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Zohran Mamdani with New York Governor Kathy Hochul. Andres Kudacki/Getty Images
It’s Election Day. Not every race has significant implications for climate change, but at least a few do. As Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo wrote, those races include:
One other race I’ll add, since it’s one of the most closely-watched elections in the nation, is the one for New York City mayor. While frontrunner Zohran Mamdani has so far said little about energy besides opposing a controversial gas pipeline into the five boroughs, the left-wing Democratic nominee said he would support construction of new nuclear power plants upstate at the last debate. City Hall has limited say over state energy policy, but the mayor does control the contracts the city government writes with the state-owned utility, the New York Power Authority, which is currently working on building a new nuclear plant. If his remarks at the final debate are any indication, Mamdani may endorse contracts to buy power from nuclear power plants as well as the wind and solar he vocally supported as a state lawmaker. “If he can buck the trend of the environmental left’s hostility to nuclear, he could demonstrate to New York City — and to democratic socialist supporters nationwide, who already view him as a likely successor to (notoriously antinuclear) Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders — that the left can think rationally about the energy system, its affordability, and the wide scope of the climate problem,” the writer Fred Stafford wrote in an op-ed for Heatmap this morning. “That would truly be charting a new path.”
On stage at the Abu Dhabi International Petroleum Exhibition and Conference yesterday, Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum announced the United States’ support for a critical minerals “club” of countries that will trade the metals needed for energy and weapons without relying on China. “In the last few weeks, the United States has announced a framework for creating a club of nations to be able to trade … [and for] refining and processing critical minerals,” Burgum said at the Adipec conference, according to E&E News.
As Heatmap’s Katie Brigham put it recently, “everybody wants to invest in critical minerals startups,” including the Trump administration. The U.S. military’s Office of Strategic Capital put up a $620 million loan for Vulcan Elements’ efforts to build a factory to produce 10,000 metric tons of rare earth magnets, according to The Wall Street Journal. The Department of Commerce is chipping in another $50 million, while private investors contribute $550 million to a deal that involves ReElement Technologies, a startup that purifies and recycles rare earth metals. Meanwhile, the Export-Import Bank of the U.S. signed onto a letter of interest promising to provide as much as $191 million in financing to Locksley Resources’ rare earths project in California’s Mojave desert.
Bloomberg Businessweek has a sweeping new dispatch from the rainforests of Guinea, where China recently completed a railroad that allows mining companies mostly controlled by Beijing to tap one of the world’s largest and richest iron ore deposits. At $23 billion, the project is Africa’s biggest ever mining project and could make the tiny West African nation the continent’s No. 2 mineral exporter. “Never before has China held this level of pricing power over the seaborne iron ore trade,” Tom Price, head of commodities strategy at Panmure Liberum, told the magazine. “Expect it to start calling the shots here.”
The U.S. has largely struggled to get a leg up on China in critical minerals. As I wrote here last month, the world’s leading commodities traders have urged Western governments to focus on refining metals, not just mining them. In September, I broke news in Heatmap about an Ohio startup called Xerion extending its novel approach to processing mineral ore from cobalt to gallium.
Utility giant Southern Company has signed deals for at least 7 gigawatts of data centers and other large power users, but has a pipeline of more than 50 gigawatts in the works, the company said in its third-quarter earnings last week. The company, which controls some of the largest utilities in the Southeast, is requiring “strong customer protections and credit provisions” to protect against rate increases to serve the new loads, Chief Financial Officer David Poroch said on the call, according to Utility Dive. “Our pipeline of large load data centers and manufacturers continues to be robust across our electric subsidiaries. The total pipeline remains more than 50 gigawatts of potential incremental load by mid 2030s.”
Poroch’s price caveats track with a trend Matthew Zeitlin wrote about recently, of utilities bending over backward to convince even their investors that ratepayers won’t be on the hook for the cost of serving the artificial intelligence buildout. With opposition to data centers high and rising, they’re trying to avoid a popular backlash.
Nineteen Democrats in the New York State Assembly want Governor Kathy Hochul to reject a mandate for electrifying new buildings. The signatories to a letter calling on the governor to halt plans to ban gas hookups in new construction include lawmakers from New York City, Long Island, and upstate, along with Assembly Majority Leader Crystal Peoples-Stokes. The letter was sent to the governor Monday, but Hochul already said she’d consider the request, Politico reported.
Another key test Mamdani's likely election will set up is how highly he prioritizes opposition to the Northeast Supply Enhancement pipeline designed to carry gas from Pennsylvania's fracking fields to stoves and furnaces in the outer boroughs. Hochul supports the project, which backers say will bring down the cost of a fuel that -- even in the most ambitious decarbonization scenarios -- New York will continue to need for many years. After running a campaign laser-focused on affordability, his approach to the project may reveal how important opposing fossil fuel infrastructure remains for the left wing of the Democratic Party.
It’s not your typical kind of media deal. The Cool Down, a climate and sustainability website known for its explainers about sustainable lifestyles and how-to guides, sold itself to the clean-energy company Palmetto. The North Carolina-based company, which leases solar panels, batteries, heat pumps, and other electrified technologies to consumers, has been expanding in recent months, as Heatmap’s Robinson Meyer wrote in a scoop on the acquisition yesterday. “By bringing our companies together, we’re pairing trusted consumer education with real, accessible energy solutions. Together we intend to empower households to take control of their energy future and benefit from the transition that’s already underway,” Chris Kemper, the founder and CEO of Palmetto, said in a statement.
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.
