Climate
AM Briefing: Trump Brings In the Lumberjacks
On Alaska’s permitting overhaul, HALEU winners, and Heatmap’s Climate 101
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On Alaska’s permitting overhaul, HALEU winners, and Heatmap’s Climate 101
These are the 10 most important clean energy transition projects struggling to get off the ground
On a second nuclear revival, a new fusion startup, and Africa’s solar boom
On Trump’s latest wind target, new critical minerals, and methane maps
On $20 billion in lost projects, Alligator Alcatraz’s closure, and Amazon state’s rally
Is there going to be a flight out of Nevada?
On copper chaos, a solar surge, and transformer hopes
Current conditions: Hurricane Erin is generating waves up to 6 feet high in North Carolina as the storm brings dangerous riptides up the East Coast • Heavy rainfall is causing deadly landslides and flooding in Senegal • Isesaki, northwest of Tokyo, is sweltering in temperatures above 100 degrees Fahrenheit as a heat wave that already broke records this month persists.
Mikie Sherrill, the Democratic nominee for governor in New Jersey, pledged Wednesday to build a new nuclear plant near the Delaware border in Salem County. At a press conference, the sitting U.S. Representative vowed to “massively expand cheaper, cleaner power generation” and build “an energy arsenal in our state.” That could mean building one or more Westinghouse AP1000s, the gigawatt-sized old-fashioned reactor for which the local utility giant, PSEG, already has early site permits from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. “I’m going to immediately develop a plan for a new nuclear power site in Salem County,” Sherrill said at a rain-soaked press conference in Kenilworth, a suburb on the north end of the state outside New York City. “It demands urgency.”
The proposal will face challenges. The U.S. hasn’t built any new commercial nuclear plants in states where the grid is managed by regional transmission organizations that formed following a deregulation push in the 1990s that broke up traditional electrical monopolies. New York Governor Kathy Hochul announced plans in June to build her state’s first new nuclear plant since the 1980s, but has a tool New Jersey lacks: the New York Power Authority, the nation’s second-largest government-controlled utility after the federal Tennessee Valley Authority. In that sense, as Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin wrote, New York’s plan mirrors the TVA’s own nuclear ambitions. Even if Sherrill finds a surprise fix to finance a new nuclear plant, she said she expects to face difficulties just dealing with the PJM Interconnection, the nation’s largest power system, of which New Jersey is a part. If elected, she said she will “instruct our attorney general to take on our grid operator.”
The chief executives of mining behemoths Rio Tinto and BHP met with President Donald Trump to push for a long-stalled joint copper mine. In a post on LinkedIn, Rio Tinto CEO Jakob Stausholm said he “highlighted the opportunity at the Resolution Copper project in Arizona” and cheered “BHP’s CEO Mike Henry as we outlined the enormous potential of this project to provide domestic copper and other critical minerals for decades to come.”
The project has faced recent troubles. On Monday, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals issued a temporary restraining order to prevent a transfer of land to the mining giants as the court considered challenges brought by opponents including the San Carlos Apache Tribe, which wants to block the mine on religious, cultural and environmental grounds. (Here’s Heatmap’s Jeva Lange with a deep dive on the fight’s long history.) Following the meeting with executives on Tuesday, Trump posted on Truth Social: “It is so sad that Radical Left Activists can do this, and affect the lives of so many people. Those that fought it are Anti-American, and representing other Copper competitive Countries.”
Solar power, in dark blue, dominates new generating capacity in the U.S. this year. EIA
Developers added 12 gigawatts of new utility-scale solar power capacity in the U.S. in the first half of 2025, and plan to add another 21 gigawatts by December. If that all comes to fruition, more than half of all the 64 gigawatts of new power slated to come online in the U.S. this year will be solar. That’s according to a new analysis of survey data the U.S. Energy Information Administration released on Wednesday. Battery storage, wind, and natural gas plants account for virtually all the other half. Assuming developers follow through, it will be the largest amount of new capacity added since 2002, when developers completed 58 gigawatts of new power plants, 57 gigawatts of which were fueled by natural gas.
Solar growth almost mirrors that of natural gas in the early 2000s. EIA
In China, the world’s largest annual emitter, the growth of solar reduced planet-heating pollution from the power sector during the first half of this year. While China’s overall carbon output dropped 1%, emissions from the electricity generation — the country’s largest single source of planet-heating gases — plunged by 3% as solar panels met new demand, according to analysis published Thursday morning by Carbon Brief.
Not to be outdone by a Garden State politician’s energy ambitions, New York announced a new pot of funding Wednesday for low-carbon fuels. In a press release, the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority made nearly $8 million available to “support innovation in the development of low-carbon fuels,” including a program to convert sewage, agricultural waste and other garbage into energy. “Early-stage innovation is a valuable tool that benefits all New Yorkers by accelerating the adoption of technologies that ultimately help to lower emissions from hard-to-electrify sectors such as aviation, maritime and heavy-duty industrial processes,” NYSERDA CEO Doreen Harris said in a statement. Proposals are due by January 22, 2026, and projects will move forward in three phases, from site selection to engineering design and construction.
This follows a series of other New York moves to step up its energy investment, including laying out plans for its new nuclear plant in June and putting out its first bulk order for energy storage last month.
Power equipment giant Hitachi Energy is investing $106 million into building North America’s biggest factory to manufacture a key component in electrical transformers. The U.S. has for years now faced a shortage of both power and distribution transformers, the equipment that modifies the voltage of electrons traveling from generating stations to the outlets in your wall. The problem is only getting worse. Manufacturers have struggled to keep up with surging demand from replacements of aging equipment and new additions as the grid expands — which, as my colleague Robinson Meyer explained yesterday, is a factor pushing up electricity prices well beyond the pace of inflation.
The problem has bipartisan origins. The Biden administration pushed to increase the efficiency of new transformers, forcing manufacturers to decide between ramping up production of existing models or preparing assembly lines to meet new standards. While the Biden-era Department of Energy backed off its plans, the Trump administration slapped new tariffs on steel and other imports needed to make transformers, and sowed new chaos for factory owners calibrating the right amount of demand to the shifting requirements of federal energy policy since the passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
When Trump made an historic investment into the nation’s only active rare earths producer, MP Materials, his Department of Defense set a price floor of $110 per kilogram meant to spur more U.S. production of the metals needed for modern weapons and clean-energy technology. But in its deal to buy the critical minerals company ReElement Technologies on Wednesday, Vulcan Elements, a North Carolina-based rare earth magnet manufacturer, said it could generate the metals at a price “significantly below” what the Pentagon promised to pay MP Materials. “This pricing will enable Vulcan to be competitive in global markets,” Vulcan CEO John Maslin told Reuters. “We wanted to make sure the unit economics made sense.”
On COP30 jitters, a coal mega-merger gone bust, and NYC airport workers get heated
Current conditions: Hurricane Erin is lashing Virginia Beach with winds up to 80 miles per hour, the Mid-Atlantic with light rain, and New York City with deadly riptides • Europe’s wildfires have now burned more land than any blazes in two decades • Catastrophic floods have killed more than 300 in Pakistan and at least 50 in Indian-administered Kashmir.
Offshore oil rigs in California. Mario Tama/Getty Images
Two weeks after de-designating millions of acres of federal waters to offshore wind development, the Trump administration Tuesday set a new schedule for auctions of oil-and-gas leases in the Gulf of Mexico and Alaska’s Cook Inlet, stretching all the way out to 2040. In a press release, Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum cited the recently passed One Big Beautiful Bill Act as a “landmark step toward unleashing America’s energy potential” by “putting in place a bold, long-term program that strengthens American Energy Dominance, creates good-paying jobs and ensure we continue to responsibly develop our offshore resources.”
The lease plan may violate federal law, however, as the administration has not conducted environmental analyses or held public hearings before putting the auctions on the calendar. “There’s no world in which we will allow the Trump Administration to hold dozens of oil sales in public waters, putting Americans, wildlife, and the planet in harm’s way, without abiding by the law,” Brettny Hardy, an oceans attorney at the environmental group Earthjustice, said in a statement. “Even with its passage of the worst environmental bill in U.S. history, the Republican-led Congress did not exempt these offshore oil sales from needing to comply with our nation’s environmental statutes.”
In an open letter published Tuesday, André Corrêa do Lago, the veteran Brazilian diplomat leading the next United Nations climate summit, warned that “geopolitical and economic obstacles are raising new challenges to international cooperation — including under the climate regime.” The letter comes after UN-sponsored talks over a plastics treaty collapsed last week, with the U.S. joining fellow oil producers Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Iran in standing athwart more than 100 other countries that supported a deal to curb production of new disposable plastics.
The climate summit, known as COP30, is set to take place in the Brazilian Amazon city of Belém in November. It will be the first global climate confab since President Donald Trump returned to office and, on his first day back in the White House, kicked off the process to withdraw the U.S. from the 2015 Paris climate deal.
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Peabody Energy backed out of its $3.8 billion agreement to buy Anglo American’s coal mines following the unexpected closure of the deal’s flagship mine. On Tuesday, the largest U.S. coal producer said that an explosion last March at Anglo America’s Moranbah North mine in Australia resulted in a “material adverse change” to its deal. The move dealt a major blow to London-based Anglo American, which had planned to use the sale as part of a broader restructuring to fend off a hostile takeover attempt by rival BHP. Anglo American CEO Duncan Wanblad said he was “very disappointed,” according to the Financial Times, and the company said it would “seek damages for the wrongful termination.”
The deal comes amid a global comeback for the main fuel blamed for climate change. As my colleague Matthew Zeitlin wrote last month, “the evidence for coal’s stubborn persistence globally has been mounting for years. In 2021, the International Energy Agency forecast that by 2024, annual coal demand would hit an all-time high of just over 8,000 megatons. In 2024, it reported that coal demand in 2023 was already at 8,690 megatons, a new record; it also pushed out its prediction for a demand plateau to 2027, at which point it predicted annual demand would be 8,870 megatons.”
The California startup ChemFinity got a big boost on Tuesday, raising $7 million in a funding round led by At One Ventures and Overton Ventures. The company, spun out from the University of California, Berkeley, claims its critical mineral recovery system will be three times cheaper, 99% cleaner and 10 times faster than existing approaches currently found in the mining and recycling industries. “We basically act like a black box where recyclers or scrap yards or even other refiners can send their feedstock to us,” Adam Uliana, ChemFinity’s co-founder and CEO, told Heatmap’s Katie Brigham. “We act like a black box that spits out pure metal.”
At a time when record heat is regularly halting flights on sweltering tarmacs, service workers at New York City’s LaGuardia and John F. Kennedy airports are slated to protest on Wednesday to demand new workplace protections from extreme heat. The workers, many of whom handle cargo and ramp services for major airlines, said in a press release that extreme heat and lack of access to water, rest breaks, and proper training threatened more incidents of heat illness. One worker claimed to have recently lost consciousness inside the cargo hold of a plane due to heat. The members of chapter 32BJ of the Service Employees International Union will be joined by State Assemblymembers Steven Raga and Catalina Cruz in their demonstration, which is scheduled to begin at 10 a.m. near LaGuardia’s Old Marine Terminal.
I swear by the shvitz. My great grandfather, after whom I’m named, went to the same Russian bathhouse in Manhattan that my cousin, brother, and I visit regularly to enjoy the sauna and cold plunge. Turns out amphibians feel the same. A researcher at Macquarie University in Sydney found that frogs could fight off the deadly chytrid fungal infection plaguing the green and golden bell frog by sitting in “frog saunas.” Spending a few hours a day in warm enclosures that reach temperatures higher than 83 degrees Fahrenheit for a week or less is all that’s needed to kill off the fungus.