Back
In 2015, countries worldwide signed the Paris Agreement, aiming to keep the global temperature rise “well below 2°C” and limit this increase to 1.5°C.
To meet these targets, there are limits to the amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) that can be emitted. These are called carbon budgets. Every year we emit more CO2, these budgets shrink. (That’s because total warming is roughly proportional to cumulative CO2.)
In the chart, you can see estimates for how much CO2 the world can emit — from the start of next year — while staying below different levels of warming. This is based on having a 50% likelihood of staying below it; if we wanted to guarantee that we didn’t pass these temperatures, our budget would be much smaller.
To get a sense of perspective, we’ve compared each budget with the projected amount of CO2 that the world is expected to emit in 2025. This tells us how many years we have left if emissions stay at their current levels.
At current emission rates, the 1.5°C budget would run out around 2030. It seems implausible that global emissions will fall quickly enough to avoid this.
The 2°C budget would last until mid-century. By taking action on climate change, we buy ourselves more time and can avoid this level of warming.
Have global carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions gone up or down this year?
The latest projections from the Global Carbon Project give us some insight. Their researchers and analysts do invaluable work in estimating greenhouse gas emissions worldwide, helping us understand how the situation is evolving.
Today, they published their latest “carbon budget”. The chart shows their historical estimates, as well as their projections for 2025.
They project that this year, emissions from fossil sources — that is, from fossil fuels and industrial processes — will increase by around 1%. Emissions from all three fuels — coal, oil, and gas — are expected to increase. Meanwhile, emissions from land-use change have decreased due to fewer extreme wildfires and reduced deforestation in South America.
This reduction in land use may offset the increase from fossil fuels, resulting in a global total similar to last year. Note that estimates for land-use emissions are much less certain than for fossil fuels.
While many countries have made progress in reducing emissions, global fossil emissions continue to rise. To tackle climate change, they need to peak and rapidly decrease in the coming years and decades.
As of Sept. 30, Ohio lawmakers eliminated a key legal tool used to rein in air pollution from power plants and industrial sites. Now, advocates are suing to restore that right.
For decades, environmental groups in Ohio and elsewhere have used air nuisance rules in state plans as a catchall way to enforce the federal Clean Air Act. Ohio’s version let people take legal action against companies whose emissions “endanger the health, safety or welfare of the public, or cause unreasonable injury or damage to property.” The rule dates back more than 50 years.
Environmental groups have used air nuisance rules to file or threaten lawsuits against coal-burning power plants, iron and steel facilities, coke plants, and other industrial operations, which emit not only planet-warming greenhouse gases but also harmful pollutants like nitrogen dioxide, sulfur dioxide, and lead.
Defendants in cases brought under Ohio’s version of the rule have included Suncoke Energy, AK Steel–Middletown Works, Georgia-Pacific Corp., and Phthalchem. Consent decrees and settlements have produced orders or agreements to stop alleged nuisances, clean up waste, and expand monitoring.
But a last-minute addition to the state’s 3,156-page budget bill, House Bill 96, told the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to cut that protection out of the state’s Clean Air Act plan.
“The air nuisance rule is the tool that Ohioans have to hold polluters accountable,” said Neil Waggoner, the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal campaign manager for the Midwest. “This is the state government saying … we’re going to take this away from you in the most secretive fashion possible.”
The Sierra Club is a plaintiff in the lawsuit, along with the Ohio Environmental Council, SOBE Concerned Citizens, and the Freshwater Accountability Project. The fifth plaintiff, Donna Ballinger, is a Middletown resident who lives close to iron and steel operations, which she claims cause nuisance conditions. An August report by the Environmental Integrity Project documented likely air quality problems in that area.
Experts warn that eliminating the right to file air nuisance complaints weakens Ohio’s enforcement of pollution measures at an already perilous moment for environmental regulation.
For months, the Trump administration has been rolling back federal pollution standards and making huge personnel cuts to the staff charged with enforcing the remaining rules and permits. The Ohio EPA has authority to enforce the Clean Air Act but doesn’t always pursue alleged violations.
“Both at the federal and state level, we’re seeing less enforcement,” said Miranda Leppla, who heads Case Western Reserve University’s Environmental Law Clinic and represents the Ohio Environmental Council and the Sierra Club in the lawsuit. “If Ohioans don’t have the ability to bring these enforcement actions on their own through the air nuisance rule, there’s a very serious concern that air quality will continue to degrade and Ohioans’ health will get worse.”
Echoing a recent law in Louisiana, HB 96 also blocks the Ohio EPA from acting on data that groups may collect through community air-monitoring efforts. Such data can fill important gaps and alert communities and enforcement officials to problems that may not be detected by EPA monitors miles away.
Ohio’s limits on using the data will particularly harm fence-line communities, Leppla said.
“At a time when Ohio is seeing renewed industrial building, including new facilities like data centers, as well as a greater federal push for more fossil fuels, it is more important than ever that Ohioans preserve their right to both collect air pollution data themselves and use that data to file suits against harmful air nuisances,” said Chris Tavenor, general counsel for the Ohio Environmental Council.
The complaint, filed on Oct. 24 in the Franklin County Court of Common Pleas, asserts that lawmakers violated the single-subject rule in the Ohio Constitution when they tacked the air pollution provisions onto the massive budget bill.
“This is fundamentally unrelated to the main purpose of the biennial budget,” Waggoner said. “And it was stuck in here in an intentional way so that folks would not have an opportunity to see it, talk about it, or debate its merits.”
The Sierra Club, Ohio Environmental Council, and other groups raised a similar argument two years ago after eleventh-hour changes to a bill about poultry included a new definition of natural gas as “green energy.” That case, also at the Franklin County Court of Common Pleas, has been briefed, and parties are waiting for Judge Kimberly Cocroft to issue her ruling.
A 2019 decision in Paulding County, Ohio, rejected a challenge to the late amendment in the 2014 budget bill that tripled property-line setbacks for turbines on wind farms. That case wasn’t appealed and would not bind the court in Franklin County.
Despite the similarities, the new lawsuit is different because the ban goes beyond how state agencies operate, Leppla said. “The air nuisance rule was created specifically to allow Ohioans who are suffering from noxious air pollution and nuisances to protect themselves when the government does not act.”
HB 96 is not the first attempt to take away Ohioans’ right to bring air nuisance claims. In 2020, the first Trump administration’s U.S. Environmental Protection Agency removed Ohio’s air nuisance rule, Waggoner noted.
The Ohio Environmental Council, the Sierra Club, Ballinger, and another Sierra Club member mounted a successful challenge in federal court, but due to delays in agency action it wasn’t until this February that the rule became effective again.
“And now here we are with the Ohio legislature attempting to remove it again, when it had already been found to be illegal to do so,” Leppla said.
To prevent another lapse, the plaintiffs in the new lawsuit have asked Judge Julie Lynch to grant a preliminary injunction against removing the rule while the case proceeds.
As defendants, the State of Ohio and the director of Ohio EPA have 28 days to file responses after the complaint was served. What happens next will depend on those filings and the judge’s rulings on any motions.
The Ohio attorney general’s office did not respond to Canary Media’s request for comment. Ohio EPA spokesperson Bryant Somerville said the agency is reviewing the lawsuit but had no further response because the matter is in litigation.
Zohran Mamdani surged to a historic victory in Tuesday night’s election for New York City mayor, riding a campaign that was laser-focused on halting soaring rents, improving mass transit, and rebuking President Donald Trump’s crackdown on immigration in a metropolis where more than one-third of the population is foreign-born.
The city’s skyrocketing electricity prices, however, received scant mention — even as utility rates animated races around the country, including Democrat Mikie Sherrill’s gubernatorial victory in New Jersey. Despite kicking off his career as a state lawmaker in 2020 by fighting to close the city’s fossil-fueled peaker plants, Mamdani, a 34-year-old democratic socialist, made little hay about climate change at all during the campaign.
Yet the next mayor of the nation’s largest city inherits a world-leading experiment in retrofitting buildings to slash emissions, open questions about how to transition to cleaner power sources, and a patchwork of adaptation efforts meant to protect aging infrastructure from mounting deluges.
The most significant climate policy under the mayor’s purview is a statute called Local Law 97. Passed in 2019, the law requires buildings over 25,000 square feet to slash emissions 40% by the end of this decade and to reach net-zero by 2050. To do so, the nearly 50,000 buildings that qualify must swap oil- and gas-fired heating systems for electric heat pumps.
When the first phase of the law came into effect last year, just 8% of the buildings covered needed to make upgrades to comply, estimated the Urban Green Council, a nonprofit focused on building decarbonization. But more than 50% of buildings will need to make changes to hit the 2030 emissions target.
“That’s a lot,” said John Mandyck, the Urban Green Council’s chief executive. “There’s a lot the next mayor is going to have to do.”
Among the law’s biggest opponents were co-op buildings, condos, and landlord associations that said compliance would cost too much. One anti-Mamdani PAC, as New York Focus reported, sought to make the law a defining issue in the race, saying the candidate from Queens would only raise the price of bringing buildings into line.
In a policy proposal, Mamdani said he would lobby Albany to extend a general tax break that helps middle-income co-op and condo owners pay for building renovations, and to reduce the fees to apply. He also vowed to staff up the agencies in charge of helping building owners navigate the rules. He said in a mid-October debate that he’d heard “from so many” that “it’s cheaper to pay the fine than to actually get into compliance.”
The city could also lower costs by finding a way to purchase heat pumps and other appliances in bulk, Mandyck said. Last year, the New York City Housing Authority agreed to buy 10,000 state-of-the-art induction stoves for apartments in the nation’s largest public housing system, and the state kicked off a new contest shortly after for heat pumps. At the debate, Mamdani said he would look to NYCHA as a model.
But Mandyck said, while the NYCHA programs are “off to a great start,” they’re still only pilot projects.
“That can be part of the solution,” he said. “But there needs to be some new entity, whether an authority or something, that would find a way to do bulk purchasing to aggregate to the market. This is a huge market.”
Yet the buildings covered under Local Law 97 represent just about 5% of the city’s total skyline.
“There’s 950,000 other buildings in New York City,” Mandyck said. “We’re going to have to think about how we help the smaller buildings decarbonize, too.”
To electrify the entire city without spiking emissions, New York will need more clean power plants.
Right now, the city depends on fossil fuels for more than 90% of its power. The mayor has limited say over the electrons that flow into the five boroughs, and the dense urban landscape leaves little space for solar and wind installations within the city. Mamdani’s one major clean-energy plan is aimed at adding solar panels to the roofs of schools, but even that would likely require approval from Albany while only meeting a fraction of local demand.
City Hall does, however, play a role in negotiating contracts for the city’s public institutions with the New York Power Authority, the state-owned utility.
Roughly one-fifth of the power NYPA sells statewide goes to public customers in the city. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, directed NYPA in June to work on building at least 1 gigawatt of new nuclear reactors in the state in the coming years, and the Mamdani administration could play a part in brokering a deal for those electrons. At the final mayoral debate, Mamdani said he considered a new nuclear plant “something worth exploring,” though he’s remained mum on nascent efforts to reconstruct the Indian Point power station that once provided about a quarter of New York City’s power.
Mamdani will also inherit a climate problem with more immediately tangible stakes than decarbonization: the need to update New York’s aging infrastructure to deal with increasingly extreme weather.
Routine rainstorms regularly overwhelm the city’s stormwater systems and cause deadly torrential flooding. Just last week, two men died in basements in Brooklyn and Manhattan amid heavy rains.
Since the devastation of Superstorm Sandy in 2012, the city has begun a series of adaptation projects totaling billions of dollars — but some less glamorous work has been underway for decades.
Take the New Creek stormwater project on the East Shore of Staten Island as an example. The project, championed by outgoing Mayor Eric Adams, a Democrat, is part of the Bluebelt Program that started on Staten Island in 1996 and transformed the city’s least populous borough into a testing ground for water-management infrastructure. The Department of Environmental Protection now plans to apply those solutions in Brooklyn, Queens, and Manhattan. Five of the 19 project sites are fully complete, and the rest are on track to be finished in the next five years, said Robert Brauman, deputy chief of Bluebelt operations at the agency.
On a sunny Wednesday morning, roughly 12 hours after Mamdani delivered a trumpeting victory speech, Brauman stood atop a concrete structure overlooking the large freshwater stream known as New Creek. Just a few years ago, it was a trickle running through a corrugated culvert under a quiet stretch of the Midland Beach neighborhood that would, in bad weather, turn into a torrent. Today, however, the water travels through a carefully regulated S-shaped pipe system, allowing New Creek to keep stormwater from flooding the surrounding neighborhoods. The city’s Department of Environmental Protection combed over 19th-century botanical records to select plants native not just to the five boroughs but to Staten Island specifically to flank the body of water.
“That prevents flooding downstream, and it gives all the plants we installed time to clean the water, so the native wetland vegetation can suck up nitrogen and phosphorus and everything else and clean the water before it goes out,” said Brauman. “That’s perfect adaptation.”
After walking the perimeter of the project, he arrived at the dead end of Mason Avenue and stopped on the sidewalk. Between the curb and the asphalt of the street was a concrete path that looked like a hard version of the polygreen foam popular on children’s playgrounds. When Brauman poured a sip of coffee from a McDonald’s cup, the liquid spread for a moment, then started to disappear. The specially made porous pavement absorbs fluids, reducing how much liquid flows into storm drains during heavy rainfall.
“This is one of the first ones on Staten Island,” Brauman said. “The city is trying to incorporate it into more projects.”
Mamdani has yet to announce whether he’ll keep Rohit Aggarwala as the Department of Environmental Protection’s commissioner. But Brauman said he’s confident projects like this will continue either way, even if Mamdani had little to say about adaptation on the campaign trail.
Mandyck said the Urban Green Council plans to think through potential policy proposals in the coming months for how to better organize and grow the city’s efforts.
“It’s clear we need to take adaptation more seriously,” he said. “There are a lot of good things going on right now in New York, but they’re a little decentralized.”
China is, without a doubt, leading global efforts to slash emissions from dirty industries, with more than 200 projects in the pipeline for producing lower-carbon chemicals, fuels, and building materials.
But the United States and dozens of other countries are still making progress on that front. Over 1,000 commercial-scale clean industrial plants — totaling roughly $2 trillion in investment — are in development or are operating globally, according to a new report from the Industrial Transition Accelerator and Mission Possible Partnership.
“There’s an opportunity for everyone in this clean industrial revolution in the making,” said Faustine Delasalle, who is both CEO of MPP and executive director of ITA.
MPP is an alliance of global climate and business groups. In 2023, the organization and its partners launched ITA at the COP28 climate conference in Dubai to advocate for increased investment in decarbonizing six key sectors: aluminum, aviation, cement, chemicals, shipping, and steel. Together, they represent roughly 30% of global greenhouse gas emissions.
This week, ahead of the COP30 summit in Brazil, the groups released the latest data, which includes about 300 more facilities than 2024’s report.
To date, only about 8% of the total projects are operational. Another 6% have reached a final investment decision — meaning they’ve secured all the necessary financing and approvals to start construction — while 7% appear “poised” to do so soon. The remaining 787 projects, or nearly 80%, have been announced but need to clear certain financial, technical, or regulatory hurdles before developers can break ground.
Delasalle said the pace at which these low-carbon facilities are coming online is still far too slow to meet global timelines for reining in planet-warming pollution. The on-again, off-again nature of national climate policy — see: the United States — and uncertain demand for cleaner fuels and metals make it challenging for developers to finance and build large, capital-intensive facilities.
Still, Delasalle said she expects the project pipeline to accelerate in the near term, particularly as other countries see China pull ahead in the race to clean up heavy industries. The country’s massive renewable-energy build-out and proactive industrial policies — including for green hydrogen — are fueling China’s early-mover advantage. Public disclosures of China’s projects are often hard to find, meaning the project-tracker report likely underestimates actual progress, according to its authors.
“There’s a growing realization that this is the direction of travel for industry, and that companies and the countries that do move will build their competitive edge,” Delasalle said. “And they are starting to do so.”
A clarification was made on Nov. 7, 2025: This story has been updated to clarify the breakdown of clean industrial projects that have reached a final investment decision versus those that are poised to reach that stage.
Former U.S. Rep. Abigail Spanberger will become Virginia’s new governor after a decisive win this week — and after a campaign that centered around rising power prices in the data-center capital of the world.
With Spanberger’s win, Democrats now control all branches of the state government. Virginia Democrats added more than a dozen seats to their majority in the House of Delegates on Tuesday; the Democrat-controlled Senate didn’t face an election.
That outcome may be a game-changer when it comes to preserving and enforcing the Virginia Clean Economy Act. Passed in 2020, the law requires top utilities Dominion Energy and Appalachian Power to achieve 100% renewable power production in the coming decades. Virginia’s Republican delegates and current Gov. Glenn Youngkin have blamed the legislation for rising power prices and pushed to repeal it, while state regulators have approved Dominion’s plans to build a raft of new gas plants in spite of the law.
The Clean Economy Act remains divisive even among Virginia Democrats. Spanberger has said that she’s committed to its long-term goals and to scaling up clean energy generation. But Democratic House Speaker Don Scott was reluctant to get into details about its future in a press conference this week, and didn’t deny the possibility of weakening its fossil-fuel restrictions, Inside Climate News reports.
The trifecta could also pave the way for Virginia to rejoin the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, a collaborative of East Coast states that requires power generators to meet a set cap on carbon emissions or buy allowances to exceed it. States reinvest those proceeds into emissions-reducing projects and clean energy. Youngkin pulled Virginia out of the partnership two years ago, but Spanberger has promised to rejoin.
But there’s one piece of the clean-energy landscape where Spanberger’s win could be more problem than solution. Dominion is currently building what will be the country’s largest offshore wind farm, with support from Youngkin. That Republican backing could be why the Trump administration hasn’t targeted the Dominion array, while at the same time dealing blow after blow to offshore wind projects in blue states.
Climate action wins in elections big and small
It wasn’t just Virginia: Democrats swept statewide races across the country this week. In New Jersey, U.S. Rep. Mikie Sherrill campaigned on a promise to rein in rising power prices, and, in contrast to her Republican opponent, showed support for offshore wind. Still, the state has no operational or under-construction offshore wind projects, and Sherrill will have limited power to counteract the Trump administration’s anti-wind policies, Canary Media’s Clare Fieseler reports.
In Georgia, Democrats beat Republican incumbents in two elections widely seen as referendums on rising utility bills. Peter Hubbard and Alicia Johnson will now take seats on the Georgia Public Service Commission, which oversees for-profit utilities and their requests to raise rates. And in New York City, Democratic candidate Zohran Mamdani — who tied climate action into his affordability-focused campaign — won the mayoral race.
Several other smaller races also have energy implications. Here are the results of a few:
Clean energy carries on
As the world prepares to meet in Brazil next week for the COP30 climate conference (sans the Trump administration), new reports show that clean-energy progress is still happening in defiance of White House opposition.
BloombergNEF took a look at the impacts of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which rolled back federal incentives for clean energy. The legislation will slow solar, wind, and storage deployment over the next few years, BloombergNEF predicts, but growing power demand will ultimately lead renewables to rebound after 2028.
And while the world remains far off track to meet the Paris Agreement goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, it’s still making progress. A United Nations report projects the impact of many countries’ new, bolstered emissions-reduction commitments, and finds they’ll limit warming to around 2.5°C this century if fully implemented. It’s not ideal, but it’s still a win from previous reports that forecast as much as 5°C of warming through 2100.
The coast is (somewhat) clear: The U.S. Interior Department removes the Atlantic coast and a portion of the Gulf Coast around Florida from Trump’s plan to expand offshore oil and gas drilling, after opposition from local Republicans. (Politico)
Take another look: A federal court ruling is forcing FEMA to fully study whether installing distributed solar and batteries makes more sense than hardening Puerto Rico’s existing grid and repairing fossil-fuel plants in the wake of recent hurricanes. (Canary Media)
Fixer-uppers: The Trump administration announces a $100 million program for operators to refurbish aging coal plants and retrofit facilities to run on natural gas. (E&E News)
Diving deep for clean heat: A 75-year-old gas-powered steam-heating network in Boston and Cambridge is transitioning to electric boilers and heat pumps that draw thermal energy from the Charles River, even in winter. (Canary Media)
Lingering shutdown impacts: The U.S. Senate will vote today on a framework to reopen the government, but funds that help low-income families pay for heating will likely still be delayed for several weeks even if the shutdown ends. (E&E News, E&E News)
Energy Star saved? EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin is quietly reconsidering plans to end the Energy Star program, and the agency has renewed contracts with the firm that administers it. (New York Times)
Coal-country dilemma: Navajo Nation citizens and officials debate the future of the coal industry in the Southwest, weighing the economic benefits against the environmental and human health impacts. (New York Times)
Hyundai Motor Group says its plan to invest $6 billion in a low-carbon steel plant in Louisiana “remains unchanged,” despite the Trump administration’s cuts to tax credits for the green hydrogen needed to produce clean iron and a recent immigration raid on a factory the automaker is building in Georgia.
In a statement last week to NPR’s Gulf States Newsroom, Hyundai said the company’s investment “is centered on creating thousands of high-quality American jobs.” The South Korean car manufacturer did not respond to Canary Media’s request for comment.
The Louisiana facility, set to come online in 2029, has emerged as the United States’ leading green-steel initiative.
“This is going to be the flagship project when it comes to green steel,” said Matthew Groch, senior director of decarbonization at the environmental group Mighty Earth.
Days before President Donald Trump returned to office in January, Swedish steel company SSAB quietly pulled out of talks with the Department of Energy for a $500 million grant to support a green-steel project in Mississippi. In June, Cleveland-Cliffs backed away from its plans to replace the blast furnaces at its Middletown Works facility in Ohio with cleaner, hydrogen-ready technology, also with $500 million in financing from the federal government.
Between those two decisions, however, Hyundai bucked the trend, announcing plans in March for its Louisiana steel plant.
Designed to use direct reduced iron, a cleaner method of making iron that relies on natural gas or hydrogen instead of the coal that fuels a blast furnace, the Hyundai facility is slated to produce 2.7 million metric tons of steel each year, including“low-carbon steel sheets using the abundant supply of steel scrap in the U.S.”
Hyundai’s initial press release did not explicitly mention direct reduced iron or hydrogen. But a Korean newspaper article noted at the time that the project would include direct reduced iron, and the 3.6 million tons of iron ore the Louisiana government said the plant would import each year will require some kind of processing. Since then, the company has clarified its plans at state regulatory hearings, Groch said.
At a Louisiana Clean Hydrogen Task Force meeting in June, Hyundai laid out its vision for bringing the plant online in about four years using what’s called blue hydrogen, a version of the fuel made with natural gas and equipped with carbon-capture technology to prevent the emissions from entering the atmosphere. But by 2034, Groch said, Hyundai intends to start producing green hydrogen — made with renewable energy — at the facility to power the process.
A clean industrial plant would likely be welcomed in Ascension Parish, roughly an hour west of New Orleans in the heart of the Bayou State’s so-called Cancer Alley. A new survey, shared with Canary Media, shows 60% of residents in the area favor investment in green hydrogen for steelmaking. The poll, commissioned by the Sierra Club’s Delta Chapter and conducted by JMC Analytics, “makes clear that steel manufacturing at this scale presents a unique set of opportunities for Louisianans,” said Angelle Bradford Rosenberg, the chair of the Sierra Club affiliate’s board.
“Residents are aware that the technology exists to make steel that is clean and has low impact on communities — they want Hyundai to make good on their promises,” Bradford Rosenberg said in a statement. “This poll shows that communities want industry to prioritize clean energy, and provide steel using renewable energy.”
For much of the past decade, Hyundai has focused on growing its presence in the U.S. market, particularly as competition from cheap Chinese electric vehicles mounts in Asia and Europe. The steel plant is part of a broader $26 billion investment that includes the EV-battery plant in Georgia where Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested and shackled hundreds of South Korean workers in a high-profile raid in September.
Signs are emerging of Hyundai’s broader ambitions. First, there’s the location of the plant in Ascension Parish. That industrial corridor hosts the Louisiana stretch of an ammonia pipeline system that extends from the Gulf state all the way north to Indiana. Hydrogen is notoriously tricky to ship because the world’s smallest molecule is prone to dangerous leaking. Transformed into ammonia, however, hydrogen becomes a liquid that can be easily transported via a pipeline.
“They could eventually be selling green hydrogen as far as Indiana,” Groch said of Hyundai. “That’s why they’re building it there.”
Then, there’s the potential to supply rivals.
Last September, General Motors inked a partnership with Hyundai to work together on new car models and establish a shared supply chain that circumvents China. In June, news broke that GM abandoned the Chinese steel company supplying its Korean factories in favor of a new deal with Hyundai.
In August, however, GM signed an unusual three-year deal to buy steel for its American plants from Cleveland-Cliffs. Typically, such deals are structured to last a year. But the expiration date of this one coincides with when Hyundai expects to start selling steel made in Louisiana in the U.S.
“Hyundai has played this incredibly well,” Groch said.
This story originally appeared in New York Focus, a nonprofit news publication investigating power in New York. Sign up for its newsletter here.
New York is violating its climate law — and doesn’t get a pass because implementing the law is “complicated,” a judge found Friday.
The 2019 law, which remains one of the most ambitious in the country, gave the state Department of Environmental Conservation until the start of 2024 to issue regulations that would “ensure” New York meets its binding greenhouse gas emissions targets. More than a year and half later, it has not — a fact that Ulster County Supreme Court Judge Julian Schreibman said was “undisputed” in the case.
Schreibman gave the DEC until Feb. 6 to issue regulations that comply with the law, called the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act.
“While DEC notes that it has taken other, commendable regulatory steps to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, it candidly concedes that the impact of those regulations would fall far short” of the targets set out in the law, which requires the state cut emissions 40% from 1990 levels by 2030 and 85% by 2050, Schreibman wrote.
Climate groups brought the case in March after Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) slammed the brakes on what was expected to be her signature policy to implement the climate law: an emissions-pricing program known as cap-and-invest. Internal emails reported by Politico show that the DEC and the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority had completed draft cap-and-invest rules at the beginning of this year, before Hochul’s abrupt about-face.
The DEC argued in court that issuing the regulations was “infeasible” because it “would require imposing extraordinary and damaging costs upon New Yorkers.” (Hochul in August said much the same about her own reasons for shelving cap-and-invest.)
The judge dismissed that argument.
“It is undoubtedly true that the task placed before the DEC is very complicated indeed,” he wrote. “But as a legal argument, this is unavailing.”
Schreibman said there were two possible paths forward: Either the legislature can step in and change the law, or the DEC must act on it. He set his deadline in February, a month into the next legislative session, to give state lawmakers a chance to weigh in. If the legislature leaves the climate law intact, he said, he is “highly unlikely” to grant the DEC an extension.
The ruling does not explicitly require the state to move ahead with cap-and-invest; the policy is not named in the climate law, and Schreibman said the content of the DEC’s regulations is not up to him. But the law does require the regulations to reflect the findings of its 2022 scoping plan, which envisioned cap-and-invest as its core measure to achieve the emissions targets. State agencies spent two years working on the rules to establish that program before Hochul put them on ice. It’s not yet clear whether the DEC could find a substitute by February.
Hochul said Monday that her administration plans to appeal the decision, which could lead the case to drag on for months longer, if not more.
Reacting to the ruling on Friday evening, she said she would do what was necessary to keep New York’s energy supply reliable and affordable and keep the state attractive to business.
“New York has been, and will continue to be, a leader in climate action, but the judge’s decision fails to factor in the realities of today that include a federal government hostile to clean energy projects, the continuing impacts of post-COVID high inflation, and potential energy shortages expected downstate as soon as next year,” Hochul said in an emailed statement. “We plan to review all our options, including working with the Legislature to modify the CLCPA and appeal, in order to protect New Yorkers from higher costs.”
Facing a cash crunch of more than $1 billion, Europe’s flagship green-steel project began publicly seeking a financial lifeline earlier this month. This week, the French hydrogen investor Hy24 swooped in to help fund Stegra, the Swedish firm behind the effort.
Construction is 60% complete on the facility, which is located in northern Sweden just below the Arctic Circle. If finished, the plant would be the world’s first large-scale steel mill fueled by clean hydrogen, giving Europe a leg up on both the United States and China in an emerging low-carbon technology.
“There is no reason to question the project, whose fundamentals are very good,” Pierre-Etienne Franc, co-founder and CEO of Hy24, told Bloomberg. “If anything, demand for green steel has risen since its launch.”
Franc did not disclose how much money Hy24 invested in Stegra (formerly known as H2 Green Steel), and the company did not respond to Canary Media’s multiple emails requesting comment.
In a press release announcing the start of the new fundraising round on October 13, Stegra CEO Henrik Henriksson said that the investments the company was seeking would represent “approximately 15%” of overall project funding, “comprising a mix of new equity, debt, outsourcing, and selected strategic partnerships.”
“Stegra has a unique position in the green steel landscape with a strong order book, a competitive cost position, and proven execution capabilities,” Henriksson said.
A previous investor from Stegra’s 2023 financing round had also stepped up before Hy24 made its announcement. Just Climate, the British low-carbon venture fund linked to former Vice President Al Gore’s investment company, told the Swedish broadcaster SVT earlier this month that it planned to increase its stake in Stegra. In a statement, Stegra told Canary Media that “several investors have conveyed their commitment to this round,” including the venture funds Altor, FAM, and Kallskär.
But Hy24 is the first new investor to come forward since the latest fundraising began. The investment firm represents “one of the most advanced funding bases for hydrogen in the world,” said Rinaldo Brutoco, the founder of the World Business Academy think tank and a hydrogen investor who has advised European governments on the hydrogen industry.
“They’re the best thing in the hydrogen space in France,” he said. “They invest at the level of ‘let’s build a full-scale plant’ and they operate at the level of ‘let’s build entire industries.’”
That Hy24 is funding Stegra, he said, is a sign the firm is “confident it’s a safe investment.”
“Will Stegra be successful? Absolutely,” Brutoco said. “Have they run into cost overruns? Sure, what new technology hasn’t? But it’s a minor hiccup.”
Still, some big investors are growing skittish. Unnamed sources told the Financial Times this month that Citigroup, one of the project’s core funders, has indicated it wants to stop lending to Stegra because of concerns about the company’s future.
Haunting the project is the ghost of its former sister company, the European battery manufacturer Northvolt, which declared bankruptcy last fall. Both firms were founded with money from Vargas Holding, a Swedish private equity investor focused on climate impacts.
“They’ve got their work cut out,” one lender said of Stegra, according to the FT. “But there is a solid case there, a basis to conduct fundraising, that there wasn’t for Northvolt.”
Amid multiple emergency board meetings, Harald Mix, chair and co-founder of Stegra, agreed to step aside.
Stegra isn’t alone in its troubles. In the U.S., the Trump administration has hampered the nascent green-steel industry by slashing funding to the two regional hubs meant to ramp up production of green hydrogen and changing the terms of grants through the Department of Energy to encourage steelmakers such as Cleveland-Cliffs to double down on coal. In Europe, meanwhile, the Luxembourg-based steel giant ArcelorMittal abandoned plans in June to produce clean steel with green hydrogen and direct reduced iron at two German sites in Bremen and Eisenhüttenstadt.
“[T]here has been slower than expected progress on all aspects of the energy transition, including green hydrogen not yet being a viable fuel source and natural gas-based DRI production not being competitive as an interim solution,” ArcelorMittal said in a statement.
That makes the latest investments in Stegra a cause for optimism, said Anne-Sophie Corbeau, a hydrogen analyst at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy.
“Some European steel producers have been going backward recently, like Arcelor, so it’s good to see this project moving forward,” she said.
America has some green shoots, too. Hyundai this month confirmed its plans to build a clean steel facility in Louisiana by the end of the decade, with plans to generate green hydrogen by 2034.
“In a time of strong headwinds for industrial decarbonization, continued investor confidence in projects like this is encouraging,” said Ariana Criste, a spokesperson at Industrious Labs, a research group that tracks steel industry decarbonization. “It shows that despite near-term challenges, the fundamentals for clean steel are solid, and each new project or demand signal helps build the technical foundation and market momentum needed to accelerate the transition.”
An update was made on November 2, 2025 to add a statement from Stegra
Thermal energy storage systems, which turn electricity into heat that can be tapped for hours or days at a time, could help decarbonize the production of everything from cement to beer.
But in the U.S., where the economics of replacing fossil fuels with electricity remain challenging, thermal-battery startup Rondo Energy has found its first industrial-scale opportunity in a more controversial place: the oil fields of California.
Last week, the San Francisco Bay Area-based firm announced the start of commercial operations for its first 100-megawatt-hour “heat battery,” located at a Holmes Western Oil Corp. facility in Kern County, the heart of the Central California oil patch.
The installation is housed in what looks like a four-story prefabricated office building. Inside sits a massive stack of refractory bricks, which are heated to temperatures of more than 1,000 degrees Celsius (1,832 degrees Fahrenheit) by an adjoining 20-megawatt solar array. That heat is tapped to generate steam that is injected into oil wells to increase production — a job previously done by a fossil-gas-fired boiler.
The project is something of a Faustian bargain. It will reduce carbon dioxide emissions by about 13,000 metric tons per year, said John O’Donnell, Rondo’s cofounder and chief innovation officer. But, of course, those reductions are in service of bringing more planet-warming fossil fuels to market.
Rondo’s argument for pursuing this application is twofold. For one, fossil fuels will be in use for decades to come, and so we might as well reduce emissions from the sector where we can. Second, thermal-storage startups need paying customers in order to scale up their technology, which could prove necessary to minimize pollution from a host of hard-to-decarbonize sectors.
“We’ve got to decarbonize the world the way it is right now,” O’Donnell told Canary Media in a Thursday call from the Washington, D.C., hotel hosting the annual summit of the Renewable Thermal Collaborative, a coalition of organizations working to cut emissions from heating and cooling. “And because California is kind of an island unto itself, we see this opportunity to make a very big impact in the state.”
Finding cost-effective projects in the U.S. has become even more important after the Trump administration canceled hundreds of millions of dollars in federal grants for industrial decarbonization efforts across the country. The defunded projects included ones that planned to use Rondo heat batteries: International spirits maker Diageo wanted to install the tech at its production sites in Illinois and Kentucky, while chemicals giant Eastman had agreed to add it to a plastics-recycling facility being built in Texas.
Those companies haven’t said if they plan to continue work on those projects absent federal funding, and O’Donnell declined to comment on their prospects. “We are ready to work with them when they’re ready to go,” he said.
But industry experts have pointed out that building first-of-a-kind thermal batteries is challenging without government funding to absorb some of the risk. The recent rollbacks jeopardize the U.S.’s ability to develop a technology that could play a major role in cleaning up industrial heating, which is responsible for roughly 13% of U.S. energy-related carbon emissions.
“Transitioning the world’s industrial economy to clean is going to take a minute — and by a minute, I mean multiple decades,” said Blaine Collison, executive director of the Renewable Thermal Collaborative. “This is a big shift that has to happen at a lot of discrete points. There are tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of facilities that have to be addressed.”
Rondo’s first 2-megawatt-hour pilot-scale heat battery started operating two years ago at a California ethanol-production facility. But that served more as a “constructability test” for the company’s technology than as a full-scale proof point for commercial viability, O’Donnell said.
Rondo’s Kern County battery, meanwhile, is its first major installation, though it has several others in the works across Europe. It’s building similar heat batteries at a chemicals plant in Germany, a green industrial park in Denmark, and an undisclosed food-and-beverage processing facility in Spain or Portugal.
The market for Rondo’s tech is stronger in Europe, where companies pay much higher prices for fossil gas and face sizeable fees and taxes on their greenhouse gas emissions, O’Donnell said. In the U.S., by contrast, fossil gas is cheap, and only a handful of states impose costs on industrial carbon emissions.
California is one of those states. Under its cap-and-trade program, industrial polluters must reduce their greenhouse gas emissions below certain thresholds — otherwise they have to pay fines or purchase offsets to make up the difference. And under the state’s Low-Carbon Fuel Standard, companies that produce and sell fossil fuels with lower embodied emissions can earn credits they can use to reduce compliance costs.
Still, even in more competitive markets like Europe and California, Rondo has additional work to do to hit its long-range cost goals. O’Donnell said the company is targeting $30 per megawatt-hour for the energy storage services its heat batteries provide, which would put it well within the range of lithium-ion batteries, albeit for a system that stores heat rather than electrical energy.
But the Holmes Western project is “not close” to that price point, he said. Rather, it’s “owned by the customer at a price point that was economical to them.”
The holy grail for thermal storage — the thing that will make it broadly cost-competitive with fossil-fueled heating — is tapping into cheap, clean power.
That’s because the cost of electricity is ultimately what dictates whether a thermal battery makes financial sense. But unlike fossil fuels, electricity prices vary not just from week to week, but from hour to hour. That makes it tricky for would-be customers to evaluate whether to stick with a gas boiler or to make a bet on an electricity-powered system like Rondo’s.
Solar and wind, however, reliably generate power at a very low cost. In some parts of the U.S. and the world, the amount of renewable energy available exceeds electricity demand for hours at a time, driving wholesale power prices to zero or even negative.
Storing this excess carbon-free electricity as heat can significantly cut costs for owners of thermal storage systems, O’Donnell said. The challenge for providers of the tech is to get utilities, regulators, and energy-market operators to allow industrial customers to access those low or negative energy prices, O’Donnell said. Today, most industrial sites buy their electricity from utilities at retail rates that don’t pass through these wide wholesale fluctuations.
This is especially true in California, where thermal batteries are “in many ways the perfect solution,” said Teresa Cheng, California director at Industrious Labs, an advocacy group focused on cutting emissions from heavy industry.
Solar power is close to overtaking fossil gas as the state’s predominant source of electricity. Much of it is generated at times when there isn’t enough demand for electricity to use it or enough battery capacity to save it for later, forcing the state’s grid operator to curtail increasing magnitudes of solar.
Thermal batteries could soak up that cheap renewable energy while helping industries decarbonize, Cheng said. But “to make this work, we need state leaders to fix industrial electricity rates so they actually reward companies for using cheap, clean power instead of letting it go to waste.”
Holmes Western Oil Corp. is in an unusual position of owning enough land surrounding its facility to build its own 20-MW solar array without connecting to the grid. That “islanded” system allows the company to self-supply solar power at a cost that justifies the project, O’Donnell said.
But that’s a rare occurrence. Most industrial customers will need to source power from the grid — and opportunities for them to access electricity at wholesale prices are few and far between.
Doron Brenmiller, cofounder and chief business officer of Israel-based thermal energy storage provider Brenmiller Energy, said Europe is moving more quickly than the U.S. to support heat batteries, including a number of projects his company is building. He cited the European Commission’s upcoming $1.2 billion pilot auction to fund efforts to decarbonize industrial process heat.
“The utilities in Europe are also very engaged in this space,” he said. Brenmiller has partnered with German energy-trading firm Entelios to integrate its growing roster of industrial thermal storage projects into a variety of “short-term flexibility markets” for specialty grid services like frequency regulation and demand response.
But getting the first large-scale projects up and running remains the most important next step for the industry, he said. Brenmiller expects its first industrial-scale project, a 32-megawatt-hour thermal storage unit at a beverage-processing plant in Israel, to start operations before the end of 2025. A second 30-megawatt-hour system at a pet-food factory in Hungary is scheduled to begin running in 2026.
“All the eyes of clients and investors are on these first few big projects,” he said. “We’ve done pilots, even at scale. But these are the real thing.”
.svg)
