SCIENCE
David Gelles, a climate writer for the New York Times, just published this article about recent climate trends. It contains interviews with a variety of climate scientists. A sample: “The world has already warmed nearly 1.5 degrees, and appears on track to blow past 2 degrees by the end of the century, if not sooner. Wall Street analysts are anticipating a world that has warmed at least 3 degrees, a scenario that would render parts of the world uninhabitable and unleash vast economic devastation.”
Revolution Wind is on. On Friday, the 704-megawatt offshore wind farm started pumping electricity onto New England’s grid from off the coast of Rhode Island. As the turbine array neared completion, the Danish developer Orsted was forced into battle against the Trump administration’s attempts to yank permits from the project — and won repeatedly, as Heatmap’s Jael Holzman wrote.
The Energy Ministers of the 9 North Seas countries gathered in
Hamburg today to boost the expansion of offshore wind. Together with
industry and transmission system operators they signed the “Investment Pact for the North Seas”. Governments commit to building 15 GW of
offshore wind per year over 2031-2040 and de-risking offshore wind
investments. The industry, in return, pledges cost reductions, 91,000
additional jobs and generating €1tn of economic activity. With the
Investment Pact, Europe is charting the massive offshore wind buildout
it needs to deliver on its energy security and competitiveness
objectives. A total of 37 GWs already exists and they are aiming for at least 100 GWs.
On Thursday, EV manufacturer Rivian announced an over $1.2 billion investment from Uber, the ride-sharing company, through 2031, as well as a deal for Uber to purchase between 10,000 and 50,000 autonomous R2 robotaxis. The fleet would first come online in San Francisco and Miami in 2028, and scale to 25 cities by 2031.
CLIMATE DESPOLIATION
The record-breaking heatwave scorching the US west this week would have been “virtually impossible” if not for the climate crisis, a team of scientists has determined.
Through the century-old Haber-Bosch process, natural gas is combined with atmospheric nitrogen at extreme temperatures and pressures to produce ammonia, which is then converted into the nitrogen fertilizers that sustain global agriculture. The Persian Gulf is a fertilizer powerhouse — the same abundant natural gas that powers economies around the world also serves as the feedstock for ammonia production. Qatar and Saudi Arabia are major fertilizer exporters, and the wider Gulf region is a critical supplier of urea, ammonia, sulfur, and phosphates. Iranian drones struck QatarEnergy’s facilities early in the war, denting LNG production. Yesterday, its CEO revealed to Reuters that the cumulative damage is far worse than initially understood: 17 percent of Qatar’s LNG export capacity may have been knocked offline for perhaps three to five years. Because that same natural gas is the feedstock for ammonia and fertilizer production, this means the disruption to the global food supply chain will outlast any ceasefire. G7 countries don’t maintain strategic fertilizer reserves. The Saudi bypass pipeline carries crude, not ammonia. A ship captain bold enough to brave the strait under drone fire would choose to carry oil over fertilizer — it’s worth more per ton. Every piece of crisis infrastructure is built to protect the commodity that markets understand and value more. Fertilizer, the commodity that actually feeds people, is an afterthought.
DARK AGE CLIMATE POLITICS
- California advocates asked state officials to investigate the role AI-generated public comments may have played in the South Coast Air Quality Management District’s vote last year against proposed rules encouraging electric heat pumps. (Canary Media)
- U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright invoked the Defense Production Act to restart Sable’s offshore oil pipeline near southern California’s coast, drawing blowback from state officials and advocates. (Associated Press)
- Data show California, Texas, and Arizona lead the nation for grid-scale battery energy storage capacity. (Canary Media)
- In response to a Meta proposal for a solar-powered data center, the Alabama legislature is threatening to put a year-long moratorium on new utility-scale solar, Jael Holzman reports.
- A decades-old U.S. Forest Service rule that’s been used to justify logging to supposedly reduce wildfire risk has been deemed unlawful by a federal court in Oregon. The rule was what’s called a “categorical exclusion” to bypass
environmental reviews for projects that should have an “insignificant”
impact. But the rampant clearcutting the forest service oversaw under
one of these categorical exclusions, CE-6, often has devastating impacts
on wildlife, soil and water quality, and the brush left behind may even
increase fire risk. So environmental groups, including WildEarth Guardians, Oregon Wild
and Green Oregon Alliance, sued the Forest Service, and a district judge
ruled in their favor, striking down the policy in January 2026. [The federal Fix Our Forests Act, pending in the Senate, would reverse the effects of the court ruling.] - The DOE extended its stay-open order for Washington state’s Centralia coal plant, even though the plant hasn’t run since its scheduled retirement date last year and a new state law makes doing so uneconomical. (news release, Washington State Standard)
- The United States could get its first new coal-fired power plant since 2013 as part of a sweeping $56 billion deal the Trump administration announced Monday with 17 Indo-Pacific countries. Terra Energy Center reached a $1 billion deal with South Korea’s Hyundai Industries Power Systems to supply large-scale boilers for a new, more than 1.2-gigawatt coal plant in Alaska. It’s the first order for utility-scale coal boilers in the U.S. since about 2006.
- The Trump administration has targeted a climate and weather research lab as retribution against Colorado
officials for imprisoning a county clerk backed by the president who was
convicted of helping election deniers meddle with voting equipment in
2020, a lawsuit filed Monday by the lab’s leadership alleged.
The
University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, a nonprofit consortium
of 129 North American universities, filed a lawsuit against four
federal agencies and their directors on Monday claiming that the administration’s efforts to dismantle
the Boulder, Colo., lab “pose a direct threat to national security,
public safety, and economic prosperity and risk setting back the
country’s global leadership in weather and space weather modeling and
forecasting.” - A coalition of 24 states, along with a dozen cities and counties, sued the Trump administration on Thursday over its decision to relinquish the government’s legal authority to fight climate change. The states are arguing that the Environmental Protection Agency acted illegally when it rescinded a 2009 scientific conclusion that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases threaten public health and welfare.
- New York has one of the nation’s most aggressive climate laws, but that may change if Governor Kathy Hochul has her way. On Friday, she proposed watering down the law requiring the state to slash emissions 40% by 2030. It’s part of an ongoing saga around the Climate
Leadership and Community Protection Act, from lawmakers failing to pass a
regulatory framework to raise revenue for implementation to
environmentalists suing Hochul for slow walking measures to cut
emissions.
Take Action!
The Environmental Defense fund writes: For years, the Good Neighbor Provision of the Clean Air Act has played an essential role in addressing some of the worst air pollution in the eastern U.S. The EPA’s latest proposal, If finalized, would weaken Good Neighbor protections and allow industry to expose millions of people to smog-forming nitrogen oxide pollution that travels across state lines. It’s a dangerous decision that would endanger public health and put communities at risk of developing serious health problems – such as asthma attacks, respiratory infections and long-term lung damage. [Smog include ground level ozone, which is a strong short-lived climate pollutant. So signing below is a climate action as well as a defense against pollution.]
We can’t allow the EPA to abandon its responsibility to protect the public. Take action to defend the Good Neighbor Rule by submitting a public comment today!