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Why Patagonia, REI, and just about every other gear retailer are going PFAS-free.
Data centers are a big test for the nascent industry. But they also can’t fill the orderbooks.
On ‘draconian’ water cuts, Tesla’s China business, and Italian nuclear
On Trump’s inverter ban, American antimony, and thermal batteries
On ‘precariously low’ oil stockpiles, China’s ammonia milestone, and a PFAS destroyer
On nuclear waste, a Nevada solar farm, and lithium-harvesting nanorobots
The Greenhouse Gas Protocol released updates on its looming new emissions accounting rules. Here’s what they mean.
The world’s most important climate standard-setting group released a spate of updates on Wednesday about two controversial and hotly anticipated projects: its effort to revise guidance for measuring electricity emissions and its new partnership with a competing standards organization.
The nonprofit Greenhouse Gas Protocol sets voluntary carbon accounting rules for companies, which it has been in the process of revising for the past two years. It released the first product of this effort — new rules for accounting for the clean energy purchases that companies make — for public comment last fall.
Around the same time, it also announced it was planning to “harmonize” its standards with those developed by the International Organization for Standardization, or ISO, a much larger entity that sets rules for measurement, safety, and quality across a wide range of industries and products. The two organizations operate under very different governance structures, and it was unclear how the marriage would work.
While it’s voluntary for companies to adhere to either group’s standards, most do, as it legitimizes their environmental claims. Soon, though, larger corporations operating in Europe and California will be required to abide by one of the two accounting rules under new emissions disclosure rules. Today, the Protocol has a far larger userbase, but the existence of the two standards is awkward, and business groups have been asking for reconciliation.
Now the Protocol says the merger will have the two organizations consolidate their disparate workstreams into a single corporate carbon accounting standard that will be put out for public comment next year. Meanwhile, the public feedback on the clean energy proposal is out — and the response was overwhelmingly negative.
Here’s what we know so far about what’s next on both fronts.
Companies hate the electricity proposal
About 70% of the nearly 1,100 respondents to the public consultation opposed criteria that would require companies to match their electricity consumption with purchases of clean energy generated in the same hour if they wanted to claim they used that clean power. A smaller majority, at 59%, opposed a rule to require that the clean energy be generated in the same regional electric grid, a strategy known as “deliverability.”
These results aren’t exactly a surprise given who participated. More than 60% of responses came from the companies that would be subject to these rules and the industry groups and consultants who represent them. They weren’t the only opponents, however. There also proved to be a pretty even split of opinion within the nonprofits and researchers who engaged.

The experts who drafted these rules were trying to improve the status quo, where companies can inaccurately claim they are fully powered by solar panels, even at night, or say they are using wind power that’s generated halfway across the world. Now the authors will have to go back to the drawing board, this time with more explicit direction to find “common ground that the plurality can see themselves in,” Tim Mohin, the CEO of the Greenhouse Gas Protocol, told me.
I’ve written in the past about how the debate over how to measure electricity emissions is just as philosophical as it is technical. Proponents of hourly matching and deliverability argue that these features make for more accurate claims that also incentivize investment in the wider range of resources that will be needed to fully decarbonize the grid, such as geothermal power plants and batteries. Detractors argue such rules will make corporate clean energy procurement more complicated and costly and deter companies from doing it at all.
Both views are present in the results of the consultation — the latter just has more voices behind it. Interestingly, about only about 20% of the government institutions that participated supported the hourly matching requirement, but all of them were either supportive or neutral on deliverability. The majority of opponents were okay with the Protocol giving companies the option to report their emissions using the hourly matching and deliverability requirements, however.

The new CEO’s philosophy
I asked Mohin, who joined the Protocol as CEO in April, about the imbalance in who participated in the public consultation process, and how the organization would take that into account. He said the Protocol’s job as a standard setter was to find common ground, and that “clearly, with what we got back in the consultation draft, we haven’t gotten there yet.”
Did he see the Protocol’s job as facilitating climate action, I then asked, or ensuring accurate reporting and comparable data?
“Our vision is decarbonization. That's why we do what we do,” he told me. “There is a difference between accuracy and precision. Accuracy is good enough to make a decision to lead to decarbonization. Precision is trying to tweak it all the way down to some more precise number. We are focused on accuracy so that we can get to decarbonization.”
Mohin noted that one commonality across all sides of the debate is a desire to make the electricity emissions accounting standard more rigorous — the disagreement comes from how to do it. He said the staff has been “working on solutions that could feed into the technical working group,” which will “restart the process” in an in-person meeting this fall.
Merging four workstreams into one
When the electricity working group reconvenes this fall, it will be under the Protocol’s new plan to join forces with the ISO.
Originally, the Greenhouse Gas Protocol had convened four separate expert groups to work on different aspects of its standard. While the “scope 2” group was updating the method for estimating electricity emissions, a “corporate standard” group was revising the underlying bible guiding corporate carbon accounting. A “scope 3” group was also tightening the rules for tallying indirect emissions, such as those resulting from when customers use a company’s product. Lastly, an “actions and market instruments” group was developing a new framework for companies to report their purchases of low-carbon fuel, carbon removal, and other types of carbon credits.
Each of these workstreams was set to assemble their own draft proposals, put them out for public comment, and then finalize them separately. To date, only the scope 2 group has reached the public consultation phase.
Now, the Protocol is scrapping that plan. ISO experts have joined the Protocol’s working groups and are already contributing to their proposals. Once all are ready for public comment, they will be combined and released as one, consensus-based draft standard.
After the public consultation and any further revisions, the two organizations will each vote to ratify the new standard separately through their distinct governance processes. Assuming they both approve it, the end product will be a single, co-branded standard.
On the Protocol’s side, the group’s independent standards board will vote on the proposal. If approved, a steering committee will assess it to ensure that it meets all pre-established goals and requirements, then ratify it.
The ISO is structured differently. It’s a membership organization made up of national standards bodies from nearly every country in the world, and it is ultimately the members that get to vote to approve new or revised standards.
I asked Mohin what would happen if one group voted to ratify the standard and the other rejected it.
“I haven’t really thought about that, but it’s a really good question,” he said. “I don’t believe that’s going to be an outcome.”
Tensions remain
There are other reasons this is an awkward marriage.
In some ways, the ISO is the more authoritative organization, having set more than 25,000 international standards adopted by countries around the world. But when it comes to greenhouse gas emissions, it’s lagged behind. By the time the ISO created a carbon accounting standard in 2006, the Greenhouse Gas Protocol was already established, and contained much more detail. The ISO standard also costs hundreds of dollars to access, while Protocol standards are freely available.
Michael Gillenwater, the executive director of the Greenhouse Gas Management Institute, which is engaged in standards development at both the ISO and the Protocol, told me the two were not that different. Still, most companies have followed the Protocol’s standard, he said, because it’s free and has a longer track record.
The Greenhouse Gas Protocol has also taken strides to embed transparency and accountability into its process. Its technical working groups are made up of a diverse range of experts from industry, academia, and NGOs. The names and affiliations of everyone involved in the process are published on the group’s website, and most of their meeting minutes and working drafts are shared publicly.
The Protocol has come under fire recently for not totally adhering to its governance principles. A member of its independent board resigned in protest last month, accusing the organization of covering up a complaint he filed about misconduct in the development of a standard for forest carbon accounting.
Still, it’s more transparent than the ISO. There, the technical committees that draft the standards are staffed by experts appointed by members. The focus is much more on geographical representation than diversity of expertise. Additional stakeholders can get involved in the drafting process as "liaisons,” but they cannot vote. The ISO also does not disclose the names of the experts staffing its technical committees, nor does it publish any of the documents they produce.
For the consolidation of the corporate emissions standard, these differences may not matter as much, as it appears that the Greenhouse Gas Protocol is simply integrating ISO members into its existing processes. The Protocol has already added the names of the ISO experts joining its working groups to its website.
The two organizations also plan to work together on additional standards, however, and transparency has already been an issue. A new, joint working group convened to develop an accounting standard for the emissions embedded in individual products has already begun meeting, but the ISO has not disclosed who it has appointed to the group, and the meeting minutes are going to be stored on the ISO’s repository, which is not accessible to the public. Only high-level summaries will be shared broadly.
When I raised these concerns with Mohin and how they might affect the Protocol’s reputation, he acknowledged there were differences in how the two organizations operated, but said he was not worried. “I think those differences are small compared to the benefits that we are accomplishing with this,” he said, adding that this is “really what the world wants, to have a single global common language.”
On Yucca Mountain, Europe’s inverter boom, and Romanian offshore wind
Current conditions: The wildfires in Spain and France are burning so hot they’re creating rare pyrocumulonimbus clouds • Hurricane Genevieve has strengthened into the first Category 5 storm of 2026 as the monster cyclone rampages across the open Pacific with no immediate destination to make landfall • A tornado in Wisconsin toppled power lines, cutting off electricity to nearly 350,000 people.

The back-to-back record heat waves that roasted Western Europe last month killed thousands in France and Germany. The heat also dried out forests, turning woodlands on opposite sides of the Pyrenees into tinderboxes that are now ablaze in some of the worst wildfires the European Union has faced in modern history. With another heat wave now looming, firefighters are racing to contain the flames as hundreds of thousands evacuate in France and Spain. “We need to realize that we’re facing a totally unprecedented fire,” President Emmanuel Macron of France told reporters Monday during a visit to the fire department of Bordeaux. “The situation we’re facing today is the hardest we’ve ever recorded, the hardest since World War II.” In Spain’s Valencia region, the flames are detonating buried ordinances leftover from the Spanish Civil War in the early 1930s, Reuters reported.
The other week, I told you when PJM Interconnection once again hit its price cap at its latest capacity auction — and still came up short of the generation needed to meet demand in 2028. On Monday, the board of the nation’s largest grid operator said in a public letter it would hold another emergency auction to find nearly 7 gigawatts of power generation to make up for the shortfall. “The board believes this reliability threat requires decisive action,” the letter stated. The move comes just weeks after PJM shattered its peak demand record after underestimating just how much electricity the grid could need during a recent heat wave in the American Northeast. It’s yet another sign of the mounting stress on the system covering 13 states as everyone from governors to the grid operator itself strive for reforms, as my colleague Matthew Zeitlin has written.
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Nuclear waste is a political paradox. Critics of atomic energy say that the radioactive waste produced during fission cancel out the benefits of using the most efficient source of carbon-free power humanity has yet harnessed. In the 1980s, the federal government took control of nuclear waste and set about building the world’s first permanent repository to store spent fuel underground for centuries. Yucca Mountain in Nevada was designated as the debut location for such a facility. Opponents in the Silver State fought back, imagining that Washington was subjecting Nevada to dangers akin to the atomic bomb tests that once took place in its deserts. In 2010 — in a move that nonpartisan Government Accountability Office later pegged as an entirely political, rather than technical, motive — President Barack Obama halted work on a project the then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid wanted kiboshed. The problem is that federal law dictates Yucca Mountain be completed as the first nuclear waste repository before other sites can be considered. No one in Congress has stepped up to make the change. As a result, the U.S. — operator of the world’s largest nuclear fleet and wannabe exporter to countries who want to get into the atomic energy game — has had no clear long-term plan for dealing with nuclear waste in 16 years.
The Trump administration is trying to change that. The Department of Energy has floated plans for nuclear innovation campuses where cutting-edge recycling companies could test out new technologies to reprocess waste into medical isotopes and fresh fuel. But E&E News reported Monday that the administration is poised to press Congress to update federal law to allow the U.S. to finally move on from Yucca Mountain. A leaked document the newswire obtained outlines the administration’s plans to instead press states to take on waste repositories and recycling facilities, in line with the Energy Department’s campus idea. That may not be easy. Even Texas, whose government has sought to roll out the red carpet for nuclear developers recently unsuccessfully sued federal regulators to the Supreme Court to block construction of a waste storage facility.
Last month, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in favor of President Donald Trump’s right to fire commissioners from previously independent agencies such as the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which oversees pipelines and the grid. On Monday, E&E News published a feature examining the implications for FERC at a particularly sensitive time in its history, when a once-sleepy agency is increasingly facing scrutiny over the health of the U.S. grid. Experts were mixed on the effects. Ari Peskoe, the director of the Electricity Law Initiative at Harvard University, called Trump “a loose cannon” with “no justification for firing any FERC Commissioner.” Commissioner David LaCerte, a Republican, cheered the Supreme Court for overturning what he said was an unlawful restriction put in place a century ago that limited the White House’s ability to fire any commissioners for anything beyond poor performance. “If a commissioner is going to buckle under that pressure and compromise their integrity because they are afraid of being fired, well, they probably didn’t deserve to be in this job in the first place,” he said during the FERC meeting. But fellow Republican Mark Christie, who previously served as FERC chair and whom Matthew dubbed “the most interesting man” on the commission, said that while he agrees with the court’s decision, open requisitions remain as to what it would mean in practice. “If FERC is now completely under the supervision of the president, is the executive branch going to say how to decide a rate case?” said Christie. “That to me is the single biggest question.”
The Department of Transportation, meanwhile, is gutting funding for public transit, walkways, and bike lanes. In a letter outlining the agency’s spending priorities to the Senate, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy proposed eliminating the Highway Trust Fund’s mass transit account and slashing funding for infrastructure that provides for the safety of pedestrians and bicyclists, bike lanes, and grants for electric vehicle charging infrastructure. That’s not all: Smart Cities Dive reported that a competitive grant program to fund solutions to traffic safety would scrap options that include public transit improvements and tolling from even being considered.
China produces most of the world’s inverters for solar panels. It’s increasingly a problem. Last year, Reuters reported that the U.S. had found “killswitch” devices in some inverters, suggesting that Beijing could — in theory — remotely disable solar panels when demand is high on the grid, or try to cause frequency problems like those that triggered the great Iberian blackout of 2025. At the start of this month, I told you the Federal Communications Commission was weighing a ban on Chinese inverters. If you share the Trump administration’s concerns, there’s good news: China’s command over the global inverter market peaked in 2024, according to new data from the research division at PV Tech. Europe, meanwhile, has emerged as a major manufacturer, hitting over 100 gigawatts of factory capacity this year. The U.S. is now at 40 gigawatts, while India is at 20 gigawatts. You’d be reasonable to wonder if these are just Chinese companies setting up shop in Europe. But you’d be wrong. “What distinguishes Europe’s inverter manufacturing expansion from other sectors, particularly solar modules, is the composition of its manufacturing base,” analyst Mollie McCorkindale wrote in the magazine. “As of 2026, over 90% of Europe’s 100-gigawatt manufacturing capacity comes from European-headquartered companies.”
Everyone knows the U.S. is veering away from offshore wind, and diligent readers of this newsletter (for whom I feel such affection) may recall that Japan is on a parallel trajectory. Elsewhere, however, offshore wind is booming. Romania, whose coastline makes up a single-digit percentage of its mostly landlocked borders, is the latest country to make big plans for seaward turbines. Bucharest is now targeting nearly 12 gigawatts of offshore wind, Renewables Now reported.