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Why Patagonia, REI, and just about every other gear retailer are going PFAS-free.
On Meta quits, Elon Musk’s solar plans, and federal coal reserves
The company’s latest sustainability report, shared exclusively with Heatmap, shows that carbon intensity per kilometer traveled has dropped 81% since 2019.
On Trump’s power pledge, America’s offshore nuclear, and Japan’s offshore wind
Current conditions: Tropical Depression Two is set to strengthen into Tropical Storm Bertha as the system widens over the Gulf Coast from Texas to Tampa Bay, Florida • Temperatures will top 112 degrees Fahrenheit in Khartoum, the capital of war-ravaged Sudan • Canadian wildfire smoke may have largely cleared in the Northeastern United States, but nearly 900 blazes are still burning, and Chicago is still under an air quality warning.
Feel the Burnham. Carl Court/Getty Images
Andy Burnham, the new leader of the British Labour Party and the likely next prime minister of the United Kingdom, has vowed to uphold a contentious ban on exploration licenses for oil and gas drilling in the North Sea. While deputy party leader Lucy Powell told the BBC on Sunday that fossil fuels from the North Sea would remain part of Britain's energy mix, the so-called “king of the north,” who previously led the industrial metropolis of Manchester as its mayor, has instead stuck by the party’s original plan. “If they don’t reverse the ban on new exploration then the industry will be very unhappy indeed,” one industry source told the Financial Times. The decision comes after rumors had swirled that Burnham may support increasing domestic fossil fuel production in a bid to bring down energy prices. In a post on his Truth Social network, Trump wrote: “The People of Aberdeen, in Scotland, are dancing in the streets because the new Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, has stated that he will be opening up, all the way, the invaluable North Sea Oil!”
Scotland is, on the other hand, getting more of Trump’s least favorite energy source. The American president’s antipathy toward offshore turbines, so goes the lore, began with an unsuccessful bid to block a project he considered unsightly off the coast of his golf course there. Last week, Renewables Now reported that offshore wind developer Ocean Winds secured the Scottish government’s approval for a 2-gigawatt offshore wind farm called Caledonia, the name Romans gave the area of Britain that ultimately became Scotland and its frontier with England. Located 25 miles off Moray Firth, the project is poised to begin construction in 2030.
In the U.S., the Trump administration has limited plans for carbon removal facilities. In Canada, as Emily has written, Prime Minister Mark Carney has opened the door to direct air capture companies looking for a new home base. But in the European Union, Brussels is already weaving carbon removal into the bloc's carbon-trading market. The EU’s highest governing body, the European Commission, proposed allowing carbon removal into its EU Emissions Trading System for the first time. “Under the current rules, companies cannot use carbon credits of any kind to comply with the regulations,” Emily wrote last week in a piece previewing the proposal. “But as 2040 grows closer, the EU plans to rely on carbon removal to offset some of the residual emissions from industries that are the most difficult to decarbonize.” For now, the scheme will be limited to direct air capture and bioenergy with carbon capture and sequestration.
Last month, New York Attorney General Letitia James headed a group of Democratic-led states in a lawsuit challenging the Trump administration’s deals to kill offshore wind projects, as my colleague Emily Pontecorvo has written. Now many of those same blue states are seeking to join private developers’ litigation seeking to thaw President Donald Trump’s freeze on approving wind projects. Last week, the states filed a motion to intervene on behalf of wind companies that accuse the administration of unfairly targeting their businesses. The states argue, according to Bloomberg Law, that the halt to federal permitting “pushes up electricity costs” and “hurts their attempts to curb fossil fuel emissions.”
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Claude-maker Anthropic is set to lease computing power for its artificial intelligence data centers from Meta, making what The New York Times described as “a potential step toward a new AI for the social networking company.” Under the deal, Anthropic would pay the Facebook parent company $10 billion over two years, in monthly increments. The agreement is roughly a third the size of the deal that the AI giant signed with Elon Musk’s xAI in May for $45 billion of computing power over three years. That deal has drawn blowback given the vast arrays of gas turbines that power xAI’s biggest data center, Colossus, which is the subject of an air pollution lawsuit filed by the NAACP. As for Meta, insiders Heatmap talked to at the end of last year put it in the bottom of hyperscalers based on its decarbonization efforts. One social scientist told us, “Google is the best, Meta is the worst. Evil corporation.”
Russia’s state-owned nuclear company has at least 18 new nuclear projects underway at home, Rosatom announced. The Kremlin-owned company said the projects are in “various stages of implementation” throughout Russia, and don’t count the more than two dozen under construction overseas in places such as Bangladesh, India, and Turkey. In a speech published in the company’s in-house magazine and shared with World Nuclear News, Rosatom Director General Alexei Likhachev said the firm aims to increase revenues to $51.3 billion by 2028 — a nearly 18% increase from this year. Improving profits, however, means reducing costs by 5% that same year.
Meanwhile, the Kremlin’s nuclear regulator, Rostekhnadzor, has issued licenses for the first two proposed units of the new Kola nuclear station in northwest Russia, near Finland. The plant is expected to begin construction next year, NucNet reported, and ultimately include four VVER-S medium-capacity pressurized water reactors.
Tesla has a fierce new competitor in the European market. The Chinese automaker Xpeng just released its compact L03 crossover. The starting price in the German market, $40,700, undercuts the Tesla Model Y’s $44,480. The vehicle, per InsideEVs, is the first Chinese car to be fully integrated with Google Maps.
On NRC moves, Blue Energy, and China’s solar and methanol breakthroughs
Current conditions: The World Cup’s final match between Argentina and Spain is set to take place Sunday in New Jersey, where the thick orange haze of Canadian wildfire smoke is still hovering • Temperatures are soaring to 110 degrees Fahrenheit in Ethiopia’s northeast Afar province • Researchers just categorized the first major dust storm of Arizona’s monsoon season, which struck Phoenix earlier in the week, as a Category 3.
An oil pipeline built in 1926 from Syria to Iraq. A century later, another may be coming. Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
On Tuesday, I told you about the United Arab Emirates’ plan to build a new port to bypass the Strait of Hormuz. Iraq and its oil partners are looking westward. The Financial Times reported yesterday that Chevron and Baghdad are in advanced discussions to form a consortium to build and restore a pipeline network through Syria as an alternate route to export oil. The U.S. oil giant is working with the Los Angeles-based TI Capital and an investment group owned by the Syrian-Qatari billionaire Al-Khayyat brothers, who own a major construction company in the Gulf nation and are, according to Bloomberg, “betting big” on Syria’s post-war reconstruction.
It’s yet another sign that, as my colleague Matthew Zeitlin wrote, it’ll be a long time before the Strait of Hormuz returns to normal operations — especially now that the war is back on.
Just two weeks ago, I told you that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission had proposed both overhauling how it measures the risks from radiation exposure and giving more flexibility to developers to prove their reactors operate safely. Now the agency is continuing its regulatory blitz with another rule, posted Thursday to the Federal Register, to smooth the way for license renewals, speed up approvals to begin construction on certain components and structures at new nuclear plants, and provide more guidance for technologies that use coolants other than water.
In Spain, meanwhile, the country’s Nuclear Safety Council gave the country’s oldest nuclear station, the Almaraz plant two hours west of Madrid, the greenlight to continue operating until 2030, according to NucNet. Currently, the Spanish government is pursuing the world’s only active nuclear phaseout policy. Virtually every country that has phased out atomic energy now regrets it. Switzerland and Belgium already reversed course. German politicians complain constantly about what a mistake it was to quit nuclear power. Taiwan, which shut down its last reactor last year, now wants to reopen at least one. Even Italy, the first country to abandon nuclear energy, is now looking to revive the industry.
Constellation Energy knows a thing or two about what works with nuclear power. So it’s quite notable that the largest operator of civilian reactors in the nation is making a bet on one of the more unique startups hoping to shape the next generation of atomic power stations. Constellation’s venture arm announced a strategic equity investment into Blue Energy, a developer that is pitching itself as a project manager to get small modular reactors built on time and on budget. Unlike most other players in the nuclear game at the moment, Blue Energy isn’t designing its own reactor. The company calls itself “reactor agnostic.” Rather, Constellation said the company would focus instead on building GE Vernova Hitachi Nuclear Energy’s BWRX-300, a 300-megawatt boiling water reactor that is currently one of the leading designs in the U.S. “With demand for near-term power rising, Constellation’s investment will help Blue Energy meet America’s need by making new nuclear development predictable, rapidly scalable, and project financeable for the first time in history,” Blue Energy CEO Jake Jurewicz said in a statement. “This relationship helps us leverage an established operator, proven technology, and innovative, project-financeable deployment models to expand access to nuclear energy.”
Meanwhile, one of the most attention-grabbing startups in the next-generation reactor race is looking at an eye-popping valuation. Led by its 27-year-old CEO Isaiah Taylor, Valar Atomics made waves when it worked with the U.S. military to transport the components for its gas-cooled microreactor by plane. The company is now eyeing a $6 billion valuation, The Information reported last night.
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New York City’s brand-new power line connecting the five boroughs to Quebec’s hydroelectric system is down for repairs in the midst of the summer heat. Hydro-Quebec, the French-speaking province’s state-owned utility, said its teams had “identified a fault with the terrestrial cable” at a location on the U.S. stretch of the route. Governor Kathy Hochul’s office called the outage “unacceptable” in a statement to Gothamist.
Over in Hawaii, Governor Josh Green, a fellow Democrat, signed legislation to adopt a clean fuel standard, making the island state the fifth in the nation to adopt such a policy. The program will come into full effect at the start of 2029, and will use market incentives to reduce the carbon intensity of fuel over time. Texas, meanwhile, is serving as the model for the new bipartisan permitting reform bill my colleague Robinson Meyer broke news of last night.
Chinese panel manufacturer LONGi’s newest solar cell has made a breakthrough in increasing the power conversion efficiency of its panels to 35.5%. That figure was confirmed this week by a European certification test. The cell design is called a crystalline silicon-perovskite tandem cell, which PV Tech described as “widely regarded as a leading technology pathway for next generation” solar panels. A perovskite top cell with a crystalline silicon bottom cell allows the solar panel to tap into both technologies’ efficiencies. By contrast, the efficiency by percentage of energy converted to electricity in thin-film solar cells like those the U.S. manufacturer First Solar sells tap out somewhere in the teens. The more popular crystalline silicon cells that China has dominated have efficiency rates of up to 24%. So LONGi’s announcement represents a significant improvement.
Meanwhile, China’s state-owned pipeline company, PipeChina, successfully shipped two batches of methanol about 125 miles through existing oil pipelines in northwest China. Hydrogen Insight hailed the test as “a record-breaking trial that could transform” a sector long plagued by questions about how to transport fuel. It’s the latest sign, as I told you last month, that Beijing is doubling down on green hydrogen.
Like a Mesopotamian metal merchant of yore, I like to train a keen eye on copper prices in this newsletter. And with good reason: It’s the basic building block of the electrical system, and it’s subject to some wild geopolitical price pressures. Just look at why the price is sliding now. Per Mining.com, the major storms in Chile and the flareup of hostilities in Iran are depressing the market for the metal, which had hit an all-time high earlier this year.
