Above: During a House Natural Resource Committee hearing on Wednesday, Rep. Dave Min (D-CA) asked Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum about investments into energy.
Below: During a House Natural Resources Committee hearing on Wednesday, Rep. Seth Magaziner (D-RI) asked Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum about wind farms.
“We find that RPS mandates have virtually zero impact on prices, and utility-scale renewables are actually associated with lower retail rates,” said Christopher Knittel, the George P. Shultz Professor and Associate Dean for Climate and Sustainability at MIT Sloan, and faculty director of the MIT Climate Policy Center. “Energy generated by large-scale solar plants, for example, comes with lower transmission, distribution, and maintenance costs for utilities, and these efficiencies can be passed on to the consumer.”
Geothermal power developer Fervo Energy priced its IPO at $27 per share, raising $1.89 billion on Tuesday night.
Why it matters: The upsized IPO shows surging investor interest in clean energy stocks amid the backdrop of the AI boom and the Iran war.
Zoom in: The Houston-based company sold 70 million shares of Class A common stock, giving it at a valuation of $7.7 billion.
Underwriters also have the option to purchase an additional 10.5 million shares. The max proceeds including the greenshoe could deliver $2.17 billion.
The offering was massively oversubscribed, says a source with knowledge of the offering, and bankers are marketing it as “the largest primary clean energy public equity deal of all time.”
The intrigue: The largest shareholders before the offering include shale firm Devon Energy, Capricorn Investment Group, DCVC, and Breakthrough Energy Ventures.
Other investors include B Capital, Google, Congruent Ventures, Galvanize, and Prelude Ventures.
Like an approaching Tsunami, El Niño events do give some warning before their arrival. Following the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, impacts on global food security are already setting off alarms. My concern is that the falling dominoes will be exacerbated as the impacts of a building El Niño system could trigger, at least, food insecurity like that in 2011-12. That episode was triggered by a 1000 year drought in Russia, which lead to a cut-off in Russian grain exports, precipitating food shortages, political unrest, and the “Arab Spring” which swept away governments across North Africa. This time the vulnerable area includes several nuclear-armed states across Asia. Predictions are tough, especially about the future.
The climatic shift devastated crops nearly 150 years ago, raising the question of whether a similar disruption could threaten global food security yet again. The strongest El Niño on record from 1877 to 1878 fueled conditions that led to a global famine which killed more than 50 million people across India, China, Brazil and elsewhere. That was 3 to 4 percent of the estimated global population at the time, equal to at least 250 million people if it happened today.
“It was arguably the worst environmental disaster to ever befall humanity,” researchers have written about the event.
This disaster took years to unfold. Drought began spreading across the tropics and subtropics in 1875. In the years that followed, a combination of strong climate forces in the Indian and Atlantic oceans formed alongside the record-breaking El Niño, amplifying and prolonging the drought.
Deepti Singh, an associate professor at Washington State University who has studied this super El Niño, said famines are not an inevitable consequence of droughts. The deliberate actions of colonialists in the 1870s disrupted local systems that communities relied on for being resilient to climate variations, Singh said.
— Sheldon Whitehouse (@SenWhitehouse) May 12, 2026
A recent New York Times piece suggested that Democrats should stop talking about climate change, sparking predictable Fox News alerts about “the end of the climate change hoax.” While I agree there are some setting where the climate discussion is not going to win points, polls do show that Americans are increasingly freaked out by a planet that is speaking more plainly every day. Key is, know your audience. UPDATE: My qualifier is that I am on the front line of deployment for clean energy, and the allies I have are often conservative Republican farmers and landowners, who do not accept human caused climate change, even though they want clean energy, and get why it’s important for a number of reasons. So I don’t have a purity test to screen those I am working with, and I don’t make it a priority to change their minds on the science as long as they are with me on the solutions. At the moment, I might add, it is still a pitched township by township battle, but we are winning, just not quickly enough, yet.
Top 10 reasons why Democrats need to talk about climate change now:
In some states, the top economic issue is the home insurance meltdown. Start with a big cost, add a huge increase, and you get big cost impact on families.
Behind the cost impact is huge hassle factor, as insurers abandon customers and whole markets, and families suddenly face massive “get new insurance” problems.
Insurance meltdown cascades into mortgage markets and property values. Florida, first and worst into this mess, now leads the country in lost residential property value.
The economic pain, bad already, will widen and worsen. One warning is a $25 trillion hit to global real estate markets. That’s Crash-level stuff.
Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself. – Seattle
Those aren’t mountains.
I don’t think there is a lot of discussion of the potential for mass food insecurity, political instability, and magnified impacts of a very large global El Niño event. Metaphors fail.
The standoff between President Donald Trump and Iran that has brought shipping to a virtual halt in the Persian Gulf has set off supply chain shocks that are upending lives thousands of miles away in Asia, raising costs for farmers at the start of key planting seasons that will sharply reduce crop yields in the second half of the year and beyond, according to government officials, economists and farming groups.
Addressing world leaders in Rome on Thursday, Dongyu Qu, the director general of the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, said the war had created not only a geopolitical crisis but “a disruption at the core of the global agrifood system.”
Iran’s destruction of gas infrastructure in the Gulf and the dueling U.S.-Iran efforts to choke the Strait of Hormuz have prevented crucial supplies of fuel and its derivatives like urea — a potent source of nitrogen that enhances harvests — from leaving the Middle East. Because fuel infrastructure takes years to build, there is no ready replacement for these supplies.
In effect, 30 percent of the world’s urea has been “wiped out,” said Pranshi Goyal, senior analyst at the market intelligence firm CRU Group. China, a major fertilizer producer, has restricted exports to ensure its farmers have enough. Russia, another big manufacturer, is seeing demand soar, potentially boosting its economy and aiding its war in Ukraine. On what is known as the spot market, urea prices are up 40 percent since February.
As winters get warmer, ticks of several kinds are flourishing. Deer ticks, known for transmitting Lyme disease, are moving farther north. The longhorned tick, which came from overseas, has gained a foothold on the East Coast and begun moving west. Gulf Coast ticks have made it to states like Connecticut and Indiana. The lone star tick, which can make people allergic to red meat, is fanning outfrom the South and has been found as far as Canada.
And even in places long accustomed to them, ticks are becoming more numerous and active for longer stretches of each year.
Marc Lame, an entomologist and clinical professor emeritus at Indiana University’s School of Public and Environmental Affairs, put it simply: “There are more and different types of ticks around than there used to be, and I don’t see that stopping anytime soon.”
The conservative Washington Times, required reading for DC Republicans, has this piece, another indicator that GOP leaders are rethinking the role of renewables in meeting the burgeoning demands of AI. Could not have written it better myself.
The writer, John Szoka, is the CEO of the Conservative Energy Network and a former member of the North Carolina House of Representatives, where he served as chairman of the Energy and Public Utilities Committee.
In rural communities across the country, a consequential debate is underway over who gets to decide how farmland is used.
Increasingly, local restrictions on solar development, including county-level bans and permitting roadblocks, are limiting farmers’ ability to make decisions about their own land, even when those decisions could improve their financial stability and support local economic growth.
At its core, the question is simple: If American farmers, who feed and fuel our nation, can’t decide how to use their own land, then what does ownership really mean?
Fervo Energy said on Monday it was targeting a valuation of up to $6.5 billion in its initial public offering in the United States, as it looks to tap renewed investor interest in the energy sector amid the rapid growth in AI data centers.
The Houston-based energy developer also said it seeks to raise up to $1.3 billion in the IPO by offering 55.6 million shares priced between $21 and $24 apiece.
Beyond booming demand from AI data centers, the growth of electric vehicles and domestic manufacturing in the U.S. is driving up electricity consumption, underscoring the need for reliable power.
Fervo Energy develops advanced geothermal systems that generate round-the-clock, carbon-free electricity, offering a dependable alternative to weather-reliant solar and wind power.
The company uses enhanced geothermal systems, or EGS technology, to address the scalability limits of traditional geothermal energy – which relies on rare conditions such as volcanic activity – and deploys subsurface monitoring tools including AI-enhanced fiber optic sensing.
