is beefing up its own operations to maintain its share of the global market. On Tuesday, NucNet reported that Russia planned to build a new facility to process uranium from two mining sites in Zabaikalsky Krai, a landlocked federal jurisdiction in the Russian Far East covering much of the area once known as Transbaikal. The two deposits, located more than 3,700 miles from Moscow, are part of one of the largest volcanic-hosted uranium clusters in the world. Russia is developing the new processing plant in hopes of shoring up its supplies for export.
Meanwhile, Germany is showing signs of the energy vulnerabilities that may have encouraged Russia’s invasion of Ukraine nearly five years ago. In 2021, Germany and much of Western Europe burned through its stores of natural gas to make up for a shortfall of wind power during a “dunkelflaute,” a period in which previously forecasted gusts never blew. That intensified the pain when Brussels was seeking to cut off Russian supplies and the Kremlin throttled the flow of gas into pipelines. On Tuesday, Reuters reported that Germany has entered winter with its lowest gas stocks on record, far below the EU average.
5. California court rules the state’s first carbon capture project illegal
A California court ruled this week in favor of activists seeking to shut down a first-of-a-kind carbon capture project in inland Kern County, north of Santa Barbara. The decision found that the Carbon TerraVault I, which stores CO2 captured from the California Resources Corporation’s Elk Hills cryogenic natural gas-processing facility, broke the California Environmental Quality Act by failing to evaluate, disclose and mitigate potential environmental effects from the facility. The facility, which started running in May, must now halt all operations until it can carry out a new environmental review. “This is a tremendous victory for Kern County communities,” Lupe Martinez, an advocate with the community group Delano Guardians, said in a statement. “We live in one of the most polluted regions in the nation, yet the county and powerful corporations attempted to push forward a project that threatened our air, water, and public health without conducting the proper environmental review required by law.”
THE KICKER
It feels almost biblical. One of the world’s biggest mining companies is facing a brutal invasion of toads. Rio Tinto plans to spend $20 million to battle what the Financial Times called “a marauding can toad that is threatening to encroach on Australia’s iron ore-rich Pilbara region.” The company is working with scientists to establish a “kill zone” between the Indian Ocean and the Great Sandy Desert in Western Australia. While the amphibians don’t affect Rio Tinto’s mining operations, an invasive pest that upsets the region’s unique biodiversity threatens to make future permitting harder since regulators will face new pressures to protect endangered native species.
DOE
Broken sea ice in Baffin Bay, in the Northwest Passage. Alison Cook
The next governor and senator from Texas, both Democrats.Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
