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On abandoning Antarctica, an EV milestone, and this week’s big earnings
Current conditions: Heavy rainfall in China has left at least 30 dead as forecasters predicts more days of downpours ahead • Severe thunderstorms are hitting the Midwest as a cold front suppresses the heat dome • The wildfires blazing across Canada are stretching into Alaska, with dozens of fires raging in the foothills of the Brooks Range.
Last year, oil giants Shell, ExxonMobil, and BP either abandoned their decarbonization goals or dialed down investments in green energy. Last week, the Financial Times also reported that the oil industry had put its effort to establish a net-zero emissions standard on pause as major companies quit the initiative. But at least one oil titan is doubling down on clean energy. On Monday, the Italian oil giant Eni said it expects its green business to rival revenues from oil and gas within a decade.
By 2035, CEO Claudio Descalzi told the FT, the operating profit “created by our new companies will balance what is coming from oil and gas, and in 2040 it will be more.” It’s a bullish bet. Earnings from Eni’s oil and gas business are still more than 10 times those from the biofuels and renewables divisions. While the company’s stock dipped by a little over 1% on Monday after the company reported its latest earnings, which beat analysts’ expectations and promised a $1.8 billion buyback, shares in Eni are up nearly 6% over the past month.
This is a big earnings week, with lots of upcoming announcements relevant for Heatmappers:
Tuesday:
Carrier
DTE Energy
Stellantis
Wednesday:
Microsoft
Meta
Rio Tinto
Hess
Entergy
Thursday:
Amazon
Shell
Southern Company
Air Products and Chemicals
TC Energy
Exelon
Xcel
Cameco
First Solar
ArcelorMittal
U.S. Steel
AES
Friday:
ExxonMobil
Chevron
Enbridge
Dominion
Brookfield Renewable Corporation
American researchers in Antarctica in 1955 set off across the ice from the icebreaker, USS Burton Island. Pictorial Parade/Archive Photos/Getty Images
In a shock to polar scientists, the National Science Foundation plans to cease operations of the United States’ only research ship capable of braving the farthest reaches of Antarctica in the Southern Ocean, the RV Nathaniel B. Palmer, Science magazine reported. Doing so would end 60 years of continuous operations of American icebreakers in Antarctica. More than 170 researchers sent a letter to the head of the NSF and Congress asking for the agency to reconsider.
The move comes amid heightened tensions on both poles as climate change brings radical changes to the planet’s ice caps. The Trump administration has taken a keen interest in the race to dominate the trade routes, military outposts, and natural resources becoming newly accessible in the Arctic, going as far as to pressure NATO ally Denmark to cede sovereignty of semi-autonomous Greenland the U.S. While the geopolitics of the uninhabited Antarctic have garnered less attention, similar dynamics are arising. China is boosting its investments in Antarctica and just opened its fifth research station. Russia has undermined attempts to inspect its bases there, which violates the Antarctica Treaty, an international agreement meant to ensure that no country can militarize the continent. China and Russia have also teamed up to tank new international protections on marine life.
The U.S. is on track to add 16,700 public fast-charging ports by the end of this year, according to InsideEVs. The effort — led by Tesla, ChargePoint, and EVgo — would represent 2.4 times the number of ports added in 2022. If the pace continues, the U.S. could have 100,000 public fast-charging ports by 2027. That’s nearing the 145,000 gas stations the U.S. operates for refueling internal combustion engine vehicles.
The milestone comes as EV sales are surging ahead of the September 30 deadline phasing out the $7,500 tax credits for electric cars Republicans set in President Donald Trump’s landmark tax law, the One Big Beautiful Bill. U.S. Even though Tesla sales dropped, U.S. EV sales overall surged 10% in the last quarter, led by GM’s new offerings.
The State of New York announced its first bulk solicitation for energy storage, putting out a bid for 3 gigawatts of batteries. The projects will be “credited and compensated based on the operational availability they achieve in each month over the course of” contracts ranging from 15 to 25 years. Governor Kathy Hochul said the bid highlighted “New York’s ongoing commitment to strengthening our grid, ensuring the state continues to have a more affordable and reliable electricity system now and well into the future.”
It’s just the latest big energy announcement from the state. Last month, Hochul ordered the New York Power Authority — the nation’s second-biggest government-owned utility after the federal Tennessee Valley Authority — to build the state’s first new nuclear power station since the 1980s. As Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin pointed out, the project mirrors the atomic ambitions of other government-owned utilities. Ontario plans to build what could be the nation’s first small modular reactors, using GE-Hitachi Nuclear Energy’s design. The TVA is slated to build the second set of those same reactors. But as I reported over the weekend for New York Focus, one of the state’s biggest utilities is lobbying Albany to consider the same kind of large-scale reactors that were just completed in Georgia, the Westinghouse AP1000.
Last month, solar panels delivered the largest share of the European Union’s electricity for the first time, narrowly eclipsing nuclear power, according to data from Ember. Yet this month, industry projections put the bloc on track for the first decline in solar growth since 2015. The EU is set to deploy 64.2 gigawatts this year, down from 65.1 gigawatts in 2024. The installations are set to help the bloc exceed the European Commission’s 2025 solar target of 400 gigawatts, bringing the total to 402 gigawatts by the end of the year.
But if the trend continues, Europe may fall roughly 4% short of its 2030 goal of 750 gigawatts of solar, installing just 723 gigawatts. That may not sound like a lot, but Dries Acke, the deputy chief executive of SolarPower Europe, said “the symbolism is big. Market decline, right when solar is meant to be accelerating, deserves EU leaders’ attention.” The industry group blamed the downturn on declines in residential solar as feed-in tariff schemes waned in Austria, Belgium, Czechia, Hungary, Italy, and the Netherlands. But corporate deals for solar power also dropped 41% between the first and second quarters of this year. Over the weekend, meanwhile, the EU signed a major trade deal with the Trump administration, promising to ramp up purchases of liquified natural gas and oil.
Scientists at the University of California at Davis used artificial intelligence to engineer proteins to boost the immune systems of plants, helping the flora fight off bacterial threats. The research, published Monday in the journal Nature Plants, opens the door to new ways of protecting crops such as tomatoes and potatoes from disease. “Bacteria are in an arms race with their plant hosts,” Gitta Coaker, the study’s lead author and a professor in the Department of Plant Pathology, said in a press release.
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The Berkeley-based startup has a chemical refining method it hopes can integrate with other existing recycling operations.
Critical minerals are essential to the world’s most powerful clean energy technologies, from batteries and electric vehicles to power lines, wind turbines, and solar panels. But the vast majority of the U.S. mineral supply comes from countries such as China, putting supply chains for a whole host of decarbonization technologies at geopolitical and economic risk.
Recycling minerals domestically would go a long way toward solving this problem, which is exactly what ChemFinity, a new startup spun out of the University of California, Berkeley, is trying to do. The company claims its critical mineral recovery system will be three times cheaper, 99% cleaner, and 10 times faster than existing approaches found in the mining and recycling industries. And it just got its first big boost of investor confidence, raising a $7 million seed round led by the climate tech firms At One Ventures and Overture Ventures.
“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 me. “We act like a black box that spits out pure metal.”
It works like this: After a customer sends ChemFinity its feedstock — anything from a circuit board to a catalytic converter to recently mined metal ore will do — the material goes into a chemical solution that dissolves the metals to be recovered, separating them from the solid feedstock. That liquid is then pumped through ChemFinity’s sorbent filters, which capture target minerals “like metal-selective Brita filters.”
The core breakthrough is a new polymer used in these filters that Uliana and his co-founder designed while PhD students in Chemical Engineering at Berkeley. The novel material is made of innumerable mineral-trapping pores smaller than the width of a hair, making it “so porous that 1 gram of the material — like a spoonful of the material — can have the same surface area internally as that of a football field,” Uliana told me. This allows the filters to capture an astonishing amount of metal using very little polymer.
Crucially, the pores are customized for each specific mineral. “You can tune the size of these pores, the shapes of these pores, the chemistries of these pores, and it basically acts like a cage, or like an atomic catcher’s mitt, just for that individual metal,” Uliana explained. After that atomic mitt traps the minerals, a proprietary liquid solution flows through the mineral-filled polymer, stripping off the minerals so that they can be recovered. The company can then reuse the porous sorbent without performance loss.
Uliana told me this method is orders of magnitude more efficient than what exists on the market today — even when compared to the most successful and innovative startups in the space such as Redwood Materials, which recycles lithium-ion battery minerals. That’s because refining typically requires more than a dozen steps and extremely high temperatures, as systems remove impurities one by one, gradually concentrating a mineral until it’s pure enough for commercial viability.
ChemFinity’s process, on the other hand, operates at room temperature. And because its filter is so selective, there are far fewer steps overall. “If we’re able to successfully scale this, it’s really unprecedented unit economics,” Uliana said. He sees potential for other companies like Redwood to adopt the startup’s refining technology as part of a larger operation.
But that’s a ways down the road. ChemFinity isn’t prioritizing battery recycling to begin with, instead focusing on recovering and refining precious metals such as gold, silver, and platinum. These minerals are all over the e-waste from consumer electronics —- things like circuit boards, connectors, memory chips, capacitors, and switches all contain precious metals.
They’re a good group of minerals to go to market with, Uliana explained, both because they’re expensive and difficult to purify. “These metals have extremely high value. So you don’t necessarily need to be quite as large-scale as if you were recovering copper from a copper tailing,” he told me. The flip side, though, is “that these are some of the hardest minerals to separate.” So if ChemFinity proves capable of refining these at scale, it will be a pivotal proof point as the startup looks to apply its process to more than 20 critical minerals across the periodic table.
With this first influx of funding, the company is looking to scale production of its novel sorbent material from a few kilograms to about 100 kilograms per day as it sets up initial pilots. And while ChemFinity’s first customers could range from manufacturers of clean tech to metal traders and jewelers, the company says its materials breakthrough could have applications in an even wider array of sectors, from wastewater treatment to carbon capture and petrochemical processing.
Because if ChemFinity has, as Uliana told me, truly created the “that perfect cage, just for one mineral at a time,” there really is a world of opportunity out there.
On GOP lockstep on renewables, a wind win, and EPA’s battery bashing
Current conditions: Hurricane Erin’s winds strengthen to 160 miles per hour as the Category 4 storm barrels toward the U.S. East Coast • Temperatures have dropped 20 degrees Fahrenheit in the U.S. Northeast as cooler air and storms sweep in • The death toll in Spain’s wildfires rises to four as the country calls in the military to deal with blazes.
Secretary of Energy Chris Wright.Alex Wong/Getty Images
President Donald Trump campaigned last year on slashing electricity rates by as much as half. His administration is now bracing for political blowback from the opposite effect — surging electricity rates as data centers drive up demand for an already limited supply, all while Congress and federal agencies curb development of the fastest-to-deploy solar and wind facilities. “The momentum of the Obama-Biden policies, for sure that destruction is going to continue in the coming years,” Wright told Politico during a visit to wind- and corn-rich Iowa. Yet, he added: “That momentum is pushing prices up right now. And who’s going to get blamed for it? We're going to get blamed because we're in office.”
Rising electricity prices are already emerging as a political issue ahead of upcoming elections, including in the New Jersey’s governor race, where rates soared by 20% in June. According to an Energy Innovation analysis of the effects of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act passed by Republicans and signed by Trump, wholesale electricity prices could rise by as much as 74% by 2035 as a result of the law.
The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has ruled that the utilities whose coal and gas-fired power stations are subject to Trump’s order to keep fossil fuel plants open could recoup the cost from ratepayers. The commission couched its decisions — which approved pathways for recovering costs from ratepayers, but did not yet greenlight rate hikes — largely on bureaucratic legal grounds, arguing that it’s “reasonable” to pass the costs along to households and businesses in the places where the electricity is used.
The ruling concerned two separate cases, and the panel’s decision diverged somewhat between them. In a case involving the PJM Interconnection, FERC gave permission to spread the costs around the nation’s largest grid system. In another involving the Midcontinent Independent Systems Operator, the regulator approved concentrating the cost recovery around Michigan, where the coal in question is located. FERC rejected questions about easing the cost to consumers with rebates as “beyond the scope” of the narrow proceedings. As a next step, the utilities that operate the plants will still need to come back to FERC for permission to hike rates on the grounds the two rulings set out.
It could have been worse. The Treasury guidance issued Friday dictating what wind and solar projects will be eligible for federal tax credits could have effectively banned developers from tapping the write-offs set to start phasing out next July. In the weeks before the Internal Revenue Service released its rules, GOP lawmakers from states with thriving wind and solar industries, including Senators John Curtis of Utah and Chuck Grassley of Iowa, publicly lobbied for laxer rules as part of what they pitched as the all-of-the-above “energy dominance” strategy on which Trump campaigned. Grassley went so far as to block two of Trump’s Treasury nominees “until I can be certain that such rules and regulations adhere to the law and congressional intent,” as Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin covered earlier in August.
Since the guidance came out on Friday, both Grassley and Curtis have put out positive statements backing the plan. “I appreciate the work of Secretary [Scott] Bessent and his staff in balancing various concerns and perspectives to address the President’s executive order on wind and solar projects,” Curtis said, according to E&E News. Calling renewables “an essential part of the ‘all of the above’ energy equation,” Grassley’s statement said the guidance “seems to offer a viable path forward for the wind and solar industries to continue to meet increased energy demand” and “reflects some of the concerns Congress and industry leaders have raised.”
Danish wind turbine manufacturer Vestas secured one of its largest orders ever — 950 megawatts of turbines — despite the Trump administration’s aggressive pushback against wind projects in the U.S. The backers of the new development, described as a tech giant, haven’t yet been revealed, according to the news site The Danish Dream. But the company’s stock soared on Monday after Treasury’s guidance proved less punitive than some had anticipated. Just last week, Vestas finance chief Jakob Wegge-Larsen told the trade publication Recharge that demand from data centers would buoy the wind industry despite the political headwinds.
Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin returned to his native Long Island Monday to hold a press conference with opponents of battery energy storage systems who object to the clean energy technology on safety grounds. In a press release, the agency said battery fires “have raised legitimate safety concerns from communities nationwide, especially in metropolitan areas.” New York has relatively little battery capacity compared to states with more wind and solar generation, and just last month put out its first bulk order for energy storage. But Zeldin accused the state of promoting batteries as a “partisan push to fill yet another delusional ‘green goal’” and putting “the safety and well-being of New Yorkers second to their climate change agenda,” and complained that New York had “banned the safe extraction of natural gas.”
In January, a large battery fire ignited at the battery facility of the Moss Landing Power Plant in Monterrey, California, spreading to roughly 100,000 lithium-ion modules at the station. The accident and resulting pollution fallout from the fire has since spurred a nationwide backlash to batteries, as my colleague Jael Holzman has written. Zeldin on Monday also touted new EPA safety guidance for grid-scale batteries, calling on developers to put in place “clear and comprehensive incident response plans.”
The United Kingdom’s famously overcast skies aren’t keeping the country from hitting new solar power milestones. Solar power generation in Britain so far this year surpassed the total for 2024 as panel installations have continued to grow this year. The country has produced more than 14 terawatt-hours of electricity from solar this year as of August 16, about one-third higher than this point last year, according to a Financial Times analysis of University of Sheffield data. That’s enough to power 5.1 million homes for a year, or the entire London Underground for more than a decade.
Same goes for the Midwest, according to Stanford air quality researcher Marshall Burke.
It’s not just you: Summers are getting smokier.
For the third year in a row, cities like Detroit, Minneapolis, Boston, and New York are experiencing dangerously polluted air for days at a time as smoke drifts into the U.S. from wildfires in Canada.
Smoke has traveled to these places in the past, Stanford University researcher Marshall Burke told me. But the data is clear that the haze is becoming more severe.
“The worst days are worse,” said Burke, “and you can see that in the averages, the last couple of years are much, much higher across the Midwest and the East Coast than we’ve observed in the past many decades.”
Burke is one of the leading scholars studying wildfire smoke, investigating everything from its effect on air quality, public health, and behavior, to preventative and adaptive public policy responses. In one of his most recent papers, which has not yet been peer reviewed, he and his co-authors analyzed the influence of smoke on air quality over the past two decades, using satellite imagery of smoke plumes to disentangle how much of the fine particulate matter, or PM2.5, measured by air monitoring stations came from fires versus more typical sources like cars and furnaces.
The study shows a sharp increase in the amount of smoke in the air around the U.S. in just the past few years. From 2020 to 2023, the average American breathed in concentrations of smoke-related PM2.5 that were between 2.6 and 6.7 times higher than the 2006 to 2019 average.
The paper also contains a stunning set of charts that show that wildfires are eroding decades of air quality gains — and the efficacy of air quality regulation in general — and that without these smoke events, PM2.5 levels would have been significantly lower.
Courtesy of Marshall Burke
I caught up with Burke to better understand what we know about this seemingly sudden escalation of smoke events, and what we can do to better protect ourselves from them moving forward. Our conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.
Given the smoke events we’ve seen in the last three years, can we say anything about the next three years?
I don’t think you want to make bets on any specific years. The long run trend, unfortunately, suggests that the last few years are going to be more representative than the sorts of years we got 10 to 15 to 20 years ago. And that is due to the underlying physical climate that’s warming and drying out fuels and making fire spread faster and fires much larger. Larger fires generate more smoke.
Has it all been driven by Canadian wildfires?
No. The East Coast and the Midwest will get exposure from fires as far as California, often in the Northern Rockies. But the recent very bad exposure — 2023 was by far the worst year in the Midwest and East Coast — that was nearly all from Canadian fires. This year, again, it’s nearly all from Canadian fires.
Why is that?
The reason we’ve seen a lot more Canadian fires is the same reason we’ve seen a lot more fires in the U.S. West — increasing fuel aridity. As temperatures warm, forests dry out. And so when you get lightning strikes, which tend to start most of the large fires in Canada, you get faster fire spread and much larger fires.
Interestingly, we’ve seen in Canada fewer total fires over time. Often I see people posting this on Twitter — Climate change is not a problem, we’re getting fewer fires in Canada — and that’s true. I think they’ve reduced other sources of ignitions. But you still get lightning ignitions.
Burned area has gone the other way — you’ve seen an increase in burned area. So, fewer fires, but much larger fires, and these larger fires are the ones that put out a lot more smoke, and the smoke gets pushed into population centers in Canada and into the U.S.
There were really large wildfires in California before 2023. Why weren’t places on the East Coast having smoky days as a result of those?
It’s the way the wind blows and how far it has to go. In the large 2020 and 2021 fire seasons we had in the U.S. West, some of that smoke certainly was making it to the East Coast, but given the prevailing wind patterns and the distance the smoke had to travel, the influence of those fires on air quality was not as big as the recent Canadian fires.
Are there other events that cause comparable air quality degradation to wildfires?
You can get really specific things — if a train crashes and lights on fire and a given town is exposed to really high levels of whatever pollutant for a few days. Sometimes you can get dust events that have broad scale exposure. But basically never do you reach the AQI levels that we see in wildfires. Wildfires are pretty unique in their ability to expose very large numbers of people to a very high level of pollutants for days, or unfortunately now, weeks, at a time. Nothing else compares in the U.S.
If you go to other parts of the world where you have large anthropogenic sources — Indian cities, Chinese cities — it can be quite different. There’s some exceptions. Salt Lake City and places where you get inversions and you get pollution trapped for many days, you can get pretty high levels of exposure, but typically nowhere close to what you get during these acute wildfire events.
When the AQI goes back down to levels that are more common in a city after a smoke event and people feel safer going outside, are you able to measure how much of the PM2.5 remaining in the air is from a wildfire? Does it matter?
We try to measure that directly — on any given day, how much of the PM that you’re experiencing is from wildfires versus from other sources. What you see is these events can turn on really quickly, and they can also turn off really quickly, either because the wind direction changes or because it rains — if it rains, you rain out a lot of these pollutants, and then you’re breathing mostly clean air right away.
We also try to measure, how does human health respond? One thing that science doesn’t give us a crisp answer to yet is, is one day of 100 micrograms better or worse than 10 days of 10 micrograms of exposure? We don’t actually really know. What we do see is people respond very differently to those two scenarios in ways that likely affect health outcomes. On really bad days, people tend to stay inside. In California, total emergency department visits go down instead of up, and that’s because people are not getting in their cars, they’re not getting in car accidents, they’re not spraining their ankle playing football or whatever because they’re staying at home.
On lower smoke days, we see emergency department visits go up. That’s probably because people are not changing their behavior. But, maybe surprisingly, we still don’t have a crisp answer if you’re thinking about asthma or mortality or other cardiovascular outcomes.
What are some of the other questions researchers are trying to answer as this becomes more of a national issue?
All sorts of things. The immediate health impacts that you think about — respiratory outcomes have been the one that’s been measured best in a lot of different settings. Cardiovascular outcomes, I would say the evidence is surprisingly more mixed on that. There’s a long-standing literature that shows cardiovascular mortality impacts of exposure to PM, but for wildfire PM, specifically, that evidence is less clear. Sorting that out and trying to understand whether there are differences is important.
Cognitive outcomes — does it increase your risk of dementia? Does student learning go down? Does it reduce cognitive performance at work? I think there’s emerging evidence that smoke is pretty important. Exposure to air pollution, more broadly, is important, but wildfire smoke, specifically, can impact these outcomes.
Birth outcomes is another one we and others have looked at. You see a pretty clear signature of wildfire smoke in birth outcomes — increases to the risk of pre-term birth, for instance. We used to just think about sensitive populations as elderly populations or people with pre-existing conditions. And basically what the research is showing is, no, actually, everyone is sensitive in some way. The list of people who are likely affected probably includes most, if not all of us.
What are the potential policy responses to this in places that haven’t had to deal with it in the past?
I think there’s three policy buckets. This is more true in the U.S. than Canada, but our fire problem is a combination of a warming climate and a century of fire suppression that has left abundant fuel in our landscapes, so number one is dealing with climate change as best we can, and two is doing something about the accumulated fuel loads. There’s a lot we can do there — prescribed burning is one approach that we and others are studying a lot; mechanical thinning, where you go out and actually remove the fuel. Understanding when and where to do that and what the benefits are is an ongoing scientific challenge, but I think most of the evidence would suggest we’re going to need a lot more of that than we’ve done, historically.
But even if we do a lot of that, we’re going to get more of these smoke events, unfortunately. And so we need to protect ourselves when these events happen. Indoor air filtration works really well, so we need to make sure people have access to filters of various types. The evidence would suggest that we see health impacts even at pretty low levels of exposure, and so if you have a portable filter — I drive my family crazy, I’m turning ours on all the time. You should basically just be running them all the time.
What about in terms of messaging? I’m thinking about city officials or state officials, when a smoke event is coming — and maybe this is still an active area of research — but what’s the current thinking on what message to send to people?
Yeah, I think it is an ongoing area, in terms of exactly how to do this and who to target with the information. The way we typically do this is to set these thresholds, right? So, above some threshold, you get a notice, and below, you don’t. That is understandable.
But what we see in the data is that there’s not some level below which you’re fine and above which you’re screwed. What we see is the more smoke you’re exposed to, the worse off you are, and so our goal should just be to reduce our exposure as best we can. How to message that effectively is not something we have a crisp social scientific answer to yet.
A lot of the advice has historically been that you should stay at home with your windows and doors closed. In California homes that is not very protective because California homes tend to be not very tight. In my view, just telling people to close their windows and doors is not sufficient for protecting health. They need some sort of active filtration — portable air filter, central air — to do that.
The other thing that’s happened in California, and I’ve seen this with my own kids — should we cancel school on really bad days? The assumption is that kids are better protected at home than they would be in the school environment, and that’s just not obviously true. It could be the case that for many kids, schools are better. We don’t know, because we do not have comprehensive measurement of indoor air quality, and this is a huge failing that we need to fix. Just as we measure it pretty comprehensively outside, we’ve got to do the same thing inside, and we just haven’t done this.