Waste Rock, Low Rivers, Rogue Generators

The Senate's bipartisan permitting package, the Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act (BAAJA), includes the full text of the Mining Regulatory Clarity Act. That bill is the mining industry's long-sought "Rosemont fix."

What Rosemont changed

In 2022, the Ninth Circuit ruled in Center for Biological Diversity v. U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service that Rosemont Copper's claim under the General Mining Act of 1872 did not let it dump millions of tons of waste rock on neighboring Forest Service land. Rosemont argued the land qualified as a "mill site" under the 1872 law. The court disagreed: the parcel had no valid mining claims of its own, so the Act's permissive rules didn't cover it.

The effect was to treat land with mineral claims differently, both legally and for permitting, from the surrounding land that companies had long treated as part of the mine. ClearPath Action called the ruling "a significant departure from long-held mining practices." Industry groups said it would make mining on public lands slower and more complicated.

The fix and the fight

The Mining Regulatory Clarity Act says miners can claim public land for waste rock disposal as long as the use is "reasonably necessary" and "reasonably incident" to mineral development. A Senate version from Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nev.) and Jim Risch (R-Idaho) dates to 2023. A House version from Mark Amodei, Steven Horsford and Mark Begich passed late last year with a handful of Democratic votes. Rosemont fixes also appeared in the 2024 Energy Permitting Reform Act and in this summer's Senate FREEDOM Act. Nevada lawmakers keep showing up on these bills. As Earthworks' Aaron Mintzes put it, "Nevada is to mining as Texas is to oil and gas."

Europe's May-to-August 2026 summer set records on several measures at once, according to a Friday bulletin from the EU's Copernicus Climate Change Service. The headline figure is heat stress, an index that combines temperature, humidity, wind and sunshine to measure how hard it is for the body to shed heat. Dangerous heat stress covered 52 percent of the continent, a record extent. In some places that meant a "feels like" temperature of 100°F (38°C) or higher.

Raw temperatures broke records too. Thirty-seven percent of European land set all-time daily, monthly or seasonal records. That covered nearly all of England and Wales and a band running from France and Spain through Italy, Switzerland and Austria. Four of Western Europe's 10 most severe heatwaves since 1950 happened between late May and mid-August 2026. All four were more intense than the 2003 heatwave, though they differed in length and extent.

The heat season is also getting longer. In both May and September, more than 40 percent of Europe reached 30°C (86°F).

Rivers and drought

The water numbers stand out most. Across 12 major river systems, total discharge was about 69 cubic kilometers below the long-term mean, roughly two years of EU public water supply. The Loire, Seine, Rhine, Glomma, Vistula and Danube had their lowest summer-average flows on record at their outlets. Long stretches of the Rhône, Po, Dniester, Elbe and Dnieper also hit record lows. By the end of August, about 46 percent of European land was in drought, and around 40 percent of that area was classed as extreme drought. Grain and other food crops suffered widespread losses.

New Jersey fined DataOne, a Microsoft-linked data center in Vineland, $1 million last week for running 62 gas-fired generators without permits. The state didn't say how long the generators had run or how much they emitted. Records that Floodlight obtained, reported with The Guardian, fill in both.

The timeline

The state says inspectors first found the tractor-trailer-sized generators on July 29, 2026, and didn't see them on a December visit. DataOne's own letter to the state says the generators started arriving in July 2025. Sixteen began running in October 2025 and another 16 in early February, and all 62 were running by June. By the July inspection, the fleet had logged more than 46,000 generator-hours in total.

Local officials knew sooner. A City of Vineland inspection report noted "Phase 1 generators are online" in early February. In May, a county health inspector traced a noise complaint to at least two generators and recorded a nighttime noise violation. More than 100 noise complaints have been filed since March. At a January town hall, CEO Charles-Antoine Beyney confirmed the generators were running, said the state environmental agency (NJDEP) knew about them, and said the site would pollute "less than a farm."

The emissions math

Floodlight gave the generators' technical specs to Rutgers environmental scientist Xiaomeng Jin and Bruce Buckheit, a former head of air enforcement at the EPA. Jin's best estimate of actual emissions is . NOx are smog-forming gases linked to asthma, heart attacks and premature death. By EPA data, that total would put DataOne among New Jersey's top five NOx emitters for 2025.

A new report from German research group Urgewald finds that several founding members of the UN-backed Net-Zero Banking Alliance (NZBA) did not reduce their loans or underwriting to coal companies between 2022 and 2025. Those banks include Bank of America, Barclays, Citibank, Deutsche Bank and Santander. Among NZBA members with any coal financing over the period, about half increased it and half cut it.

Mark Carney launched the alliance before COP26 in 2021. Unlike the UN's Race to Zero campaign, it never required members to stop financing fossil fuels. After Donald Trump's re-election, North American banks began to leave. The alliance weakened its rules in April 2025 and shut down in October 2025.

How the numbers are counted

Urgewald scales each loan or underwriting deal by the share of the borrower's revenue that comes from coal. A $100 million loan to RWE, which gets 21% of its revenue from coal, therefore counts as $21 million. The definition covers companies that mine, process, trade, transport or burn coal for power, and makers of coal equipment. It excludes cement and steel. The method does not distinguish between companies expanding coal and those winding it down.

Santander gave hundreds of millions of dollars a year in loans and underwriting to coal companies, mainly the US power plant operators Duke Energy and Southern Company. Glencore gets only 4% of its revenue from coal but has just won preliminary approval to keep mining in Australia's Hunter Valley until 2045. Last year it received financing from Bank of America, Citigroup, Santander, Barclays, Deutsche Bank, HSBC and Standard Chartered.

Geothermal startup Dandelion Energy, which began at Alphabet's X lab, has finished nearly 100 homes with homebuilder Lennar at the Ken Caryl Ranch development in Littleton, Colorado. Every home has its own ground-source heat pump. The project is part of a 2025 deal to equip more than 1,500 Colorado homes over two years. Dandelion wants to reach 10,000 homes a year nationwide.

How the cost comes down

Geothermal heating has usually been a custom, high-end product. Drilling alone often costs more than $10,000 per home. Dandelion says it can install systems twice as fast and at half the cost of comparable projects. Its method is to treat a subdivision like a production line:

• A lightweight rig moves from lot to lot and drills before foundations are poured.
• Each home gets a single borehole 200 to 500 feet deep, where the ground stays around 50°F all year.
• The crew finishes one or more homes per day. A standalone job could lose a whole day just moving the rig to and from the site.
• Identical homes mean no custom design for each building and no HVAC retrofits.