California Rejects Phase-Out Plan for Gas Heaters

Current conditions: Tropical Storm Barbara is strengthening off the Pacific coast of Mexico and could become the first hurricane of the season • Smoke from wildfires in Canada’s Manitoba province brought orange skies to the United Kingdom • Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania is recovering after heavy rains brought flash flooding over the weekend.

THE TOP FIVE

1. Southern California officials reject gas phase-out

Facing the threat of legal challenges from the Trump administration, California’s South Coast Air Quality Management District, a regional agency that regulates pollution, voted on Friday to reject proposed rules to reduce sales of gas-fired furnaces and water heaters. The rules would have required manufacturers to gradually increase the proportion of zero-emissions appliances like heat pumps that they sell to 90% by 2036, and put surcharges on gas equipment. The standard took two years to draft and bring to a vote but was fiercely attacked by the gas lobby, which labeled it a “gas ban.”

2. Trump gives go-ahead to expand coal mine

The Department of the Interior approved the expansion of the Bull Mountains coal mine in Montana on Friday, cutting short its environmental review process and allowing the mine to operate for nine more years. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum cited Trump’s energy emergency declaration, saying that it “is allowing us to act decisively, cut bureaucratic delays and secure America’s future through energy independence and strategic exports.” The mine exports its coal to Japan and South Korea. My colleague Jael Holzman has covered the administration’s efforts to speed mining approvals, including for projects that may not be economically viable.

3. Westinghouse plans nuclear expansion

Trump signs executive orders related to nuclear in May.in McNamee/Getty Images

In an interview published Sunday, Dan Sumner, the CEO of Westinghouse, told the Financial Times that the company is talking to the Trump administration about building 10 new AP1000 nuclear reactors. The news follows an executive order Trump issued in May setting a goal of starting construction on 10 such large, conventional reactors in the next five years. The last AP1000 built in the U.S., at the Vogtle Electric Generating Plant in Georgia, took 15 years to complete. As my colleagues Matthew Zeitlin and Katie Brigham explained in a recent piece, however, between the complex licensing process and an underdeveloped workforce and supply chain, it will be tough to speed things up.

4. Third UN Ocean Summit meets in France

The third United Nations ocean conference kicks off today in Nice, in the South of France, and the U.S. is not in attendance. Delegates, scientists, and environmental advocates from around the world are gathering to advance global cooperation to protect the ocean from global warming, plastic pollution, and overfishing. During a pre-conference event on Sunday, French prime minister Emmanual Macron called for global moratorium on deep-sea mining, and said 30 countries were ready to commit to it. “I want us to reach an agreement for the entire planet,” he said. “It’s completely crazy to go and exploit, to go and drill in a place we don’t know. It’s frenzied madness.”

5. Senate moves to end fuel economy standards

A raft of provisions for Trump’s budget bill put out by the Senate Commerce Committee last week included a rollback of the Corporate Average Fuel Economy Standards. The proposal would eviscerate “one of the federal government’s longest-running programs to manage gasoline prices and air pollution,” writes Heatmap’s Robinson Meyer, by setting all fines levied on noncompliant automakers under the program to zero dollars. But Ann Carlson, a UCLA law professor who led the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration from 2022 to 2023, told Robinson that she doubted the change would make it through the Senate’s strict rules that enable it to pass the budget with a simple majority.

THE KICKER

Senators Bill Cassidy, Shelley Moore Capito, and Susan Collins are among the more than four dozen members of Congress who have stayed at a Lake Como villa owned by the Rockefeller Foundation to talk climate change and energy policy — on the nonprofit Aspen Institute’s dime, reports NOTUS.