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Sparks

The SEC Climate Fight Enters a New Round

Now it’s in the courts.

The SEC building.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

The legal battle over the Securities and Exchange Commission’s new rule on climate-related disclosure has begun. On Thursday, the Commission issued a pause on the rule, which sets standards for publicly-owned companies to report their exposure to climate-related risks like extreme weather or future regulations in their annual filings.

The rule finalized in early March was significantly weaker than what the Commission had originally proposed in 2022. Rather than make disclosure mandatory, the regulations say that companies only have to report certain types of information, such as their greenhouse gas emissions, if they deem the information “material.” Despite this, the decision invited swift backlash from all corners, including from the energy industry, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Republican states, and environmental groups.

Between March 6, the day the rules were finalized, and March 14, at least nine petitions were filed in multiple courts of appeals seeking review of the final rules. Liberty Energy Inc. and Nomad Proppant Services, two oilfield service companies, filed a motion seeking a stay pending judicial review. The petitions were later consolidated for review in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit, where the Chamber of Commerce and several other business groups also filed a motion seeking a stay. Now, the Commission has decided to accede to the request and pause the rules as the court reviews the petitions.

“In issuing a stay, the Commission is not departing from its view that the Final Rules are consistent with applicable law,” the order said. “Thus, the Commission will continue vigorously defending the Final Rules’ validity in court.”

The rules were not set to go into effect until 2026, so it remains to be seen whether or by how much the legal challenges will delay implementation. Margaret Farrell, the chair of the securities law group at the firm Hinckley Allen told the Wall Street Journal that she didn’t think the legal challenges would “fundamentally change” the direction things are heading in. “There is an obligation, which the SEC underscored a few years back, to consider the impact of climate change and climate events on the business,” she said, “regardless of the new rule.”

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Sparks

Why Really Tiny Nuclear Reactors Are Bringing In Big Money

Last Energy just raised a $40 million Series B.

A Last Energy microreactor.
Heatmap Illustration/Last Energy

Nuclear energy is making a comeback, conceptually at least. While we’re yet to see a whole lot of new steel in the ground, money is flowing into fusion, there’s a push to build more standard fission reactors, and the dream of small modular reactors lives on, even in the wake of the NuScale disappointment.

All this excitement generally revolves around nuclear’s potential to provide clean, baseload power to the grid. But Washington D.C.-based Last Energy is pursuing a different strategy — making miniature, modularized reactors to provide power directly to industries such as data centers, auto manufacturing, and pulp and paper production. Size-wise, think small modular reactors, but, well, even smaller — Last Energy’s units provide a mere 20 megawatts of electricity, whereas a full-size reactor can be over 1,000 megawatts. SMRs sit somewhere in between.

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Why That One Tesla Cybertruck Caption Is Suddenly Everywhere on TikTok

Believe it or not, it doesn’t have anything to do with Elon Musk.

A Cybertruck.
Heatmap Illustration/Tesla

It shows up when you are most vulnerable. Maybe it’s under a reel of Fleabag’s season 2, episode 5 confession scene, in which Phoebe Waller-Bridge finally gets together with Andrew Scott’s “hot priest.” Or maybe it’s slapped on a TikTok of an industrial hydraulic press squashing some gummy bears. No matter what, it’s always the caption of the video you find yourself transfixed by without quite knowing why: “The Tesla Cybertruck Is an All-Electric Battery-Powered Light-Duty Truck.”

For the past few months, Instagram and TikTok users have been inundated by posts with the same caption, a seemingly AI-generated paragraph about Tesla’s Cybertruck, providing a “comprehensive overview of its key features and specifications.” The caption could be applied to anything and pops up seemingly at random, creating the disconcerting effect that Elon Musk is lurking around every digital corner. This is not because legions of social media users have suddenly become lunatic Cybertruck stans, however (though there are certainly some of those, too). Rather, it’s a technique for spam accounts to game the algorithm and boost their engagement.

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China Might Not Need Coal to Grow Anymore

And if it doesn’t, that’s very good news, indeed, for global emissions.

China Might Not Need Coal to Grow Anymore

First it was the reservoirs in China’s massive network of hydroelectric dams filling up, then it was the approval of 11 new nuclear reactors — and it’s all happening as China appears to be slowing down its approval of new coal plants, according to a research group that closely follows the Chinese energy transition.

While China is hardly scrapping its network of coal plants, which power 63% of its electric grid and makes it the world’s biggest consumer of coal (to the tune of about half of global coal consumption), it could mean that China is on the verge of powering its future economic growth non-carbon-emitting energy. This would mean a break with decades of coal-powered growth and could set the table for real emissions reductions from the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases.

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