Governors' Wind Energy Coalition

The Trump administration is shaking up federal involvement in the mining, tech, energy and defense sectors by making the government part-owner of dozens of U.S. companies — and sparking a conversation among progressives about how a future Democratic president might reboot the party’s approach to climate and labor policy.

Starting with Trump’s surprise moves to take a “golden share” in U.S. Steel and then a 10 percent share in Intel more than a year ago, the administration is approaching $30 billion in equity stakes, warrants or similar plans in U.S. companies by most estimates, a fairly radical departure from orthodoxy outside of times of financial crisis — like the massive government bailouts of 2008-2009 — or world war.

Iowa Environmental Council’s annual “condition of the state” report on Iowa’s electric generation shows that while wind continues to dominate Iowa’s electricity generation sources, there has been a “reversal” in the state’s progress to meet energy demand with renewable sources. 

For the first time in several years, according to the report, the share of energy generated by coal increased in 2025. 

The environmental council holds that for other sectors to reach climate goals of net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, the electricity sector needs to be “carbon-free” by 2035. 

The outdoor apparel company Patagonia joined conservation and tribal groups to sue President Trump on Wednesday, seeking to overturn his move to shrink Bears Ears National Monument in southern Utah by more than one million acres.

The lawsuit escalated Patagonia’s feud with Mr. Trump, which began in the president’s first term and became a core part of its corporate strategy. And it kicked off a sweeping legal battle over whether presidents have the power to shrink such sites in the first place.

Mr. Trump signed a proclamation in July that cut 91 percent of Bears Ears, an expanse of red-rock canyons rich with archaeologically significant sites, reducing its area by more than 1.2 million acres. He also shrank a second monument in southern Utah, Grand Staircase-Escalante, by nearly 1.7 million acres, or 90 percent.

California is pushing back against the Trump Administration’s efforts to kill offshore wind energy projects along the Central Coast. 

Earlier this year, the U.S. Department of the Interior (DOI) paid Golden State Wind $120 million — the cost of its offshore lease — to abandon plans for a wind farm in federal waters off Morro Bay.

California Attorney General Rob Bonta said the DOI used “federal taxpayer dollars” to buy out the lease and cancel the project. In return, Golden State Wind is required to invest the same amount in out-of-state fossil fuel projects. 

In response, Attorney General Bonta and the California Energy Commission (CEC) filed a lawsuit last week against both the Trump Administration and Golden State Wind LLC.

“They appear to be either [undeveloped] sites that have no electricity or infrastructure, or they are fields that are deemed to be mature and not something a company like ours would find attractive for further investment,” said this person, who was granted anonymity to discuss the administration’s plans.

“If the administration has in fact done this [deal], and the U.S. has rights to 65 billion barrels of Venezuelan crude, that’s a good thing, that’s historic, that’s laudable,” this person said. “But it’s not really impactful in the short term or anything other than aspiration.”

Industry executives are also raising issues ranging from the quality of the oil fields Venezuela offered for the venture, the amount of time and money needed to get oil flowing in a country that recently suffered a massive earthquake and whether the deal itself was actually legal.

Vulnerable House Republicans returned to Washington this week pushing for action before the midterms on reining in data centers, only to find their leadership still undecided on the volatile issue.

Further complicating the debate: President Donald Trump’s Truth Social post Monday saying that the only reason Americans might not want data centers built in their communities is if they “want to end up being backwards and poor.”

The desire for action on data centers, which had already divided the House GOP conference, came up in multiple member discussions early this week — including a conversation that House Speaker Mike Johnson hosted Monday with freshman lawmakers, Republicans told POLITICO.

Ryan McElroen had spent years repairing the New York City subway underground when he got the opportunity to work in the middle of the ocean.

“I had no views other than the darkness at work,” he said. “Then I went polar opposite.”

Two years ago, McElroen began being trained by his union, the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) Local 3, for a job in the emerging offshore wind industry. Since then, he has completed six one-month-long rotations constructing New York’s first large-scale offshore wind projects: four on Sunrise Wind, roughly 30 miles (48km) east of Montauk Point, and two on Empire Wind in the New York Bight, 30 miles south of Long Island.

Despite advancements in wind and solar power, countries have continued to burn oil, gas and coal, releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere where it traps the sun’s heat and has raised average global temperatures by about 1.4 degrees Celsius. The damage from global warming is now felt across the planet, with intensifying heat, drought, floods, fire and other threats to humans, animals and plants.

The idea laid out in the U.N. report would be extremely difficult because it would require pulling carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere on a colossal scale. Achieving that would potentially mean blanketing enormous parts of the world with forests or relying on novel technologies for sucking carbon out of the air that haven’t yet worked on any significant scale.

Democratic governors have a new message for data center developers amid community backlash: Cut a deal.

Community benefit agreements are increasingly appearing in state strategies for handling the data center boom. In recent months, three Rust Belt governors — Pennsylvania’s Josh Shapiro, Illinois’ JB Pritzker and Michigan’s Gretchen Whitmer — have called on project developers to enter into legal agreements with communities that can cement pollution limits, hiring commitments and local investment promises.

The controversial maneuver to return lease payments to developers — often in exchange for their investing in fossil fuels — is part of President Donald Trump’s broader strategy to stymie the clean energy resource, which coastal states have been depending on to meet their growing need for reliable and affordable electricity. The buyouts began as Trump’s earlier efforts to halt in-progress offshore wind farms largely failed under scrutiny from federal judges.

Now the unprecedented lease-refund approach is increasingly facing legal blowback of its own. Late last week, California became the eighth state to challenge the practice, arguing that it jeopardizes the state’s investments and resulting jobs in offshore wind.