Current conditions: Warming in the Gulf of Mexico is raising the risk of a tropical storm • Strong winds in the Rocky Mountains and lightning from drier storms are creating conditions for wildfires to spread out West • Heavy rainfall is bringing flash floods to vast swaths of northern India.
THE TOP FIVE
1. Trump administration targets Europe over climate rules
On a trip to Europe to promote U.S. fossil fuel exports on Thursday, Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum lashed Brussels for adopting a “climate ideology” that he said distracted policymakers in the West from more pressing concerns such as competing with China over artificial intelligence. “What’s going to save the planet is winning the A.I. arms race. We need power to do that and we need it now,” Burgum said, according to The New York Times. “We need to worry about the humans that are on the planet today. The real existential threat right now is not one degree of climate change.”
Back in Washington, the Securities and Exchange Commission issued a warning to European companies operating under accounting rules that prioritize sustainability and climate responsibility. In an interview with the Financial Times, SEC chair Paul Atkins said the International Financial Reporting Standards Foundation was “chasing political fads,” calling the accounting rulemaking organization’s focus on climate “a real issue, a real problem.” Meanwhile, Canada may be getting on board with a U.S. demand to abandon climate targets. Ottawa is considering scrapping a cap on oil emissions as part of its latest update to its decarbonization target, Reuters reported late Thursday night.
2. Hyundai says immigration raid delays battery plant in Georgia
Last week, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement conducted its biggest workplace raid since President Donald Trump returned to office, arresting hundreds of workers at a Hyundai electric vehicle battery plant in Georgia. The vast majority of the workers were South Koreans, as I reported on Monday in this newsletter, spurring a diplomatic incident with Seoul that saw the country’s foreign minister consider a trip to the U.S. For now, the raid has had the immediate effect of delaying the manufacturing facility. Construction at the site, which is co-owned with the battery giant LG Energy Solution, is currently on pause as the companies grapple with worker shortages. The setback could take months to sort out. “This is going to give us minimum two to three months delay, because now all these people want to get back,” Hyundai Chief Executive Officer José Muñoz told Bloomberg. “Then you need to see how can you fill those positions. And for the most part, those people are not in the US.”
“You are already poorer because of this idiocy, you just don’t know it yet,” Heatmap’s Robinson Meyer wrote in a post on X last week, in response to a video of ICE agents chaining workers at the wrists and ankles. “This will crush American manufacturing know-how.”
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3. Only 44% of Americans would welcome a data center
Renewables aren’t the only infrastructure that invites not-in-my-backyard opposition these days. Data centers may be even less popular, according to a national poll conducted by Heatmap’s intelligence platform, Heatmap Pro. The survey of 3,741 American voters asked, “Would you support or oppose a data center being built near where you live?” and found that just 44% of respondents said they would support or strongly support a data center being built near them, while 42% would oppose or strongly oppose it. That’s a net support of only +2%. Nearly all energy projects fared better. Natural gas posted 34% net support, while wind netted 19%, and even nuclear saw 10% net support.
“It’s worth stepping back and thinking of how remarkable this is,” Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin wrote. “The American public, according to Heatmap’s polling, is more skeptical of data centers which, once built, are essentially warehouses than they are of gas-fired power plants which emit, besides the greenhouse gases, nitrogen oxide and sulfur dioxide.”
4. California lawmakers reach last-minute deal on climate and energy
In a series of deals struck amid late-night negotiations, California Governor Gavin Newsom and Democratic lawmakers agreed to extend the state’s cap-and-trade program, ease regulations on oil and gas production, reform utility spending, and advance regional energy sharing. Taken together, public radio station KQED wrote, “they present lawmakers with a series of monumental” policy shifts just days before the legislative session ends. Climate activists praised the cap-and-trade extension but lambasted the drilling rules as a sellout to fossil fuel companies. But the utility reforms could prove among the most politically salient as electricity prices soar across the country and capture growing political attention. The overhaul will allow governments to fund grid infrastructure through bonds rather than capital expenditures through the utilities that are ultimately passed on to ratepayers with higher costs.
Yet even that may have a limited effect on prices. As Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin wrote in June, “in the near term, there’s likely not much policymakers can do about electricity prices, and therefore utility bills going up. Renewables are almost certainly the fastest way to get new electrons on the grid, but the completion of even existing projects could be thrown into doubt by the House bill’s strict ‘foreign entity of concern’ rules, which try to extricate the renewables industry from its relationship with China.”
5. China is exporting its clean-energy boom
China isn’t just exporting its solar panels, batteries, and electric vehicles. The world’s second largest economy has sharply increased plans for new foreign factory investments in recent years, pledging more than $210 billion since 2022, new research shows. A report from Johns Hopkins University's Net Zero Industrial Policy Lab found that Chinese companies are looking to establish manufacturing sites closer to raw materials overseas. The researchers at the lab and Brown University tracked more than 460 green factories abroad announced by Chinese firms since 2011. More than 80% of them came after 2022. As China’s firms expand abroad, “countries must plan, fund and implement green industrial policies and bargain hard with Chinese firms to achieve their priority of sustainable development,” Tim Sahay, co-director of the Net Zero Industrial Policy Lab, told Bloomberg.
THE KICKER
Chinese scientists have created a new material that makes liquor taste better while slashing pollution from the distilling process. Using a series of heating, chemical, and steam treatments, researchers transformed distiller’s grains into a composite material made of activated carbon and silica, known as AC-SiO2. The new material is able to remove nearly 86% of the benzaldehyde, the naturally occuring substance formed during fermentation that causes off flavors and potential health problems from drinking. Instead, the AC-SiO2 captures the benzaldehyde molecules. “This work not only provides a green solution for the liquor industry but also shows how agricultural waste can be upgraded into something valuable,” Zhicheng Jiang, a co-author of the study from Sichuan University, said in a press release.
