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Calling the initial plan to eliminate Energy Star “vexing,” RE Tech Advisors’ Deb Cloutier, one of Energy Star’s original architects, told Heatmap’s Jeva Lange, “There are a lot of lobbying efforts that I’m personally aware of within the commercial real estate industry and the manufacturing industry, where folks are reaching out and doing calls to action for the House and Senate Appropriations majority members — similar activities to what we did eight years ago when Energy Star was directly under fire.” She added, “I know that there are many, many representatives, both Republican and Democrats, who support Energy Star. We’ve had 35 years of bipartisan support, and it has been earmarked in congressional law many times, through multiple George H.W. and George W. Bush administrations.”
The world is on track to warm by an average of 2.8 degrees Celsius by the end of the century, the Rhodium Group predicted in its latest forecast. The consultancy said its modeling showed a 67% likelihood that global temperatures will rise between 2.3 degrees and 3.4 degrees thanks to the current trajectory of planet-heating pollution. That’s a significant improvement on the dire predictions issued a decade ago. But if decarbonization doesn’t pick up pace, the probability of limiting warming to 2 degrees — the more modest target set in the Paris Agreement — is below 5%. Still, the findings don’t deviate much from Rhodium’s projections before Trump returned to office. As Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo wrote this morning, “in the long run, Trump might not mean much for the climate’s trajectory.”
Nevertheless, the overshoot beyond 2 degrees is partly why Bill Gates took a more moderate stance on climate change in his latest memo, as Heatmap’s Robinson Meyer wrote last week. It’s also why, as Rob explained in a big story, private companies promising to commercialize technology to geoengineer the world’s temperature are raising large sums of money.
The Department of Energy is stepping up its efforts to keep aging coal plants online. The agency on Friday announced plans to offer up to $100 million to owners of coal-fired power stations that plan to modernize the stations with upgrades that “improve efficiency, plant lifetimes, and performance of coal and natural gas use.” In a press release, Secretary of Energy Chris Wright praised President Donald Trump for having “ended the war on American coal” and “restoring common sense energy policies that put Americans first.”
Despite Trump’s promises to revive American coal production and use, exports fell 11% in the first half of this year due to China buying less of the fuel amid ongoing trade negotiations, according to an analysis published Friday by the Energy Information Administration.
Quarterly coal exports, on the rise on the Biden administration, are now plunging. EIA
In the latest sign that Wall Street is heeding Trump’s calls to veer away from investment initiatives that cut out fossil fuels, lending giant State Street’s asset management arm withdrew its U.S. operations from what was once a leading climate action group for the industry. The company said “it had decided that only its units serving UK and European clients would remain part of the Net Zero Asset Managers” group, the Financial Times reported. BlackRock, Vanguard, and JP Morgan Asset Management had already left the group known as NZAM in the U.S. JP Morgan and State Street had already also quit another green investor group, Climate Action 100+, last year.
Months after Taiwan shut down its final reactors earlier this year, a plurality of voters approved a referendum calling for the last atomic plant to be turned back on. Years after Germany completely exited nuclear power, the new government has reversed Berlin’s position and has now joined France in supporting atomic energy again as it considers ways to restore its fleet. Switzerland and Belgium, meanwhile, reversed plans to shut down nuclear plants, and Italy — the first country in the world to end its nuclear power production years ago — is working on reviving its industry. That leaves only Spain still stubbornly planning to close its nuclear plants starting in 2027.
The tides may be turning. In February, a majority of lawmakers in Spain’s parliament approved a resolution condemning Socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez’s phaseout plans. Now the board of Spain’s Centrales Nucleares Almaraz-Trillo has officially requested a three-year extension on the operating license for units one and two of the Almaraz Nuclear Power Plant. If granted, the extension would allow the reactors to stay online through 2030. The station currently supplies 7% of Spain’s electricity.
Fusion energy, the joke goes, is the energy source of tomorrow — and always will be. But recent laboratory breakthroughs have unleashed billions of dollars in private financing to commercialize fusion energy for real, with companies promising to open power plants in the next decade. There’s a big bottleneck, however: Many of the materials needed for fusion reactors are scarcely produced right now. New bipartisan legislation aims to change that by extending the 45X tax credit for clean manufacturing — one of the few parts of the Inflation Reduction Act retained in Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act — to producers of vanadium, deuterium, helium-3, and other materials needed for fusion power to take off.
The Senate voted Thursday to overturn Biden-era rules limiting drilling in the Alaskan Arctic. The 52-45 vote, in which Senator John Fetterman of Pennsylvania joined Republicans to vote in favor, canceled out the 2022 Biden administration plan that made just 52% of land in what’s known as the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska available for drilling. A previous Trump administration proposal made 82% of the area eligible for drilling. “This will benefit North Slope communities with jobs & economic growth, and support their tax base to improve access to essential services like water and sewer systems and clinics,” Alaska Senator Dan Sullivan, who sponsored the legislation to withdraw the Biden-era rules, said in a post on X in September.
The move comes a week after Trump opened a broad swath of Alaskan wilderness to drilling, as I reported here.
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Chinese electric auto giant BYD reported another slump in its quarterly profits amid growing domestic competition. Much like Tesla, which has seen its market share in the U.S. drop in recent months as rivals surged ahead, BYD saw its third-quarter profits tumble 33% from a year earlier to roughly $1.1 billion. Total revenue dropped 3%. The Shenzhen-based company — the world’s largest electric automaker — remains dominant in China, but rivals Geely Automobile Holdings and Chongqing Changan Automobile Co. saw increases in third-quarter sales of 96% and 84% respectively, Bloomberg reported.
Still, BYD’s strength in the international market gives the Chinese company an edge over Tesla, the U.S.’s domestic EV champion. As Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin wrote recently, “Tesla’s stranglehold over the U.S. EV market may be weakening, so too is its hold on the international market.”
Real estate giant Related Companies agreed to build a data-center campus worth more than $7 billion on farmland outside Detroit, in what The Wall Street Journal called “one of the largest deals yet” for this class of property deals to power artificial intelligence. The 250-acre campus is the fourth new site announced as part of a $300 billion contract between Oracle and OpenAI to power the ChatGPT-maker’s Stargate project.
The news came the same day the small modular reactor startup Blue Energy announced a deal with the artificial intelligence company Crusoe to develop a nuclear-powered data center campus in Port of Victoria, Texas. The project, which aims to build up to 1.5 gigawatts of power, would first build natural gas-fired plants with the intention of phasing them out in favor of Blue Energy’s nuclear reactors by 2031. The nuclear company plans to construct its plants on sites where it can ship the reactors to the campus by barge. “We’re not really doing anything where there isn’t regulatory precedent in the past,” Blue Energy CEO Jake Jurewicz told nuclear scholar Emmet Penney on the podcast Nuclear Barbarians earlier this month. “In the end, it comes down to being really thoughtful with design, plant architecture, and site selection.”
Nuclear waste recycling was once a third-rail issue among liberals who, like former President Jimmy Carter, feared that the technology to extract additional reactor fuel from spent uranium risked sending the message worldwide that the U.S. supported continued weapons proliferation. But when the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee voted Wednesday to approve legislation to streamline the process for licensing nuclear recycling plants, only a handful of Democrats pushed back. The radioactive waste sitting at power plants across the U.S. is relatively tiny compared to the amount of electricity those fuel rods produced. But part of why the spent fuel remains dangerously toxic for so long is that it still contains the vast majority of the energy in the uranium. By reprocessing the enriched metal to extract the useful fuel isotopes, the nation’s waste stockpile would shrink and, by some estimates, the U.S. could power its entire grid system for more than a century.
At this week’s vote, the opposition stood out against the unanimous support for other bills to promote plastics cleanup and diesel emissions, E&E News reported. But the bipartisan Nuclear REFUEL Act attracted just a handful of dissenters, ultimately passing in a 16 to 3 vote. Separately, in Illinois late Thursday, Governor JB Pritzker signed legislation to lift the state’s moratorium on building nuclear reactors. That puts the state, by far the largest nuclear hub in the nation, in play for new large-scale reactors that the Trump administration has pledged to fund.
Pumpkin bumper crops? Quoth the farmer, nevermore. INOAA
Happy Halloween, to all who celebrate. In the holiday spirit, would you like to read something a little spooky? Climate change is already taking a toll on the nation’s pumpkin crop. Extreme heat and rain are reducing how many gourds are available for jack-o-lanterns, as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration warned last year. The downward trend continues. In the latest crop update from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the per capita availability of pumpkins fell by 11%, more than five times the reduction in squash and twice the fall in sweet potatoes.
