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The new rule is expected to face challenges in court.“Today’s action is another example of how the Trump administration is trying to take us back in time with its reckless fossil fuels agenda,” Erik Grafe, a lawyer with Earthjustice, an environmental nonprofit group, said in a statement to The New York Times.
A cobalt mine in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Michel Lunanga/Getty Images
For the first time in United Nations climate negotiations, countries attending the COP30 summit in Belém, Brazil, are grappling with the effects of mining the minerals needed for batteries, solar panels, and wind turbines, Climate Home News reported. In a draft text on Friday, a working group at the summit recognized “the social and environmental risks associated with scaling up supply chains for clean energy technologies, including risks arising from the extraction and processing of critical minerals.”
The statement came amid ongoing protests from Indigenous groups, including those from Argentina who warned that the world’s increased appetite for South America’s lithium reserves came at the cost of local water resources for peoples who have lived in regions near mining operations for millennia.
Nearly one fifth of the Environmental Protection Agency’s workforce has opted into President Donald Trump’s mass resignation plan, according to new data E&E News obtained on Friday. As of the end of September, the EPA’s payroll included 15,166 employees, according to data released during the government shutdown, meaning that more than 2,620 employees accepted the “deferred resignation” offer.
Under Administrator Lee Zeldin, the EPA has advanced proposals that even the agency under Scott Pruitt, the top environmental regulator at the start of Trump’s first term, dared not attempt. Zeldin has moved to rescind the endangerment finding, which forms the legal basis for virtually all major climate regulations at the EPA. Zeldin even tried to kill off the popular Energy Star program for efficient appliances, but — as I wrote earlier this month — he backed off the plan.
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The next-generation geothermal company Eavor is preparing to start up its debut closed-loop system at its pilot project in Germany, Think Geoenergy reported. The startup has stood out in the race to commercialize technology that can harness energy from the Earth’s molten core in more places than conventional approaches allow. While rivals such as Fervo Energy, Sage Geosystems, and XGS Energy, pursue projects in the American Southwest, Eavor focused its efforts on Germany, where it saw potential to tap into the lucrative district heating market. Eavor also developed special drilling tools that promised to shave “tens of millions” off the cost of digging wells. As I wrote here last month, the company just completed successful tests of its technology.
BlackRock’s Global Infrastructure Partners inked a deal with the Spanish construction company ACS to form a joint venture to develop roughly $2.3 billion worth of data centers. The 50-50 joint venture will consist of ACS’ existing data-center portfolio, including 1.7 gigawatts of assets under development in Europe, the U.S., and Australia. ACS is contributing its existing portfolio to the business, The Wall Street Journal reported, “in exchange for about 1 billion euros in cash and initial earnout payments of up to 1 billion euros” if the data centers hit certain commercial milestones. “Global demand for data centers is set to grow more than 15 times by 2035, driven by the expansion of AI, cloud migration, and the exponential rise in data volumes,” ACS CEO Juan Santamaria said.
In a first, Swedish scientists have managed to successfully isolate and sequence RNA from an Ice Age wooly mammoth. Researchers at Stockholm University extracted the genetic information from mammoth tissue preserved in Siberian permafrost for nearly 40,000 years. The findings, published in the journal Cell, show that RNA, in addition to DNA and proteins, can be preserved over long periods of time. “With RNA, we can obtain direct evidence of which genes are ‘turned on,’ offering a glimpse into the final moments of life of a mammoth that walked the Earth during the last Ice Age. This is information that cannot be obtained from DNA alone,” Emilio Mármol, lead author of the study, said in a press release.
Editor’s note: This article has been updated to clarify the staff shrinkage at the EPA.
