The technology that undergirds decarbonization requires a lot of minerals, and those minerals are often found or processed overseas — really often in China. The Biden administration thought this was a problem, so as it subsidized the domestic use and manufacture of solar panels, … | Continue reading
Back in 2019, the year I bought my Tesla Model 3, Elon Musk was more nuisance than accused neo-Nazi. He released an offbeat autotuned rap song about Harambe the gorilla and was acquitted of defamation charges after calling a rescuer in the Thailand cave incident of being a “pedo … | Continue reading
Current conditions: A major incident was declared in parts of England after Storm Herminia brought severe flooding • A 3.8-magnituted earthquake was recorded off the coast of Maine • It’s warmer than average across central and eastern states, but colder than average in the Southw … | Continue reading
Today’s internet is inundated with “AI slop,” and mocking the often bizarre outputs produced of language models (recall the Google AI that recommended making pizza with glue) has become an online pastime. Yet artificial intelligence advocates have not been deterred from their cla … | Continue reading
It’s not just tech stocks that are reeling after the release of Chinese artificial intelligence company DeepSeek’s open-source R1 model, which performs similarly to state-of-the-art models from American companies while using less expensive hardware far more efficiently. Energy an … | Continue reading
A century ago, prospectors tromped through remote areas, hoping to spot valuable, mineralized rocks simply poking out of the ground. Eventually, after they found all of the obvious stuff, they progressed to doing airborne geophysical surveys that used tools such as electromagneti … | Continue reading
Current conditions: Storm Herminia could bring fresh flooding to England and Wales, just days after Storm Éowyn • A giant iceberg is on a collision course with the island of South Georgia in the Atlantic Ocean • Phoenix, Arizona, might see rain today for the first time in 156 day … | Continue reading
Now that President Donald Trump has been officially inaugurated and issued his barrage of executive orders celebrating fossil fuels and shelving climate technologies such as wind energy and electric vehicles, climate tech startups are in a pickle. Federal funding can play a criti … | Continue reading
On his fifth day back in office, President Trump is making the rounds to recent disaster zones —- North Carolina, which is recovering from Hurricane Helene, and later Los Angeles, where fires are still burning. In the immediate aftermath of both catastrophes, Trump was quick to b … | Continue reading
The Department of Interior has issued an order suspending the ability of its staff, except a few senior officials, to permit new renewables projects on public land. The document, dated January 20, suspended the authority of “Department Bureaus and Offices” over a wide range of re … | Continue reading
Two weeks after two of California’s most destructive wildfires on record sparked on the same day in Los Angeles, tens of thousands of displaced residents are taking the first steps of their recovery processes. Officials have started lifting evacuation orders for both the Eaton an … | Continue reading
Current conditions: The Hughes Fire in LA, which has burned more than 10,000 acres, is 36% contained • Parts of Florida have been colder than Alaska this week • Dhaka in Bangladesh is the most polluted city in the world today. THE TOP FIVE 1. Rain finally forecast for parched Sou … | Continue reading
President Donald Trump signed 46 presidential actions during his first 12 hours in office, including overturning 78 of former President Joe Biden’s executive orders. Between Trump’s moves with major ramifications (like ending all wind permits) and those that seem to represent mor … | Continue reading
Given the Trump administration’s new pause on grants under the Inflation Reduction Act, this week’s conversation is with Bob Moczulewski, tax director for law firm Baker Tilly’s federal credits and incentives practice. We asked him to explain this 90-day pause via executive order … | Continue reading
1. Magic Valley, Idaho – It’s never a dull day for the Lava Ridge wind project. Trump’s executive order also put a moratorium on the wind project site and essentially invalidated its environmental review under Biden. As we’ve explained, the project got permits in the final days o … | Continue reading
President Trump’s executive order halting permits and leases for wind projects is starting to look like a potential existential threat to the industry’s future. Just don’t expect everyone to say it out loud. On Monday, Trump issued an order pausing new federal approvals for wind … | Continue reading
When Donald Trump has talked about his new administration’s energy policy leaders, he has focused, so far, on a specific type of person. You might call them energy insiders. At the highest level, they include Doug Burgum, the former North Dakota governor and incoming interior sec … | Continue reading
Current conditions: Ireland and the UK are preparing for heavy rain and 90 mile per hour winds from the coming Storm Eowyn, which will hit early Friday morning • A magnitude 5.7 earthquake struck the Philippines on Thursday • The Los Angeles fire department quickly stopped a new … | Continue reading
In a textbook illustration of how quickly a fire can start, spread, and threaten lives during historically dry and windy conditions, a new blaze has broken out in beleaguered Los Angeles County. The Hughes Fire ignited Wednesday around 11 a.m. PT to the north of Santa Clarita and … | Continue reading
Early last week, the view out my windows had become alluringly clear. The peaks of the San Gabriel Mountains that had been obscured by a cloud of smoke from the Eaton Fire that devastated the city of Altadena reappeared. The campfire smell had blown away — from this part of Los A … | Continue reading
President Trump’s first executive actions put the wind industry on ice, undermined the transition to electric vehicles, and paused funding for EV chargers. But so far Trump has done little — if anything — to stymie the country’s fastest growing clean energy technology: solar. Thi … | Continue reading
The fires that have swept greater Los Angeles over the past two weeks have shattered long-held assumptions about wildfire risk. Unlike many of the catastrophic, climate-intensified wildfires that have burned various swaths of California over the past decade, the Palisades and Eat … | Continue reading
Current conditions: Torrential rains triggered landslides in Indonesia that left at least 17 people dead • Temperatures could reach 115 degrees Fahrenheit in parts of Australia as an extreme heat wave lingers over half the country • The forecast is looking good for some much-need … | Continue reading
The Los Angeles wildfires have killed at least 27 people, destroyed more than 17,000 structures, and displaced tens of thousands. In the next few months, the billions of costs in damage to homes and property will ripple through the state’s insurance market — and likely cause its … | Continue reading
The newly inaugurated president does not like the wind industry. Especially the offshore wind industry. Donald Trump Monday night issued an expansive executive order targeting the sector that the industry is only just starting to digest. And while the executive order was mostly b … | Continue reading
The newly inaugurated president does not like the wind industry. Especially the offshore wind industry. Donald Trump Monday night issued an expansive executive order targeting the sector that the industry is only just starting to digest. And while the executive order was mostly b … | Continue reading
At 2:30 a.m. on June 6, 1998, Whitley Strieber awoke to a knock on his hotel door. Strieber, a UFOologist — that is, a scholar of unidentified flying objects and other paranormal phenomena — was in Toronto that night on tour, promoting his latest book, and he groggily got up to l … | Continue reading
President Donald Trump signed 33 executive orders, memoranda, and proclamations after dinnertime on Monday, giving journalists, pundits, and concerned citizens plenty of material to work through after his first day in office. His Day One mandates included ordering federal workers … | Continue reading
Current conditions: Heavy rainfall triggered flooding and disrupted travel in Spain • An oil spill in Nigeria’s Niger River delta has entered its fourth week • Dangerous fire conditions persist in Southern California, where the Palisades fire is 61% contained. THE TOP FIVE 1. Tru … | Continue reading
Here we go. Here we go: On Monday, Donald Trump was sworn in as the 47th president of the United States. Surrounded by some of the country’s richest men, including Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and the oil magnate Harold Hamm, Trump rejected what he called a “radical and corrupt es … | Continue reading
It’s not just drill, baby, drill (for oil) — it’s mine, baby, mine. Along with the shots at wind energy and the previous administration’s climate policy, President Donald Trump’s blizzard of energy and environmental policy announcements and executive orders on Monday included a b … | Continue reading
Ding dong, the electric vehicle “mandate” is dead. President Donald Trump fulfilled his longtime campaign promise on Monday by functionally ending former President Joe Biden’s tailpipe emissions standards, which had aimed to “accelerate the ongoing transition to a clean vehicles … | Continue reading
President Donald Trump has ordered the federal government to stop all permits for wind energy projects. Trump on Monday evening issued a sweeping executive order that the government “shall not issue new or renewed approvals, rights of way, permits, leases, or loans for onshore or … | Continue reading
President Trump signed nine binders of executive orders in front of an arena full of supporters on Monday night, with actions ranging from a regulatory freeze to requiring all federal workers to return to the office full-time. While the full implications of Trump’s Day One action … | Continue reading
In a completely unsurprising redux of President Donald Trump’s first term, the new/old U.S. president has officially notified the United Nations of America’s intent to withdraw from the Paris Agreement. According to the terms of the agreement, which went into effect in 2016, it t … | Continue reading
Donald Trump will look to further unleash American energy production as some of the first actions of his new term, saying in his inaugural address that he would “declare a national energy emergency,” and that the U.S. will “drill, baby drill.” He boasted that the United States ha … | Continue reading
Current conditions: Dangerous Santa Ana winds return to fire-ravaged Southern California • It is cold and cloudy in Davos, Switzerland, for the start of the World Economic Forum • A blanket of cold air will cover most of the U.S. this week, bringing temperatures between 15 and 25 … | Continue reading
Current conditions: Dangerous Santa Ana winds return to fire-ravaged Southern California • It is cold and cloudy in Davos, Switzerland, for the start of the World Economic Forum • A blanket of cold air will cover most of the U.S. this week, bringing temperatures between 15 and 25 … | Continue reading
Most climate insiders don’t expect the Inflation Reduction Act to get repealed. They don’t foresee the world’s temperature rising more than 3 degrees Celsius by 2100, and they are bullish on hot rocks and geothermal. Those are the findings from our exclusive — and highly unscient … | Continue reading
Pacific Gas & Electric is one of the oldest and largest utilities in the United States. It’s also one of the most notorious. The company serving Northern California was driven into bankruptcy after being found liable for the deadly 2018 Camp Fire, which destroyed the town of Para … | Continue reading
Current conditions: Parts of North Dakota could feel wind chills of minus 50 degrees Fahrenheit in the coming days • A fire at the world’s largest battery storage plant prompted evacuations and health warnings in California’s Monterey County • It is warm and sunny in Doha, where … | Continue reading
Doug Burgum is, by all accounts, a normie. Compared to some of the other picks for incoming President Trump’s cabinet, the former North Dakota governor is well respected by his political colleagues; even many of the Democrats on the Energy and Natural Resources Committee seemed c … | Continue reading
Confirmation hearings for Donald Trump’s energy and environment appointees continued Thursday, with Lee Zeldin and Doug Burgum appearing before the Senate for their nominations as Environmental Protection Agency administrator and secretary of the Interior. While Burgum was long t … | Continue reading
Today we’re speaking with Cici Vu and Morgan Putnam from DNV Energy Systems, who helped craft a must-read report out this week on community relations in transmission with Americans for Clean Energy Grid (ACEG). Their report compiles findings of a roundtable with environmentalists … | Continue reading
1. Youngkin sides with locals – Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin this week said at his State of the State address that he would oppose efforts to “end local control of solar project siting” – indicating he will fiercely challenge efforts by some state policymakers to resolve challeng … | Continue reading
1. McIntosh County, Oklahoma – Say goodbye to the Canadian River wind project, we hardly knew thee. The TransAlta utility-scale wind facility was canceled mere days after we were first to report on the uprising in favor of a ban on new renewables in the state. Local residents had … | Continue reading
After a week and a half of unimaginable destruction, Los Angeles is at last beginning to look toward its recovery from the Palisades and Eaton fires. Traversing that stage will take years, not only because of the significant economic and political implications of the fires, but a … | Continue reading
Here’s a grim fact: The most destructive fires in recent American history swept over a state with the country’s strictest wildfire-specific building code, including in some of the neighborhoods that are now largely smoldering rubble. California’s wildfire building code, Chapter 7 … | Continue reading