Net Zero

1. Trump’s AI plans
2. Cleaner credit cards
3. Offshore wind turnaround
4. Oil demand slows
5. Gulf renewables boom

BP’s warning to shareholders, and China’s plan to avoid summer blackouts.

Trump’s AI plans

Top fossil fuel and Wall Street CEOs will join US President Donald Trump for a summit on AI and energy today. The conference will define the contours of a coming showdown between the administration and tech companies on the fate of clean energy in the US. Upward of $70 billion in new AI and related energy projects are expected to be announced in Pittsburgh today.

If the roster of attendees is any indication — including top Trump administration energy officials and the leaders of ExxonMobil, Chevron, and major gas producer EQT — the emphasis will be on coal and gas-fired power generation. New hydroelectric and nuclear projects are also on the docket. That pits the administration’s priorities against those of tech companies and many top utilities, which have argued that renewables are the cheapest and fastest way to add new capacity to the power grid. AI leaders including Amazon, Google, and Microsoft campaigned heavily, but unsuccessfully, against the clean energy tax credit cuts that Trump signed into law this month. Now, the pressure is on the administration and its fossil fuel industry allies to prove they can power the AI boom quickly, cleanly, and cost-effectively.

Cleaner credit cards

Mastercard will this week report a decline in emissions even as its net revenue grew in 2024, according to a copy of its annual impact report shared exclusively with Semafor. The 7% year-on-year fall in Scope 1, 2, and 3 carbon emissions — compared with 12% growth in net revenues — brought the financial firm’s overall, combined emissions to their lowest level since it began tracking the data in 2016, barring a sharp one-year dip during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The figures encapsulate a growing trend among major companies successfully “decoupling” emissions from revenues: Ikea’s parent company this year said it had cut emissions by 30% since 2016, while growing revenues 23.7% in that time, while Mars last year reported a 16% decline in carbon emissions since 2015, set against 60% sales growth.

Offshore wind’s survival strategy

A pair of multibillion-dollar deals for new offshore wind projects outside the US point to a rebound for an industry that has spent the last few years on life support.

Late last week, Danish developer Ørsted raised nearly $3 billion from a group of two dozen banks and export credit agencies to finish a 600-megawatt offshore wind farm in Taiwan. Meanwhile, Spain’s Iberdrola and the United Arab Emirates’ Masdar agreed a $5.2 billion deal for a new offshore wind project in the UK, which the companies said is the largest single offshore wind deal of the decade. Globally, projects totalling more than 11 gigawatts of offshore wind capacity locked in financing in the first half of 2025, more than in all of 2024, according to BloombergNEF.

The exception: the US, where the Trump administration’s tax policies look likely to darken the industry’s prospects.

Oil demand slows

Global oil demand growth this year, in barrels per day, anticipated by the International Energy Agency. That would be the slowest annual increase since the 2008 global financial crisis (excepting the pandemic), with the contraction particularly acute in emerging markets, the IEA reported. It may be too soon to blame the slowdown entirely on Trump administration tariffs, but they are likely an important contributor, the IEA said. Oil prices, already relatively low because the market is oversupplied, fell again this week after Trump said he would allow Moscow more time to pursue a peace deal with Kyiv before imposing further sanctions that could restrict Russia’s oil exports.

Gulf renewables boom

Saudi Arabia awarded local companies $8.3 billion worth of projects to add 15 gigawatts of domestic wind and solar electricity capacity.

The facilities will be developed by ACWA Power, PIF’s Water and Electricity Holding Co., and Aramco Power. The wind farms will be in Riyadh province, while the solar plants will be spread across the kingdom.

Gulf countries are investing in renewable energy at home — both to decarbonize their power grids and to free up more fossil fuels for export — and abroad: Some companies have developed global expertise, with ACWA Power a major player in Asia and Africa, and Abu Dhabi’s Masdar pursuing a 100-gigawatt global portfolio of renewable energy assets.

— Mohammed Sergie

New Energy

• US Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Missouri) tweeted that he convinced the Trump administration to block a major new cross-country power transmission project. The company behind the project called the statement “bizarre.”
• Cuts to clean energy tax credits in Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act will raise average household energy costs by up to $192 per year, and increase total industrial energy costs by up to $11 billion by 2035, according to a Rhodium Group report.

Fossil Fuels

• The Middle East will overtake Asia as the number-two regional producer of natural gas this year, Rystad Energy projects, trailing only North America.
• BP warned shareholders to expect lackluster second quarter earnings because of low oil prices, but said its upstream production plans remain on track.

Finance

• Third-party auditors aren’t doing enough to prevent greenwashing in the carbon offset market, a paper in the research journal Science argues.
• HSBC became the first UK bank to drop out of the banking industry’s net zero alliance, following most of its US peers.
• Sales of catastrophe bonds, which enable insurance companies to pass some risk from extreme weather events to investors, are at an all-time high.

Tech

• Venture capital firms are racing to place bets on EV battery swapping startups.

Politics & Policy

• Deep cuts by the Trump administration to federal weather forecasting agencies are raising the risk of injury, death, and property damage from future floods and other disasters, experts warn.
• China’s new plan to avoid summer blackouts: A program to swap old air conditioners for newer, more efficient models.

When OpenAI announced that ChatGPT-4 chatbot had passed the Uniform Bar Exam, it was an “oh, wow,” moment, Thomson Reuters CEO Steve Hasker told Semafor’s Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson.

The development crystallized Hasker’s core strategic challenge — how to ensure that Thomson Reuters’ expensive legal content library would retain its value to customers, if large language models could transform professionals’ ability to access and interpret information. He’s challenged his team to ask: “Where do we build, where do we buy, where do we partner?”