Current conditions: Another atmospheric river is deluging the West Coast, this time in the Pacific Northwest • Dozens of U.S. cities notched record high temperatures in October • At least 11 of Thailand’s southern provinces are under emergency warnings for flooding and nearly 7-foot waves amid a surge of monsoon conditions.

THE TOP FIVE

1. The UN climate summit begins in Turkey

The 31st annual global climate summit kicked off this morning in Antalya, a Turkish resort city on the country’s southern Mediterranean coast. Known as the 31st Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, or COP31, the event marks the second year in a row that virtually every nation on Earth will gather except the United States, after President Donald Trump withdrew the country from both the landmark 2015 Paris Agreement and from the larger global body shortly after his return to office last year. The biggest item on this year’s agenda, reports my colleague Emily Pontecorvo, is the “35x35” pledge, Turkey’s proposal to electrify 35% of the world’s final energy use by 2035. Today the world uses electricity for just 21% of end-use energy. As I reported last week, the latest projections from the Rhodium Group put the likely electrification rate worldwide at 28% by 2035.

2. The Senate tweaked its permitting reform deal

Senate negotiators on Saturday released an update to the text of the bipartisan permitting reform deal, known as the “manager’s amendment.” The new version of the Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act, or BAAJA, overhauls the provisions to make building transmission lines easier, addressing concerns that a proposal to allow federal and state permitting to begin at the same time threatens states’ power. It also adds benefits for power lines renovated with advanced transmission technologies to allow them to carry more electricity. “There’s something in these changes for everyone — environmentalists, tribes, utilities,” my colleagues Robinson Meyer and Jael Holzman wrote over the weekend, “but it remains to be seen if they put the bill into a Goldilocks zone.” Perhaps most importantly from a political perspective, the revised legislation veers away from some proposals Native American groups had called an infringement on tribal sovereignty. “Definitely not enough to satisfy all tribes — there are 575 across the U.S. — but nonetheless, notable and probably approaching something large tribes and tribes with significant interest in energy development can live with,” Julian Brave NoiseCat, a writer and the first Oscar-nominated Indigenous North American filmmaker, wrote in a post on X. Still, in a sign “that there’s real effort here to try to honor tribal consultation,” he noted that the manager’s amendment excludes the records tribes share with federal and state governments from Freedom of Information Act, which would “keep sensitive sacred sites from exposure.”

The chamber is scheduled to hold a procedural vote on the bill later today. Last night, Trump himself finally endorsed BAAJA, urging “all senators” to vote for the bill on Monday, calling it a “big win for U.S. energy independence and dominance” in a post on Truth Social.

3. Anthropic inks a $3.4 billion deal for heavy-duty gas generators

Anthropic has struck a deal for 1.7 gigawatts of gas-fired engines to power its data centers. Valued at $3.4 billion, the Claude maker has agreed to help with engineering and construction to install the generators as part of the deal with San Antonio, Texas-based equipment supplier OnePWR Solutions, the Financial Times reported over the weekend. Anthropic stopped short of acquiring OnePWR itself, instead taking over the generator orderbook previously pledged to construction giant Caterpillar.

The deal got plenty of notice in the financial newswires, and yet the news was largely overshadowed in the artificial intelligence world by the blockbuster revelation that Jensen Huang, the chief executive of AI chipmaker Nvidia, had an extramarital relationship with a Chinese spy, prompting an investigation by his company’s board of directors.

Sign up to receive Heatmap AM in your inbox every morning:

4. France’s leftist presidential candidate vows to shut down all nuclear plants

French leftist leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon. Photo: Kenzo TRIBOUILLARD / AFP via Getty Images

Jean-Luc Mélenchon, France’s far-left presidential hopeful and the No. 2 candidate behind the far-right Marine Le Pen, has pledged to shut down the 18 nuclear power plants that provide the overwhelming majority of the country’s power and render its grid one of the cleanest in Europe. “We advocate a mixed economy guided by the ecological imperative,” Mélenchon said in a speech Saturday, in which he also promised to send French warships to Gaza to confront the Israeli military head on. The current nuclear power program, he said, “is dangerous, costly, and risky. We will abandon it.” Instead, he said, France would generate all its power from renewables, buttressing wind and solar with as-yet-unproven wave and tidal power technology. “If you criticize nuclear power in the same breath as you promote marine power, your policy isn’t a clown but rather the entire circus,” Seaver Wang, an oceanographer turned energy expert at the Breakthrough Institute in the U.S., wrote in a post on X.

Meanwhile, a political crisis in remote Paraguay has cast one of Latin America’s more promising would-be nuclear newcomers into uncertainty. Just last week, a source familiar with U.S. government plans to export nuclear technology told me Paraguay was near the top of the list of countries looking to set up a civilian nuclear program under Washington’s guidance. The two nations signed a memorandum of understanding in August, and U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau visited the country just last month as part of a trade delegation. Whether the landlocked South American nation bought reactors or not, Asunción had plans to ramp up mining of uranium and titanium, Mining.com reported. But President Santiago Peña’s abrupt resignation Thursday amid the collapse of Ueno Bank appears to bring any further progress to a halt, at least for now.

5. China’s distributed solar and wind take a hit

China’s registrations of new wind and solar projects fell over 11% in September compared to the previous month as the number of distributed renewable projects dipped. The country registered 3,536 solar projects and 15 wind projects that month, versus 3,972 solar and 29 wind projects in August, according to a Renewables Now analysis of official government data. That isn’t to say solar is slowing down. Newly registered utility-scale solar projects more than doubled to 53 in September from 23 in August.

THE KICKER

Democrats’ strategy of finding candidates with strong local appeal continues paying off, even on the most down-ballot of races. Over the weekend, the Associated Press declared Democrat Brian Matlock the winner of the Arizona Mine Inspector race. With a white handlebar mustache, he certainly looks the part of the Southwestern mine inspector if ever there were one.