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The Quest to Ban the Best Raincoats in the World
Why Patagonia, REI, and just about every other gear retailer are going PFAS-free.
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Why Patagonia, REI, and just about every other gear retailer are going PFAS-free.
A ubiquitous byproduct of the oil and gas industry just got a green competitor.
Current conditions: The weekend’s polar vortex chill in New York City is over as temperatures are set to hit 70 degrees Fahrenheit today, your humble correspondent’s birthday • A winter storm blanketing the Sierra Nevadas with as much as four feet of snow on Interstate 80’s Donner Pass, the primary route between Sacramento and Reno named for the notorious 1846 episode of snowbound settlers driven to cannibalism • Days after thermometers finally slid from an almost sauna-like 118 degrees to somewhere in the 90s, thunderstorms are deluging India’s northern Uttar Pradesh state as dust storms blast cities such as Kanpur.
The Trump administration is bringing construction of virtually all new onshore wind turbines to a halt, putting as many as 165 projects on pause on the grounds that they may threaten national security. The projects, sited on private land, are being stalled by the Department of Defense, and include “wind farms which were awaiting final sign-off, others in the middle of negotiations, and some that typically would not require oversight” by the military, according to the Financial Times. Wind farms require routine approvals from the Pentagon to make sure turbines don’t interfere with radar systems. Normally these assessments are done in a few days. But developers told the newspaper they have faced a mix of setbacks since last August.
Back in December, the administration made a similar argument to justify an order to stop work on all offshore wind farms. Developers sued, and it only took weeks for federal courts to put a pause on the order. That legal strategy is now expected to play out once again on land.
Exxon Mobil and Chevron are resisting the White House’s pressure to increase oil production as the administration presses U.S. oil majors to ramp up supply to ease the demand shock from the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. In an interview with the Financial Times, Exxon’s finance chief Neil Hansen said there would be “no change” to the company’s strategy in the Permian Basin, while Chevron’s chief financial officer Eimear Bonner said “the crisis has not prompted any change to any of our plans.” The statements come days after the price per barrel of crude hit $126 last Thursday. “There’s really no need for us to shift up because we’re already up, we’re already in high gear,” Hansen said. “That doesn’t mean we aren’t looking at the potential to expand that but there are limitations.”
That doesn’t mean the industry isn’t happy to play along with Trump’s other foreign policy ventures. In a post on X last week, Bloomberg columnist Javier Blas highlighted the rapid shift of Exxon Mobil CEO Darren Woods’ views on Venezuela, which went from “uninvestable” in January” to, just four months later, “a huge resource that’s now opened up more freely to the world” where “we’ll be uniquely positioned and play an important role in bringing those barrels to market.” Meanwhile, the U.S. Senate candidate who could become the first Democrat to win statewide in Texas in 32 years has sought to ease the oil industry’s concerns about his political views. In an interview on Tejano singer Bobby Pulido’s podcast, Democratic Senate nominee James Talarico disavowed his party’s past rhetoric promising to phase out oil and gas production. “The idea that politicians in Washington think they can just eliminate this industry, eliminate these jobs, is something we had to fight against, something we have to fight against in our own party,” he said. “I’m a big fan of the renewable industry we’ve got in Texas … but it’s going to take an all-of-the-above approach.” Killing off the U.S. industry while global demand remains in effect is “not practical” and “it’d do so much damage to our state,” he said.
For all the hype over nuclear power in the United States, the Canadians are the North Americans on track to build the hemisphere’s first small modular reactor. On Friday, Ontario Power Generation’s project to expand its Darlington atomic station just east of Toronto with the world’s first BWRX-300 hit a critical milestone as the province-owned utility completed installation of the reactor’s basement some 35 meters, or about 115 feet, underground. The 300-megawatt unit was designed by GE Vernova Hitachi Nuclear Energy, the heir to General Electric’s 20th-century legacy of building the world’s fleet of boiling water reactors that today still makes up the second-largest share of all commercial fission plants after the Westinghouse-pioneered pressurized water reactor. If the reactor enters into service on time in 2029 — a big if — it will be the first on multiple counts: The first SMR from GE Hitachi. The first SMR in either Canada, North America, or the Western Hemisphere. Indeed, the first SMR in the entire democratic world, an overdue moment as China completes its Linglong-1 project in Hainan and Russia’s floating Akademik Lomonosov nuclear station remains in operation. “Ontario is building the Western World’s first small modular reactor,” Stephen Lecce, Ontario’s minister of energy and mines, said in a statement. “Ontario just executed with great precision the first foundation of a new nuclear reactor in Ontario in over 30 years. This is a major achievement as the world turns to Ontario to refurbish and build large scale nuclear on-time and on-budget.”
Ontario set a model for the rest of the region on how to pursue nuclear power despite modern development constraints. Its government-owned utility opted for the reactor over cheaper renewables and batteries by examining a whole systems-cost approach that included the transmission and back-up generation implied by a big solar and wind buildout. That ownership model also inspired neighboring New York to tap in its New York Power Authority, the largest state-owned utility the U.S., to lead the charge on building at least a gigawatt of new reactor capacity, as Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin explained last year. In December, as I wrote at the time, New York Governor Kathy Hochul forged a nuclear alliance with Ontario’s government to work together on issues related to building new reactors. The U.S. last year pumped $400 million into GE Hitachi’s plan to build America’s first BWRX-300 at the federally owned Tennessee Valley Authority’s Clinch River facility, as I reported for Heatmap.
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The Trump administration hasn’t abandoned its effort to kill New York’s congestion pricing scheme. On Friday, Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy filed a notice of appeal to U.S. District Judge Lewis Liman’s March 3 decision to dismiss the administration’s lawsuit arguing that New York had overstepped its federal authorization by putting the toll in place. Before New York City implemented congestion pricing, experts warned that the apparent opposition captured in the pages of the New York Post was a paper tiger. Successful efforts to impose tolls on cars driving into dense urban areas with lots of public transit in Singapore and London had followed the same arc: Vehement blowback before the tolls take effect, contented acceptance once the charges become as normal as any other toll on the city’s roads and drivers start enjoying the easing of the gridlock. Within months of congestion pricing taking effect, polls showed that, already, support had flipped with more New Yorkers wanting to keep the tolls in place than eliminate them. But a year in, the results were hard to debate. As The City put it: “Less traffic. Faster buses. More subway riders.”
The latest legal challenge comes as New York grapples with mounting energy issues. In March, the Hochul administration proposed pushing back a key deadline in the state’s landmark decarbonization law. The state has yet to broker a final budget as legislators struggle to reach a deal with the governor’s office. Meanwhile, the state’s grid operator has issued a warning urging regulators to allow two barge-mounted power plants in Brooklyn to stay open past their planned closure.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has ruled that The Metals Company’s deep-seabed mining application is fully compliant with U.S. regulations. On Friday, the Canadian company, which is aiming to harvest mineral-rich nodules from a 1.7-million-acre swath of the Pacific called the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, called the approval “a key milestone” toward commercialization that puts the firm on track to start producing metals by the first three months of next year. Under a new regulatory framework NOAA put out, which The Metals Company applied to use, “applicants with exploration-phase data to submit a consolidated application for both an exploration license and commercial recovery permit,” establishing “a more efficient” permitting timeline. “This determination marks an important step forward in NOAA’s transparent, rules-based process, and brings us ever closer to providing the U.S. with a new, abundant and lower-impact source of critical metals,” Gerard Barron, chairman and chief executive of The Metals Company, said in a statement. “It reflects the sheer scale of scientific, environmental, and engineering effort and expertise that have been brought to bear on this project over the last 15 years, which provides us with sufficient information to move efficiently and responsibly into commercial operations under NOAA’s oversight.” Shares in the company surged on Friday in response to the news.
In March, the United Nations’ International Seabed Authority vowed to establish a global framework for regulating deep seabed mining this year, as I wrote at the time. Japan, meanwhile, is stepping up its efforts to create its own seabed mining industry.
The kiwi disappeared from the hills around New Zealand’s capital more than a century ago. But now the country’s flightless national bird is once again living in Wellington. Last week, the Capital Kiwi Project, a charitable trust that aims to bring the birds back to the city, released its 250th kiwi. “They are a part of who we are and our sense of belonging here,” Paul Ward, founder of the Capital Kiwi Project, told Euronews. “But they’ve been gone from these hills for well over a century and we decided as Wellingtonians that wasn’t right.”
Current conditions: The storms soaking the American South with as much as 10 inches of rain are tamping down the region’s wildfire risk • Cavite, the Philippine port city on a peninsula at the southern lip of Manila Bay, is facing its eighth straight day of temperatures nearing 110 degrees Fahrenheit • North Korean state media just issued a warning of a “severe” and “unusual” drought, killing off crops and threatening food shortages in the infamously famine-afflicted hermit kingdom.

Belgium has long ranked as the world’s No. 4 biggest user of nuclear energy as a percentage of its electricity mix, generating nearly half its power from fission. But the country passed a nuclear phaseout law in 2003. Since 2022, when Brussels started to weigh delaying the shutdowns, the European Union’s capital nation has closed five of its seven commercial reactors. The policy divided the government, with liberals fighting to preserve the reactors and Green Party officials, including former Energy Minister Tinne Van der Straeten, who previously worked at a private law firm that counted Russian gas giant Gazprom as one of its biggest clients, pushing for a full atomic exit. Now Belgium is halting the decommissioning of its last two reactors and nationalizing its nuclear plants in a bid to save the industry. In a Thursday post on X, Prime Minister Bart De Wever said his government had reached an agreement with the French utility giant Engie to “initiate the necessary studies for a full takeover” of Belgium’s nuclear industry. Engie owns all seven nuclear plants in the country. “This government chooses safe, affordable, and sustainable energy,” De Wever wrote, “with less dependence on fossil imports and more control over our own supply.”
France, which generates more of its power from fission than any other nation, followed a similar approach, fully nationalizing the utility Électricité de France in 2023 as part of a plan to shore up and expand the reactor fleet. Last month, EDF, as the French giant is known, announced a $117 million investment in a factory to build parts for France’s flagship nuclear reactor, the EPR2. On Wednesday, meanwhile, the Canadian government put out a statement vowing to develop “a transformative” new national nuclear strategy on Wednesday that would focus on the country’s natively-designed CANDU technology and burgeoning uranium mining sector.
America’s solar boom may look slightly dimmer since the Trump administration cracked down on permitting and eliminated key tax credits. But construction has begun on the 140-megawatt Iron Spur Solar project in Snyder, Texas, ensuring that the facility locks in tax credits before the phase-out in July, I can exclusively report for this newsletter. It’s the biggest U.S. project yet funded by Energea, a solar financing startup that allows investors to buy shares in networks of solar farms in the U.S., Brazil, Colombia, and South Africa. Iron Spur is expected to start producing electricity in 2029. Now that the company is looking for offtakers to buy the electricity, co-founder and managing partner Mike Silvestrini said “something has changed.”
“In the past, it was an ass-kissing process of communicating with guys at these big IT companies,” he told me. “It’s turned. All of a sudden, having the power production abilities gives us the upper hand, and we’re able to negotiate from higher ground than we ever have before. It’s a noticeable change. That’s going to continue.” With the tax credit going away, he said, “the cheapest source of new power generation is about to get more expensive. That pretty much guarantees that domestic energy rates go up after July 5, as there are no longer projects with that tax credit available.” In fact, he added, Energea is better off waiting to negotiate a power purchase agreement, offering some insight into how the solar market could change if Republicans don’t manage to pass legislation to salvage the tax credits. “It behooves companies like ours and projects like Iron Spur to be patient and see how markets respond to a now-finite number of investment tax credit projects,” he said.
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As I told you at the start of the week, the Trump administration is replicating the $1 billion deal it made with TotalEnergies to convince the French energy giant to abandon its two offshore wind projects in the U.S. Reporting by Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo later showed that the legal justification for the federal government’s cash offer was shaky at best, and that the actual text of the agreement contained no definite assurances that the company would invest any more than it had already planned to. Now Congress is getting involved. On Wednesday, as Emily reported, two House Democrats sent a letter to Total CEO Patrick Pouyanné announcing that they have opened a formal investigation into the deal. “We’re going to get every document, every email, every last receipt on this deal, and every person who had a hand in this is going to answer for it,” Jared Huffman, the ranking member of the House Natural Resources Committee from California, said in a press release. “What I have to say to TotalEnergies is this: Consider yourself on notice, we’re coming for you.”
A former official at the Department of the Interior told Utility Dive this week that the deals set a new precedent that could be abused: “You wouldn’t want to create a situation where you are allowing companies, for instance, to buy up leases for anti-competitive purposes and just not do anything on them for a period of time and then give them back and get their money back.” In Virginia, where Dominion Energy just started up its first offshore wind farm, Governor Abigail Spanberger signed legislation this week meant to support training and expansion of the new energy sector’s workforce, per offshoreWIND.biz. Total, for its part, isn’t eschewing renewables everywhere. The company just started construction on a 440-megawatt solar farm in the Philippines, PV Tech reported.
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More than 50 countries have agreed to work on trade measures to cut demand for fossil fuels. The pact came out of the Santa Marta climate summit in Colombia, in what the nonprofit Covering Climate Now called “a game-changing moment.” Climate scientist Johan Rockstrom told delegates at the First Conference on Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels: “You are a light in the tunnel of darkness.” For all the reversals of decarbonization policies we’ve seen over the past two years, however, the world is rapidly looking for alternatives to fossil fuels as the war in Iran drives up prices. “We decided that the transition away from fossil fuels could no longer remain a slogan but must become a concrete political and collective endeavor,” Irene Vélez Torres, environment minister of Colombia, told the Financial Times. Notably, the six-day confab did not include the world’s biggest emitters: China, the U.S., and India, who are responsible for more than 40% of current emissions.
Rivian is set to produce up to 300,000 vehicles at its Georgia factory, up 50% from its initial estimate. The electric automaker announced the news Thursday as part of its first-quarter earnings call. The company said it had reworked a loan deal with the Department of Energy to borrow just $4.5 billion of the original $6.6 billion awarded under the Biden administration, TechCrunch reported. Overall, Rivan’s earnings beat analysts’ expectations, according to Sherwood.
Genetically modified crops are widely considered to be essential to feeding a growing human population on a planet with a rapidly changing climate. That’s especially true now with the Iran War causing fertilizer shortages at the start of the growing season. Now the EU, long a bastion of GMO policy, is authorizing four more genetically engineered crops for import and use in food and animal feed. The approval, per Fertilizer Daily, is for one new soybean variety and renewed approvals for one maize and two cotton products.