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The push comes as residential electricity prices continue climbing. Rates for American households spiked by an average of 7.4% in September compared to the same month in 2024, according to new data from the Energy Information Administration.
EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin.Kevin Lamarque-Pool/Getty Images
The Environmental Protection Agency made some big news on Wednesday, just before much of the U.S. took off for Thanksgiving: It’s delaying a rule that would have required oil and gas companies to start reducing how much methane, a potent greenhouse gas, is released from their operations into the atmosphere. The regulation would have required oil and gas companies to start reducing how much methane, a potent greenhouse gas, is released from their operations into the atmosphere. Drillers were supposed to start tracking emissions this year. But the Trump administration is instead giving companies until January 2027 as it considers repealing the measure altogether.
The New York Power Authority, the nation’s second largest government-owned utility after the federal Tennessee Valley Authority, is staffing up in preparation for its push to build at least a gigawatt of new nuclear power generation. On Monday morning, NYPA named Todd Josifovski as its new senior vice president of nuclear energy development, tasking the veteran atomic power executive with charting the strategic direction and development of new reactor projects. Josifovski previously hailed from Ontario Power Generation, the state-owned utility in the eponymous Canadian province, which is building what is likely to be North America’s first small modular reactor project. (As Matthew wrote when NYPA first announced its plans for a new nuclear plant, the approach mirrors Ontario’s there.) NYPA is also adding Christopher Hanson, a former member of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission whom President Donald Trump abruptly fired from the federal agency this summer, as a senior consultant in charge of guiding federal financing and permitting.
The push comes as New York’s statewide grid reaches “an inflection point” as surging demand, an aging fleet, and a lack of dispatchable power puts the system at risk, according to the latest reliability report. “The margin for error is extremely narrow, and most plausible futures point to significant reliability shortfalls within the next ten years,” the report concluded. “Depending on demand growth and retirement patterns, the system may need several thousand megawatts of new dispatchable generation over that timeframe.”
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Zillow, the country’s largest real estate site, removed a feature from more than a million listings that showed the risks from extreme weather, The New York Times reported. The website had started including climate risk scores last year, using data from the risk-modeling company First Street. But real estate agents complained that the ratings hurt sales, and homeowners protested that there was no way to challenge the scores. Following a complaint from the California Regional Multiple Listing Service, which operates a private database of brokers and agents, Zillow stopped displaying the scores.
The European Commission unveiled a new plan to replace fossil fuels in Europe’s economy with trees. By adopting the so-called Bioeconomy Strategy, released Thursday, the continent aims to remove fossil fuels in products Politico listed as “plastics, building materials, chemicals, and fibers” with organic materials that regrow, such as trees and crops. Doing so, the bloc argued, will help to preserve Europe’s “strategic autonomy” by making the continent less dependent on imported fuels.
Canada, meanwhile, is plowing ahead with its plans to strengthen itself against the U.S. by turning into an energy superpower. Already, the Trans Mountain pipeline is earning the federal coffers nearly $1.3 billion, based on my back-of-the-napkin conversion of the Canadian loonies cited in this Globe and Mail story to U.S. dollars. Now Prime Minister Mark Carney’s government is pitching a new pipeline from Alberta to the West Coast for export to Asia, as the Financial Times reported.
Swapping bunker fuel-burning engines for nuclear propulsion units in container ships could shave up to $68 million off annual shipping expenses, a new report found. If small modular reactors designed to power a cargo vessel are commercialized within four years as expected, the shipping companies could eliminate $50 million in fuel costs each year and about $18 million in carbon penalties. That’s according to data from Lloyd’s Register and LucidCatalyst report for the Singaporean maritime services company Seaspan Corporation.
The first fusion reaction to produce more energy than it took to spark occurred at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in December 2022. Since then, billions of dollars have flowed into fusion energy research and a number of prominent companies have proposed building power plants harnessing the technology. As Heatmap’s Katie Brigham put it, it’s “finally, possibly, almost time for fusion.” But the U.S. risks losing its edge, according to a new report by the Congress-backed Commission on the Scaling of Fusion Energy. “While the United States has long been at the forefront of fusion research, the international competition is intensifying,” the report published last month concluded. “China, in particular, is rapidly advancing its fusion energy capabilities through massive state investments and aggressive technological development, narrowing the window for American leadership.”
A coal plant in Hanchuan, Hubei province, China.Photo by Getty Images
China’s emissions remained flat for another quarter in a row, continuing a downward trend that started last year, as I wrote here earlier this month. Backing up that data is new research from Greenpeace East Asia, which found that China approved just under 42 gigawatts of new coal-fired capacity nationwide in the first nine months of 2025. That may sound like a lot, but if the current pace continues, 2025 is on track to be the second-lowest year for approvals since the COVID-19 shock in 2021. It would also be the second consecutive year of decline. “China’s power-sector emissions peak is within reach as early as 2025. Yet maintaining momentum to curb coal approvals remains critical,” Gao Yuhe, Greenpeace East Asia’s Beijing-based project manager, said in a statement. “Clear policy signals to cap coal and boost renewables are essential to accelerate both the power sector and societal emissions peaks.”
In the U.S., meanwhile, the Environmental Protection Agency filed a motion late Monday evening asking the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit to eliminate a Biden-era rule tightening limits on soot. The regulation, E&E News reported, was “predicted to save thousands of lives by tightening the exposure limit to a pollutant tied to a higher risk of strokes, lung cancer and other cardiovascular and respiratory diseases.”
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Since 1980, the Department of the Interior has run National Environmental Policy analyses on every five-year offshore drilling plan. But, as E&E News reported Tuesday, the agency’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management called that step “discretionary” in its latest proposal. To justify the change, the Trump administration cited two past rulings from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia that rejected challenges to NEPA assessments of five-year plans.
It’s a striking dichotomy with how the administration has dealt with offshore wind, most easily communicated via the meme of Shaquille O’Neal sleeping in one frame and awake with eyes ablaze in the next. Environmental damage from offshore oil and gas drilling? “I sleep,” as the meme goes. Environmental damage from offshore wind turbines? Now that, as I have written in this newsletter, has the Trump administration’s attention.
Iran “no longer has a choice” but to move its capital city as ecological strain on Tehran’s water and land make the metropolis impossible to sustain. In remarks carried on state media Thursday, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian said the government had “no option” but to consider an alternative city for the capital. “When we said we must move the capital, we did not even have enough budget,” he said, according to the London-based news service Iran International, which broadcasts in English and Farsi. “If we had, maybe it would have been done. The reality is that we no longer have a choice; it is an obligation.” As the capital sinks by near one foot per year and water supplies shrink, Tehran faces “catastrophe” and “a dark future,” he said. “Protecting the environment is not a joke. Ignoring it means signing our own destruction.”
Tehran wouldn’t be the only major city on the move. Indonesia is designing a new capital in Borneo called Nusantara to replace Jakarta, which is also slowly sinking.
Redwood Materials, the battery recycling startup led by Tesla co-founder JB Straubel, has cut dozens of workers as the company scales back some of its projects to focus on tapping into demand for grid-scale batteries, Bloomberg reported Tuesday. The layoffs took place this month and were spread across the company, amounting to up to 6% of the total workforce. Redwood is now focusing on repurposing old batteries for the grid and extracting critical minerals from scrapped power packs.
Here’s a statistic for the vegetarians to whip out on Thanksgiving: A 16-pound turkey has a carbon footprint as big as the gravy, cranberry sauce, mashed potatoes, rolled biscuits, and apple pie combined, research from Carnegie Mellon University found. Before you go off starting a fight with your truck-driving, meat-loving uncle, the scientists noted that, “compared to all the environmental lifestyle decisions that an American family could make, these are very, very small potatoes.” I wish you all a happy and peaceful Thanksgiving holiday.
