** Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), who former President Trump named his vice presidential running mate Monday, is broadly aligned with the former president on climate and environmental issues, minimizing the threat of climate change and calling electric vehicles a “scam.” Political reported Vance has not gone as far as the former president, who has falsely claimed climate change is a “hoax.”
** Celebrity motivational speaker Tony Robbins is financially backing a plan to turn coal into clean-burning hydrogen with no greenhouse gas emissions at the site of a former West Virginia coal plant, although critics express skepticism.
** The U.S. House advances legislation that contains a provision to block funding for a new federal rule to protect coal miners from silica dust, which is a contributor to a new wave of black lung cases.
** Texas has become the hottest grid battery market in the U.S. as data shows installers added nearly 1.3 GW of battery storage across the country in the first quarter of 2024, the sector’s best-ever start to a year.
*** A NextEra investor used access to internal records to file a lawsuit claiming the utility lied about political activities aimed at boosting its profits and controlling the shift to clean energy.
** Researchers at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution want to dump 6,600 gallons of sodium hydroxide, otherwise known as caustic soda or lye, into the ocean off the coast of Cape Cod in an effort to slow climate change. The unusual plan will likely face significant headwinds, not just from US regulators but from local fishing communities and environmentalists as well, as local news station WBUR reports.
** Twenty Starlink satellites were prematurely released during a failed SpaceX rocket launch last week — and now, observations have confirmed they all burned up in the upper atmosphere after falling back to Earth. Experts are currently investigating what happened, and the rockets responsible will remain grounded until this investigation is concluded.
World
** The electricity grid operators of the three Baltic countries on Tuesday officially notified Russia and Belarus that they will exit a 2001 agreement that has kept Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania connected to an electricity transmission system controlled by Moscow.
** Cleveland-Cliffs will buy Canadian steelmaker Stelco Holdings for C$3.85 billion ($2.8 billion), it said on Monday, marking its first acquisition since a failed bid for rival U.S. Steel last year.
** Five development finance institutions have banded together to find a way to develop the world’s biggest electricity-generation project, the planned Grand Inga hydropower complex in the Democratic Republic of Congo that’s been stalled for decades.
