Net Zero

1. Energy aid freeze
2. Tellurium crunch
3. Europe’s renewables pullback
4. Saving JETPs
5. Mining for schools

The latest from Jeff, Javier, and Jigar.

How the USAID collapse helps Putin

The Trump administration’s freeze on foreign aid funding and dismantling of USAID pose an urgent threat to Ukraine’s energy security and will harm efforts toward a peace deal, senior Congressional Democrats told Semafor.

Since Russia began systematically demolishing Ukraine’s energy system with missiles and drones around October 2022, USAID has overseen much of the response by the US and Europe to provide Ukraine with the equipment, technicians, and policy support needed to rebuild the grid. As temperatures drop, blackouts persist, and massive attacks continue, emergency energy hardware is stuck in Poland, officials told Semafor. The freeze also sets back progress toward opening Ukraine’s energy market to US and European investors, a goal that Trump has seemed interested in pursuing.

“The Trump Administration’s halt of assistance to repair Ukraine’s energy grid is cruel and miscalculated,” Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH), the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said. “Halting these repairs will not only assist [Russian President Vladimir] Putin in his effort to harm Ukraine, but it will give the Russian leader a leg up at the negotiation table.”

Tellurium crunch

China said it would restrict exports of five critical minerals from next week as part of a broader package of retaliatory measures against US President Donald Trump’s tariffs.

Among those being curbed is tellurium, used in the manufacture of solar panels. Yet analysts and businesses are unperturbed. For one, the US solar industry is “hardly going gangbusters anyway,” said Ian Lang, an Associate Professor of Economics at the Colorado School of Mines. And the US has other countries to turn to for tellurium, including Canada and the Philippines.

Mike Koralewski, the Chief Supply Chain Officer of First Solar — which says it commands around a 40% share of the domestic utility-scale market — told Semafor that the company doesn’t currently anticipate any operational impacts. But China’s latest move does emphasize “the urgent need for the United States to accelerate the strategic development of copper mining and processing of its derived materials, including tellurium,” he said.

Europe’s renewables pullback

Several of Europe’s top energy companies are pulling back spending on renewables projects, partly thanks to US President Donald Trump. Ørsted, whose share price is down 20% in the last year, said it will cut its investment plans to 2030 by 25%, even though its most recent earnings report was in line with analysts’ expectations. The company recently replaced its CEO: New chief Rasmus Errboe said the pullback is intended to keep the company strong while the Trump administration freezes leasing and permitting for many wind projects.

TotalEnergies CEO Patrick Pouyanné said this week that he expects offshore wind construction in the US to halt under Trump. Equinor, meanwhile, said it will halve renewables spending and crank up oil production targets by 10%. And BP, which suspended a low-carbon fuels project in Australia this week, is also expected to slash its renewable energy targets this month.

Saving JETPs

US contribution to a coal phaseout plan in Indonesia that European countries are now scrambling to shore up. The US was a major donor to several “just energy transition partnership” programs, which raised a total of $45 billion to help Indonesia, South Africa, and Vietnam close down coal plants early. Now that Trump has withdrawn the US from the Paris Agreement and frozen foreign aid funding, there’s a huge hole in those plans that other donors will need to fill. And the fate of potential JETPs under discussion for Colombia and elsewhere is now highly uncertain.

Mining for schools

The world’s largest mining project will begin production by the end of the year following decades of delays, Guinea’s mining minister told Semafor — with 5% of eventual revenues earmarked to expand the country’s education system.

Initial shipments from the Simandou mountain range in southeast Guinea — home to the planet’s largest high-grade iron ore deposits — are due to begin by the first quarter of 2026, Minister of Mines and Geology Bouna Sylla said on the sidelines of the Mining Indaba conference in Cape Town. The ambition to boost Guinean education with mining profits is the latest attempt by an African government to ensure its citizens benefit from natural resources, which are otherwise typically shipped elsewhere for refining. Guinea’s plan to earmark revenues from its natural resources marks an acknowledgment of the skills gap — particularly around science and technology — that is holding back economic development in many African countries.

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New Energy

• European airlines are pushing back their targets for hydrogen-fueled planes as the costs of low-carbon aviation solutions have “ballooned.”
• Profits are falling at Octopus Energy as the company spends heavily on recruiting new customers and building renewables.

Fossil Fuels

• Natural gas prices in Europe are rising, and in some places have jumped above the price of coal, which could cause power plants to switch back to dirtier fuels.
• TotalEnergies is counting on the Trump administration to finalize $4.7 billion in financing for a new LNG export project in Mozambique.
• Colombia canceled a joint project between its state-owned oil company and Occidental Petroleum, citing environmental concerns.

Finance

• State Farm, California’s top home insurance provider, wants to raise rates by 22% following last month’s devastating wildfires.
• Jeff Bezos’ philanthropic fund pulled its backing for the Science Based Targets initiative, which had been a leading certifier of corporate climate plans but has been embroiled in controversy over its policies on carbon offsets.

EVs

• A growing number of countries in Africa are looking to natural gas, not batteries, to decarbonize passenger cars.
• Elon Musk raised hackles in Germany when he said the country focuses too much on “past guilt.” Then Tesla sales there fell 59%.

COP30

• Many of the world’s top-polluting nations are expected to miss a deadline to submit new climate plans ahead of COP30.
• Argentina, under President Javier Milei, is the latest country to consider dropping out of the Paris Agreement.

Personnel

• After four years leading the Biden administration’s Loan Programs Office, Jigar Shah will return to podcasting. His replacement under Trump, John Sneed, is already at work blocking funding from the office and refocusing it on nuclear and LNG.

South Africa should prevent the US from accessing its minerals if Washington withdraws funding to the nation over its land expropriation policies, its mining minister said on Monday.

US President Donald Trump, in a social media post hours earlier, accused South Africa of “confiscating land, and treating certain classes of people VERY BADLY” — referencing a law passed last month that allows land to be seized without compensation if deemed to be in the public interest — and added that he’d be “cutting off all future funding” to the country.

“If [the US] don’t give us money, let’s not give them minerals,” Mineral Resources Minister Gwede Mantashe said at a conference in Cape Town.