Meteorologists on X are tracking a potential nor’easter that could form off the East Coast late this week. 

A powerful nor’easter could lash the East Coast this week — a rarity for September.

Only around 1 percent of nor’easters have historically occurred during September.

They are most common from November to April. pic.twitter.com/t9LNEgAeqD

— Ben Noll (@BenNollWeather) September 21, 2026

A late-September nor’easter is rare for this time of year, and it comes as El Niño has curbed hurricane development so far this season. 

Is it nor’easter season already?! Things are getting started early this year!

The East Coast will be on watch for a potentially powerful early-season nor’easter later this week — with rain, wind and waves whose severity depends on the exact track. pic.twitter.com/A1K5vF2Xhj

— Ben Noll (@BenNollWeather) September 20, 2026

“While not technically a hurricane, the coastal impacts from a powerful Nor’easter will bring “battering waves” and erosion plus very strong winds perhaps gusting to 70-80 mph,” meteorologist Ryan Maue wrote on X earlier Monday, adding, “Even without a storm name — news media should take this “climate-fueled cyclone” very seriously.” 

While not technically a hurricane, the coastal impacts from a powerful Nor’easter will bring “battering waves” and erosion plus very strong winds perhaps gusting to 70-80 mph.

Even without a storm name — news media should take this “climate fueled cyclone” very seriously. pic.twitter.com/E57I2hWeAd

— Ryan Maue (@RyanWeather) September 21, 2026

PIX11 senior meteorologist Mike Masco said, “Some model guidance has hinted at gusts of 60–70 mph from eastern New Jersey to eastern Long Island. That is NOT a forecast at this point, but I’m not dismissing the potential, particularly across eastern Long Island.” 

🌊 NOR’EASTER SEASON TO KICK OFF THIS WEEKEND?

The European model is showing a setup that could produce a long-duration nor’easter potentially with some tropical characteristics.

Here’s what I’m watching at 500 mb, roughly 18,000 feet up: Upper-level energy rotating in from… pic.twitter.com/7Ar2P7oCY5

— Mike Masco (@MikeMasco) September 21, 2026

The good news is that peak hurricane season was on September 10 (11 days ago), without a named storm, because strong wind shear associated with El Niño was tearing apart developing systems in the Atlantic Basin. However, the season runs through November 30.

Authored by Michael Zhuang via The Epoch Times,

A county justice bureau in southwestern China has ordered local law firms to report cases related to the government’s “anti-organized crime” campaign and obtain official approval before lawyers can argue that a defendant’s alleged offense should be classified differently.

The notice, issued directly to law firms by the Justice Bureau of Pu’an County in Guizhou Province, requires lawyers handling cases covered by a recent anti-organized crime public notice to report them to the bureau’s public legal services department, according to a Sept. 18 blog post by a legal blogger on Chinese news portal NetEase.

The requirement has prompted concerns among Chinese lawyers that a government administrative agency is attempting to exercise control over how defense lawyers present their cases in court.

The notice states that law firms handling cases covered by the campaign “must promptly report [them] to the county justice bureau’s public legal services department.”

It adds: “If the defense argument is to change the legal characterization of the crime, it must be reported to the county justice bureau for study and approval before that defense theory can be expressed. All law firms are requested to strictly implement this.”

Under the arrangement, lawyers would therefore need to do more than simply notify the justice bureau that they are handling a particular case. Before presenting a defense argument that challenges the prosecution’s characterization of an alleged offense, they would have to obtain approval from the same government agency responsible for regulating the local legal profession.

Lawyers Question Restrictions

Two China-based attorneys spoke to The Epoch Times on condition of anonymity, giving only their surnames out of fear of reprisal.

Zhang, a human rights lawyer from Hubei Province, said the local county requirement violates China’s Criminal Procedure Law and interferes with defendants’ rights to a defense, as well as lawyers’ independent practice.

“Lawyers [should act] independently in accordance with the law and not be subject to unlawful interference by any administrative agency,” Zhang said. “Establishing administrative approval or consent as a prerequisite for using a defense argument is tantamount to placing the review of judicial administrative agencies above the law.”

China’s Criminal Procedure Law provides that defense lawyers should, based on facts and law, present materials and opinions concerning innocence, lesser offenses, or the reduction or exemption of criminal responsibility.

However, the Pu’an County notice requires lawyers to wait for the justice bureau to “study and approve” one category of such defense arguments before presenting it.

Liu, a Beijing-based human rights lawyer, told The Epoch Times that the requirement is particularly significant in cases arising from government-led anti-organized crime campaigns, in which lawyers may need to challenge the evidence or the prosecution’s classification of an alleged offense.

“In mainland China, the more anti-organized crime is designated by the authorities as a task, the more lawyers need to question the evidence and the characterization of the crime,” Liu said.

If administrative agencies can screen out defense arguments they do not approve of, he said, a trial could effectively be left with only the prosecution’s account, reducing the defense to a mere formality.

“Special campaigns such as the ‘anti-organized crime’ campaign launched by the Chinese Communist Party … carry clear political-task implications for local officials,” Liu said. “This precisely reflects that the [local] authorities concerned are moving toward abandoning judicial fairness, and doing so will lead to more wrongful and unjust cases.”

Similar Rule Previously Withdrawn

The requirement in Pu’an has a precedent elsewhere in Guizhou Province.

According to a 2015 report by Chinese state-owned media outlet The Paper, the Zunyi Municipal Justice Bureau introduced a rule in late 2014 requiring lawyers to report cases in which they intended to argue for a defendant’s acquittal or seek a change in the criminal charge.

Lawyers filed a government information disclosure request concerning the rule. The justice bureau responded that because the provision was controversial, it had decided to withdraw it.

The earlier rule required lawyers to report such cases. The Pu’an notice goes further by explicitly stating that a lawyer seeking to change the legal characterization of a crime must obtain the county justice bureau’s “study and approval” before expressing the defense argument in court.

Ye Zilong contributed to this report.

It’s the communist playbook in real time.  Allow crime to fester, then disarm law abiding citizens rather than punishing the people responsible.    

Democratic Socialist Mayor of Seattle, Katie Wilson, has been a disaster for the city and she’s only been in office nine months.  So far, multiple major corporate employers are leaving Seattle to avoid tax expansion, homeless camps are growing exponentially, she has triggered several public safety controversies, faced potential recall and plunging public approval. 

Anyone with sense could have predicted this, but Seattle is a nesting ground for woke cultism and Wilson said all the right things during her campaign.

As with any far-left administration, it was only a matter of time before Wilson went after firearms rights.  In a recent announcement on a “new approach to gun violence”, the Mayor calls for “preventing gun violence before it happens”.  Part of this plan includes Wilson pushing for added restrictions to firearms carry in Washington. 

Wilson wants to work with the state legislature to advance gun violence prevention legislation, including regulation of firearms “in sensitive spaces,” regulation of firearms at the city’s center, and an update to juvenile firearm possession and sentencing laws (she does not specify what these updates would entail).  

Washington already preempts most local gun regulation. Cities cannot ban carry on their own; any broader restrictions would require a change in state law. Current state rules limit guns in some city-run stadiums and convention centers, with exceptions for people who have a valid concealed pistol license.

Wilson’s proposal has not spelled out whether licensed concealed carry would be included in every “sensitive space.”  But her added restrictions, as presented, would only affect legal and law abiding gun owners.  

The problem with this model is that it ignores the source of the crime.  The vast majority of gun violence in Seattle is committed by 0.1% of all residents, and the majority of these criminals are repeat offenders.  Roughly 900 people in a city of 780,000 are connected to 52% of the violence.  Why not simply lock these 900 people up for good? 

On such case is Alrick Hollingsworth, who served only seven years for shooting five people are a Seattle bus stop and was released early.  Hollingsworth went back out on the streets this year only to commit another shooting.

Wilson and leftists like her will never lock up repeat offenders this because it would contradict their position on “social solutions” to crime response. Many criminals who commit violence are already on law enforcement radar because they have a long rap sheet of lesser offenses.  Wilson promotes a program called “LEAD Seattle” (Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion) which “diverts” offenders with “lesser crimes” away from prosecution and into social services projects. 

This problem is magnified in juvenile courts where offenders consistently get a slap on the wrist and sent to the revolving door.     

Whether or not the WA legislature agrees with Wilson on increased gun carry restriction is not yet clear, but the narrative is predictable.  Leftist candidates have consistently lost favor with the American public when it comes to gun control and they seem to have backed away from their more aggressive rhetoric on the issue.  However, that doesn’t mean they are abandoning their gun grabber roots.  

As we have seen in the past, gun control always starts with incrementalism – They start with less contentious restrictions, like a ban of concealed carry in public spaces, then move the ball forward from there.  Why should the rest of Seattle’s citizens pay the price for the actions of 900 dangerous thugs?  There’s no logical reason other than control.  The goal is not to solve crime, the goal is to exploit crime as a vehicle to add new laws.  

Authored by Haley Zaremba via OilPrice.com,

The future of nuclear energy is in China’s hands. While the United States remains the world’s largest producer of nuclear energy, China’s sector is growing at such a rapid clip that it is expected to overtake France as well as the United States to become the world’s leading nuclear power producer within the next decade. In addition to this rapid expansion of traditional nuclear power capacity, Beijing has also quickly become the global leader in a broad and diverse range of advanced nuclear power technologies.

“By a wide margin, China will have the world’s most dynamic and significant nuclear industry through 2035,” Damien Ma, energy lead analyst for Gavekal Technologies, wrote in a recent report, as quoted by the South China Morning Post. “Construction efficiencies mean China can build a new plant in about six years, compared with more than a decade for the latest Vogtle reactors in the US,” Ma went on to say.

The United States has added just one nuclear plant in the last decade, Georgia’s long-delayed, over-budget, and controversial Plant Vogtle. Over the same time, China added a staggering 34 gigawatts of capacity. And, Beijing’s latest five year plan shows that China has no intentions of slowing down.

“With innovation and security as its leading themes, the latest FYP illuminates how nuclear energy underpins multiple strategic priorities for China in the context of not only energy security but also technological innovation and global engagement,” the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a nonprofit policy research organization and bipartisan think tank recently reported.

The Chinese government has been eager to build up the most advanced nuclear power sector in the world as a part of Beijing’s broader bid to establish lasting dominance in the global energy sector by becoming the world’s first electrostate. Building the world’s most advanced nuclear energy fleet is a part of this goal, and includes innovative approaches to how nuclear reactors are designed, deployed, and fueled.

“From the world’s first in-reactor thorium breeding confirmation to a dual PWR-HTGR plant and commercial supercritical CO2 generation, China is assembling a vertically integrated advanced nuclear ecosystem,” Power Magazine reported in March of this year. “The breadth of activity signals a coordinated push toward fuel independence and industrial deployment.”

The United States has also been bullish about building up and advancing its aging nuclear sector. The Trump administration has publicized its intentions to “produce lasting American dominance in the global nuclear energy market” and is likewise bullish on developing next-gen nuclear reactors and nuclear fusion technology on its own home turf. Similarly to China, the United States is also fighting to free itself from international nuclear fuel supply chains, and is attempting to do so by building up domestic uranium extraction and enrichment capacities. But the United States’ advanced nuclear sector is lagging far behind China when it comes to spending and technological knowhow.

But while China is historically quite secretive about its technological advancements and cutting-edge energy sector developments, this week Beijing made a surprising move to share its expertise with the rest of the world. This week, China signed a deal with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to more freely share its knowledge on high-temperature gas-cooled reactors (HTGRs) with other countries. HGTRs are a form of advanced fourth-generation reactor that is capable of producing nuclear energy at extremely high temperatures, opening avenues for use in a variety of industrial applications.

The new deal “covers cooperation in HTGR research and development, reactor design, construction, commissioning and operation,” as well as the exchange of “information on supply chains and personnel training,” according to a recent Interesting Engineering report. “The deal could give other countries greater access to China’s engineering experience with HTGRs as interest grows in nuclear systems that can provide both electricity and high-temperature industrial heat.”

This development is a promising starting point for a more cooperative approach to what is indeed a borderless problem – climate change and the growing problem of artificial intelligence’s energy demand growth. Advanced nuclear energy systems could provide a critical lifeline by offering clean energy 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Authored by Naveen Athrappully via The Epoch Times,

The Department of Education has announced that it is investigating a Massachusetts school district over allegedly enabling a minor girl student’s “gender transition” without the knowledge of parents or securing their consent.

The probe was launched by the department’s Student Privacy Policy Office (SPPO) against the Public Schools of Northborough and Southborough school district, the department said in a Sept. 17 statement.

The girl was enrolled at Algonquin Regional High School, where school personnel allegedly facilitated the student’s “social transition to a boy” while keeping her parents in the dark.

“The parents claim that their daughter participated in counseling sessions after school to support the transition while they were under the impression she was receiving academic assistance for her math class,” the department said.

The school personnel also allegedly began referring to the child by a male name and using male pronouns without the parents’ knowledge.

According to the Education Department, a school counselor is accused of reporting the parents to the Massachusetts Department of Children and Families (DCF) for countering the school’s actions.

In December 2024, DCF removed the child from her family home. The parents are still engaged in custody litigation over their daughter.

The Education Department said the allegations raise serious questions about the school district’s compliance with federal laws protecting parental rights, specifically the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) and the Protection of Pupil Rights Amendment (PPRA).

FERPA grants parents the right to access their children’s education records for inspection and review. Parents also have certain control over the disclosure of personal information from these records.

Under PPRA, parents have rights regarding surveys, analyses, or evaluations of their children in certain areas, including sex behavior or attitudes and mental or psychological problems.

The law also covers the administration of physical examinations of minors. Parents have the right to review instructional materials used in the educational curriculum.

The Education Department said that under FERPA, parents can request changes to their child’s education records. If the school rejects the requested changes, parents can seek a hearing on the issue at the institution.

According to the department, it is currently unclear whether the school district and the school complied with FERPA and PPRA. The SPPO probe will determine whether these regulations were violated.

“Parents have a right to know what is happening with their children at school, particularly when it concerns deeply personal matters involving their health and well-being,” Frank Miller, director of SPPO, said in the statement.

“These egregious allegations are not an isolated problem. Families deserve answers, and SPPO will thoroughly investigate reports like this and hold any educational institution that violates federal law accountable.”

The Epoch Times reached out to the Public Schools of Northborough and Southborough and Algonquin Regional High School for comment but did not receive a response by publication time.

Another school district from Massachusetts was previously identified by the Education Department as violating parental rights. In that case, the district was found to have asked students to take part in a survey containing sexually explicit questions despite parents having expressly requested that their children be exempted.

The survey of students as young as seventh grade included questions regarding sexual encounters, alcohol and drug use, and gender identity, the department said, alleging the school district violated PPRA and parents’ rights to shape their children’s moral education.

Meanwhile, the department announced last month that it had sent letters to schools across the United States, reminding them of educators’ obligations under FERPA and PPRA and warning that noncompliance could result in the loss of federal funding.

The letters were sent while the 2026-2027 academic year was underway and were prompted by reports of educational institutions withholding crucial information from parents and issuing surveys containing sexually explicit material even after parents had opted their children out of such activities.

Miller said that in certain cases, state education departments had pressured school districts to violate FERPA.

“The department is committed to putting parents back in the driver’s seat. We will fully enforce FERPA and PPRA and ensure parents have the information and authority they need to make decisions for their children,” Miller said.

Satellite images gathered by Bloomberg show supertankers with capacity for 14 million barrels at Saudi Arabia’s Gulf export terminals over the weekend, the highest tanker count observed since at least June, according to data compiled from the European Union’s Sentinel-2 satellite.

However, as OilPrice notes, overall Hormuz traffic kept falling over the same weekend, nonetheless. Just a dozen commodity vessels crossed the strait, down from 35 a week earlier, and Thursday’s crossings totaled four tankers against a 10-day moving average of 16, Kpler data cited by Reuters showed.

Saudi Arabia moved crude through the strait at 2.9 million barrels a day over the past six days, JPMorgan said in a Friday note, calling the kingdom’s shift “the most notable pivot” among Gulf producers.

On September 11, drone strikes launched from Iraq shut down Saudi Arabia’s East-West pipeline, also known as Petroline, which normally carries as much as 7 million barrels a day across 1,200 kilometers from Eastern Province fields to the Yanbu terminal on the Red Sea. The attack took 4-5 million barrels a day of that capacity offline, with total Saudi crude loadings falling from 7.5 million bpd in January and February to about 2.1 million barrels a day by mid-September, a decline of more than 70%.

US Energy Secretary Chris Wright said September 15 the pipeline would restart within days, but an industry analyst told Al-Monitor pump stations were destroyed in the strike and full restoration could take six weeks or more.

Yemen’s Houthi movement claimed cruise missile, ballistic missile and drone strikes on Riyadh and on Aramco facilities at Yanbu overnight September 18-19, and Saudi Arabia confirmed the Houthis targeted civilian infrastructure at the port where the East-West pipeline terminates. The Riyadh missile was intercepted and Saudi authorities reported no casualties or damage from either strike, but the attempt puts Yanbu, the kingdom’s primary outlet since the Hormuz freeze, under renewed threat.

Aramco pipes crude to its Ras Tanura terminal on the Persian Gulf, ships it on smaller vessels to the Gulf of Oman, and transfers it to larger tankers there, a routing it is using to move about 60 million barrels loaded at Ras Tanura for September and October delivery, mainly to Chinese and South Korean refiners. Gulf exports have rebounded to an average of 1 million to 1.5 million barrels a day, roughly in line with August levels.

Authored by Chris Summers via The Epoch Times,

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has rejected the claims of some artificial intelligence researchers that the technology could wipe out humanity, calling the arguments “doomsday narratives.”

Huang said in a Sept. 17 interview with CBS News that predictions made by former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon and Anthropic’s alignment science lead, Evan Hubinger, were not grounded in science.

Coxon said in a Sept. 9 post on X that the “people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.”

Hubinger said he agreed it could end humanity.

“Jacob is correct here – We really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans! I personally think it is >10% within the next decade,” he wrote.

Huang told CBS’s senior business and technology correspondent Jo Ling Kent on Thursday that 2030 won’t be the end of the world.

“There is zero percent chance that’s going to be the end of the world,” he said. “Scaring people is unnecessary. It is irresponsible.”

U.S. President Donald Trump said in a Sept. 14 post on Truth Social that the United States needed no AI guardrails and that it already had significant criminal and regulatory power over Big Tech companies.

“There is a SICK conspiracy going on against AI and Data Centers, and the only one that is happy about it is China,” Trump wrote.

Nvidia CEO Agrees With Trump

Huang said on Thursday that he agreed with the U.S. president’s view on legislation and regulation.

“Before we come up with new laws and new regulations, let’s apply the current laws and current regulations,” Huang said.

“There are all kinds of laws and regulations. … You have cybersecurity unauthorized entry, you have damage liabilities, all kinds of liabilities associated with cybersecurity. All kinds of liabilities associated with products. … My point is apply those first, don’t let this doomsday narrative cause someone to relieve them of the laws that currently exist.”

Huang has been invited to a dinner at the White House on Sept. 24, when Trump will host Chinese leader Xi Jinping.

Trump has said AI will be on the agenda during his meeting with Xi.

China

Huang told CBS that Xi wanted China to benefit from AI.

“They want China to prosper, just as we want America to prosper,” Huang said.

Nvidia manufactures specialized H200 chips that power large language models (LLMs) used by AI agents to synthesize information.

Trump said in a Dec. 8 post on Truth Social that he had told Xi the United States would allow exports of Nvidia H200 chips to approved customers in China “under conditions that allow for continued strong National Security.”

In July 2025, Nvidia restarted exports of H20 graphics processing units (GPUs) to China after U.S. regulators approved it.

Nvidia is now worth more than $5 trillion, making it the most valuable company on the planet. The company manufactures many of its chips in Taiwan, but last year, it opened a semiconductor fabrication plant in Phoenix, Ariz.

Last month, Taiwanese authorities indicted nine people, including a senior partner manager at Nvidia’s Taiwan unit, for allegedly taking part in a scheme to export servers with advanced Nvidia chips to China.

In June, Taiwan-born Huang told Nvidia shareholders that attempts to build artificial intelligence data centers with smuggled chips were a “dead end,” because the company provides no support or repairs for such products.

“National security is first and foremost,” Huang said. “Where commercial opportunities conflict with U.S. national security, national security comes first.”

Both the Kremlin and the White House had recently signaled mutual openness to the idea of President Putin actually attending the G20 Miami Summit which is set for December 14-15. Some reports have recently expressed optimism that some kind of grand Ukraine peace deal could emerge from such an engagement.

However, Bloomberg has poured cold water on this, reporting Monday that “Vladimir Putin is set to travel to China for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit hosted by President Xi Jinping but is likely to skip the Group of 20 in the U.S. with Donald Trump.”

Kremlin officials have indicated that a personal appearance at the APEC would be Putin’s first since 2017

“There’s only a very slim prospect of him joining President Trump for the G20 in Florida, the people said, asking not to be identified because the matter isn’t public,” notes Bloomberg.

But it does remain possible, given the Shenzhen-hosted APEC summit takes place almost a full month ahead of the annual G20 summit.

The Kremlin now signaling that it intends to turn down any potential Trump invitation perhaps underscores that Putin is much more comfortably in Xi’s corner.

Back in April, The Washington Post reported, “The United States intends to invite Russian President Vladimir Putin to the Group of 20 leaders’ summit scheduled for December at President Donald Trump’s Doral golf resort in Miami, though the invitation has not yet been sent.”

And then just weeks ago there was a Russian delegation in attendance for the Asheville G20 finance ministers and bank governors meeting. The Europeans were angry over their presence, which included a meeting with Scott Bessent.

Ukraine’s President Zelensky is expected to be in Miami. This raised the prospect of an unprecedented Putin-Zelensky meeting even as the war rages. But it should be remembered that Putin has time and again stated he would entertain face-to-face negotiations with Zelensky only if a final settlement was to be signed.

So if the White House does intend to get Putin there, a lot of scrambling and diplomatic progress would have to happen in the next few months. But Putin might also simply wish to send a signal that Western efforts to isolate him on the world stage have failed.

President Zelenskyy said he is ready to meet Putin in person in the United States if Putin attends the G20 summit in Miami in December.

“Yes, of course. We have to come. We have to meet, to speak and make decisions.

It’s not about words. What I will tell him or what he wants to… pic.twitter.com/PVjyTJrS5O

— Anton Gerashchenko (@Gerashchenko_en) September 12, 2026

Traveling to Miami would send a resounding symbol to hawkish European capitals, akin to the prior Alaska summit with Trump. But again, it seems that so far the Kremlin is giving this possibility the preemptive cold shoulder.

Authored by Jeremy Lott via The Epoch Times,

A $7 billion federal government grant program for solar promotion, authorized during the Biden administration, was reinstated by a federal judge on Sept. 18 in a ruling that rebuffed the Trump administration’s efforts to cancel it.

Judge Mary McElroy of the U.S. District Court for the District of Rhode Island wrote in her ruling that the current Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA’s) “termination of the Solar for All program is declared unlawful.”

Money was appropriated in 2022 for a Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund under the Inflation Reduction Act that later spawned the $7 billion Solar for All grant program in June 2023. Congress at the time dedicated billions of dollars to the program and a separate smaller amount in the millions of dollars for its administration by the EPA.

Funds for the grant program would be used to “create and expand low-income solar programs that provide financing and technical assistance, such as workforce development, to enable low-income and disadvantaged communities to deploy and benefit from residential solar,” the Biden-era EPA wrote.

Current EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin criticized the program on Sept. 7, 2025, saying that canceling it would save taxpayers billions of dollars.

“The One Big Beautiful Bill eliminated the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, which included a $7 billion pot called ‘Solar for All,'” he said in a statement announcing the program’s cancellation.

“EPA no longer has the statutory authority to administer the program or the appropriated funds to keep this boondoggle alive.“

An audit of the program found that as of early August 2025, the program’s 60 grant recipients had “drawn down approximately $71 million, or 1.02 percent, of the obligated funds for various aspects of project planning and implementation.”

The Trump-era EPA canceled the program. Under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the current Congress canceled some funds for administering the program and rescinded Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund money that was not already obligated.

The EPA noted that none of the plaintiffs suing the government were actually grant recipients. Instead, they were prospective subrecipients or third-order beneficiaries, such as unions. The government argued that they lacked standing to sue.

McElroy disagreed on the standing question. She also interpreted the text of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act to mean that “existing grants were not to be rescinded” and that only minor “unobligated” funds could be clawed back.

Practically, all of the funds were spoken for by designated recipient organizations. What that means is that, unless reversed on appeal, the current EPA may find itself obligated to give out the remaining nearly $7 billion in solar promotion subsidies from the Biden era.

Patrick Crowley, president of the Rhode Island AFL-CIO, one of the parties that brought suit, told The Epoch Times that he was “very pleased with the ruling.”

The union president said he did not “think the federal government should appeal,” as the ruling makes “very clear that this program should never have been stopped by the EPA in the first place.”

Carolyn Holran, a spokesperson for the EPA, indicated that Crowley might be disappointed by her agency’s next steps.

“EPA is reviewing the decision and considering options for appeal,” she told The Epoch Times.

Crowley said the total Rhode Island slice of federal funding should come to $49 million, which would provide “thousands of good-paying union jobs.”

Unions and the Trump administration have often been at loggerheads over green projects. Crowley said that they had notched up legal victories on offshore wind projects and solar grants, and promised more.

“We won’t back down in our efforts to protect our members’ jobs while we build a new carbon-free economy,” he said.