Axios

NEW YORK – Less than 5% of water used in chip manufacturing is recycled, Ecolab chair and CEO Christophe Beck said Tuesday at Axios House at Climate Week and the UN General Assembly.

Why it matters: Water is used throughout chip production at manufacturing plants that can span a mile or more, so innovations in reducing the amount needed and recycling wastewater are highly sought.

• Axios' Amy Harder and Ben Geman hosted conversations with Beck and Amazon chief sustainability officer Kara Hurst at the Sept. 23 event. The event was sponsored by Salesforce.

What they're saying: "What we've done as a company is to invent technologies where you can reuse water at every step of that process," Beck said.

• The water has to be "1,000 times more pure than the water you use for drugs that you inject in your blood."

Separately, Hurst shared how she thinks emissions cuts enabled by AI can surpass emissions growth from the increase in data centers' energy demand.

• "Right now, people are talking about it as if it won't happen, and I do think it will happen," Hurst said.
• "If we really take the opportunity to think about AI as a tool we can use for good, and we think about all of the use cases for AI – it will increase energy demand," Hurst said. "However, we have to use it as a tool for our benefit and think about all of the possibilities that we can apply it to sustainability use cases."
• "There's a huge possibility when you think about the implications for what we will yet invent, and I'm actually really optimistic about it."

AI has already helped Amazon streamline packaging decisions and create tools like its "customer fit" to help consumers choose clothing sizes, Hurst said.

• "That means less product returned to us, less reverse logistics and of course less environmental" impact, she said. "So it doesn't have to be sustainability out in front to the customer. We know it is, but for the customer, a better experience."

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In a View From the Top conversation, Salesforce's Sunya Norman, SVP of impact, and Margaret Taylor, VP and head of public affairs and strategic relations, discussed how the future of AI depends on sustainability.

• AI "requires energy and water and natural resources," Norman said. "So, really, the future of AI is sustainable AI. That's how we're going to figure out how to scale AI responsibly." Norman added that the tech sector needs to lead this change, but that it's "a full value chain challenge."

There's a shakeout coming in the EV charging industry as financial challenges mount for some of the early players, according to analysts at Bloomberg Intelligence.

Why it matters: Companies that dominated the charging business to date aren't the ones that will lead the next phase of growth, per their 2026 EV charging outlook.

Electric vehicle sales are expected to plummet after tax credits disappear Sept. 30, but there could be a silver lining: It's an opportunity for charging infrastructure to catch up with demand.

Why it matters: Worries about where to charge have long been a hindrance to EV adoption.

The nuclear renaissance in the U.S. will need to be financed by a combination of the federal government, private investors and hyperscalers paying premiums for power, TerraPower's CEO Chris Levesque said Wednesday at an Axios House event at Climate Week NYC.

Why it matters: The U.S. needs new power for soaring electricity demand, but traditional nuclear plants have been prohibitively expensive.

Zoom in: Levesque said the first U.S. nuclear facilities were paid for by his parent's generation with raised rates, but "we can't do that again."

• In new nuclear deals, hyperscalers — data center companies that deliver large amounts of computing power to customers — will draft a 20 or 25-year power purchase agreement and pay a premium for the first 20 years of plant output, said Levesque.
• That kind of premium "alleviates the burden on the ratepayer. That's going to be the new structure we're looking at in these deals," said Levesque.
• "It's great that nuclear energy is getting so much attention now, but we don't worry about the technology being ready or the demand being there. It's a very capital intensive business to deploy these first plants," said Levesque.

Catch up quick: TerraPower has developed a nuclear reactor design that uses liquid sodium as a coolant instead of water, which the company says lowers costs.

• This summer, the company closed $650 million from investors including Nvidia's VC arm, Bill Gates and HD Hyundai, and before that raised over $1 billion.

Driving the news: On Tuesday, TerraPower announced an agreement with Evergy and the state of Kansas to explore deploying TerraPower's reactors in Evergy's territory.

• "The key part of the story there is an advanced reactor being embraced by traditional nuclear energy companies," said Levesque on stage.
• "More and more mainstream utilities . . . are seeing that if we're going to get back into nuclear energy, we're going to have to get into new technology," said Levesque.

The bottom line: Nuclear is expensive, and advanced reactors need a novel combination of partners to get it deployed.

The Trump administration wants a small equity stake in Lithium Americas as it renegotiates the company's $2.26 billion Energy Department loan for the Thacker Pass project in Nevada, a White House official said Tuesday.

• Reuters first reported the proposal.

Voltpost, a startup that specializes in turning street lights into electric vehicle charging stations, is launching a sleeker, more flexible charger Wednesday in Brooklyn during Climate Week.

Why it matters: The new charging platform, Voltpost Air, allows cities to repurpose existing infrastructure to quickly expand EV access without disruptive construction or costly grid upgrades.

Super Typhoon Ragasa unleashed hurricane-force winds and heavy rains on Hong Kong and southern China on Wednesday morning local time, as officials in Taiwan reported 14 deaths from the strongest storm to hit the planet this year.

The big picture: Officials in Taiwan's Hualien County told media that the deaths were due to a lake barrier bursting during the storm and that 124 people remained missing.

"It's a hell of a target-rich environment right now," for leaders who are unafraid to speak up on political and environmental issues, Patagonia CEO Ryan Gellert said Tuesday at an Axios House event during NYC Climate Week.

Why it matters: A lot of U.S. business leaders are afraid of triggering the Trump administration's wrath, but the Patagonia CEO is continuing in the company's tradition of speaking up on environmental and social issues.

President Trump isn't an existential threat to the energy transition and climate change, investor and climate activist Tom Steyer said Tuesday at an Axios House event during Climate Week NYC.

Why it matters: Steyer's free-market views offer an upbeat contrast to the Trump administration's focus on fossil fuels and nuclear over other clean-energy technologies.

In President Trump's first address to the United Nations General Assembly since returning to the White House, he said Russian President Vladimir Putin's name once. Windmills, however, he mentioned at least three times.

The big picture: As wars rage in Europe and the Middle East, Trump used his lengthy address to scold the international body, paint climate change as a hoax and warn of immigration "destroying" countries' "heritage."

NEW YORK – From turning crops into sustainable aviation fuel to recycling carbon fiber, repurposing resources is crucial to driving the clean energy transition, sustainability leaders said at Axios House at Climate Week and the UN General Assembly on Monday.

Why it matters: Resource conservation can convert waste into value, helping industries cut emissions and reach sustainability goals.

• Axios' Amy Harder, Ben Geman and Chuck McCutcheon hosted conversations with Delta Air Lines chief sustainability officer Amelia DeLuca, World Resources Institute president and CEO Ani Dasgupta, and McLaren Racing sustainability director Kim Wilson. The event was sponsored by Suntory Global Spirits.

Today, sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) is derived from soy and other crops, but DeLuca said future sources could include materials such as corn or wood waste. She stressed SAF's "value chain approach," which affects corporations, farmers and rural communities.

• "You've got a whole rural community that's like, 'I actually don't know where my future is,'" DeLuca said. "Sustainable aviation fuel, it's not just a blip. It's not a five-year thing. This is a multiple-decades' worth of a product that we're going to need as an industry that also helps those communities, and that's again where you have that win, win, win."

Meanwhile, Wilson noted that McLaren Racing pioneered the use of recycled carbon fiber in the racing industry, which can reduce emissions by up to 90%.

• After discovering that materials accounted for a significant portion of its footprint, McLaren Racing worked with a supplier to recycle aerospace waste.
• "The thing about new materials is you have to think about how do we not compromise between on-track performance … for sustainability, but we also need to find ways to balance that and innovate," Wilson said.
• McLaren Racing has already used recycled carbon fiber for non-safety-critical parts in Austin and Silverstone and is exploring what's next.

Separately, Dasgupta said technology is transforming the clean energy transition "at a scale and speed and price that we didn't even think possible."

• However, Dasgupta noted that "technology itself doesn't produce good outcomes. We need to orchestrate that outcome." He said collaboration across industries and tech innovators is needed to help ensure a smooth transition.

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In a View From the Top conversation, Kim Marotta, Suntory Global Spirits' chief environmental sustainability officer and head of enterprise risk management, addressed the importance of industry collaboration in resource conservation.

• "You can't do it one company alone, you can't do it one farmer alone, you can't do it one community alone," she said. "When we look at our watersheds, so many of our peers and competitors are in those watersheds, so we don't compete against each other. … We have projects in Mexico where we have Pernod Ricard, Brown-Forman, almost every one of our peers and competitors involved in replenishing the water in that watershed for the long term."

President Trump derided the United Nations for raising awareness of climate change, calling it the "greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world" in remarks at the UN General Assembly on Tuesday.

Why it matters: While many of the U.S.'s allies have pledged to combat the trend of global warming, Trump mocked their investments in green energy and commitment to sustainability in a tirade minimizing its risks.

Democrats must shift from former President Biden's "tepid tone" on climate change to a more aggressive stance to persuade voters, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) said Tuesday at an Axios House event at Climate Week NYC.

Why it matters: Whitehouse — the top Democrat on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee — is among those in his party who think climate can be a winning pocketbook issue as insurance premiums rise and other financial impacts surface.

Climate change is causing "a major paradigm shift" in real estate markets due to the impact on insurance, investment guru David Burt said Tuesday at an Axios House event at NYC Climate Week.

Why it matters: Burt drew considerable attention for predicting the 2008 financial collapse.

• Burt, founder and CEO of DeltaTerra Capital, was immortalized in the 2015 movie "The Big Short" when Brad Pitt played a character based on a composite of him and others.

Driving the news: Burt has been warning recently that not enough money is being collected to cover the costs related to climate change as risks keep increasing.

• "Insurers are starting to hike premiums, and some lenders are starting to think about increasing insurance requirements," Burt said.
• If the Federal Reserve was paying more attention to climate's effects, it would support a case for lowering interest rates, he said.
• The Fed "should be focusing on the economies where home prices are falling," he said. "You're already starting to see delinquencies rise."

Burt also said Chairman Jerome Powell and others "need to sort of look away from the aggregate and start looking at the regions that are being most impacted."

• He cited "most of Florida," particular its west coast, along with the Mountain West, Southern California and the Gulf states of Texas and Louisiana

Zoom in: In a separate Axios House appearance, Potential Energy Coalition CEO John Marshall said polls show 80% of Americans living in high-risk zones have become highly concerned about insurance costs.

• Marshall, whose group unites marketers who seek to change the narrative on climate, said the insurance impact could make it easier to convey the dangers of climate change to the public.
• "It's a decently simple message, because insurance starts to resonate across America — 'Your town could be next,''' Marshall said.
• "And that gets people's attention; it moves it away from something that you have to make a value-space choice for ... It's a way to think about materiality."

NEW YORK – The Trump administration is putting oil and gas deals front and center at Climate Week and the UN General Assembly, a senior White House official said at Axios House on Monday.

Why it matters: The White House is focusing on natural gas by making it a strategic asset in global power politics.

• Axios' Mike Allen and Amy Harder hosted conversations with Jarrod Agen, executive director of the White House National Energy Dominance Council; Federal Energy Regulatory Commission former chair Neil Chatterjee; and Form Energy co-founder and CEO Mateo Jaramillo. The event was sponsored by GE Vernova.

What they're saying: ​​"We are abundant in natural gas here and it is a huge leverage point we have," Agen said.

• Agen stressed that countries are looking to strike deals to stop depending on Russian oil: "It's Europe, it's Asia. They are looking for U.S. energy. They want to get off of Russian energy sources, and we have such a supply."

While many in the sustainability industry disagree with the use of fossil fuels, Chatterjee believes AI is going to "snap us out" of the decades-long fossil fuel versus clean energy debate.

• "AI and the national security implications of AI will be the thing that finally breaks us out of our probably two decades long sort of antiquated fight that we've had to where if you're for fossil fuels, you're of the political right, and if you're for clean energy and climate solutions, you're of the political left," Chatterjee said.
• "For the political left, there has to be a recognition that in order to win the AI race and keep energy affordable and reliable, we cannot do it without fossil fuels."
• "For the political right, I think there has to be a recognition that we cannot possibly do this with fossil fuels alone."

By the numbers: Rising energy costs are a challenge leaders across the spectrum are trying to solve, and Jaramillo says long-term storage could be one of the keys to driving costs down.

• "We expect that this will be a sort of a dampener effect on prices," Jaramillo said. "You're utilizing the assets you already have more efficiently, more effectively, and you don't have to go overbuild in the future to get the same result, and so it sort of has a deflationary effect on the system overall."

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In a View From the Top conversation, GE Vernova CEO Scott Strazik called nuclear power a breakthrough technology that's "moving very rapidly" because of its power density.

• "Land is going to become a challenge," Strazik said. "You can take a 300-megawatt small, modular reactor that we're constructing right now, and that one football-field-size solution powers 300,000 homes in the U.S. We're building the first one right now in Ontario, Canada."
• "We have our first application into the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to start construction on the first plant in the U.S. that we hope to be there by sometime in '27. … So we're going to need zero-carbon electrons that can run at base load, and nuclear is a good solution for that."

Al Gore says AI's surging electricity demand merits giving nuclear power a fresh look — even with what he thinks is a persistent hefty price tag.

Why it matters: The former vice president and famous environmentalist has had an evolving perspective on nuclear. It encapsulates the tricky position the power source occupies in our broader energy and climate debate.

Energy-related CO2 emissions per capita fell in every U.S. state from 2005 to 2023, per federal data.

• That was largely because we burned less coal and more natural gas (which emits less CO2 comparatively), but wind and solar also played their part.

Why it matters: The numbers indicate some success in reducing emissions to curb climate change, but the Trump administration's pro-coal, anti-wind-and-solar attitude could jeopardize that progress as it gets harder to start new clean energy projects.