Current conditions: Tropical Storm Mario is lashing the southwestern U.S. with rainstorms and potential flash flooding • The drought in the Northeast and the Ohio Valley is worsening, with rain deficits in major cities 15% below average • Tropical Cyclone Mirasol is bringing heavy rains to the Philippine island of Luzon.
THE TOP FIVE
1. Justice Department looks to sink Vermont’s climate Superfund
The Trump administration announced a lawsuit Tuesday aimed at tanking Vermont’s Climate Superfund Act, which set up the nation’s first program to force fossil fuel companies to pay for adaptations to deal with the effects of warming temperatures. The Department of Justice said the legislation “will likely” impose “billions of dollars in liability on foreign and domestic energy companies for their alleged past contributions to climate change.” The motion, filed on Monday, comes months after the Justice Department filed an initial complaint in May targeting the law and similar legislation in New York, Hawaii, and Michigan.
“Like New York, Vermont is usurping the federal government’s exclusive authority over nationwide and global greenhouse gas emissions,” Acting Assistant Attorney General Adam Gustafson said in a press release. “More than that, Vermont’s flagrantly unconstitutional statute threatens to throttle energy production, despite this administration’s efforts to unleash American energy. It’s high time for the courts to put a stop to this crippling state overreach.”
2. Senator Mark Kelly puts out ‘AI in America’ blueprint
Arizona Senator Mark Kelly released a proposal Wednesday morning designed to give Democrats a roadmap to back the buildout of data centers to support the boom in artificial intelligence. The 16-page pitch makes no mention of novel tools grid operators are considering to force data centers to dial back electricity consumption when power supply is low, known as demand response. But the proposal does call for establishing a pipeline of projects to support large-scale clean electricity production from 24/7 sources. “While solar and battery storage dominate today’s pipeline, they alone can’t reliably power the AI,” the blueprint reads. “We must build an innovation pipeline for geothermal, nuclear, and other clean dependable sources, while also deploying near-term solutions that advance and strengthen our energy systems for the demands ahead.”
The value of finding ways to add more data centers before that large new power output is available is the big reason for supporting the curtailment of electricity usage at big server farms, Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin wrote last month. “Creating a system where data centers can connect to the grid sooner if they promise to be flexible about power consumption would require immense institutional change for states, utilities, regulators, and power markets.”
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3. U.S. in talks to fund multibillion-dollar minerals consortium
The U.S. government is in talks to set up a multibillion-dollar fund for overseas mining projects to help counter China’s grip over the world’s critical mineral supply, the Financial Times reported. The Trump administration is discussing the effort with the New York investment firm Orion Resource Partners, and looking to establish the fund under the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation. The fund would invest in projects to produce minerals such as copper and rare earths. “These talks really show that the [Donald] Trump administration is trying to align its financial tools with its broader mineral ambitions,” Gracelin Baskaran, director of the critical minerals security programme at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, told the newspaper. “This public-private partnership stands to catalyze a significant amount of capital.”
The move is the latest effort by the Trump administration to take on a bigger role in the mining industry, which requires high upfront costs and years-long development timelines that pose problems for companies beholden to quarterly shareholder updates. In July, the Department of Defense took an ownership stake in MP Materials, the only active rare earths producer in the U.S., marking the most significant federal intervention in the private sector since Washington nationalized railways during World War I. In a sign of the dealmaking environment, Heatmap’s Katie Brigham wrote this month that “everybody wants to invest in critical mineral startups.”
4. House hearing on geoengineering highlights Republican divides
The House of Representatives held a hearing Tuesday on the risks posed by weather modification and geoengineering technologies. Led by Georgia Republican Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, the hearing — entitled “Playing God with the Weather — a Disastrous Forecast” — examined the idea of manipulating the makeup of the atmosphere to artificially cool the planet, which is an emerging, if hotly contested, idea among some commercial startups. GOP officials such as Greene and Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., have raised concerns over what such technology could do. The issue took on a new partisan valence after the flash flooding that killed more than 135 people in Texas this summer, which Fox News suggested could be linked to cloud-seeding experiments underway in the region.
In his testimony, Christopher Martz, a meteorologist and policy analyst at the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, warned that there were still major uncertainties about the potential deployment of geoengineering technologies. At times, however, the questioning devolved into debates over the reality of settled science about the effects of fossil fuel emission on warming itself.
“Did man create the Ice Age?” Greene asked Martz at one point.
“No,” he responded.
“Yeah, right, so none of us were alive back then to know for sure,” she said.
5. Solar developer abandons three projects in Connecticut
Solar developer PosiGen is planning to pull out of three of its projects in Connecticut. The company told state officials late last month it would need to shut down its facilities, eliminating 78 jobs, as financing dried up for the projects. The move highlighted the challenges ahead for the solar industry as federal tax credits barrel toward next year’s phaseout deadline. In 2015, the Connecticut Green Bank helped fund low-and moderate-income homeowners’ purchase of solar panels through PosiGen. But the federal program backing the effort, known as Solar for All, is set to unwind under the Trump administration. The company expects to start laying off workers in Connecticut next week, according to the news site CT Insider.
THE KICKER
Robert Redford died Tuesday at 89 years old. During his lengthy career and filmography, the actor fashioned himself as an activist voice for a number of causes, including the U.S. effort to decarbonize its electrical sector. In February 2016, after the Supreme Court paused the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan, Redford accused the conservative justices of rendering a verdict “on the wrong side of history” in an op-ed in Time magazine.“It was a clear departure from how our courts normally handle government oversight. And I cringe at how we will have to answer to history. When our children and their children ask, ‘When the majority of Earth’s citizens — its scientists, military professionals, industrialists, and more — realized the threat of climate change was real, why didn’t you do more? Why did you delay?’”
