These profits are largely a product of supply constraints brought on by the war in the Middle East. With the Strait of Hormuz effectively blockaded, oil suppliers have rerouted shipments over land and through pipelines. The resulting supply shortages, constrained refining capacity, and higher transportation costs have driven up oil and gasoline prices, delivering windfall profits for producers.

But companies aren’t using those profits to drill lots of new wells or explore untapped oil fields. Instead, they’re pocketing the cash and paying their shareholders, experts say. What was once an industry defined by the “drill, baby, drill” ethos is now defined by another term: “capital discipline.” It’s a phenomenon in which rampant drilling and production growth has given way to tightened belts and bigger payouts to investors.

Oil executives expected a weak financial year in 2026 due to a supply glut, but the closure of the Strait of Hormuz constrained oil production and allowed companies to charge top dollar for use of their refineries outside the Middle East.

“While we didn’t anticipate the current situation, we were prepared for it,” Exxon CEO Darren Woods said in a July call with analysts, according to the Wall Street Journal. “Despite the temporary loss of approximately 10 percent of our upstream production, we delivered exceptional financial results.”

Chevron executives offered a similar assessment. In July, Chief Financial Officer Eimear Bonner told Bloomberg that the company didn’t adjust their production as prices rose. “We did not change any of our plan,” she said.

Finances first, politics later

The Trump administration’s focus on “unleashing” U.S. energy is running headlong into oil companies’ growing commitment to financial discipline. For instance, the administration assured the public that oil majors would leap at oil fields in Venezuela after the country’s leader, Nicolas Maduro, was detained in January. But drilling stayed low throughout the administration’s efforts to pry open public lands for oil development, and corporations have been wary and selective about new opportunities in Venezuela. Similarly, even as the administration has opened up U.S. federal lands for drilling, companies have shown only a lukewarm response. As Americans bleed cash at the gas pump, President Donald Trump has even accused oil companies of “making too much money” from the war, unable to otherwise influence them to significantly ramp up their production.

“Oil and gas companies respond more to financial incentives than they do to political signaling,” said Clark Williams-Derry, an energy finance analyst at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis. “They’re going to be looking at their finances first rather than politicians’ demands.”

Lessons on discipline

If the U.S.-Israel war with Iran had occurred in 2012, oil companies might have seen the price spike as a chance to drill more wells. As fracking took off and prices rose during the 2000s, many companies tied their CEO compensation to production growth. Investors poured money into oil companies. But those days of aggressive production eventually ran into price crashes, especially after a Saudi-led coalition of oil-producing countries flooded the market with crude in 2014 and the COVID-19 pandemic sank prices again in 2020.

In the last five years, as investors soured on drill-happy oil companies, they embraced a new, more disciplined approach to capital expenditure. Investors wanted steadier returns. Rather than rewarding aggressive production growth, they pushed companies to focus on lower-cost drilling, restrain spending, and return more cash to shareholders.

“What is perhaps most telling about the corporate response to the turbulent forces impacting the oil and gas sector is just how little changed [in 2026],” Tom Ellacott, senior vice president of corporate research at Wood Mackenzie, said in a July press release. “Capital discipline has proved more durable than either the bears or bulls expected.”

Satisfied investors

Drilling in the U.S., as measured by the number of oil rigs, has ticked up during the summer, Williams-Derry noted, but only after the president launched a war in Iran that drove up oil prices. As of June, it had only recovered to the rate recorded at the same point last year, according to data from Baker Hughes, an energy technology company.

In this new mode, Williams-Derry said, international oil companies have used wars, notably the conflicts in Ukraine and Iran, to boost their revenues so they can maintain large payments to their Wall Street investors. In times without price spikes, oil majors collectively took out debt as they paid their investors, their revenues unable to support the payments on their own, according to Williams-Derry’s internal analysis of their cash flow statements. In an ironic twist, oil companies have benefited more from constraints on global oil production than from “unleashing” it.

The climate implications of this new ethos are complicated. Already, oil companies’ tight spending has drawn most of them away from renewable energy investments. France’s TotalEnergies is the one supermajor that has charged ahead with its renewables business, though the Trump administration agreed to pay the company more than $900 million to cancel two offshore wind projects off New York and North Carolina. More discipline may also push companies to capture and resell the leaking natural gas from oil fields because maximizing revenue from existing wells has become more attractive than drilling expensive new ones. And this new attitude could keep oil and gasoline prices higher for longer, maintaining the appeal of electric vehicles and renewable energy sources. (Chinese solar panel and EV exports to some countries have spiked during the war.)

A cash business

At least one analysis firm, Wood Mackenzie, believes disciplined oil companies could fall behind global demand, causing them to lose a share of the global oil market to nationally owned oil companies like Saudi Arabia’s, potentially changing the politics of energy security for Western countries.

Ultimately, however, this phase of “capital discipline” may only be temporary, Williams-Derry said. No oil company wants to be so disciplined that it begins to decline. Eventually, some growth will likely be necessary.

Still, those companies have proven as capable of benefiting from energy shocks to U.S. consumers as they are of relieving them, an important note for political actors hoping to rely on oil companies for energy security.

“At least for now, production of oil is no longer the way executives are getting paid,” Williams-Derry said. “What matters is their ability to generate cash.”

This article originally appeared in Grist. It has been edited to conform with Corporate Knights style. Grist is a non-profit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future.

Austin Corona is an energy reporter at Grist.

The post For oil companies, high prices mean huge profits – not more drilling appeared first on Corporate Knights.

When Gerard Mullin decided to train in offshore wind, he didn’t know what to expect. But on his first long-term project in Massachusetts, he immediately relished the consistency of the work, the good pay and the novelty of laboring at sea.

“I thought it was the best thing in the world,” he said.

In his first eight weeks working offshore, Mullin made more money than he had saved in the previous five years.

But the industry was on shaky ground. Mullin had his bags packed for five weeks offshore with Empire Wind in New York when President Donald Trump’s stop-work order last year stranded him at home in Boston. Trump—who had railed against the industry in his 2024 election campaign—halted all future permitting last year and canceled 12 offshore wind leases this spring and summer.

Thousands of workers like Mullin who were promised steady, well-paying careers in offshore wind now find themselves racing to secure the few positions left or returning to their prior work. Meanwhile, the supply chain that emerged to support offshore development has been left adrift, including in towns in need of a promised economic boost.

Those are less-discussed consequences of the political turmoil besetting the domestic industry, said Elizabeth Wilson, a professor at Dartmouth College studying offshore wind.

“All of the promises of economic development that offshore wind was supposed to help support have evaporated,” Wilson said.

For Mullin, the change was shocking.

“All of a sudden, the federal government is concerned with my work, and there’s nothing I can do to change how they view it,” Mullin said. “Now there are things completely outside of my control, changing how I make a living.”

Trump has long scorned offshore wind, calling the 2012 project he unsuccessfully opposed near one of his Scottish golf courses “disgusting & inappropriate.” His administration, which has inaccurately described renewables as costly and unreliable as it tries to block them in favor of climate-altering fossil fuels, said his offshore wind policies are good for the economy and workers.

“President Trump has delivered on his popular promise to reverse the Left’s costly Green New Scam to lower prices for families and businesses and strengthen our country’s energy security,” Taylor Rogers, a White House spokeswoman, said in a statement. “By prioritizing the production of reliable, affordable, and secure energy sources, the President has restored U.S. energy dominance—creating thousands of good-paying energy jobs across the country.”

Tim Sullivan, who was CEO of the New Jersey Economic Development Authority until December, said he can’t comprehend the White House’s logic.

“It’s the strangest thing: I’ve spent 15 or so years working in public-sector economic development; I’ve never seen people cheering for job destruction, particularly elected officials,” he said.

As a pile driver, a specialized structural laborer essential to offshore wind projects, Mullin lived and worked on a ship five weeks at a time, followed by five weeks at home with his family. It was a schedule that suited him well.

Mullin joined offshore wind projects across Massachusetts, Virginia and New York. His employer, an international contractor, even brought him and other members of his union across the Atlantic for a wind project off the coast of Scotland.

Now, Mullin is back to the same type of onshore construction work he did four years ago, before he started with wind.

“The writing was on the wall that this idea that I’m going to go to the same ship, five weeks on, five weeks off, steady—that just isn’t the reality anymore,” Mullin said.

Opportunity lost

Joshua Grigsby, 42, took his son to Rio de Janeiro, Disney World and SeaWorld. Natalie MacDonald, 26, stopped living paycheck to paycheck. Others bought homes and started families.

Inside Climate News spoke with over a dozen workers and union leaders who said the financial opportunities from the nascent U.S. offshore wind industry had been unparalleled. They saw long-term careers ahead of them. They feel that opportunity slipping through their fingers.

Anthony Hibbard was on one of the first boats that carried ironworkers to Vineyard Wind, off the coast of Massachusetts. What he found was “financial freedom,” he said, and he worked his way up to become a foreman on Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind.

After the Trump administration’s moves to scuttle the industry, Hibbard returned to local, onshore jobs in Portland, Maine, where he earns just one-fifth of what he did offshore.

“I make enough to get by, but I like to be smart with my money, and I don’t have the scope to continue being smart with it,” Hibbard said. “It’s definitely—you can feel the difference, that’s for sure.”

The loss of offshore wind has had financial consequences for many union workers. While many were paid the same per hour as jobs they could find onshore, they could work more than double the hours, and the company covered many living expenses. Grigsby made double to triple what he did onshore.

When Zaheer Razi, 28, joined the Piledrivers Local 56 union as a commercial diver, he transitioned into offshore wind as soon as he could. The logic was that it could be the anchor for people’s careers, he said—union leaders told workers to “set your roots down,” expecting over a decade of steady work.

He’s still working on Revolution Wind near Rhode Island, but he knows it won’t last.

“I’m probably one of the few guys that’s probably going to be working till mid-August, I believe, and then it’s really going to be silent for the next two or three years,” Razi said. “It is very frustrating, but it’s out of our control. Nobody could have really predicted it, but at this point, we’re just riding it out for what we can.”

Razi’s project is one of the five major U.S. wind farms that appear to remain on track despite the political backlash. But they are nearing completion and the permitting pipeline is all but blocked, meaning construction jobs will soon evaporate, according to multiple experts and union leaders.

Kris Ohleth, director of the Special Initiative on Offshore Wind, a U.S. policy think tank, attributed the lack of employment prospects to the political uncertainty that has stymied investor interest.

“We’ve trained them, we’ve given them this great experience, they’re building their futures for their families, and now they have no projects to work on,” Ohleth said of the offshore wind labor force, “and that’s because of the lack of market confidence.”

At the time of Trump’s election, the market research firm BloombergNEF forecast that the United States would build 39 gigawatts of offshore wind by 2035, enough electricity to power 13 million homes. By the end of last year, the firm had downgraded that prediction to just 6 gigawatts, according to Harrison Sholler, a wind analyst at BNEF.

For Garrison Biel, an offshore wind diver, the industry’s decline has meant there are close to no employment opportunities left.

“They’re more gigs than jobs,” Biel said. “They’re like short hitches, trying to wrap things up, tidy everything up. So I know people that are still working, but it’s not like how it was the first couple of years when it started, where that’s all you needed to do.”

He switched back to commercial diving around eight months ago because “what was available left offshore was slim pickings,” he added.

Biel said the offshore wind industry was supposed to be reliable, with guaranteed time off to make up for the long periods away from home and the weeklong, 12-hour-per-day shifts.

“Now, everybody that’s doing it, they get off the boat after working seven-twelves for a couple of weeks and they go right back to work, because they don’t know if they’re ever going to go back out on a boat again,” he said.

Grigsby was able to buy a house with his money from offshore wind. His union’s business manager, John Dunderdale, said at least a dozen other members of Piledrivers Local 56 did the same.

When these projects disappear, “you’re taking away their means of bringing back into the community,” Dunderdale said.

“Now you have a member sitting home, collecting unemployment, because there’s no work,” he added.

Benjamin Hawkins, who lives in Whitman, Massachusetts, said he made enough to upgrade his parents’ house and enjoy a new degree of “leverage” over his life.

“It’s heartbreaking, because you wonder about what’s going to happen in the future with your money,” Hawkins said.

He added: “Offshore wind was the reason I could improve that life, so to have the president affect my life, just as an average American—it was not on my bingo card.”

“We Sold This Dream”

Offshore wind first began edging into the U.S. energy market in 2011, decades after it had taken off in Europe. An Obama administration study that year predicted that a vibrant offshore wind industry could help meet the nation’s renewable energy needs while investing in infrastructure and creating “thousands of construction and operational jobs.”

The first U.S. offshore wind farm, Block Island, came online near Rhode Island in 2016, and states began offering financial incentives to drive development. The Biden administration made offshore wind a central priority in 2021, and from there, state and federal agencies geared up for a boom. The federal government sold leases to major international energy companies that began to see the U.S. as an attractive market, centered in the Northeast, Virginia and California.

Construction and permitting began in force not long before Trump returned to office with a promise to kill offshore wind.

“That’s like somebody working on skyscrapers, and then somebody saying, ‘We’re not allowed to build any skyscrapers,’” Biel said. “It’s just a kind of crazy thing.”

No comprehensive or exact estimate of offshore wind-related jobs exists, but New Jersey’s Economic Development Authority estimated in 2022 that a typical project creates around 1,000 construction jobs per year and 100 lifetime operational jobs.

Dunderdale said shutting down any project at that size and scale is a “huge hit,” both for the workers and their local economies.

Central to the fledgling domestic industry was the growth of training and certification programs, primarily through community colleges and unions.

Millwrights Local 1121, which operates across New England, met with developers in 2021 to start offshore wind job training, which would cost $10,000 to $20,000 per person. It was worth it, said the union’s vice president and business manager, Andy Benedetto, because they had heard there would be “years’ and years’ worth of work.”

“We invested millions of dollars in training, more or less, and lots of hours went into putting all this together, and now that work is dried up for the foreseeable future,” Benedetto said. “We hope not too long, but we built this whole workforce, and we sold this dream to our members that if they get involved and get the training and go on this first project, then they’re going to carry over for the next 10 years.”

His union wasn’t alone. Public and private investments poured in to develop the new workforce. New York, New Jersey and Massachusetts led the Northeast with millions of dollars in grants to training and research programs.

Ironworkers Local 7, which operates across the Northeast, received $300,000 from Massachusetts in 2022 “to be ready for when the work comes,” said Grant Provost, the union’s Maine business agent. “And the work never really came.”

Dunderdale helped build the only U.S.-based school with heavy-lift training for Piledrivers Local 56. In total, offshore wind training cost the union about $30,000 per person, which he said was “an investment in the member.”

Esther Rosario, executive director of the labor coalition Climate Jobs New York, said unions that spent years preparing for the offshore wind economy have to reassess their plans.

“We’re ready to work, we’re ready to build, we have the trained workforce—we need work,” Rosario said. “You can’t apprentice somebody into a job that doesn’t exist.”

Offshore wind was billed as a boon not just for the building trades but for the entire economy. Manufacturing would move to the United States and locals would fill those jobs. For port cities like Massachusetts’ Salem and New Bedford, or New Jersey’s Paulsboro, the loss has threatened years of expected economic progress.

In August 2025, Trump canceled a $34 million grant to build an offshore wind terminal in Salem, which Frank Callahan Jr., president of the Massachusetts Building Trades Unions, said at the time put 800 construction workers out of a job.

“It means fewer jobs, fewer career opportunities,” Callahan said in a recent interview. As an example of this loss, he pointed to Prysmian Group, an Italian manufacturer, abandoning plans in January 2025 for an offshore wind cable plant near New Bedford.

At one point, Salem County, New Jersey—one of the state’s poorest counties—was poised to gain 1,500 new jobs for its population of 65,000.

“That’s a huge inflection point in that county’s economy that at this point is hard to see materializing any time soon,” said Sullivan, the former New Jersey official.

What’s Next?

The thousands of offshore wind workers aren’t all suddenly unemployed. Most did some trade work before, and unions are used to moving members onto different projects when conditions shift.

Still, Provost, the Ironworkers business agent, said offshore wind is a huge dent in unions’ portfolio of opportunities.

“If we’re not building offshore wind, and we’re not building jobs like that, you got to get in on university- and state-funded projects, and that doesn’t keep everybody busy,” Provost said. “We’ve got a massive amount of unemployed people in Local 7 right now.”

And just because workers can transition doesn’t mean they want to.

If he had a choice, Hawkins said, “I’d never work on land again.”

In addition to the financial opportunity, Razi said offshore wind was a once-in-a-lifetime experience.

“We were meeting people from all over Europe, all over the world, and it was just a great environment to learn as somebody being in their mid-20s,” said Razi, who is finishing up an offshore diving job.

Living and working together consistently for weeks on end, crews became good friends, even vacationing together and learning each other’s languages. Hawkins joked that every rigger knew how to curse in at least three languages.

“It’s like being at the U.N.,” he said.

Benedetto said the millwrights he represents are eager to return to offshore wind, but they feel burned by political headwinds turning against them.

“They did a good job,” he said, “and they’re bummed out that they’re middle-class workers being used as pawns.”

Last November, Mullin’s building in Boston caught on fire, and he lost everything he owned. Six weeks later, he said, he was able to buy a condo near the city.

“That would not have been possible without offshore wind,” he said.

Mullin said he wishes others, especially young people entering the trades for the first time, could have the opportunity he did.

“It’s just too bad because they were good jobs and people were happy with them,” he said. “And it really was just a fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay.”

Ajani Stella is a Dow Jones reporting fellow at Inside Climate News, based in New York City. Previously, he interned at amNewYork, covering politics, housing and crime. His reporting experience also includes immigration, labor and higher education policy issues. Ajani is currently a junior at Georgetown University, where he serves as executive editor of the student newspaper, The Hoya.

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Grid-scale batteries are an important part of the energy system today, providing a mechanism to compensate for fluctuating renewable-energy supply by storing power when there is a lull in energy production.

For decades, the backbone of the electrical grid has been transmission infrastructure. But as more activities shift from fossil fuels to electricity, and demand for power lines from renewable-energy projects surges, the infrastructure is struggling to keep up. Instead of building massive new wires, experts say that batteries can help bridge the gap during peak hours when power is needed. Battery power is cheaper, faster to build, and can be deployed precisely where the demand is coming from, such as near an artificial intelligence data centre or electric vehicle factory.

The last five years have seen grid battery capacity boom as developers push for large utility projects all over the world, in the United States, China, South Africa, Chile, Canada and Australia, among others.

But the prolonged and increasingly extreme heat is also degrading batteries’ lifespans. According to a report by the International Energy Agency, most grid batteries deployed today cluster around two to four hours – a capacity insufficient to last through the night or support the grid during extreme weather conditions when demand reaches its peak.

With modern technology, grid storage is transitioning beyond the four-hour lithium-ion default toward long duration. These are some of the technologies that have moved past their pilot stage and are now being deployed for large-scale, long-duration storage.

Iron-air batteries

Form Energy is a U.S.-based company that has invented an iron-air battery technology capable of storing and discharging electricity for up to 100 hours on multiple consecutive days. This is a significant edge on lithium-ion batteries, which provide energy for shorter time spans, depending on the device in which they are installed.

The battery cycle of iron-air batteries operates like reversible rusting. During the discharge process, the battery inhales oxygen from the air and converts the metallic iron to rust. While charging, an electrical current converts the rust back into iron while the battery breathes out oxygen.

In October 2024, Form Energy began production at its first high-volume manufacturing facility in West Virginia, powering more than 75 gigawatt-hours of projects, according to Fast Company. In October 2025, it deployed its first commercial batteries, and earlier this year it announced plans to build what some called the “largest battery in the world by energy capacity” as part of a project to support powering a Google data centre in Minnesota.

The venture was developed in collaboration with the Xcel Energy utility, which is headquartered in Minneapolis. Xcel Energy will supply the power for this new data centre, while Google will cover the infrastructure and utility costs associated with its own electric service.

Form Energy anticipates delivering and shipping the first iron-battery modules to the data centre by the end of 2028. The company also expects to hit a yearly production capacity of 500 megawatts before the end of 2028.

Compressed-air technology

Compressed air is an ancient technology. Its first practical application emerged in the 1600s, and it went on to revolutionize construction and mining efforts by running pneumatic drills to bore tunnels through the Alps in the 1800s. In the modern age, companies such as Toronto-based Hydrostor have developed a system of compressed-air energy storage, or A-CAES (for “advanced compressed air energy storage”), to support off-peak electricity.

Founded in 2010, Hydrostor stores energy in rock caverns. It says that a single 500-megawatt, eight-hour A-CAES facility can store enough electricity to power a city the size of Boston for eight hours on less than 100 acres of land.

“At its core, A-CAES functions as a giant air battery,” Hydrostor’s chief technology officer, Chris Phebus, wrote in June. “When discharged, the cavern is flooded with water. To charge, compressed air is injected into the cavern, displacing water upward into a surface reservoir. It is 100 percent charged when the cavern is filled with air. To discharge, water flows back into the cavern, pushing the compressed air to the surface to generate electricity. The cavern operates at a fixed pressure band with the weight of the water column acting as a massive underground piston.”

Hydrostor’s facility in Goderich, Ontario, is the world’s first commercially contracted A-CAES project. The company is now scaling through its Willow Rock facility located in Kern County, California. In early 2026, Hydrostor signed a 50-megawatt offtake agreement with California Community Power (CC Power). This partnership enables the Willow Rock facility to supply and store energy for eight hours of continuous, emission-free discharge to six distinct local, non-profit public energy agencies.

The tech is part of a growing field known as long-duration energy storage, which is meant to increase the reliability of grids during peak demand or when renewable-energy generation lulls.

Carbon dioxide

Founded in 2020 in Milan, Italy, Energy Dome is a deep-tech facility adapting long-duration energy storage with its innovative battery technology of storing 2,000 tons of carbon dioxide daily in a dome at its primary hub in Piacenza.

When demand for energy peaks, Energy Dome treats carbon dioxide like a giant, reusable battery. When renewable energy is abundant, the facility uses this electricity to compress carbon dioxide into a high-pressure state. This stores the energy in the pressure of the gas. When the grid requires power, the system releases the pressure, which expands the carbon dioxide, generating electricity on demand. It doesn’t use lithium or other critical materials. The facility’s batteries have a much longer life expectancy than lithium-ion batteries.

In July 2025, Energy Dome announced a partnership with Google, using the facility’s carbon dioxide battery technology to provide carbon-free energy to power the electrical grids serving Google’s operations.

The firm is also developing its first U.S.-based 200-megawatt-hour facility in Columbia County, Wisconsin, in a partnership with Alliant Energy. Construction is slated for 2026 and completion is expected by late 2027. This project will “deliver enough electricity to power approximately 18,000 Wisconsin homes for 10 hours on a single charge,” according to Alliant.

Sodium-ion batteries

Founded in 2011, China’s Contemporary Amperex Technology Co., Limited’s technology consists of cheap, abundant sodium-ion batteries to reduce dependence on lithium.

This battery technology operates through “reversible sodium-ion movement between the cathode and anode,” according to Tycorun, a Chinese battery manufacturer.

In July 2021, CATL unveiled its first-generation sodium-ion battery. It was a test case to demonstrate that sodium-ion chemistry can realistically compete with lithium.

CATL is currently scheduling the delivery of its first sodium-ion energy storage system, which is expected to enter commercial deployment in September 2026.

ESS News says battery shipments are expected to  to reach one gigawatt-hour by the end of 2026 across four sectors: “battery swapping, passenger vehicles, commercial vehicles, and energy storage.”

Zinc-air batteries

In the bid to come up with longer duration batteries, a Toronto-based company is making waves: e-Zinc’s electromechanical technology stores energy in zinc metal. Unlike lithium-ion, e-Zinc’s technology incorporates zinc-air chemistry that provides 10- to 100-hour discharge at a cheaper cost than other battery technologies.

The World Economic Forum called it an “affordable, flexible and long duration energy storage solution” in naming it to its global list of 100 Technology Pioneers in 2023. Zinc is an abundant metal, with between 30% and 40% of it coming from recycled scrap metal. “e-Zinc’s solution can replace diesel generators for backup power for commercial and industrial customers or run on remote microgrids or at grid scale to firm up renewable generation,” the World Economic Forum noted.

In 2024, the company raised US$31 million in Series A2 financing and later that year opened a 42,000-square-foot pilot facility in Mississauga, Ontario. It has partnered with the California Energy Commission and Toyota Tsusho Canada to develop two commercial pilots that are expected to validate e-Zinc’s technology in customer-facing settings.

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This “clean and conventional energy superpower” construct pops up a lot in recent government speeches and announcements and was the framing for the prime minister’s “Forward Guidance: Canada’s Energy Future” video released just before Canada Day.

The argument is a double-barrelled one.

Let’s start with the clean part of the equation: looking into the future, the world will be powered by electricity, not fossil fuels. Electricity is inherently more efficient, and therefore cheaper for consumers. It’s also something that can be produced domestically at lower and lower costs, and something that we can control, freeing the Canadian economy from the volatility and unpredictability of foreign-caused oil price spikes.

Canada needs to lay track to prosper in this emerging Electric Age, but in the meantime the Carney government argues that the path to that cleaner future will be paved with the profits from expanded oil and gas production. Maximizing this profit requires curbing the industry’s greenhouse gas emissions so that Canadian oil and gas is the “greenest” option in the marketplace (something, it should be noted, that Canadian companies have been claiming for years). This is the “conventional” part of the argument, and there is no doubt, after last week, that the federal government is prepared to throw everything but the kitchen sink at it to make it a reality.

In fact, it appears Ottawa is even prepared to ignore an important aspect of the recently signed Alberta–federal memorandum of understanding related to the necessity of the new pipeline having a private-sector proponent. With none in the offing (which Canadian Climate Institute board chair Peter Nicholson predicted would be the case in a widely read recent article), the Alberta and federal governments are contemplating up to 90% public ownership.

What isn’t yet clear is the extent to which the federal government is prepared to put its money where its mouth is when it comes to sparking the “clean” side of its energy superpower ambitions.

The prime minister’s statements last week could not have been more categorical. Invoking the name of the visionary founder of Ontario Hydro, he said, “Our new plan will help build clean energy on a scale that would astound even Sir Adam Beck.” Later in his video, the PM underlined the broad societal benefits of electrification: “The path to affordability is electrification. The path to competitiveness is electrification. The path to sustainability is electrification.” He’s on solid ground with all of this, and recent Canadian Climate Institute research underlines this point.

Thus far, however, the rhetorical enthusiasm for “clean” has not been backed by on-the-ground support at a scale similar to what’s rolling out for “conventional” projects. The duelling announcements last week were a case in point. The press conference by Minister Hodgson referenced above was for a federal government contribution of $26 million for 17 clean-energy projects. A couple of days prior, Prime Minister Carney and Alberta Premier Danielle Smith announced that Canadian taxpayers may be on the hook for up to 90% of a $35- to $43-billion price tag.

Millions of dollars for “clean” versus billions for “conventional.”

The next few months will provide no shortage of key moments that put the federal government’s “clean” commitments to the test.

Will Saskatchewan keep burning coal in violation of a Harper-era policy? Will the dispute between Newfoundland and Labrador and Quebec over hydro development on the lower Churchill River be resolved? Will Alberta continue its de facto moratorium on low-cost renewables while building new unabated natural gas plants for artificial intelligence?

There will also be ongoing tests of the commitment to shrink the emissions of Canadian oil and gas production: it’s not clear at the moment whether the revised industrial carbon price will actually enable the long-promised Pathways carbon-capture project.

After last week, it’s clear that Carney intends to forge an entirely new way forward on climate and energy – one he views as more strategic and sustainable than climate policies of the past and aligned with a goal of net-zero emissions by 2050. In his own words: “The climate crisis is still with us and our commitment to fighting it is absolute.”

Achieving that goal requires deliberate policy choices. Net-zero isn’t a switch that can be flipped in 2045; becoming a clean-energy superpower requires steady, sustained effort. The most interesting question to watch in the months ahead is whether Carney’s government assembles a new climate and clean-growth plan with sufficiently ambitious detail to achieve the outcomes the prime minister has now personally set.

Rick Smith is president of the Canadian Climate Institute.

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Research shows that the global cloud-gaming user base reached more than 395 million in 2024, with forecasts projecting this number to creep toward 500 million by 2027.

Cloud gaming now represents around 38% of the global online video game market. According to the latest Cloud Gaming Report, 51% of 22,665 players surveyed used cloud gaming daily in 2025, and more than 75% at least weekly.

The dematerialization of video games is raising other questions around how to quantify carbon footprints, and what to do about it. From arcade cabinets to physical cartridge to digital downloads and now cloud gaming, video games are progressively shedding their physicality and relocating into data centres. And while this process of detaching from hardware does mean fewer plastic cartridges, it still doesn’t do away with the industry’s environmental impact.

Climate technology company Greenly reported last October that the electricity usage for consoles in the United States totalled 3.9 terawatt-hours in 2025, resulting in 1.6 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent. This figure doesn’t include the electricity consumption of televisions, which are often used for gaming. The report further quantifies the emissions created as a result of one hour of cloud-based gaming, totalling 0.44 kilograms of carbon dioxide equivalent.

These numbers are in line with previous findings. A 2023 report by Playing for the Planet, an alliance supporting the video game industry to take action on the environment, found that the total carbon impact per hour of gameplay was roughly 50 grams of carbon dioxide equivalent across different forms of play. Among these options, cloud-gaming devices (such as Logitech G Cloud, Nvidia Shield TV, PS TV, etc.) produced the fewest emissions, while cloud gaming on a console or PC (such as desktop computer, Xbox Series X/S, PlayStation 5, etc.) connected to a TV produced the most.

Reducing emissions from video games

A big challenge when determining the carbon footprint of the video game industry is the lack of proper reporting by companies and the need to piece estimated data from many different places. Matt Anderson, decarbonization lead at Playing for the Planet, emphasizes that “the simplest way to reduce emissions is to have renewable electricity.” When considering the life cycle of video games, electricity consumption is key at every step, from development, production, to that act of playing the games.

Findings from an extensive 2019 research project by Joshua Aslan, now senior manager of environment and climate strategy at Sony Interactive Entertainment, corroborates these numbers. The results showed that cloud gaming produced more carbon emissions than downloading games in 2019. However, using a dedicated cloud-gaming device created fewer emissions per hour of gameplay than playing disc-based games on a console.

But these numbers tell only part of the story, says Michael Iantorno, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Waterloo. The whole life cycle of games is much more difficult to quantify, he says. Players might download the same game across different devices, while physical games might change hands multiple times, allowing many different people to play the same game across decades. “It’s very hard to quantify, because we can’t just do a one-to-one comparison.”

“The lion’s share of [the energy consumption] is happening somewhere else,” says artist Alex Custodio, a researcher at Concordia University. “It’s completely invisible to the user.” Whether it is the game makers using high-end computers to run energy-intensive programs like Unity, or the player who downloads a 100-gigabyte game over high-speed internet, the environmental cost is obfuscated.

A huge infrastructure problem

But the difficulty of clarifying gaming’s impact hasn’t stopped indie game makers in particular, as well as fans and enthusiasts of games, from engaging in a variety of practices and experiments that support green gaming: climate-sensitive mods (or user-created modifications to a game’s content) for existing games, solar-powered gaming devices, and perma-computing focused on long-lasting, repairable and sustainable digital systems, to name a few.

Initiatives like Playing for the Planet bring together small and large studios under an umbrella, providing working groups to develop a climate strategy, tools that help developers measure the carbon footprint of their games from the developmental stages to the use phase. “There’s just so much changing now with digital technology,” Anderson says, “so we really need to think about future scenarios and trajectories to make sure we don’t get caught off guard.”

Still, Custodio is skeptical of initiatives that make vague promises or put the responsibility on players. “Those are important, those need to exist, but they need to exist with a note saying, hey, this is a huge infrastructural problem.” The change cannot be implemented simply on the consumer’s end; it must transform how video game companies operate, from the manufacturing of the hardware to the design of the software they produce throughout the whole life cycle of video games.

Alexandre Paquet is a Toronto-based researcher writing about video games and culture industries.

The post The rise of cloud gaming yields mixed results for industry emissions appeared first on Corporate Knights.

But now, five years later, a family of Wyoming oil tycoons is bringing the Keystone concept back from the dead — and the Trump administration is signaling its support. Last week, President Trump signed a presidential permit for the so-called Bridger expansion pipeline, which would likely deliver oil from the carbon-intensive Alberta tar sands to a pipeline hub in central Wyoming, 647 miles away. From there, the oil could move through other pipelines to key refineries as far south as the Gulf of Mexico.

“Slightly different than the last administration,” Trump said ⁠at the White House last Thursday when he signed the presidential permit. “They wouldn’t sign a pipeline deal, and we have pipelines going up.”

The presidential permit gives the project the green light to transport oil across international borders, and it’s only the latest step in what appears to be a fast-tracked timeline for the revived tar sands pipeline. Last month, the federal Bureau of Land Management announced that it would begin conducting an environmental review of the project on an expedited schedule. (The Trump administration has shortened many of the environmental review processes required for pipeline construction.) Bridger Pipeline, the company behind the project, says it wants to begin construction next year and start moving oil in 2028.

The pipeline would carry at least 550,000 barrels of crude oil per day. That’s only about two-thirds of what Keystone XL would have carried, but it could expand to a peak capacity even larger than what was originally planned — more than 1 million barrels a day. The similarity between the new pipeline’s path and Keystone’s has led some opponents to call the successor “Keystone Light.” The Canadian portion of the new pipeline would be built by a company called South Bow, which was spun off from TC Energy, the company behind the original Keystone XL line.

The proposed pipeline would be one of the biggest new fossil fuel developments of Donald Trump’s second presidency. It comes at a time of growing oil production in Alberta and skyrocketing global crude prices due to the war the president is waging in Iran. The project is being pushed by the True family, a clan of oilmen with a long history of drilling in the Rockies — and a history of oil spills from pipelines across the region.

“We know that there is limited pipeline capacity to move Canadian crude oil, and we have extensive experience in the Rocky Mountains,” said Bill Salvin, a spokesperson for Bridger Pipeline, the True family pipeline company proposing the project.

The True business empire dates back to the 1940s, when a wildcatter named Henry Alphonso “Dave” True Jr. began exploring for oil in Wyoming. He and his three sons expanded their company into a network of almost a dozen corporations that includes a drilling company, a network of local oil pipelines, a trucking company, an oil trading company, an oil equipment company, a geothermal energy firm, and a real estate company called Brick & Bond, according to a Grist review of corporate records. They also invested in cattle ranching, becoming some of the state’s largest landowners. One of True’s sons, Diemer True, served for two decades in the Wyoming legislature.

This corporate expansion has given the four-generation True family outsize influence in a state that doesn’t produce much oil but neighbors the massive Bakken shale formation of North Dakota, which is served by some of the True family pipelines. The family name is synonymous with oil in Wyoming, and True family members have become prominent donors to the University of Wyoming and to a conservative legal foundation in the region. The Trues have also run afoul of the federal government: Several members of the family engaged in a 10-year dispute with the Internal Revenue Service over what the government said was a strategy to evade some taxes by shuttling ranchland purchases between different companies. (The case ended in a multimillion-dollar fine against the Trues, which was upheld by an appellate court in 2004.)

“They’re very prominent, and their business interests have spread all around the West,” said Phil Roberts, an emeritus professor of history at the University of Wyoming and an expert on the state’s oil industry. He noted that families like the Trues have shifted away from oil production as the state’s fields have declined, investing in pipelines and oilfield services to maintain their revenue.

“Those fields have gotten really worn out, so they’ve had to diversify,” said Roberts.

Tad True, the grandson of the True who first struck oil in Wyoming, has led the family’s pipeline business for most of this century, expanding its network to more than 4,000 miles across Wyoming, Montana, and North Dakota. He argued as early as 2006 that more pipeline development was needed in order for regional oil producers to remain competitive, and in a 2012 testimony before the House of Representatives he said that the Obama administration’s regulations were blocking the pipelines needed for the fracking boom that was then in full swing. True spoke at the Republican National Convention the same year, accusing Obama of “playing politics” with the Keystone XL pipeline, which the then-president had rejected the previous year. (While the pipeline was primarily intended to carry Canadian shale oil to American markets, it would also have included an “on ramp” for crude from True’s part of the country.)

True’s company, Bridger Pipeline, has a history of oil spills. In 2015, one of the pipelines it operated ruptured underneath the Yellowstone River after fast-moving waters eroded sediment and rock from the riverbed. At least 30,000 gallons of crude oil streamed into the river, contaminating the water supplies of Glendive, Montana. The town had to truck in bottles of drinking water after some residents noticed an odor in their tap water. Then, just a year later, another pipeline operated by one of the company’s subsidiaries leaked 600,000 gallons into a stream in North Dakota — almost enough oil to fill an Olympic-sized pool. Another pipeline broke several years later, dumping 45,000 gallons of oil onto ranchland in Wyoming. The company ultimately paid $1 million in fines to the Montana Department of Environmental Quality for the 2015 spill and $12.5 million for the 2016 spill.

In total, there have been at least 42 spills as a result of pipeline operations by True subsidiaries since 2010. According to data collected by the federal Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, more than a third of those spills had detrimental effects on the environment or people. The data shows that the Bridger Pipeline company alone is responsible for seven of those spills in just the last three years. The most recent spill took place in March near Guernsey, Wyoming.

“That definitely sets off some alarm bells,” said Kenneth Clarkson, communications director with the nonprofit Pipeline Safety Trust. “It’s not acceptable to have one incident, and when we have this quantity, it’s definitely troubling.”

If the expanded Bridger pipeline ultimately carries tar sands oil from Canada, as appears likely, the environmental consequences of a spill could be dire. Given the thick, viscous nature of tar sands, operators mix a type of thinner — called a “diluent” in technical parlance — to help it flow through pipelines. In the event of a rupture, the diluent can easily evaporate, leaving behind a heavy, tar-like substance that sinks to the bottom of rivers and other waterways. That particular property of tar sands made cleanup of the Kalamazoo River particularly complicated after a different company’s pipeline burst in southwestern Michigan in 2010.

“We regret any spill from our pipelines,” said Salvin, the Bridger spokesperson. “Anytime oil gets out of the line, that’s unacceptable to us, so we do everything possible to keep the oil in the line.” He said that Bridger will employ “horizontal drilling” to tunnel under rivers and streams, which he said would reduce the risk of ruptures. Salvin did not say what type of oil the pipeline would carry, but confirmed it would be engineered for “mostly heavy crude” from Alberta; the Canadian portion of the pipeline will begin in the town of Hardisty, in the heart of Alberta’s oil sands.

He also said the company would use advanced technology to monitor for leaks. In the aftermath of the 2015 spill, when North Dakota’s then-governor Doug Burgum challenged Tad True to prevent leaks, True created an artificial-intelligence software called Flowstate that analyzes pipelines for potential ruptures. Salvin said the company now uses the software on all its pipelines and markets it to other operators as well.

Even though the new proposed pipeline is similar to Keystone XL in length and size, it will only cost $2 billion, far less than Keystone’s $8 billion price tag. That’s because its route will largely follow existing infrastructure and rights-of-way established by True Companies pipelines. Salvin said that the company has held a dozen landowner meetings and has secured surveying easements, or allowances to scout the land for construction, from 374 of the 376 private landowners along the pipeline route. Unlike Keystone XL, the route does not cross any federally recognized tribal lands.

“We’re very familiar with what happened with the previous project,” said Salvin. “Given that we have existing pipeline corridors that we have access to, that’s one of the reasons why this makes such commercial sense to us.” Salvin declined to offer details about the financing of the project, and such details are not publicly available because Bridger is a privately held company.

The project must still secure a number of state and local permits, but so far it isn’t having any trouble with the Trump administration, which has been aggressive in supporting new oil and gas development. The line cuts through Montana and Wyoming, including public land overseen by the Bureau of Land Management, which is leading the federal government’s review of the project under the National Environmental Policy Act. Although the law typically requires the preparation of a detailed assessment of the project’s impact on wildlife and waterways, the bureau has suggested it might fast-track the pipeline’s review.

Past studies have found that it typically takes federal agencies more than two years to complete an environmental impact statement, but the Bureau has indicated in public filings that it intends to publish a final impact statement by next May and make a decision on the project, allowing the company to begin construction by July.

Though True family members do not appear to be particularly close allies of Trump himself, they have given more than $4 million to Republican candidates and political action committees since 1977, according to federal records. A combined $12,000 went to Trump’s unsuccessful reelection campaign in 2020, the only apparent record of True financial support for the president. Furthermore, six members of the True family appeared on a 2022 endorsement list for Liz Cheney, the Wyoming politician who lost her reelection bid after she voted to impeach Trump.

The business case for the new pipeline rests on a number of big assumptions. The existing pipelines from the tar sands are running near capacity, but the Bridger proposal assumes that production in Canada’s oil hub will continue to increase. Many forecasters aren’t so sure; even with prices high, current projections show that production growth is slowing and may peak in 2030 at around 3.5 million barrels a day, well under what the proponents of Keystone XL anticipated.

Second, the pipeline would only carry oil to central Wyoming, not all the way to the Nebraska refinery hub targeted by the original Keystone XL pipeline. Another company would need to build another pipeline across Nebraska in order for the crude to reach the major oil refineries on the Gulf Coast. (Salvin said Bridger is “exploring options” for that segment.) Third, it’s unclear if those refiners will even want as much of the heavy Canadian crude oil that the pipeline would offer, since imports of similar oil from Venezuela have started to tick up following Trump’s kidnapping of Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro and subsequent negotiations with the country’s new leadership.

“To call this plan half-baked would be an insult to baking,” wrote energy lawyer and anti-pipeline advocate Paul Blackburn in a blog post last month. Blackburn is an advisor to Bold Alliance, the activist network that opposed the last Keystone XL proposal.

Many of the same activist groups that opposed the prior pipeline are getting ready to oppose this one as well. The Bold Alliance, which organized tribes and rural landowners against Keystone, has said it will litigate any attempt to extend a pipeline into Nebraska. Jenny Harbine, a managing attorney with the nonprofit Earthjustice, said her group is “keeping a close eye” to ensure federal and state agencies adequately consider environmental and safety concerns. The Bureau of Land Management and the Montana Department of Environmental Quality, which is coordinating its review with that of the federal government, closed an initial public comment period last week.

This article originally appeared in Grist. Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org

The post A family of Wyoming oil tycoons is trying to revive Keystone appeared first on Corporate Knights.

A windfall tax, also known as an excess profits tax, is applied when a certain industry gains higher-than-average profits from a crisis, to such an extent that those extra earnings appear “unreasonable or unfair or immoral,” says Hadrian Mertins-Kirkwood, senior researcher at the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.

Prior to the outbreak of the war, Canada’s oil and gas industry was expected to make $30 billion this year in profit, according to Mertins-Kirkwood. Now profits are expected to go as high as $100 billion, resulting in about $70 billion in excess earnings. “Their profits tripled basically overnight through no act of their own,” he says.

As Canada grapples with an ongoing affordability crisis, as many struggle to afford housing, groceries and now gas, Mertins-Kirkwood and left-leaning organizations and politicians like the Alberta Federation of Labour and NDP Leader Avi Lewis argue that excess profits in the oil and gas sector could benefit more Canadians if redirected toward public priorities.

Who gains?

“These companies are making money off of an illegal war against Ukraine and now the Iran war,” Catherine McKenna, former Canadian minister of environment and climate change, told Corporate Knights at the Montreal Climate Summit on April 16. “I feel if you’re going to make those profits, they can be reinvested in a way that supports Canadians, not given back to your largely U.S.-based shareholders.”

Mertins-Kirkwood projects that Canadians as a whole are spending an additional billion dollars each month because of higher oil prices. However, Canadians themselves aren’t padding the oil industry’s pockets on a one-to-one basis, he says. Most of the oil that the Canadian oil industry produces is sold to international markets, such as refineries in the United States.

Canada wouldn’t be the first to establish a windfall tax. The United Kingdom currently has one in place, and ministers in Germany, Italy and Spain have recently called on the European Commission to implement one because of rising gas prices. That approach is not widespread, however, Mertins-Kirkwood says, because in many countries the oil industry is state-owned, so a large share of the windfall would already go to the government.

Not likely

While the Alberta Federation of Labour has urged the Alberta government to implement a windfall tax, most arguments push for the tax to be imposed at the federal level.

However, natural resources fall primarily under provincial jurisdiction, which complicates any federal attempt to impose a windfall tax, says Kent Fellows, a professor in the School of Public Policy at the University of Calgary. Further, Alberta, the largest oil-producing province in Canada, already takes royalties from the oil and gas sector, he says. “When prices increase and these firms are more profitable, the public purse gets a larger chunk of their revenues.”

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According to the Business Council of Alberta, resource royalties in recent years have generated an estimated $20 billion annually, or approximately one-quarter of total provincial government revenues in a roughly $75-billion budget. “The idea of a windfall profit tax doesn’t really make a lot of sense here because really they’d just be stealing from themselves,” Fellows says.

Mertins-Kirkwood, however, argues that a windfall tax would be applied after royalties have already been taken, so it would have no bearing on how much provinces already collect.

Another major pushback against the initiative is the idea that a windfall tax could stifle investment in the oil and gas sector. Investors take on the risk that in a low-price environment they might lose money, Fellows says. But if prices go up, they also expect to benefit. “They’re making calculated bets on that capital investment, and right now those bets are paying out.”

Leah Golob is a freelance business journalist based in Toronto.

The post As war sends oil profits surging, calls grow louder for a windfall tax appeared first on Corporate Knights.

As an industrial powerhouse, it has more recently turned into an example of Chinese green transformation, boasting the world’s first smart and zero-carbon port that is 100% electricity driven and green-energy backed. Onsite industrial-scale wind turbines and solar panels ensure renewable-energy self-sufficiency in the 10th-busiest port in the world, handling more than 20 million shipping containers annually.

It’s perhaps no wonder, then, that China chose to host last year’s summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization in Tianjin, on the banks of the Bohai Sea, in yet one more show of growing influence from Beijing. With twice the number of world leaders in attendance since the summit launch in 2001, from Russian President Vladimir Putin to Indian head of state Narendra Modi, Xi Jinping called for an end to the “Cold War mentality” that was triggering “turbulence and transformation” and called for “equal and orderly multipolarization” of the world that could pave the way to a “more just and equitable global governance system.”

The group pledged increased cooperation in energy, infrastructure, green industry, AI and innovation. These are the economic pillars of the present and the future that is being built. And they are the architecture for a new kind of cold war, one over our ecological future, propelled by a growing geopolitical rivalry between the giants of the 21st century.

Great power rivalry

In an article last year in Foreign Policy magazine, the influential historian and futurist Nils Gilman argued that the advent of the “ecological cold war” is upon us, driven by a struggle “over the metabolic basis of modern industrial society.”

“Call it a Green Entente vs an Axis of Petrostates,” he wrote on LinkedIn.

In the wider transition to a low-carbon economy, China needs no introduction. Its influence in the green transition – through supply chain routes and cheap hardware – is plain to see. It has installed more solar and wind than the rest of the world combined, the United Nations has said. Its capacity to drive down the cost of clean technologies has been a boon for reining in the growth of carbon emissions, giving vast swaths of the planet the tools to shift to renewables.

It has also played at least some role in the U.S. decision to retreat from climate policies, with a Trump administration that has made a U-turn to a fossil fuel agenda and adopted protectionist measures in an “America first” attempt to decouple from Chinese economic might. At the same time, the United States has signalled a sharp interest in ridding itself of dependency on China for critical minerals, which are not just key to green tech but intrinsic to military hardware. This year, Trump launched “Project Vault,” which includes loans for domestic mining and a bid to stockpile reserves.

Europe has responded to growing national backlash to climate policies by cooling them down and doubling down on its own protectionist measures. In the midst of all this, emerging economies that could help accelerate the energy transition are running up against roadblocks.

A piece of the green pie

While some observers take issue with Cold War framing, others are mapping out the ripple effects of these geopolitical tensions when it comes to the race to slow down planetary warming. “We are in the midst of a green cold war,” agrees economist Jorge Arbache, a professor at the University of Brasília. “The implications are that China, which is already leading, will probably lead even more because China will keep investing in green production.”

For Arbache, the heart of the struggle has to do with the amount of money that is at stake. Suffice to say, it’s a lot. One 2025 estimate from the Boston Consulting Group pegs the opportunities embedded in four key sectors – critical minerals, green tech manufacturing, green industrial material and green services – as US$11 trillion by 2040. “We are talking about an extremely big business agenda, and of course there is a competition in terms of who will eat what size of the cake,” Arbache says.

Although many developed countries are well positioned to participate in that agenda, it is also true that they do not necessarily have the key elements, such as critical minerals, available clean energy, carbon markets, abundant water and biodiversity. “Geography is back,” Arbache says. That means that developing economies that do have those assets could find themselves better positioned than before. “It gives those economies a bargaining power that they did not have very recently,” he says.

Chaos vs. foresight

But the name of the game, lately at least, has been chaos, driven by its number-one agent, U.S. President Donald Trump. “If I could sum it up, it’s better to govern chaos, because order is too costly,” observes Sabino Vaca Narvaja, a political scientist and former Argentine ambassador to China. “A fragmented society is easier to manipulate.”

China, of course, is steeped in contradiction, pouring money into coal projects, and facing accusations of human rights violations. It also has a different logic to its movements, Vaca Narvaja notes, one that bets on the long term. And so far, it has paid off.

The Chinese incursion into the green market was not about business at the outset, Arbache notes; it was about domestic security. Beijing registered, decades ago, the vulnerability it could face when it came to power supply. A desire to become energy self-sufficient shifted it into green-tech development, which has positioned it as a leader in renewables development. It now has a stranglehold on a huge chunk of the critical-minerals market, controlling 50% of global production and 87% of processing and refining.

China’s formula also relies on the rest of the world, Vaca Narvaja notes. It needs the world to buy its products. And it is. “China’s cleantech products are going basically everywhere in the world,” said Lauri Myllyvirta, non-resident senior fellow at the Asia Society Policy Institute’s China Climate Hub, in a conversation held last year on China’s climate path amid trade tensions.

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For all major cleantech products except batteries, “the Global South, broadly understood, has overtaken the old developed world as the larger destination,” Myllyvirta said. There are countries with impressive uptake in solar, such as Pakistan, South Africa and Middle Eastern countries, but it’s the broad-based nature of the boom that’s sending the biggest signal. “From one side, there is the cost competitiveness of Chinese supply, and from the other side, there is a massive diversity of drivers,” he said.

Electrification is everywhere. Cities are turning to electric buses. Drivers are turning to electric vehicles. Governments and individuals alike are turning to solar power in the Middle East and Africa. Clean-energy sectors continued to drive growth in China in 2025, doubling in value from 2022 to US$2.1 trillion – which is equal to the economies of Brazil or Canada, according to an analysis from the think tank Carbon Brief.

At the same time, a glut in solar panel production is leading to uncertainty. Beijing set its 2026 growth target between 4.5% and 5%, the lowest level in 35 years, noting a “grave and complex” landscape.

“I don’t think we will be talking about renewable energy the way we are if it wasn’t for what China has been able to accomplish in the last decade,” says Jai Asundi, executive director of the Center for Study of Science, Technology and Policy, in Bangalore, India. “Taking a technology that has been developed somewhere else, and driving the price down. A classic capitalistic efficiency market. That is, if you are more efficient in the way you use a resource, then the capital flows to you.”

Emerging economies demand protagonism

The flip side of that efficient flow of capital, of course, is that it can make it difficult for other economies to compete. Take a place like India, where attempts to jump-start domestic green-energy device production have stalled. “Energy prices are very high in India. So to produce something is already very costly. And some of these technologies are very energy intensive,” Asundi says.

India, which represents 17% of the world’s population, is a prescient case study for wide swaths of the world that are trying to shrink a yawning inequality gap by raising gross domestic product, without contributing to global warming. The developed world built its industrialized wealth at the expense of the environment. That is no longer an option.

“What we are struggling with is this notion of how we work as an ecosystem,” Asundi says. “How do we work as a global society as opposed to a country-driven society? Because after all, climate change is not a country phenomenon; it is a global phenomenon.”

Chen Yu, senior policy officer at the non-profit Global Witness, agrees. “U.S.–China competition may continue, and the global energy landscape seems to be becoming more regionalized and multipolar, but this does not necessarily mean inevitable confrontation,” she says. “The key question is whether competition preserves space for cooperation and allows for fairer rules and resource distribution, rather than creating exclusive blocs.”

Whatever the mix, what matters, she stresses, is that the process of reducing emissions is not delayed.

The rise of ‘powershoring’

Unfortunately, the current moves and countermoves of nations trying to bolster national economies, and respond to electorate demands, is proving detrimental. Arbache says there are alliances available now using today’s technology that could speed up decarbonization, but they are being squandered. The Brazilian economist, who is also the former vice president of the Development Bank of Latin America and the Caribbean, coined the term “powershoring” to describe the strategic relocation of energy-intensive industries to countries that have clean, abundant and secure energy. To produce one tonne of aluminum using coal-fired electricity results in 20 to 22 tonnes of carbon dioxide, Arbache says. But if you produce that same aluminum in Iceland, which runs on nearly 100% renewable power, the carbon output drops to 2 to 3.5 tonnes.

Countries like Brazil, Uruguay and Paraguay also offer abundant green grids for manufacturing. But they are not attracting as many powershoring projects as anticipated from places like Europe, Arbache says. “Although they need new allies and friends to solve their problems, they are still very skeptical because of this very notion of protectionism,” he says. “In the end, they are harming their own economies and they are also harming our economies.”

Canada’s balancing act

Canada, with three-quarters of its exports going to the United States, is also navigating tricky terrain. The shifting sands of Trump tariffs has led the government to overhaul how it approaches trade and put it in hot pursuit of new partners – or increasing the strength of existing ones.

Prime Minister Mark Carney said as much in his headline-grabbing speech at Davos this year, where he warned middle powers that if “we’re not at the table, we’re on the menu.” The phrase carried added weight because it came on the heels of an announcement to expand trade with China, and, crucially, allow at first up to 24,500 Chinese EVs annually into the Canadian market. Carney has since signed agreements with India to export uranium for its fleet of nuclear reactors, critical minerals, and oil and gas. The government also announced a split from the United States over auto policy, revitalizing incentives for EV production and purchase, and the intention of customizing new tailpipe emissions rules, rather than defaulting to the U.S. ones.

The divergence from U.S. policy is significant, says Rick Smith, president of the Canadian Climate Institute. “All we get from the Trump administration is this drumbeat that fossil fuels are the future. It’s very easy to let that overwhelm us as Canadians – to assume that that’s correct, and it’s not,” he says. “The actual economic opportunity is in decarbonization.”

While there are inherent challenges to decarbonization for an oil- and gas-producing country that other nations do not have, Smith says Canada is in a privileged position to move in on the booming battery market. “We’ve got all the elements of a very significant battery supply chain in Canada. And very few countries can say that,” he says. “In a grand contest between China and the United States, should we just be happy that China’s winning on the decarbonization front? No. We should also be getting our elbows up and trying to compete.”

Natalie Alcoba is a Buenos Aires-based journalist and senior editor of Corporate Knights.

The post The race for low-carbon energy is turning into a green cold war  appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Husk’s expansion is an example of the solar boom taking off across Africa. The continent holds 60% of the world’s best solar resources; while it accounts for just 1% of global installed solar photovoltaic capacity, the tides are gradually turning.

Africa added 54% more solar capacity in 2025 than the previous year, according to the latest Africa Market Outlook for Solar PV released by the Global Solar Council. This is the highest annual deployment Africa has ever recorded, led by South Africa, which added 1.6 gigawatts of new solar capacity. Nigeria followed with 803 megawatts, and Egypt with 500 megawatts.

The immense potential that solar holds has “hit everybody” on the continent, says professor Chiso Ndukwe-Okafor, executive director of Consumer Advocacy and Empowerment Foundation, an advocacy organization that works on the energy problem in Nigeria.

Ndukwe-Okafor contends that African countries are looking for ways to increase the productivity of their economies and recognize affordable energy as essential to that goal. “To have a productive society, there [must] be an enabling environment,” she explains. “And an enabling environment means you have to have constant and affordable power.”

The Global Solar Council report found that solar installations on the continent are being driven by both large utility-scale projects, which feed electricity directly into national grids, and distributed solar systems, which include rooftop installations and mini-grids to meet the energy demands of households and businesses.

Distributed systems are rapidly increasing even in off-grid African communities. Last year, for example, Ghana and Switzerland jointly launched a $200-million National Clean Energy Programme to develop 137 megawatts of rooftop solar photovoltaic capacity across approximately 4,000 installations.

Solar power “reduces the cost [of energy] to the community while improving their ability to become more productive,” Ndukwe-Okafor says.

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Meanwhile, investments in solar power are increasing on the continent. Between 2020 and 2025, Africa invested US$34 billion in clean power technologies, out of which 52% was allocated to solar energy, according to the State of African Energy 2026 Outlook Report. These investments were also possible because of policy reforms and the support of governments, including in Nigeria, where its Nigeria Electrification Programme initiative deploys mini-grids, rooftop solar and other solar solutions to people without access to electricity. Since 2018, the private-sector-driven program has helped at least 5.9 million Nigerians access electricity services, in part through the commissioning of 180 mini-grids.

Despite the boom, Africa still lacks adequate financing and investment, which could limit the continent’s potential to generate at least 300 gigawatts by 2030, a goal set by the Africa Renewable Energy Initiative. Besides, the capital costs for solar projects in Africa are three to seven times higher than in developed countries.

This financing gap widened after U.S. President Donald Trump ended Power Africa in February 2025. The Power Africa program was launched during the Obama-led administration in 2013 and aimed at providing electricity to millions of households in Africa. Before it ended, the program “contributed to 14,300 megawatts of capacity reaching financial close”  and “facilitated over 41 million new or improved connections for homes and businesses.”

Nevertheless, Ndukwe-Okafor believes that “Africa is a huge [solar] market” with existing policies that can attract the right investment to the solar sector.

Saint Ekpali is a Nigeria-based journalist who covers the environment, health and energy in Africa.

The post Solar energy is taking off across Africa appeared first on Corporate Knights.

This story was originally published by Canary Media. It has been edited to conform with Corporate Knights style.

It’s typically depicted as green. It’s loved by some and feared by others. It had a heyday in the 1960s before drawing a political backlash that led to statewide prohibitions. Now, as it grows more popular with Americans than any time in recent memory, state after state is changing the law to once again legalize it.

The United States is racing to restore the might of its once-great nuclear sector and build new reactors to meet surging electricity demand and compete with China and Russia. It’s been a rapid change: a decade ago, at least 16 states restricted construction of new nuclear power plants, a legacy of the lasting reputational damage from Three Mile Island, the United States’ only major civilian nuclear accident.

Five states – Wisconsin, Kentucky, Montana, West Virginia and, most recently, Illinois – have fully lifted their moratoria since 2016. Others are loosening the reins, with Connecticut easing restrictions on small modular reactors and Rhode Island allowing utilities to buy electricity from neighbouring states’ nuclear plants.

Five more – California, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey and Vermont – are now weighing legislation to overturn their bans. Oregon, meanwhile, is considering a bill that would require a feasibility study to look into nuclear power. (In Hawaii, the results of such a study concluded in December that the state should maintain its moratorium on atomic energy.)

California lawmakers introduced a bill last month to repeal the state’s 50-year ban on new nuclear power. Legislators in New Jersey, where the recently elected Democratic Governor Mikie Sherrill campaigned on building a new reactor, advanced a bill earlier this month that would de facto overturn the state’s moratorium. Last week, a bipartisan band of lawmakers in Minnesota’s statehouse vowed to legalize reactor construction again in the state ​“because we have to.”

The legislative push offers the most significant evidence so far that blue states that once served as bastions of anti-nuclearism are embracing atomic energy. The shift comes amid a deregulatory campaign by the Trump administration that’s meant to clear bottlenecks in the nuclear supply chain and spur a new wave of reactor projects, both big and small. Nuclear power started attracting attention again in recent years as the trade-offs of relying on wind and solar alone grew clearer and demand for electricity soared in the near term from data centres and in the long term from forecasts on electrification of vehicles, heating and industry.

A global race is now underway that the United States and its allies are largely losing. On both sides of the Atlantic, the nuclear industry mostly stalled over the past few decades as flat electricity demand and cheap natural gas from the United States and Russia made atomic power plants seem like a 20th-century relic. But the geopolitical risk of relying on a fossil fuel that requires constant replenishing became undeniable as Russia started throttling shipments of gas to Ukraine’s allies after the war kicked off in 2022.

Now U.S., European and Japanese companies are scrambling to secure funding and offtake agreements for reactor designs that, in many cases, haven’t yet been built. Soaring oil and gas prices, which the International Energy Agency warned this week will take a long time to stabilize even after the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran ends, are expected to only further drive demand for nuclear power. France’s historic buildout of nuclear reactors, after all, started in response to the 1970s oil embargo.

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Meanwhile, Russia’s state-owned Rosatom dominates the nuclear export industry, actively building the first atomic power plants in newcomer countries such as Turkey, Egypt and Bangladesh. On Monday, the Kremlin announced its latest deal to build Vietnam’s debut nuclear plant. And China is building nearly as many reactors at home as the rest of the world combined, at a relatively rapid clip.

States started banning new nuclear power plants even before the partial meltdown in 1979 at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in eastern Pennsylvania. The Atomic Energy Commission, the federal regulator in charge of both overseeing commercial reactors and promoting the industry, was increasingly seen as too cozy with the companies under its authority. An anti-war movement with limited options to slow the military’s atomic weapons race instead trained its attention on the civilian power industry, and environmentalists took issue with the relatively small but extremely long-lived volumes of radioactive waste that nuclear plants produce.

California enacted one of the nation’s first major statewide bans on building new nuclear plants in 1976, three years before Three Mile Island. Until then, states and municipalities had only minimal restrictions on nuclear power plants, which fell primarily under federal jurisdiction. But a 1974 law in California reorganized the Golden State’s bureaucracy, centralizing energy regulation for the first time in Sacramento and granting the newly established California Energy Commission powers to restrict permits for atomic energy facilities until a plan to permanently deal with nuclear waste came to fruition. Through its top cultural export, the state broadcast its skepticism of atomic energy: released just 12 days before the Three Mile Island accident, a Hollywood thriller starring Jane Fonda, ​The China Syndrome, depicts a dangerous cover-up of a problem at a nuclear power plant.

In the years that followed, more states, including Maine and Oregon, adopted California-inspired moratoria predicated on a permanent solution for nuclear waste coming into commercial use, according to data from the National Conference of State Legislatures. Others – including Hawaii, Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Vermont – effectively banned nuclear construction by making any new reactors subject to politically unattainable approval by the state legislature. A handful of states also rewrote rules to require a statewide referendum on building a new nuclear plant.

Some states enacted only partial bans. New York, for example, just barred construction of nuclear reactors on Long Island, where protesters blocked the Shoreham Nuclear Power Plant from coming online and financially crippled the region’s utility, forcing a state takeover.

Attitudes toward nuclear power have since evolved. Despite a drop in support following the meltdown at the Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear plant in northern Japan in 2011, a majority of Americans in both political parties have come to favour an expansion of nuclear energy. Polls from the Pew Research Center and Gallup show the highest support in years.

In 2016, Wisconsin became the first state to reverse course. Lawmakers in the factory-dense state pitched legislation to repeal the ban as a way to shore up the supply of reliable, clean power for manufacturers whose shareholders increasingly demanded a lower carbon footprint.

Seeking an alternative to fossil fuels that could make use of existing transmission lines and boilers at coal-fired plants, Kentucky followed suit a year later. Montana came next, in 2021, then West Virginia in 2022.

Illinois, by far the largest user of atomic energy of any state, only partially lifted its ban at the end of 2023, legalizing construction of as-yet-unbuilt small modular reactors with an output of 300 megawatts or less. While more than a dozen developers are racing to commercialize various kinds of so-called SMR designs, the promise of cheaply mass-producing identical reactors remains mostly theoretical. The only modern nuclear reactor design in operation in the United States, the 1,100-megawatt Westinghouse AP1000, remained effectively banned in Illinois until January, when Democrat Governor JB Pritzker fully repealed the moratorium and called for new plants.

The changing sentiment is a necessary but not sufficient precondition for more nuclear plants to start construction in the United States. Big questions remain about how to finance projects, train workers and establish supply chains for novel kinds of reactors.

Alexander C. Kaufman is a contributing reporter at Canary Media and an award-winning writer who has covered energy and climate change for more than a decade. 

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