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EPA chief Lee Zeldin, on the far right, eyes Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the health secretary, to the right of President Trump. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
The “Make America Healthy Again” wing of President Donald Trump’s political coalition is urging the White House to fire Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin over his decisions to deregulate harmful chemicals. In a petition circulated online, several prominent activists aligned with the administration’s health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., accused Zeldin of having “prioritized the interests of chemical corporations over the well-being of American families and children.” As of early Friday afternoon, The New York Times reported, more than 2,800 people had signed the petition. By Sunday afternoon, the figure was nearly 6,000. The organizers behind the petition include Vani Hari, a MAHA influencer known as the Food Babe to her 2.3 million Instagram followers, and Alex Clark, a Turning Point USA activist who hosts what the Times called “a health and wellness podcast popular among conservatives.”
The intraparty conflict comes as one of Zeldin’s more controversial rollbacks of a Biden-era pollution rule, a regulation that curbs public exposure to soot, is facing significant legal challenges. A lawyer told E&E News the EPA’s case is a “Hail Mary pass.”
The Democratic Republic of the Congo, by far the world’s largest source of cobalt, has slapped new export restrictions on the bluish metal needed for batteries and other modern electronics. As much as 80% of the global supply of cobalt comes from the DRC, where mines are notorious for poor working conditions, including slavery and child labor. Under new rules for cobalt exporters spelled out in a government document Reuters obtained, miners would need to pre-pay a 10% royalty within 48 hours of receiving an invoice and secure a compliance certificate. The rules come a month after Kinshasa ended a months-long export ban by implementing a quota system aimed at boosting state revenues and tightening oversight over the nation’s fast-growing mining industry. The establishment of the rules could signal increased exports again, but also suggests that business conditions are changing in the country in ways that could further complicate mining.
With Chinese companies controlling the vast majority of the DRC’s cobalt mines, the U.S. is looking to onshore more of the supply chain for the critical mineral. Among the federal investments is one I profiled for Heatmap: an Ohio startup promising to refine cobalt and other metals with a novel processing method. That company, Xerion, received funding from the Defense Logistics Agency, yet another funding office housed under the U.S. military.
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Last month, I told you about China’s outreach to the rest of the world, including Western European countries, to work together on nuclear fusion. The U.S. cut off cooperation with China on traditional atomic energy back in 2017. But France is taking a different approach. During a state visit to Beijing last week, French President Emmanuel Macron “failed to win concessions” from Chinese leader Xi Jinping, France24 noted. But Paris and Beijing agreed to a new “pragmatic cooperation” deal on nuclear power. France’s state-owned utility giant EDF already built a pair of its leading reactors in China.
The U.S. has steadily pushed the French out of deals within the democratic world. Washington famously muscled in on a submarine deal, persuading Australia to drop its deal with France and go instead with American nuclear vessels. Around the same time, Poland — by far the biggest country in Europe to attempt to build its first nuclear power plant — gave the American nuclear company Westinghouse the contract in a loss for France’s EDF. Working with China, which is building more reactors at a faster rate than any other country, could give France a leg up over the U.S. in the race to design and deploy new reactors.
It’s not just the U.S. backpedaling on climate pledges and extending operations of coal plants set to shut down. In smog-choked Indonesia, which ranks seventh in the world for emissions, a coal-fired plant that Bloomberg described as a “flagship” for the country’s phaseout of coal has, rather than shut down early, applied to stay open longer.
Nor is the problem reserved to countries with right-wing governance. The new energy plan Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, a liberal, is pursuing in a bid to leverage the country’s fossil fuel riches over an increasingly pushy Trump means there’s “no way” Ottawa can meet its climate goals. As I wrote last week, the Carney government is considering a new pipeline from Alberta to the West Coast to increase oil and gas sales to Asia.
There’s a new sheriff in town in the state at the center of the data center boom. Virginia’s lieutenant governor-elect Ghazala Hasmi said Thursday that the incoming administration would work to shift policy toward having data centers “pay their fair share” by supplying their own energy and paying to put more clean power on the grid, Utility Dive reported. “We have the tools today. We’ve got the skilled and talented workforce. We have a policy roadmap as well, and what we need now is the political will,” Hashmi said. “There is new energy in this legislature, and with it a real opportunity to build new energy right here in the Commonwealth.”
A cutaway of the MARVEL reactor, showing its size relative to a person. Idaho National Laboratory
For the past four years, the Department of Energy has been developing its very own microreactor. The Microreactor Application Research Validation and Evaluation, or MARVEL, is a 10-kilowatt, liquid-metal cooled microreactor currently under construction at the Idaho National Laboratory. On Thursday, the lab unveiled the “first potential end users for MARVEL,” including Amazon Web Services, energy equipment giant GE Vernova, oil giant ConocoPhillips, and the data center operator DCX. “With access to MARVEL, companies can explore how microreactors will potentially help us win the global AI race, solve water challenges, and so much more,” John Jackson, national technical director for the microreactor program at the Energy Department’s Office of Nuclear Energy, told Power magazine. “The MARVEL testbed exemplifies how nuclear energy can open the door to a stronger, safer and more prosperous future for our country.”
It’s part of the strides the Trump administration has taken on nuclear power recently. Earlier this week, as I wrote here, the Energy Department awarded $400 million each to two small modular reactor projects aiming to build the first lower-powered versions of third-generation units based on the light water reactors already in operation today. Last month, as I covered in this newsletter, the agency put up a $1 billion loan to fund the restart of the working reactor at the Pennsylvania plant once known as Three Mile Island. There is, after all, what Heatmap’s Katie Brigham called a very “real” nuclear dealmaking boom afoot.
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The prestigious journal Nature has retracted a study published last year that concluded that climate change would cause a catastrophic drop in economic output of 62% by the end of the century, a jarring finding taken so seriously that central banks worked the warning into risk-assessment models. But a team of economists noticed an error in data from Uzbekistan. Excluding the Central Asian republic from the calculation pegged the predicted plunge in economic activity at 23%. That doesn’t mean climate change isn’t an economic threat, as the papers detractors noted to The New York Times. “Most people for the last decade have thought that a 20% reduction in 2100 was an insanely large number,” said Solomon Hsiang, a professor of global environmental policy at Stanford University who in August co-wrote the critique of the original study. “So the fact that this paper is coming out saying 60% is off the chart.”
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The advocacy group Rewiring America is out with an interesting new thought experiment on the potential benefits of making the country’s households more energy efficient as a means of clearing space on the grid for data centers. Upgrading U.S. houses, condos, and apartments with efficient appliances, solar panels, and batteries could create enough capacity to meet the rising electricity demand of large data centers over the next five years. Doing so would create more than 600,000 jobs for carpenters, electricians, and others involved in the supply chain. Virtual power plants — software systems that allow utilities to pay homeowners for the right to tap into rooftop solar panels, batteries, plugged-in electric vehicles, and smart thermostats to balance the grid — are, advocates say, emerging as a potential source of large-scale power that can be harnessed in the next few years, a timescale relevant to many data center projects that are expected to complete construction before new power plants can come online.
Back in October, I told you the next-generation geothermal startup Eavor was on the brink of completing its first power plant south of Munich, Germany. Now the Calgary-based company has entered into commercial operation. Eavor officially delivered its first electrons to the German grid from its facility in Geretsried. Eavor hailed the milestone as proof not just of its potential to operate a generating plant but a victory for its in-house drilling technology designed to carve a closed-loop well deep underground. “With Geretsried now on-stream, we’re more confident than ever that our closed-loop geothermal system, designed for adaptability and suited to the world’s diverse regions, will secure its place as the leading solution for commercial geothermal application,” CEO Mark Fitzgerald said in a statement. It’s not the only geothermal startup making waves. As I wrote in yesterday’s newsletter, Zanskar, the Salt Lake City-based company using artificial intelligence to find new conventional geothermal resources, just claimed one of the biggest discoveries in the U.S. in more than 30 years.
You may also recall another newsletter from October where I told you that all Trump’s nominees to serve on the board of the Tennessee Valley Authority vowed to stand against privatizing the federally-owned utility, easing fears that the president’s recent boardroom meddling wasn’t an attempt at selling off the power provider on which more than 10 million Americans depend for cheap electricity. If you agree with analyses showing public ownership as the best way to keep prices down, then I have good news for you. When businessman and Republican megadonor Lee Beaman came before the Senate for a confirmation Wednesday, the nominee for the board said his preference for private enterprise came with an exception for the TVA. “Although I generally believe that the private sector is more efficient than government, in the case of TVA, I think TVA is more uniquely, appropriately operated as a government entity,” Beaman told the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, per E&E News.
