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What parliamentary elections in France and the U.K. mean for everyone else.
While America has been distracted by its suddenly-very-real upcoming election, two other important political stories have been unfolding across the pond. The results of last week’s parliamentary votes in France and the United Kingdom have the power to sway global climate policy — and they might even contain lessons for the U.S. about the rise (or fall) of the far-right.
In June, French President Emmanuel Macron called snap elections, and the far-right National Rally party led by Marine Le Pen was widely expected to achieve a majority in the country’s 577-seat National Assembly. Instead, the New Popular Front, a hastily-formed alliance between the hard left, Greens, and Socialists, came out on top in a runoff, followed by the centrist Ensemble (which includes Macron’s Renaissance party) and the National Rally in a distant third. Because no party won the 289 seats needed to gain control of the chamber, the left and center now have to form a coalition government, which means ideological compromise — something that’s distinctly un-French. “We're not the Germans, we're not the Spanish, we're not the Italians — we don't do coalitions,” one French political commentator toldSky News.
Climate change wasn’t a big theme, but the National Rally’s proposals certainly had experts nervous. The party tapped into simmering discontent among some demographics — farmers, in particular — who feel unfairly burdened by new regulations in service of the European Union’s ambitious agenda, known as the Green Deal, including a goal to cut the bloc’s net greenhouse gas emissions by at least 55% by 2030 and reach net zero by 2050. If it had won, the party planned to dismantle France’s energy efficiency rules, roll back a 2035 ban on new gas-powered cars, block new wind farms, do away with low-emission zones, and transform electricity trade. France is already the EU’s third biggest emitter, and the EU as a whole is responsible for about 9% of global CO2 emissions, although emissions have been falling, especially in the energy sector.
As the dust settles in France, the biggest danger to climate policy now is stalemate. The lackluster results for the far right are no doubt a relief to the climate conscious. “We have avoided a catastrophe,” Alain Fischer, president of the French Academy of Sciences in Paris, toldNature. The winning NFP, for its part, backs the Green Deal’s emissions targets and wants France to become “the European leader in renewable energies” through offshore wind power and the development of hydroelectric power. It also calls for the “creation of an international court for climate and environmental justice.” But the next several months are likely to be chaotic as the parties tussle over what the government should look like, and there is no deadline for these decisions to be made. The leadership limbo could bring political paralysis at a time when the EU is just getting its bearings following bloc-wide parliamentary elections — which, by the way, saw the Greens lose seats in lots of places. In response, the non-profit Climate Group put out a statement calling for the French government to “commit to safeguarding the EU Green Deal and ensuring a sustainable future for the continent.” The good news is that a large majority of EU voters want to see more climate action.
The Labour Party won the general election in a landslide, bringing an end to 14 years of Conservative Party rule. During his tenure, former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak watered down key net-zero strategies, delayed a ban on new combustion engine vehicles, scrapped energy efficiency standards, and approved a large new oil field in the North Sea. His party also pulled low-emission zones into the culture wars in a desperate attempt to win over voters. None of this played to his advantage. According to Desmog, two-thirds of the Conservative members of Parliament who were anti-net zero lost their seats, including the former energy secretary. “With a clear mandate for climate action,” wrote climate change think tank E3G, “all eyes are now on Labour to deliver.”
New Prime Minister Keir Starmer has pledged to turn the U.K. into a “clean energy superpower” by doubling onshore wind, tripling solar power, and quadrupling offshore wind by 2030. He also plans to upgrade the grid to speed the rollout of clean energy projects, while at the same time denying new licenses for oil and gas exploration in the North Sea. He wants to establish a publicly owned clean energy firm and decarbonize the power sector by 2030. And he plans to reinstate the 2030 ban on new gas cars. The goals are lofty, and meeting them will “extensive change across every sector of the economy,” wrote Carbon Brief. But Labour seems to be wasting little time. Days after taking power, the new government scrapped a ban on onshore wind farms that had been in place since 2015 and which the new Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves called “absurd.”
The U.K. accounts for about 1% of global greenhouse gas emissions. That might be paltry compared to, say, the U.S. (13.5%) or China (32%), but it has a chance now to use its global influence and proximity to Europe to keep the needle moving in the right direction. That goes especially if it is nudged by the Green party, which surprised everyone by quadrupling its number of seats in Parliament (albeit to just four). As The New York Timesnoted, Britain is where the industrial revolution began, so “the speed and scale of Britain’s energy transition is likely to be closely watched by other industrialized countries and emerging economies alike.”
What’s clear from both of these cases is that people really care about climate policy and are willing to vote with that in mind. That can swing either way, though, depending on the particular set of policies and how they affect the electorate. As extreme weather intensifies, however, it may become more difficult for far-right parties to minimize the significance of climate change. “We need to recognize that extreme weather is politicizing people against this climate denial,” said Paul Dickinson, founder of CDP, an emissions disclosure platform, and co-host of the podcast Outrage + Optimism. “It is the Achilles heel of the extreme right that they’re opposed to the realities of extreme weather. That’s how I think if we’re organized and disciplined, we will defeat them.”
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Microsoft is canceling data center leases, according to a Wall Street analyst.
The artificial intelligence industry is experiencing another TD Cowen shock.
The whole spectrum of companies connected to artificial intelligence — the companies that design the chips, that supply the power, that make the generation equipment — shuddered Wednesday when the brokerage released another note from analysts pointing to evidence that Microsoft was giving up on its data center leases.
“Microsoft has both (1) walked away from +2GW of capacity in both the U.S. and Europe in the last six months that was in process to be leased, and (2) has both deferred and canceled existing data center leases in both the U.S. and Europe in the last month,” the analysts wrote.
Microsoft is one of the biggest players in the artificial intelligence industry, with its near-$14 billion investment in OpenAI and acommitment to spend $80 billion on data center capacity this year.
The company is pulling back, the TD Cowen analysts said, because it had decided not to support incremental increases in training workloads for OpenAI models. Shares in Nvidia, the chip designer that’s become one of the most valuable companies in the world on the back of optimism about artificial intelligence, are down 7% since market close Tuesday, while shares in the power companies Vistra and Constellation are down 9% and 7% respectively. GE Vernova, which makes turbines for gas-fired power plants, is down 9%.
Much of the power industry saw huge increases in their stock prices in 2024, as investors bet on increased demand for electricity from data centers, manufacturing, and electrification. But 2025 so far has been a year of mild expectations.
In February, Cowen analysts issued a similar note warning that Microsoft was pulling back on some of its data center leases. And in January, of course, many of the AI and energy stocks that had been soaring 2024dropped when the Chinese artificial intelligence company DeepSeek released an open source model comparable in performance to the state of the art in the United States but that required far less computing power to train.
The Cowen analysts were hardly doomy about AI and data center construction, writing that Google and Meta may be “backfilling” the capacity left behind by Microsoft as they seek to expand their own data center footprints.
But the case for across the board optimism may be slightly dimming across the sector. CoreWeave, which buys Nvidia chips and operates data centers, has had to reduce the amount of money its seeking to raise in its planned initial public offering to $1.5 billion, from the over $4 billion it was looking to get from investors earlier in the IPO process, Bloomberg reported. Nvidia, an investor in CoreWeave and its most important supplier, will be “anchoring” the IPO, kicking in $250 million.
The tax agency reopened its online portal to allow dealerships to register sales retroactively.
As recently as last month, some electric vehicle buyers were running into roadblocks when they tried to claim the EV tax credit on their 2024 returns. Their claims were rejected, it turned out, because the dealership where they bought their EV never registered the sale with the Internal Revenue Service.
On Wednesday, the IRS instituted a fix: It reopened the online portal for dealerships to report these sales retroactively.
The confusion all started with a major change the IRS made to the EV tax credit program last year. Previously, all dealers had to do was give the buyer a “time of sale” report that they could submit to the IRS come tax season. But as of 2024, dealerships were expected to register every EV sale that was eligible for the tax credit through this new online portal. Not only that, they had to do so within three days of the sale. The portal would not allow entries dated more than three days post-sale.
The IRS and the National Automobile Dealers Association did outreach to educate dealerships about the changes, but many were apparently still unaware of the requirements — some never even made an online account. Customers were similarly ignorant of the intricacies of the process. Many received time of sale reports and thought they were all set. But in January, when they began trying to claim the credit on their taxes for the previous year, they were surprised to receive an error message saying that their EV was not registered with the IRS. Some tried to get their dealerships to register the sale retroactively, but the IRS portal didn’t allow for it.
President Trump has vowed to kill the EV tax credit, and Congress is just now beginning to hammer out the legislation that could execute his wishes. In light of that, and given the relative chaos at the IRS caused by Elon Musk’s “efficiency” department demanding access to private taxpayer information and laying off thousands of IRS employees, it was unclear whether the Treasury Department would do anything to help these unlucky EV buyers seeking their refunds. The Treasury did not respond to multiple inquiries from Heatmap in February.
The Dealers Association also never responded to multiple inquiries from Heatmap about the issue. But in a notice to dealerships this week, first reported by NPR, the trade group said the IRS planned to roll out an update to the portal on Wednesday to allow for sales made in 2024 to be submitted.
If any of this has made you nervous about getting an EV this year, remember that you have another, safer option for claiming the tax credit. Instead of claiming it on your taxes in 2026, you can transfer it to your dealer, who can take it off the sale price of the car on the spot. Just make sure they know about the online portal!
The electric vehicle company Rivian is known for products that are, well, large: pickup trucks, SUVs, and delivery vans. But for the past three years, it has been stealthily designing the technology platform for a slew of much smaller, yet-to-be-revealed electric vehicles — think bikes, scooters, and golf carts. Today, Rivian officially spun off that project into its own company, called Also, while … also … announcing that the new venture had raised a $105 million Series B funding round.
The name Also, the company’s CEO Chris Yu told me, points to the idea that owning a car and owning a smaller EV are not mutually exclusive — rather, it’s about finding the right tool for the job. “If I’m taking my family to Yosemite on the weekend, I want to use my Rivian R1S, but for my daily school runs, probably not. That’s not the most efficient or enjoyable way to do it,” Yu told me. In the U.S. about 80% of all car trips are 15 miles or less, and over 50% of are less than six miles. The goal of Also, Yu said, is for smaller EV’s — or “micromobility solutions” — to replace cars for those shorter daily excursions.
Prior to his new role, Yu worked as vice president on Rivian’s “Future Programs” team, working to incubate Also alongside Rivian’s CEO RJ Scaringe, who will now serve as the new company’s board chair while continuing to lead Rivian. The incumbent EV-automaker participated in Also’s Series B alongside the lead investor, venture capital firm Eclipse, and will maintain a minority ownership stake in it.
Also’s flagship product is set to launch in the U.S. and Europe early next year, and will be followed by consumer and commercial products for the Asian and South American markets, though the company hasn’t yet said what these products will be. In the U.S., electric scooters and e-bikes have taken off in cities, while in some suburban areas, beach towns and retirement communities, golf carts are ubiquitous. Across much of South Asia, Africa, and Latin America, three-wheelers such as rickshaws and mototaxis are everywhere, and are increasingly being electrified.
But there’s still a long way to go. “The rate of electrification for small vehicles across the world is far, far lower than cars, like low single digit percent,” Yu told me. He said that what will set Also apart from existing offerings — besides electrification, of course — is the scale the company aims to operate at and its intuitive technology platform.
Also is developing everything in-house, from the motors to the software, which Yu said will lead to the type of seamless, personalized user experiences that customers have come to expect from newer EVs such as Rivians or Teslas. Think “walking up to your vehicle and having it automatically know that it’s you and unlocking,” Yu told me, or “adjusting to your profiles, your media plays, what you were last playing, etc.” Making something like an e-bike or electric golf cart “smarter,” Yu explained, could also help with issues such as security — potentially making Also’s TBD products less vulnerable to theft — or safety, such as gauging if someone is riding at a dangerous speed for the area or in an inappropriate zone.
Even with this type of advanced technology integration, Yu claimed that the company’s products will be cost competitive with what’s on the market today due to the scale that Also aims to achieve. Yu’s hope is that taking advantage of Rivian’s existing technologies and retail footprint will help.
Whatever form factor Also’s small EVs take, Yu told me they will embody Rivian’s adventurous spirit, “weaving in some of what people aspire to do and look forward to doing, whether it’s on a weekend or summer vacations,” he explained. So will this look like an off-roading golf cart? A smarter electric mountain bike? A scooter that also rips on the backroads? We’ll have to wait until next year to see.