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A federal judge lifted President Donald Trump’s stop-work order for the Revolution Wind project off the coast of Rhode Island, Heatmap’s Jael Holzman reported Monday. Judge Royce Lamberth, a Reagan-era Republican appointee to the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, granted a motion for a preliminary injunction at the hearing, allowing construction to continue as the government conducts a review of its concerns over the project. “There is no question in my mind of irreparable harm to the plaintiff,” Lamberth said. As I previously reported in this newsletter, the project’s owners, Danish energy giant Orsted and the developer Skyborn Renewables, filed a lawsuit earlier this month. Analysts never expected Trump’s order to hold, as Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin reported last month, though the cost to the project’s owners was likely to rise. The Trump administration has enlisted at least half a dozen agencies in a widening attack meant to stymie the offshore wind industry, despite its growth overseas in Europe and Asia.
In an interview with Axios, Secretary of Energy Chris Wright insisted the assault on offshore wind and the use of the federal permitting apparatus to stall projects, is “a one-off exception, or one-off complication.” Overall, he said, building infrastructure is “going to be massively easier than it has been in a long time.”
“The biggest remaining thing” in the Trump administration’s energy agenda that has yet to come to fruition? “Permitting reform,” Wright told Axios. “We’re building big infrastructure, but that’s still much slower and clumsier than it should be.” The will to find compromise on a new permitting reform bill may be limited. Republicans in Congress are reluctant to fuse energy legislation into the next reconciliation bill, as I wrote here yesterday. Last week, I reported that Representative Scott Peters, a key Democrat championing a federal permitting reform bill, warned that he wouldn’t move forward while the Trump administration blocked solar projects in California. But Wright said he’s been talking to Republicans and Democrats and said the political window may “quite possibly” open this year.
Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro.Alex Kent/Getty Images
Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro stepped up his threats to withdraw from the PJM Interconnection if the nation’s largest grid operator doesn’t speed up interconnections of new supply and find ways to curb electricity price hikes. In a speech at a summit convened in Philadelphia to bring together the 13 states in the grid system, the Democrat said that PJM’s “slow, reactive approach” to addressing rising power demand “is no longer working for our states,” particularly “at a time when the Trump administration is cutting funding for energy projects.” Separately, in a Monday interview on Bloomberg TV, Shapiro said, “If PJM is not willing to look in the mirror and really reform itself, then I’m willing to go my own way, and Pennsylvania can stand alone in this effort.”
It’s not the first time he’s threatened to leave. In January, Shapiro said something similar while criticizing PJM’s “market failure.” In the meantime, on Monday, he pitched what he called the PJM Governors’ Collaborative to coordinate leaders of the dozen other states in the grid system to advocate for better rates. Shapiro isn’t the only one asking questions about PJM. As Matthew wrote yesterday, “the system as it’s constructed now may, critics argue, expose retail customers to unacceptable cost increases — and greenhouse gas emissions — as it attempts to grapple with serving new data center load.”
Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway has fully exited Chinese automaker BYD, ending what Reuters described as a 17-year investment that grew over 20-fold in value in that period. The selloff, revealed in a filing by Berkshire’s energy subsidiary, recorded the value of the investment as zero as of the end of March, down from $415 million at the end of 2024. The company initially invested in BYD in 2008, when it bought a roughly 10% share of the Shanghai-based automaker. In August 2022, Berkshire started paring back its position. By June of last year, Berkshire had sold off almost 76% of its stake, bringing it to just under 5% of BYD’s outstanding shares, CNBC reported. Buffett has not explained why he started selling his BYD stake. But in 2023, he told CNBC’s Becky Quick that BYD is an “extraordinary company” being run by an “extraordinary person,” but “I think that we’ll find things to do with the money that I’ll feel better about.” Around the same time, Berkshire sold most of the company’s shares in Taiwan’s leading semiconductor manufacturer, TSMC.
The U.S. has granted Perpetua Resources permission to begin construction on a mine in Idaho that will produce gold and antimony, a brittle, silvery-white metal used in semiconductors, batteries, and high-tech military equipment, Reuters reported. China controls the global market for antimony, generating nearly four times the supply of the second-place producer, Tajikistan, according to U.S. Geological Survey data. The U.S., by contrast, has no active antimony mines.
Perpetua’s Stibnite project, about 138 miles north of Boise, could change that. The U.S. Forest Service gave Perpetua a conditional notice to proceed, and construction is slated to start next month. Once complete, Stibnite could supply up to 35% of America’s needs. “Completing federal permitting for Perpetua Resources’ Stibnite Gold Project is a major step towards unlocking America’s critical minerals resources,” Emily Domenech, executive director of the government's permitting council, told Reuters.
A University of Delaware-led research team has developed a new type of catalyst that can help convert plastic waste into liquid fuels without the unwanted byproducts from current methods. Traditional catalysts have a hard time working on bulky polymers because the molecules don’t interact with the active parts of a catalyst, where the chemical reaction takes place. To address this, the scientists transformed a nanomaterial called MXenes (pronounced max-eens) to have larger, more open pores. As a result, the catalyst triggered a reaction nearly two times faster than traditional catalysts. “Instead of letting plastics pile up as waste, upcycling treats them like solid fuels that can be transformed into useful liquid fuels and chemicals, offering a faster, more efficient and environmentally friendly solution,” Dongxia Liu, a professor at the University of Delaware's College of Engineering and the senior author on the study, said in a press release.
The U.S. is pushing hard to commercialize fusion energy. At least one company, the Microsoft-backed Helion, aims to generate its first electricity for the grid as early as 2028. But Commonwealth Fusion, which is aiming for the 2030s, has raised a third of all the private capital invested into fusion energy so far. Though fusion hopefuls have been burned before, the investment boom is a sign that, as Heatmap’s Katie Brigham wrote last year, “it is finally, possibly, almost time for fusion.”
The United Nations General Assembly has convened in New York City. With wars raging in Ukraine, Sudan, and Gaza, and Western powers such as the United Kingdom and Australia granting official recognition to the state of Palestine, climate change is likely to take a backseat outside of the New York Climate Week panels, conferences, and happy hours that take place across the city alongside the UN gathering.
The U.S. has dramatically reversed its public diplomacy on climate change since President Donald Trump returned to office. While the European Union has remained largely committed to its goals, the bloc could not find enough consensus to pass a binding climate plan ahead of the UN meeting. Instead, the 27 nations signed onto a “statement of intent,” in what the Financial Times called “a blow to hopes of EU leadership” in advance of November’s big UN climate summit, COP30, in Brazil.
Guyanese President Irfaan Ali. Riccardo Savi/Getty Images for Concordia Summit
A year ago, the leader of Guyana went viral for a BBC segment in which he lambasted a British journalist for daring to lecture his tiny South American nation about climate change when his country has more carbon-absorbing forests than people, and Britain grew rich long ago felling its old-growth trees. In an interview in The New York Times series with world leaders published this past weekend ahead of the UN General Assembly, Guyana President Irfaan Ali delivers a similarly strident rebuke of critics in the rich world who oppose his country’s embrace of Exxon Mobil’s offshore drilling. “The moral question is: Who can produce what the world needs in the least environmentally damaging way? Because let’s be clear on this, too. We can’t be naïve. The world will need fossil fuel a long time into the future,” he said.
But that doesn’t mean Guyana is going all in on using fossil fuels at home. “Guyana is a new oil producer, but we are using the resource to finance our energy transition, to build resilient infrastructure, to support the region that we are in, to invest in livelihood options that will keep our forest standing, which stores many gigatons of carbon,” Ali said. “We’re investing in solar farms, hydro, natural gas, wind and biomass, all aimed at transitioning to a low-emission energy grid. We are building off-grid systems, solar farms, wind farms for the hinterland community, where the Indigenous people live.”
Republicans overhauled federal energy policy with the last budget legislation that became the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. At the moment they’re deep in negotiations over a new spending bill to forestall a government shutdown on October 1. But Congress is also already looking ahead to a possible second reconciliation bill in the fall — though that is unlikely to say much of anything about energy, according to E&E News. House Budget Committee Chair Jodey Arrington, a representative from Texas, said the first reconciliation bill “exhausted” the possibilities for energy reforms and left little “meat on the bones.” Senate Environment and Public Works Committee Chair Shelley Moore Capito, a West Virginia Republican, said energy policy would “be interesting if it develops,” but said “it’s not developing now.” Some in the clean energy world had hoped a second reconciliation bill would be a chance for moderate Republicans with a lot of wind and solar in their states to quietly reverse anti-renewables policies that made it into law in the OBBB Act. But avoiding the issue might keep more punitive policies at bay, including a Republican proposal to add new fees on electric vehicles.
Energy prices are a central theme of New Jersey’s gubernatorial race as Democrat Mikie Sherrill has repeatedly vowed to pressure the state’s regional grid operator over utility rates that surged 20% this year, and even build new nuclear reactors to meet growing demand for power. At her first televised debate Sunday night with Republican Jack Ciattarelli, Sherrill slammed the Trump administration’s cuts to renewable energy and vowed to take on utilities and the PJM Interconnection, the nation’s largest grid operator, which serves New Jersey. “Everbody at the table is at fault, and they keep dumping the costs onto the ratepayer here in New Jersey,” she said, according to a CNN transcript. “Let’s face it, some of our utility companies have made over a billion dollars in profits, and yet our ratepayers are constantly suffering.”
Ciattarelli instead blamed renewables for the high prices, a claim the data in this piece by Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin seriously undercuts. “Nobody wants wind farms on our Jersey Shore,” Ciattarelli asserted, and vowed to pull out of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, the interstate carbon-trading market in the Northeast. But his solutions didn’t sound so far off from the Democrat’s, including promises to “expand our nuclear footprint in South Jersey” and “accelerate solar on rooftops.”
Maybe call it a teal jay? Biologists at the University of Texas at Austin reported the discovery of a bird formed naturally by a green jay and a blue jay mating in the wild, marking one of the first documented examples of hybrid species created due to changing climate patterns. The two different parent species are separated by 7 million years of evolution, and their migratory ranges only recently started to overlap. “We think it’s the first observed vertebrate that’s hybridized as a result of two species both expanding their ranges due, at least in part, to climate change,” Brian Stokes, a graduate student researching ecology and evolution and first author of the study, said in a press release.
