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In the early hours of Monday morning in Switzerland, mediators from Pakistan and Qatar announced that talks between the United States and Iran had ended after making “encouraging progress.” Now, a “High Level Committee” will attempt to iron out the specifics of a deal over the next 60 days, covering tense issues such as nuclear enrichment, sanctions, and Israeli military actions in southern Lebanon. The statement also said that a “communication line” had been set up “to avoid incidents and miscommunication with the aim of safe passage for commercial vessels through the Strait of Hormuz.”
The agreement followed several days of confusion over the state of the waterway. While Iran declared the strait closed over the weekend in protest over Israeli actions in Lebanon, a U.S. military spokesman told The New York Times, “Iran does not control the Strait of Hormuz. Traffic continues to flow, and U.S. forces are monitoring the situation to ensure this remains the case.” Meanwhile, Iranian officials have said their own exports are receiving waivers from sanctions, and that a U.S. blockade is no longer in effect. “Oil and petrochem exports are waived, blockade lifted, some frozen assets released, and major reconstruction & development plan launched for Iran,” Iran’s foreign minister Seyed Abbas Araghchi posted on X Sunday evening.
Initial results in Colombia’s presidential election showed Abelardo de la Espriella, the right-wing candidate allied with Donald Trump, winning office against his leftist opponent, Ivan Cepeda, an ally of outgoing President Gustavo Petro. While the campaign largely revolved around issues related to drugs and crime, de la Espriella has also pledged to support the country’s fossil fuel industry, including support for fracking and expanding overall oil and gas production. Petro, by contrast, “sought to wean the Andean nation off fossil fuels by halting new drilling licenses and seeking to ban fracking,” Bloomberg reported. Petro’s environmentalist bent chilled outside investment in the oil and gas sector, which is still Colombia’s No. 1 exporting industry.
China’s Commerce Ministry targeted two favored U.S. rare earth companies with export controls on Monday, Bloomberg reported, adding American mineral producers MP Materials and USA Rare Earth to its export control list. The two companies were among 10 added to the list, Chinese state news agency Xinhua reported. “Organizations and individuals from any country or region are prohibited from transferring or providing dual-use items originating in China to the above-mentioned entities. Relevant ongoing export activities shall be immediately halted, according to the statement,” Xinhua said. Earlier this month, the Pentagon added several Chinese companies to its own list of companies known to support the Chinese military. These included tech giants Baidu and Alibaba, as well as the electric vehicle company BYD. This designation comes with restrictions on the companies’ commercial relationships with the Department of Defense.
MP Materials’ Mountain Pass Rare Earth Mine. David McNew/Getty Images
The two companies have been the recipient of billions of investment and largesse from the federal government as the U.S. seeks to build up a rare earths mining and processing industry that’s no longer reliant on China, which dominates the sector. MP Materials has received a combination of direct investment, financing, and purchase commitments for its neodymium-praseodymium production and output. While the Trump administration has shown little interest in catalyzing the wind and electric vehicle sectors (both of which use neodymium-praseodymium oxide in their electric motors), the defense industry is a major customer of MP Materials’ rare earths products. USA Rare Earth has received over $1 billion in federal investment.
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It’s not just the risk of a West Coast hurricane — the return of the El Niño weather system could portend a “mini-Dust bowl” in the Midwest. AccuWeather forecasters warned over the weekend that there’s a 70% chance already-present El Niño conditions in the Pacific Ocean could develop into what’s known as a “Super El Niño,” characterized by ocean surface temperatures 2 degrees Celsius hotter than average. Though El Niño is notorious for sending extreme rain into the southern U.S., it can also cause drier conditions further north. Combined with the extremity of this year’s projected temperature anomaly, that could lead to a multi-year drought in the Midwest. “The stronger the upcoming El Niño conditions get, the longer it takes for weather patterns to return to their historical average,” AccuWeather senior meteorologist Paul Pastelok explained. Already several Plains and Mountain West states are in “extreme drought,” and the El Niño could set the table for even more dry weather to come.
Michael Bloomberg, founder of financial news service Bloomberg LP and a prolific climate philanthropist, announced a $285 million commitment on Sunday “to help clean energy scale fast enough to power the world’s energy systems,” according to a press release from his charitable organization, Bloomberg Philanthropy. The gift is aimed at accelerating wind and solar deployment both in developed and emerging markets, with the goal that the two technologies should “generate more than half” of electricity in countries responsible for 70% of global emissions. The money will support trade groups for the wind and solar industry, data collection and analysis efforts to demonstrate wind and solar’s capabilities and costs, technical assistance to set up electricity markets in a way that encourages wind and solar deployment, and working with investors and financial institutions to “help unlock private capital for clean energy infrastructure.”
The substantial gift toward two mature technologies stands in contrast to other climate and philanthropic investment approaches (like, say, Bill Gates’) that focus on “breakthrough” technologies that are not currently widely deployed, or may not even exist at all. Bloomberg’s gift comes after Gates closed his main climate giving vehicle’s advocacy and policy shops early last year, and later issued a memo outlining a “strategic pivot” to focus more on global public health and extreme poverty.
Developer Elementl says it will build a new 1.5-gigawatt nuclear plant 100 miles outside Columbus, Ohio. The twist: It’ll be powered by small modular reactors. The proposed plant would features several BWRX-300 SMRs made by GE Vernova Hitachi Nuclear Energy, a design that has also been favored by Ontario Power Generation at its first-on-the-continent SMR facility. Elementl said in a press release Friday that it expects to hear back from PJM Interconnection later this year about interconnection, which would set up the facility to be in service by 2034.
Editor’s note: This article has been updated to correct the location of a potential “mini-Dust Bowl.”
In other macroeconomic news: The Federal Reserve announced Wednesday that it was leaving its benchmark interest rate unchanged for the fourth straight time. Speaking at his first policy meeting since taking office, Kevin Warsh, Trump’s newly appointed Fed chairman, promised to “deliver price stability.” But CNN noted that most of Warsh’s colleagues signaled in their economic outlooks that they anticipated hiking rates again later this year. Rate cuts, as Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin has written, are key to boosting renewables, whose upfront costs make them sensitive to interest rates on capital.
The Department of the Interior has agreed to pay the developer Invenergy $765 million to cancel its four offshore wind leases, an amount equal to what the company paid the federal government for access to the areas. Like the administration’s previous deals to kill off as-yet-unbuilt offshore wind projects, Invenergy’s agreement is structured as a legal settlement. As Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo explained, the deal follows a similar $928 million arrangement with TotalEnergies announced in March, and an $885 million agreement with several joint ventures in April. That brings the total amount the administration has agreed to pay to end offshore wind leases to more than $2.5 billion to date.
A group of state attorneys general filed a legal challenge to those previous deals earlier this month that questions their use of the Judgment Fund, a functionally unlimited well of cash the federal government can use to settle ongoing or imminent lawsuits. Here’s Emily with more on the Judgment Fund and why using it may be tricky for the administration to defend.
Among the most poignant critiques of solar energy are its intermittency and the amount of land needed to generate vast quantities of power. Batteries are quickly solving the first part of that equation. But data from a new interactive map the Solar Energy Industries Association published this morning shows that solar today takes up just 0.04% of the total U.S. land area, and 0.07% of prime American farmland. There were zero states where solar used more than 0.5% of prime farmland, according to the data, which was shared exclusively with Heatmap. In fact, nearly every state has more abandoned prime farmland than solar-developed parcels. Nationally, there are 43 acres of abandoned prime farmland for every acre of solar on prime farmland. As a particularly jarring point of comparison, golf courses alone use 2.6 times as much prime farmland as solar, while suburban development just since 2014 uses roughly six times as much. “America depends on our land to grow our food, build our communities, and power our lives,” Tim Pawlenty, the newly-appointed chief executive of SEIA and a former Republican governor of Minnesota, told me in a statement. “Responsible land use means balancing all of those needs. This map helps provide important context by showing that solar and agriculture can thrive together. Solar development uses a very small amount of farmland compared to many other common land uses, while also delivering affordable energy, local tax revenue, and reliable income for farmers and landowners.”
California beamin'.EIA
Solar, meanwhile, hit a major milestone in California. In the first five months of 2026, utility-scale solar generation in the California Independent System Operator surpassed natural gas power, according to a new analysis from the Energy Information Administration. Compared to the same five-month period in 2024, this year saw a 21% increase in solar generation. Gas-fired generation, meanwhile, sank by 60%.
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Estonia’s parliament has passed a new bill creating the Baltic nation’s first complete set of rules for producing nuclear energy and overseeing its safety, NucNet reported, a key step toward building the NATO country’s first atomic power station. Meanwhile, Swiss lawmakers just rejected a bid to slow down legislation to allow for construction of new reactors again. Switzerland’s Council of States, its upper house of parliament, blocked a motion to refer a nuclear bill to the Federal Council ahead of a planned vote later this week.
In Sweden, the parliament approved legislation to streamline permitting for mining and processing uranium. The bill also included an amendment to open up more coastal sites to reactor development, World Nuclear News reported.
The U.S. is seeing the start of a solar manufacturing boom, perhaps best exemplified by the opening of the first fully integrated plant in Qcells’ factory. Now Soltec, a startup that manufactures tracking equipment to maximize power production, has launched a new line of hardware that it says is completely compliant with new restrictions on foreign imports. The company said it had spent the past year “reorganizing its U.S. supply chain with a clear objective: to provide customers with a highly localized supply network capable of meeting the domestic content requirements” of new federal rules. “By localizing its U.S. supply chain, Soltec helps customers pursue Made-in-USA tax benefits while improving cost competitiveness, delivery certainty, and resilience against tariffs, freight volatility and broader geopolitical disruptions,” Mariano Berges, Soltec’s chief executive, said in a statement. “The objective is to protect U.S. customers and provide greater execution certainty for their projects in an increasingly complex market environment.”
In case you were wondering where former Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem may turn up, here’s your answer: copper mining. The current special envoy to the Shield of the Americas, a pact of right-leaning Western Hemisphere countries, has joined NovaRed Mining, a junior miner that holds two early-stage copper exploration assets in Canada. Noem, who is taking an adviser role, boasts “extensive experience spanning economic development, infrastructure, energy, agriculture, national security and public-private collaboration,” the company said in a press release.
