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The Fish and Wildlife Service has lifted its ban on issuing permits for incidental harm to protected eagles while also pursuing enforcement actions — including against operators that reported bird deaths voluntarily.
Pennsylvania is out, Virginia wants in, and New Jersey is treating it like a piggybank.
A new PowerLines report puts the total requested increases at $31 billion — more than double the number from 2024.
The battery recycling company announced a $425 million Series E round after pivoting to power data centers.
On Vineyard Wind’s win, Hydro-Quebec, and the EU-India trade deal
Current conditions: Temperatures as low as 30 degrees Fahrenheit below average are expected to persist for at least another week throughout the Northeast, including in New York City • Midsummer heat is driving temperatures up near 100 degrees in Paraguay • Antarctica is facing intense katabatic winds that pull cold air from high altitudes to lower ones.
President Donald Trump, no fan of the Paris Agreement.Tom Brenner/Getty Images
The United States has, once again, exited the Paris Agreement, the first global carbon-cutting pact to include the world’s two top emitters. President Donald Trump initiated the withdrawal on his first day back in office last year — unlike the last time Trump quit the Paris accords, after a prolonged will-he-won’t-he game in 2017. That process took three years to complete, allowing newly installed President Joe Biden to rejoin in 2021 after just a brief lapse. This time, the process took only a year to wrap up, meaning the U.S. will remain outside the pact for years at least. “Trump is making unilateral decisions to remove the United States from any meaningful global climate action,” Katie Harris, the vice president of federal affairs at the union-affiliated BlueGreen Alliance, said in a statement. “His personal vendetta against clean energy and climate action will hurt workers and our environment.” Now, as Heatmap’s Katie Brigham wrote last year, at “all Paris-related meetings (which comprise much of the conference), the U.S. would have to attend as an ‘observer’ with no decision-making power, the same category as lobbyists.”
America has not yet completed its withdrawal from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the overarching group through which the Paris Agreement was negotiated, which Trump initiated this month. That won’t be final until next year. That Trump is even planning to quit the body shows how much more aggressive the administration’s approach to climate policy is this time around. Trump remained within the UNFCCC during his first term, preferring to stay engaged in negotiations even after quitting the Paris Agreement.
Just weeks after a federal judge struck down the Trump administration’s stop work order on the Revolution Wind project off Rhode Island’s shores, another federal judge has overturned the order halting construction on the Vineyard Wind project off Massachusetts. That, as Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo wrote last night, “makes four offshore wind farms that have now won preliminary injunctions against Trump’s freeze on the industry.” Besides Revolution Wind, Dominion Energy’s Coastal Virginia offshore wind project and Equinor’s Empire Wind plant off Long Island have each prevailed in their challenges to the administration’s blanket order to abandon construction on dubious national security grounds.
Meanwhile, the White House is potentially starving another major infrastructure project of funding. The Gateway rail project to build a new tunnel under the Hudson River between New Jersey and New York City could run out of money and halt construction by the end of next week, the project manager warned Tuesday. Washington had promised billions to get the project done, but the money stopped flowing in October during the government shutdown. Officials at the Department of Transportation said the funding would remain suspended until, as The New York Times reported, the project’s contracts could be reviewed for compliance with new rules about businesses owned by women and minorities.
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A new transmission line connecting New England’s power-starved and gas-addicted grid to Quebec’s carbon-free hydroelectric system just came online this month. But electricity abruptly stopped flowing onto the New England Clean Energy Connect as the Canadian province’s state-owned utility, Hydro-Quebec, withheld power to meet skyrocketing demand at home amid the Arctic chill. Power plant owners in New England and New York, where Hydro-Quebec is building another line down the Hudson River to connect to New York City, complained that deals with the utility focused on maintaining supplies during the summer, when air conditioning traditionally surges power to peak demand. Hydro-Quebec restored power to the line on Monday.
The storm represented a force majeure event. If it hadn’t, the utility would have needed to pay penalties. But the incident is sure to fuel more criticism from power plant owners, most of which are fossil fueled, who oppose increased competition from the Quebecois. “I hate to say it, but a lot of the issues and concerns that we have been talking about for years have played out this weekend,” Dan Dolan — who leads the New England Power Generators Association, a trade group representing power plant owners — told E&E News. “This is a very expensive contract for a product that predominantly comes in non-stressed periods in the winter,” he said.
Europe has signed what the European Commission president Urusula von der Leyen called “the mother of all deals” with India, “a free trade zone of 2 billion people.” As part of the deal, the world’s second-largest market and the most populous nation plan to ramp up exports of steel, plastics, chemicals, and pharmaceuticals. But don’t expect Brussels to give New Delhi a break on its growing share of the global emissions. The EU’s carbon border adjustment mechanism — the first major tariff in the world based on the carbon intensity of imports — just took effect this month, and will remain intact for Indian goods, Reuters reported.
The Department of the Interior has ordered staff at the National Park Service to remove or edit signs and other informational materials in at least 17 parks out West to scrub mentions of climate change or hardship inflicted by settlers on Native Americans. The effort comes as part of what The Washington Post called a renewed push to implement Trump’s executive order on “restoring truth and sanity to American history.” Park staff have interpreted those orders, the newspaper reported, to mean eliminating any reference to historic racism, sexism, LGBTQ rights, and climate change. Just last week, officials removed an exhibit at Independence National Historical Park on George Washington’s ownership of slaves.
Tesla is going trucking. The electric automaker inked a deal Tuesday with Pilot Travel Centers, the nation’s largest operator of highway pit stops, to install Tesla’s Semi Chargers for heavy-duty electric vehicle charging. The stations are set to be built at select Pilot locations along Interstate 5, Interstate 10, and several other major corridors where heavy-duty charging is highest. The first sites are scheduled to open this summer.
A federal judge in Massachusetts ruled that construction on Vineyard Wind could proceed.
The Vineyard Wind offshore wind project can continue construction while the company’s lawsuit challenging the Trump administration’s stop work order proceeds, judge Brian E. Murphy for the District of Massachusetts ruled on Tuesday.
That makes four offshore wind farms that have now won preliminary injunctions against Trump’s freeze on the industry. Dominion Energy’s Coastal Virginia offshore wind project, Orsted’s Revolution Wind off the coast of New England, and Equinor’s Empire Wind near Long Island, New York, have all been allowed to proceed with construction while their individual legal challenges to the stop work order play out.
The Department of the Interior attempted to pause all offshore wind construction in December, citing unspecified “national security risks identified by the Department of War.” The risks are apparently detailed in a classified report, and have been shared neither with the public nor with the offshore wind companies.
Vineyard Wind, a joint development between Avangrid Renewables and Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners, has been under construction since 2021, and is already 95% built. More than that, it’s sending power to Massachusetts customers, and will produce enough electricity to power up to 400,000 homes once it’s complete.
In court filings, the developer argued it was urgent the stop work order be lifted, as it would lose access to a key construction boat required to complete the project on March 31. The company is in the process of replacing defective blades on its last handful of turbines — a defect that was discovered after one of the blades broke in 2024, scattering shards of fiberglass into the ocean. Leaving those turbine towers standing without being able to install new blades created a safety hazard, the company said.
“If construction is not completed by that date, the partially completed wind turbines will be left in an unsafe condition and Vineyard Wind will incur a series of financial consequences that it likely could not survive,” the company wrote. The Trump administration submitted a reply denying there was any risk.
The only remaining wind farm still affected by the December pause on construction is Sunrise Wind, a 924-megawatt project being developed by Orsted and set to deliver power to New York State. A hearing for an injunction on that order is scheduled for February 2.
