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David Richardson, the acting head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, resigned Monday after just six months on the job. Richardson had no experience in managing natural disasters, and Axios reported, he “faced sharp criticism for being unavailable” amid the extreme floods that left 130 dead in Central Texas in July. A month earlier, Richardson raised eyebrows when he held a meeting in which he told staff he was unaware the U.S. had a hurricane season. He was, however, a “loyalist” to Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, CNN reported.
With hurricane season wrapping up this month, President Donald Trump was preparing to fire Richardson in the lead up to an overhaul of the agency, whose resources for carrying out disaster relief he wants to divvy up among the states. When FEMA staffers criticized the move in an open letter over the summer, the agency suspended 40 employees who signed with their names, as I wrote in the newsletter at the time.
The Environmental Protection Agency proposed stripping federal protections from millions of acres of wetlands and streams. The New York Times cast the stakes of the rollback as “potentially threatening sources of clean drinking water for millions of Americans” while delivering “a victory for a range of business interests that have lobbied to scale back the Clean Water Act of 1972, including farmers, home builders, real estate developers, oil drillers and petrochemical manufacturers.” At an event announcing the rulemaking, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin recognized that the proposal “is going to be met with a lot of relief from farmers, ranchers, and other landowners and governments.” Under the Clean Water Act, companies and individuals need to obtain permits from the EPA before releasing pollutants into the nation’s waterways, and permits from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers before discharging any dredged or fill material such as sand, silt, or construction debris. Yet just eliminating the federal oversight doesn’t necessarily free developers and farmers of permitting challenges since that jurisdiction simply goes to the state.
A chart from the report shows how much worse this year is than previous ones.J.D. Power
Americans are spending greater lengths of time in the dark amid mounting power outages, according to a new survey by the data analytics giant J.D. Power. The report, released last month but highlighted Monday in Utility Dive, cited “increased frequency and severity of extreme weather events” as the cause. The average length of the longest blackout of the year increased in all regions since 2022, from 8.1 hours to 12.8 by the midpoint of 2025. Ratepayers in the South reported the longest outages, averaging 18.2 hours, followed by the West, at 12.4 hours. While the duration of outages is worsening, the number of Americans experiencing them isn’t, J.D. Power’s director of utilities intelligence, Mark Spalinger, told Utility Dive. The percentage of ratepayers experiencing “perfect power” without any interruptions is gradually rising, he said, but disasters like storms and fires “are becoming so much more extreme that it creates these longer outage events that utilities are now having to deal with.”
The problem is particularly bad in the summertime. As Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin explained back in June, “the demands on the grid are growing at the same time the resources powering it are changing. Between broad-based electrification, manufacturing additions, and especially data center construction, electricity load growth is forecast to grow several percent a year through at least the end of the decade. At the same time, aging plants reliant on oil, gas, and coal are being retired (although planned retirements are slowing down), while new resources, largely solar and batteries, are often stuck in long interconnection queues — and, when they do come online, offer unique challenges to grid operators when demand is high.”
Another chart shows the causes of prolonged outages. J.D. Power
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You win some, you lose some. Earlier this month, solar developer Pine Gate Renewables blamed the Trump administration’s policies in its bankruptcy filing. Now a major solar manufacturer is crediting its expansion plans to the president. Arizona-based First Solar said last week it plans to open a new panel factory in South Carolina. The $330 million factory will create 600 new jobs, E&E News reported, if it comes online in the second half of next year as planned. First Solar said the investment is the result of Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act. “The passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act and the Administration’s trade policies boosted demand for American energy technology, requiring a timely, agile response that allows us to meet the moment,” First Solar CEO Mark Widmar said in a statement. “We expect that this new facility will enable us to serve the U.S. market with technology that is compliant with the Act’s stringent provisions, within timelines that align with our customers’ objectives.”
If you want to review what actually goes into making a solar panel, it’s worth checking out Matthew’s explainer from the Climate 101 series.
French oil and gas giant TotalEnergies said Monday it would make a $6 billion investment into power plants across Europe, expanding what The Wall Street Journal called “a strategy that has set it apart from rivals focused on pumping more fossil fuels.” To start, the company agreed to buy 50% of a portfolio of assets owned by Energeticky a Prumyslovy Holding, the investment fund controlled by the Czech billionaire Daniel Kretinsky. While few question the rising value of power generation amid a surge in electricity demand from the data centers supporting artificial intelligence software, analysts and investors “question whether investment in power generation — particularly renewables — will be as lucrative as oil and gas.” Rivals Shell and BP, for example, recently axed their renewables businesses to double down on fossil fuels.
The world has successfully stored as much carbon dioxide as 81,044,946 gasoline-powered cars would emit in a year. The first-ever audit of all major carbon storage projects in the U.S., China, Brazil, Australia, and the Middle East found over 383 million tons of carbon dioxide stored since 1996. “The central message from our report is that CCS works, demonstrating a proven capability and accelerating momentum for geologic storage of CO2,” Samuel Krevor, a professor of subsurface carbon storage at Imperial College London’s Department of Earth Science and Engineering, said in a press release.
The new rule is expected to face challenges in court.“Today’s action is another example of how the Trump administration is trying to take us back in time with its reckless fossil fuels agenda,” Erik Grafe, a lawyer with Earthjustice, an environmental nonprofit group, said in a statement to The New York Times.
A cobalt mine in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Michel Lunanga/Getty Images
For the first time in United Nations climate negotiations, countries attending the COP30 summit in Belém, Brazil, are grappling with the effects of mining the minerals needed for batteries, solar panels, and wind turbines, Climate Home News reported. In a draft text on Friday, a working group at the summit recognized “the social and environmental risks associated with scaling up supply chains for clean energy technologies, including risks arising from the extraction and processing of critical minerals.”
The statement came amid ongoing protests from Indigenous groups, including those from Argentina who warned that the world’s increased appetite for South America’s lithium reserves came at the cost of local water resources for peoples who have lived in regions near mining operations for millennia.
Nearly one fifth of the Environmental Protection Agency’s workforce has opted into President Donald Trump’s mass resignation plan, according to new data E&E News obtained on Friday. As of the end of September, the EPA’s payroll included 15,166 employees, according to data released during the government shutdown, meaning that more than 2,620 employees accepted the “deferred resignation” offer.
Under Administrator Lee Zeldin, the EPA has advanced proposals that even the agency under Scott Pruitt, the top environmental regulator at the start of Trump’s first term, dared not attempt. Zeldin has moved to rescind the endangerment finding, which forms the legal basis for virtually all major climate regulations at the EPA. Zeldin even tried to kill off the popular Energy Star program for efficient appliances, but — as I wrote earlier this month — he backed off the plan.
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The next-generation geothermal company Eavor is preparing to start up its debut closed-loop system at its pilot project in Germany, Think Geoenergy reported. The startup has stood out in the race to commercialize technology that can harness energy from the Earth’s molten core in more places than conventional approaches allow. While rivals such as Fervo Energy, Sage Geosystems, and XGS Energy, pursue projects in the American Southwest, Eavor focused its efforts on Germany, where it saw potential to tap into the lucrative district heating market. Eavor also developed special drilling tools that promised to shave “tens of millions” off the cost of digging wells. As I wrote here last month, the company just completed successful tests of its technology.
BlackRock’s Global Infrastructure Partners inked a deal with the Spanish construction company ACS to form a joint venture to develop roughly $2.3 billion worth of data centers. The 50-50 joint venture will consist of ACS’ existing data-center portfolio, including 1.7 gigawatts of assets under development in Europe, the U.S., and Australia. ACS is contributing its existing portfolio to the business, The Wall Street Journal reported, “in exchange for about 1 billion euros in cash and initial earnout payments of up to 1 billion euros” if the data centers hit certain commercial milestones. “Global demand for data centers is set to grow more than 15 times by 2035, driven by the expansion of AI, cloud migration, and the exponential rise in data volumes,” ACS CEO Juan Santamaria said.
In a first, Swedish scientists have managed to successfully isolate and sequence RNA from an Ice Age wooly mammoth. Researchers at Stockholm University extracted the genetic information from mammoth tissue preserved in Siberian permafrost for nearly 40,000 years. The findings, published in the journal Cell, show that RNA, in addition to DNA and proteins, can be preserved over long periods of time. “With RNA, we can obtain direct evidence of which genes are ‘turned on,’ offering a glimpse into the final moments of life of a mammoth that walked the Earth during the last Ice Age. This is information that cannot be obtained from DNA alone,” Emilio Mármol, lead author of the study, said in a press release.
Editor’s note: This article has been updated to clarify the staff shrinkage at the EPA.
