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Why Patagonia, REI, and just about every other gear retailer are going PFAS-free.
On ‘precariously low’ oil stockpiles, China’s ammonia milestone, and a PFAS destroyer
On nuclear waste, a Nevada solar farm, and lithium-harvesting nanorobots
The Greenhouse Gas Protocol released updates on its looming new emissions accounting rules. Here’s what they mean.
On Yucca Mountain, Europe’s inverter boom, and Romanian offshore wind
On Meta quits, Elon Musk’s solar plans, and federal coal reserves
Current conditions: Tropical Storm Bertha washed out the majority of monitored sea turtle nests in the western part of the Florida Panhandle • Record rain in West Virginia swelled creeks that toppled bridges in the north central part of the state • In the Pacific, Tropical Depression Kiyapo is barreling toward the northern part of the Philippines’ Luzon island.
Aerial view this month of solar panels in China’s Zhejiang Province. VCG/VCG via Getty Images
China just quietly upped its target for renewable energy consumption, ratcheting up the goal 53% by 2030, rising to 1.8 billion tons of coal equivalent from 1.18 billion tons last year. That’s according to the latest five-year plan for renewables the National Development and Reform Commission published on its website. Wind and solar, paired with energy storage, are expected to provide 20% of electricity during the summer and winter evening peak periods, up from 10% currently, according to Bloomberg. By 2030, Beijing wants 300 gigawatts of peak capacity from renewables. Non-electric utilization of renewables, such as for heavy industry, is projected to rise to 150 million tons of coal equivalent from 60 million in 2025. The People’s Republic is betting on novel technologies to start taking off. By the start of the next decade, China wants to increase solar thermal capacity to 15 gigawatts from just under 2 gigawatts at the end of last year. The government wants marine energy, such as tidal and wave power, to go from virtually nothing today to at least 400 megawatts.
In the meantime, Beijing’s buildout of nuclear reactors continues apace. Per my promise to keep you abreast of all the big milestones, here’s the latest: China General Nuclear just installed the “supermodule” for the CAP1000 — the Chinese version of America’s Westinghouse AP1000 — at its Unit 2 project at the Lufeng Nuclear Power Plant in Guangdong Province. The installation this week of a module that’s too big to be transported by rail or boat and thus needed to be fabricated on site “signifies that the construction of the reactor building” for the new unit “has entered a new phase.”
Meta has quit a top corporate initiative to promote clean energy as the Facebook parent company has built out at least a dozen gas-fired power stations to supply electricity to its data centers over the past year. While rivals such as Apple, Google, and Microsoft remain members of the RE100, a project of the British-headquartered nonprofit the Climate Group that former United Kingdom Prime Minister Tony Blair co-founded, Recharge News reported that Meta had left the initiative. A spokesperson for the company told TechCrunch it was a mutual decision, though Meta declined to comment on the exact reasoning.
The United States currently has a little over 70 gigawatts of capacity to manufacture solar panels each year. Tesla has plans to dramatically increase that number. “We are just going to multiply it [by] an order of magnitude,” Vaibhav Taneja, Tesla’s chief financial officer, said during an earnings call Wednesday night. “We’re going at a very rapid scale.” It was just one of the various investments the electric auto giant is banking on investors to support as billionaire CEO Elon Musk ramps up spending on manufacturing semiconductors and humanoid robots as part of its artificial intelligence buildout, while also tackling an energy source that the scale of China’s factories has largely brought down to a commodified price. The stock plunged nearly 15% on Thursday as CNBC cautioned that investors are increasingly spooked about spending on artificial intelligence. “Yes, this means that we are doing a lot of things all at the same time,” Taneja said. “And that’s why we just have to go as fast as … humanly possible, make things work in the real world.”
Adding to the company’s woes: The U.S. government is now looking to strengthen regulations on car door hands after federal filings linked electric door failures to at least 15 deaths in Tesla vehicles, Bloomberg reported.
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The price of Brent crude, the international benchmark for oil, surpassed $100 per barrel for the first time since May amid President Donald Trump’s threats to ramp up the U.S. bombing campaign against Iran and a resurgence of attacks from Yemen’s Tehran-backed Houthi rebels in the Red Sea. West Texas Intermediate, the U.S. benchmark, finished out the day of trading at a little over $92 per barrel. Murban crude, out of the United Arab Emirates, soared nearly 20% to more than $107 per barrel. On Thursday, Trump told Axios he was close to a final decision on whether to launch a “massive attack” on Iran, “bigger than ever before.” The threat comes on what the Financial Times clocked as the 12th straight night of U.S. strikes against the Islamic Republic.
A new analysis from the consultancy Wood Mackenzie, meanwhile, showed the limits of Saudi Arabia’s main bypass for the Strait of Hormuz. Riyadh redirected virtually all crude exports through its East-West Pipeline to Yanbu on the Red Sea after Iran closed the narrow waterway at the mouth of the Persian Gulf at the start of the war in February. Volumes flowing through the pipeline peaked at more than 4 million barrels per day in March. But by June, that flow declined to about 2.4 million barrels per day, a 41% decline. On the whole, crude exports out of the Persian Gulf fell 82% between January and June. That’s likely due to dropping production as the regional industry struggles to find sufficient outlets for its supply. The Red Sea corridor also also “faces a declared Houthi blockade that, if enforced, could reduce global oil supply considerably.”
The U.S. has 4.2 billion short tons of coal reserves in active mines and another 356 billion short tons in untapped deposits, according to an updated U.S. Geological Survey report the Department of the Interior released Thursday. If extracted and burned in a power plant, the coal could supply the nation’s needs for at least 600 years at the current rate of consumption, the agency said. “American Energy Dominance is more important than ever, and so is beautiful, clean coal’s role in the production of electricity needed to fuel our future prosperity,” Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum said in a statement. “Thanks to the USGS’s rigorous and independent assessment, we’re better equipped to manage America’s vast public lands responsibly while supporting energy security and economic opportunity.” Of the 34 coal mines on federal land, 14 are located in Wyoming, followed by Colorado with six, North Dakota and Utah with four mines each, and Alabama and Montana with three mines each. But Wyoming's mines contain 87% of the reserves associated with active mines on federal lands. As I told you last month, the Trump administration put up $850 million to support a coal revival. And the Iran War, as my colleague Matthew Zeitlin wrote in March, is only fueling more demand for coal.
Last month, I told you that Japan was the other country, besides the United States, bucking the global trend toward more, not less, offshore wind. Here’s a good reminder that, in most cases, such trends are directional, not definitive. The 315-megawatt Oga-Katagami-Akita offshore wind project just received its certification from Japanese regulators, “confirming that the design of its wind power generation facilities complies with” technical standards. It’s a major step toward building the array of 21 Vestas turbines off the coast of Akita Prefecture, per offshoreWIND.biz.
The company’s latest sustainability report, shared exclusively with Heatmap, shows that carbon intensity per kilometer traveled has dropped 81% since 2019.
Lime, the electric scooter and bike-sharing company that recently raised $174 million in its initial public offering, estimates that it replaced 38 million car trips across the globe last year. Even as it helped prevent substantial vehicle pollution, though, Lime racked up about 90,000 metric tons of carbon emissions tied to its own activities.
While that number pales in comparison to the tens of millions of tons of carbon that tech companies like Microsoft and Google emit, or the hundreds of millions of tons that traditional car companies like Ford report, the point stands: Even companies producing solutions to climate change have emissions to deal with.
For such a small player, Lime has made quite a bit of progress reducing its climate impact. Since 2019, when Lime first began tracking its carbon footprint, the number of kilometers traveled by Lime’s bikes and scooters each year has grown nearly 250%, while the carbon intensity of each kilometer has decreased by 81%. All in all, Lime has reduced its total reported emissions from direct and indirect sources by 35%. The company made much of that progress in just the past two years.
According to Lime’s latest sustainability report, shared exclusively with Heatmap, its biggest recent strides came from doing something that is generally considered to be pretty difficult: It decarbonized part of its supply chain.
Most of the emissions related to Lime’s business come from activities that are not within the company’s control. Its biggest source has always been the manufacture of the vehicles and batteries it uses, and more specifically from the manufacture of aluminum, which requires a huge amount of electricity to smelt.
Lime doesn’t manufacture its own vehicles, so it had to convince its partners to find and use lower-carbon metals and batteries. “One of the strategic advantages we have is that we design our own vehicles. We’re not buying them off the shelf,” Andrew Savage, Lime’s vice president of sustainability, told me. “So we don’t own the manufacturing, but we have a large amount of input and ability to work with suppliers to modify a supply chain.”
Savage said that a significant sourcing effort in 2024 paid off in 2025, when the company increased the amount of aluminum in its products that was made using renewable electricity and sourced more batteries made with renewable power. That combination of efforts cut the company’s total capital goods-related emissions in half compared to the previous year, and reduced the carbon intensity of each Lime vehicle by more than 25%. It also didn’t cost too much, Savage told me, adding that the expenditure was “marginal enough that it has made sense for us.”
Lime has also invested in its repair capabilities, which allows the company to keep its vehicles and parts in circulation much longer and avoid buying as many new ones. This has helped to keep emissions down even as its business has grown.
Another major source of emissions for Lime is shipping and logistics — again, a part of the business that is somewhat out of its hands. Lime hires third parties to pick up its bikes and scooters from major ports, transport them to regional hubs, and then distribute them to the markets where it operates. Initially, the vehicles were transported in trucks fueled by diesel. In 2024, Lime found partners that would be able to pick up its cargo at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach and bring them to its logistics hubs in electric drayage trucks.
The company made similar moves throughout its European business, transitioning most of its port-to-hub shipments to trucks running on a bio-based diesel fuel called HVO100, which is made from used cooking oil and other waste oils and estimated to reduce emissions by 89% compared to conventional diesel. This past year, Lime expanded its use of HVO100-fueled trucking partners to cover shipments from hubs to 16 cities.
The problem with HVO100, according to Nikita Pavlenko, the program director for fuels and aviation at the International Council on Clean Transportation, is that there will never be enough of it to fully decarbonize heavy duty trucking. “Particularly in Europe, where the transport sector is more reliant on diesel, it could never feasibly be met with waste oils entirely,” he told me. Purpose-grown crops like palm and soy could meet the increased demand for bio-based diesel, but that starts to come at the expense of land-use emissions and deforestation.
Savage was well aware of the limitations, and told me he views HVO100 as an interim solution. “We looked across Europe and somewhat shockingly found very few options on the electrification side,” he said. Even a country like Norway, which is famous for its adoption of electric vehicles, does not yet have much in the way of electric trucking and logistics, he said. “But it’s something that we absolutely expect to come in as part of our decarbonization roadmap.”
Interestingly, Lime reported that its upstream shipping and logistics emissions slightly increased in 2025 compared to 2024, although the company has cut this category in half overall since 2019. Lime attributed this to an increased use of expedited shipping for certain parts last year, but said its increased use of EVs and HVO100 helped mitigate the impacts.
Lime currently operates on five continents and in 230 cities. While it’s made some progress on low-carbon shipping within the EU and U.S., there’s still Australia, South America, and Asia to figure out. Looking ahead to next year, Savage said he wants to expand the number of markets and the amount of goods the company moves using lower-carbon vehicles. He also wants to augment the company’s repair practice.
“We view the work we’re doing on decarbonizing the business as going completely hand in hand with our mission and objective as a company,” Savage said. “It’s not a sideshow.”
