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The first fusion reaction to produce more energy than it took to spark occurred at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in December 2022. Since then, billions of dollars have flowed into fusion energy research and a number of prominent companies have proposed building power plants harnessing the technology. As Heatmap’s Katie Brigham put it, it’s “finally, possibly, almost time for fusion.” But the U.S. risks losing its edge, according to a new report by the Congress-backed Commission on the Scaling of Fusion Energy. “While the United States has long been at the forefront of fusion research, the international competition is intensifying,” the report published last month concluded. “China, in particular, is rapidly advancing its fusion energy capabilities through massive state investments and aggressive technological development, narrowing the window for American leadership.”
A coal plant in Hanchuan, Hubei province, China.Photo by Getty Images
China’s emissions remained flat for another quarter in a row, continuing a downward trend that started last year, as I wrote here earlier this month. Backing up that data is new research from Greenpeace East Asia, which found that China approved just under 42 gigawatts of new coal-fired capacity nationwide in the first nine months of 2025. That may sound like a lot, but if the current pace continues, 2025 is on track to be the second-lowest year for approvals since the COVID-19 shock in 2021. It would also be the second consecutive year of decline. “China’s power-sector emissions peak is within reach as early as 2025. Yet maintaining momentum to curb coal approvals remains critical,” Gao Yuhe, Greenpeace East Asia’s Beijing-based project manager, said in a statement. “Clear policy signals to cap coal and boost renewables are essential to accelerate both the power sector and societal emissions peaks.”
In the U.S., meanwhile, the Environmental Protection Agency filed a motion late Monday evening asking the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit to eliminate a Biden-era rule tightening limits on soot. The regulation, E&E News reported, was “predicted to save thousands of lives by tightening the exposure limit to a pollutant tied to a higher risk of strokes, lung cancer and other cardiovascular and respiratory diseases.”
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Since 1980, the Department of the Interior has run National Environmental Policy analyses on every five-year offshore drilling plan. But, as E&E News reported Tuesday, the agency’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management called that step “discretionary” in its latest proposal. To justify the change, the Trump administration cited two past rulings from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia that rejected challenges to NEPA assessments of five-year plans.
It’s a striking dichotomy with how the administration has dealt with offshore wind, most easily communicated via the meme of Shaquille O’Neal sleeping in one frame and awake with eyes ablaze in the next. Environmental damage from offshore oil and gas drilling? “I sleep,” as the meme goes. Environmental damage from offshore wind turbines? Now that, as I have written in this newsletter, has the Trump administration’s attention.
Iran “no longer has a choice” but to move its capital city as ecological strain on Tehran’s water and land make the metropolis impossible to sustain. In remarks carried on state media Thursday, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian said the government had “no option” but to consider an alternative city for the capital. “When we said we must move the capital, we did not even have enough budget,” he said, according to the London-based news service Iran International, which broadcasts in English and Farsi. “If we had, maybe it would have been done. The reality is that we no longer have a choice; it is an obligation.” As the capital sinks by near one foot per year and water supplies shrink, Tehran faces “catastrophe” and “a dark future,” he said. “Protecting the environment is not a joke. Ignoring it means signing our own destruction.”
Tehran wouldn’t be the only major city on the move. Indonesia is designing a new capital in Borneo called Nusantara to replace Jakarta, which is also slowly sinking.
Redwood Materials, the battery recycling startup led by Tesla co-founder JB Straubel, has cut dozens of workers as the company scales back some of its projects to focus on tapping into demand for grid-scale batteries, Bloomberg reported Tuesday. The layoffs took place this month and were spread across the company, amounting to up to 6% of the total workforce. Redwood is now focusing on repurposing old batteries for the grid and extracting critical minerals from scrapped power packs.
Here’s a statistic for the vegetarians to whip out on Thanksgiving: A 16-pound turkey has a carbon footprint as big as the gravy, cranberry sauce, mashed potatoes, rolled biscuits, and apple pie combined, research from Carnegie Mellon University found. Before you go off starting a fight with your truck-driving, meat-loving uncle, the scientists noted that, “compared to all the environmental lifestyle decisions that an American family could make, these are very, very small potatoes.” I wish you all a happy and peaceful Thanksgiving holiday.
In just the last three months, Georgia Power has removed 6 gigawatts of projected demand from its 2030s forecasts — enough to serve every household in the Atlanta metropolitan area more than three times over, according to a filing Friday with the Georgia Public Service Commission. The cause: canceled or postponed data center developments. Projects totaling nearly 6 gigawatts of projected demand by the mid 2030s fell off the books. Of the 28 large power user projects the Southern Company-owned utility disclosed in its report to regulators, 18 have broken ground and 10 are pending constructions. That indicates that the developers are pushing to make sure they advance, and suggests the dip in the last quarter may not extend. In the report, Utility Dive noted, Georgia Power said the “majority of new generation” the company wanted approval for was “not backed by” contracts with large power users.
The adjustment comes as Georgia Power pushes regulators to approve a large new buildout of power plants that could raise monthly bills by $20, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported. Voters ousted long-time Republicans from the Public Service Commission, electing two Democrats who campaigned on slashing rising rates, Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo reported earlier this month. Data centers, however, are proliferating elsewhere. Just last night, Amazon unveiled plans to invest $15 billion in data center complexes in northern Indiana.
A chart shows the diverging output for gas and solar.EIA
Over the last three years, California generated steadily more electricity from utility-scale solar farms while generation from natural gas-fired plants dropped. Gas still dominates the state’s power generation, but industrial solar generation more than doubled in the first eight months of 2025 compared to the same period in 2020, new analysis from the federal Energy Information Administration found. Between January and August of this year, natural gas supplied 18% less power than during the same months five years ago. Gas-fired generation spiked in 2021 to compensate for droughts reducing hydroelectric output, and has fallen since. But the largest year-over-year drop occurred this year.
You can count on one hand the number of new nuclear reactors built in the United States and Europe in recent memory. And while the Trump administration is taking major steps toward spurring new reactor projects in the U.S., the long-trumpeted nuclear renaissance has scarcely led to any new power plants with the promise of producing electrons anytime soon. That’s certainly not the case in China. Friday’s newsletter included China’s latest approval of two new reactors to begin construction. Today’s newsletter includes the update that China has officially patched yet another reactor onto the grid. China National Nuclear Corporation, one of the two major state-owned atomic power utilities in the country, announced that Unit 2 of its Zhangzhou nuclear plant is officially hooked up to the grid, World Nuclear News reported. It’s the second of six planned reactors, based on the Chinese-designed Hualong One model, at the same location in Fujian province.
It’s that capacity to build even the most complex of clean-energy infrastructure that has flattened out China’s emissions in recent years, as I wrote earlier this month. To go deeper on China’s grid, you should listen to the episode of Heatmap’s Shift Key podcast that includes UC San Diego export Michael Davidson.
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The Environmental Protection Agency has granted certain states the power to permit so-called Class VI wells to store captured carbon dioxide. Now many of those Republican-led states want to use that authority to reject carbon wells, E&E News reported. In Texas, the colorful energy regulator Wayne Christian called his agency’s decision to permit a major carbon removal and storage project “a danger.” In Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis called carbon storage a “scam” in a video posted on Facebook in March. In Louisiana, Governor Jeff Landry issued an executive order in October slapping a moratorium on new applications for Class VI permits until the state could “put into place a well-thought-out and methodical approach to application review and permitting.” And in Alabama, GOP state lawmaker Matthew Hammett prefiled a bill that would ban CO2 wells in the state’s southern county of Covington.
Arguably the biggest problem facing carbon capture technology is where to put that captured carbon and how to get it there. CO2 pipelines come with some risks, and mounting pushback. Until there’s somewhere for those pipelines to go, such as a well, it’s hard to justify the investment. No wells and no pipelines mean capturing carbon emissions before they enter the atmosphere will likely remain an unaffordable luxury.
The Trump administration has granted polluters waivers from Clean Air Act rules as part of its effort to revive heavy industry. But until recently, regulators appointed by President Donald Trump said such a pass wasn’t needed for the coking industry, which distills coal into fuel for a blast furnace. On Friday, Trump issued a proclamation granting a dozen coke manufacturing plants a two-year extension on fully meeting hazardous air pollutant rules, E&E News reported.
The move isn’t entirely unexpected. Trump has tried to revive coal-fired power generation, but keeps coming up against broken equipment that shuts down stations anyway, as Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin reported. But as Matthew wrote in July, global coal demand is rising, and the U.S. wants in on it.
As recently as 2022, when Cameco bought its 49% share of Westinghouse, the Canadian uranium producer doubted the company had a future in reactors. Cameco was primarily interested in Westinghouse’s fuel fabrication and maintenance service businesses. “We just assumed there wouldn’t be anything new,” Grant Isaac, Cameco’s president and chief operating officer, told The Wall Street Journal. Now, the Trump administration putting up $80 billion to fund at least 10 new Westinghouse AP1000, each with the capacity to power 1 million American homes.
