Welcome to another edition of Climatebase Weekly.

In today’s edition…

🌎 This Week In Climate: US Rules on Deep Sea Mining, Renewables Take Lead in Europe, and More. We’re covering:

🌟 Featured climate jobs at 15+ new employers — Scroll down to view them all.

❄️ Minneapolis Climate Week (Feb. 3 - Feb. 6) — The calendar is open!

🚀 Climatebase Fellowship Cohort 9 — Discovery Sessions Coming Up

Quick reminders:

The Minneapolis Climate Week event calendar is officially live — and events are still rolling in.

From panels and workshops to meetups and community gatherings, this is your chance to see what’s happening across the city and start planning your week. Many events have limited capacity, so we recommend browsing early and registering soon.

A few events we’re especially excited about:

👉 Browse the full event calendar and register for events now — and if you’re hosting something during the week, be sure to get it on the calendar.

And one more thing 👀

We’ve got some big announcements coming up around Colorado Climate Week, Boston Climate Week and SF Climate Week over the next two weeks — keep your eyes out.

Applications are now open for Cohort 9 of the Climatebase Fellowship, our climate career accelerator designed to help ambitious, mission-driven professionals supercharge their careers in climate—whether that means landing your next role, pivoting into the sector, or launching your own climate projects and ventures.

We’re hosting a series of live sessions over the next two weeks designed to give prospective Fellows a real look at what the Climatebase Fellowship unlocks — from career transitions to startup-building and hands-on support.

What’s coming up:

👉 Apply to the Climatebase Fellowship

Explore some of the latest wins from our Fellowship community:

Want more wins? We recently published a blog highlighting some of the recent standout wins from graduates of the Climatebase Fellowship — from career breakthroughs and startup launches to powerful personal journeys across the climate ecosystem.

If you’re curious what’s possible inside the Fellowship community, this is a great place to start.

👉 Apply to the Climatebase Fellowship

By Julian Moore

In 2025, wind and solar reached a historic milestone, producing 30% of the EU’s electricity and surpassing fossil fuels (29%) for the first time. Driven by a 19% surge in solar capacity, renewables and nuclear combined now provide 71% of the bloc's power. Notably, coal’s share plummeted to a record low of 9.2%.

Despite this progress, the transition faces hurdles. Drought-induced hydropower shortages forced an 8% increase in gas usage, while political pushback and new energy deals with the U.S. complicated long-term climate goals. Furthermore, underinvestment in power grids remains a critical issue; lack of storage and network capacity has forced operators to waste cheap renewable energy, keeping costs high for consumers. Experts emphasize that upgrading infrastructure and battery storage is now essential to stabilize prices and fully capitalize on the green shift.

The Trump administration has issued a new rule to fast-track deep-sea mining in international waters by consolidating exploration and commercial recovery into a single permitting process. Citing the 1980 Deep Seabed Hard Mineral Resources Act, the administration aims to streamline access to critical minerals like cobalt and nickel, which have become increasingly important with the growth of green energy and innovations in defense technology.

However, the move faces intense criticism. Environmentalists and scientists argue that merging permits reduces oversight and risks destroying largely unexplored ecosystems through sediment plumes and heavy metal contamination.

The U.S. remains an outlier globally; while the UN's International Seabed Authority (ISA) and leaders like Emmanuel Macron call for a moratorium due to ecological risks, the U.S. is not a party to the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea. This unilateral shift signals a major push for industrial exploitation despite significant scientific and diplomatic pushback.

A new Carbon Majors report reveals that just 32 fossil fuel companies generated half of global CO2 emissions in 2024. State-owned entities dominated the list, with Saudi Aramco identified as the top polluter, followed by ExxonMobil as the leading investor-owned emitter. Notably, the 17 state-controlled companies in the top 20 belong to nations that recently blocked a global fossil fuel phaseout at COP 30.

While clean energy investment is rising, these "carbon majors" continue to expand production, making the 1.5°C Paris Agreement goal increasingly unattainable. However, experts note that this concentrated data is now a powerful tool for legal accountability. This evidence is already being used in landmark court cases and "climate superfund" laws to force companies to pay for damages from extreme heat and flooding.

Antarctic penguins are shifting their breeding cycles earlier at a record-breaking pace—moving up reproduction by two weeks in just a decade. According to Oxford University researchers, this shift is the fastest life-cycle change ever recorded in vertebrates, driven by temperatures rising 3°C since 2012.

The trend is creating "winners and losers" among species. While Adelie and chinstrap penguins are specialists dependent on krill, the more aggressive gentoo penguins are moving their breeding times even faster. This creates an unprecedented overlap, leading to intense competition for food and nesting sites. Combined with earlier commercial fishing and shrinking sea ice, these pressures threaten the Adelie and chinstrap with extinction by the end of the century. Scientists used over 9 million crowdsourced images to track these shifts, highlighting a critical mismatch between penguin births and available food resources.

For Climatebase, Abigail Bassett argues that the Trump Administration’s recent decision to pull the United States out of more than 60 international organizations will ultimately undermine US national security and competitiveness. 

President Trump has signaled a major retreat from global climate action, moving to withdraw the U.S. from the UNFCCC and the IPCC. This shift toward isolationism involves rolling back clean energy legislation, freezing research grants, and prioritizing fossil fuels.

While the administration frames international accords as "burdensome foreign obligations," these agreements are largely non-binding. Critics argue that withdrawal does not insulate the U.S. from climate reality; instead, it weakens national security and economic interests. By leaving these frameworks, the U.S. forfeits its influence over global trade and defense rules shaped by climate data, while agencies like NASA and the Department of Defense lose access to vital scientific baselines. Ultimately, this retreat risks leaving the world’s second-largest polluter technologically and diplomatically behind as the rest of the globe coordinates on climate mitigation.

Check out some of the latest featured jobs below. If you don't see anything that speaks to you, you can always go to Climatebase to explore over 50,000 new climate jobs.

Gaia AI

“Gaia AI builds modern forest data infrastructure—field LiDAR + SLAM + satellite analytics—to power carbon, wildfire, and biodiversity decisions.”

MEER

“Surface-based cooling technology and community-led adaptation to reduce heat stress and build a more livable, resilient world.”

Grantham Foundation for the Protection of the Environment

“Dedicated to conserving the environment by funding impactful climate initiatives that often go unsupported.”

SecondMuse LLC

“Driving sustainable growth through innovative, market-driven solutions that benefit communities and the planet.”

Flash Forest

“We’re an aerial reforestation company that uses a data-driven, biodiversity-centric approach to rebuild healthy resilient forests at scale.”

Station A, Inc.

“"AI-driven platform optimizing cost-effective clean energy for commercial real estate."”

Critical Loop

“Making power more accessible and efficient by combining industry-leading energy storage with advanced control software.”

The 2035 Initiative at UC Santa Barbara

“Empirical research and policy development to slash global climate pollution for a sustainable future.”

CNaught

“"Streamlining corporate carbon credit purchases to maximize impact and reduce complexity."”

Ocean Visions

“Driving ocean-based solutions to tackle climate crises and restore marine health.”

RE-volv

“Empowering nonprofits with solar energy, saving costs, and perpetuating climate-forward investments.”

Spherical

“"Empowering community-driven climate resilience with open-source tools and collaborative visioning in Los Angeles."”

Terraformation

“Accelerating global forest restoration to combat climate change through native ecosystems and sustainable solutions.”

Aquaria

“Transforming air into water for reliable, climate-resilient supply.”

Revalue

“Transforming carbon projects with unmatched quality for massive planetary impact.”