The Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry voted 23-0 in favor of advancing Brooke Rollins’ nomination for secretary of agriculture. She must now clear a full Senate vote before officially being installed at USDA. Baring any last-minutes surprises, Rollins is expected to easily receive enough votes. “Thank you to the entire United States Senate...
Articles from Around the Web
With Trump 2.0, These Climate Donors Are Thinking Differently
Three days after President Trump formally ordered a U.S. departure from the Paris Agreement, Bloomberg Philanthropies announced that it would step in alongside other unnamed donors to cover the country’s funding and disclosure obligations to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, whose job it is to implement the climate deal made in the French capital...
China launches limited tariffs after Trump imposes sweeping new levies
China imposed targeted tariffs on American imports on Tuesday and put several U.S. companies, including Google, on notice for possible sanctions, in a measured response to the sweeping duties on Chinese imports imposed by President Donald Trump. Beijing’s limited reply to Trump’s imposition of a 10% tariff on all Chinese imports underscored the attempt by Chinese policymakers to...
CORE POWER Hires Engineering Firm to Support Floating Nuclear Power Plants
Shipping nuclear propulsion start-up CORE POWER, which in November of last year announced a deal with Westinghouse for design and development of floating nuclear power plants (FNPPs), has hired an architectural and marine engineering firm to help design FNPPs that could provide energy for operations at U.S. shipping ports. Glosten, with offices in Seattle, Washington, and Providence,...
US grid investments take off as power demand hikes
Investors are scrambling to build transmission infrastructure to meet surging power demand from data centers and accommodate a vast array of clean power projects waiting in grid connection queues. Demand for clean power hiked on the back of falling costs, federal tax credits, and ambitious renewable energy targets, leading to over 2.5 TW of solar, wind and...
Low-Energy Fridays: Is the National Energy Council a good idea?
After his electoral victory, President Donald J. Trump announced the formation of a “National Energy Council” that will coordinate energy and environment-related activities within the administration—though the specifics of when this may arrive and in what form are still unknown. This prompts two thoughts: First, this is going to make for very confusing acronyms since the...
The Problem With DeepSeek’s Energy Breakthrough
Unsurprisingly, the news that China’s DeepSeek AI had leapfrogged competitors triggered an investor sell-off. It dragged down Nvidia, the American chipmaker powering the AI revolution, as well as related tech stocks, from Micron and Advanced Micro Devices to manufacturing juggernaut TSMC. There is, after all, some wisdom in worrying that we don’t know who the ultimate...
Trump’s Second-Term Playbook: Lower Oil Prices to Curb Inflation, Boost Growth, and Pressure Russia
At home, lower energy prices—particularly at the pump—are central to Trump’s strategy for reducing consumer inflation and stimulating economic growth. The President has set an ambitious goal of reducing retail gasoline prices to below $2 per gallon, a significant drop from the current national average, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA).
Senate confirms Burgum as Interior secretary
The Senate confirmed former North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum as Interior secretary Thursday in a 79-18 vote, with the majority of Senate Democrats joining every Republican in the chamber. Burgum, a one-time candidate for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination-turned-visible Trump campaign surrogate, has been among the president’s least controversial nominees. He advanced out of the Senate Energy...
Nuclear revival puts uranium back in the critical spotlight
Is uranium a critical mineral? Not according to the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), which dropped it from its critical minerals list in 2022 on the grounds it didn’t qualify because it was a “fuel mineral.” U.S. President Donald Trump wants it to think again. One of Trump’s many “Unleashing American Energy” directives requires the Secretary of the Interior...