Today: Regulator pushes back deadline after flood of public comments over reporting requirements; AI data centers are building power plants; private-equity firm makes $400 million bet on environmental restoration.

Welcome back: Companies preparing to report their greenhouse gas emissions and climate risk in California have a matter of weeks to publish some of their inaugural reports under new rules.

But the rulemaking hasn’t been completed.

WSJ Pro Sustainable Business's Clara Hudson reports that the California Air Resources Board, the state’s agency primarily tasked with overseeing pollution, said that it changed the timeline to the first quarter of next year because of the amount of public comments its staff received on the requirements. The rules were originally due to be published this month.

Lawyers have said the delay means some companies will have to make their own determinations while preparing to report to the agency how climate poses a financial risk to their business starting in January. Reports on greenhouse gas emissions are due in the summer.

• Most companies selling plastic bags in California are misleading consumers about whether their bags are ultimately recycled, Attorney General Rob Bonta alleged in a lawsuit, Clara Hudson writes.
  
  He brought the suit against Novolex, Inteplast, and Mettler, alleging violations of environmental marketing claims, false advertising and unfair competition laws. None of the companies responded immediately to requests for comment. (WSJ)
   
• California Gov. Gavin Newsom has signed a law designed to prevent a repeat of the Moss Landing fire by strengthening statewide safety standards for grid battery installations. (Canary Media)
   
• California signed clean energy and carbon storage support into law, but rejected a forever chemicals ban and a boost for virtual power plants. It also approved potential new oil drilling. (Trellis)

Tech companies in the AI race need power, and lots of it. They aren’t waiting around for the archaic U.S. power grid to catch up.

In West Texas, natural-gas-fired power generation is under construction as part of the $500 billion Stargate project from OpenAI and Oracle. Gas turbines are in use at Colossus 1 and 2, the massive data centers Elon Musk’s xAI is building in Memphis, Tenn. More than a dozen Equinix data centers across the country are using fuel cells for power.

With the push for AI dominance at warp speed, the “Bring Your Own Power” boom is a quick fix for the gridlock of trying to get on the grid. It’s driving an energy Wild West that is reshaping American power.

• An Nvidia-backed AI startup is planning to build a data-center complex with CoreWeave that is capable of generating its own power on a site that is two-thirds the size of Central Park, the WSJ's Bradley Olson writes.
  
  Poolside is joining with the cloud-infrastructure provider on a plan to build a data center on more than 500 acres of land that sits on a sprawling ranch in West Texas. The site is owned by the Mitchell family, which has run oil-and-gas companies for decades in the state and is located in the heart of the fracking boom. (WSJ)
   
• AI spending may be transforming the economy, but a lot of Americans don’t want the giant data centers anywhere near them. (Barron's)
   
• As tech companies build AI data centers worldwide, vulnerable communities have been hit by blackouts and water shortages. (NYT)

Ecosystem Investment Partners has raised $401.3 million for its latest private-equity fund to invest in environmental restoration and conservation projects across the U.S., a strategy that benefits from infrastructure development and the need to reduce its impact.

The firm invests in the restoration of wetlands, streams and habitats for both plants and animals, as well as projects that support biodiversity and water quality, with the aim of selling so-called mitigation credits the work generates. Buyers of the credits include project developers in sectors such as oil-and-gas infrastructure, mining, data centers, renewable energy and real estate, WSJ Pro's Luis Garcia writes.

Federal and state laws, including the Clean Water Act and the Endangered Species Act, require developers to offset the environmental impact of their projects, either by buying mitigation credits or doing the restoration themselves.

American companies and public organizations spend as much as $12 billion a year to mitigate the environmental effects of their activities, mostly through buying mitigation credits, said Nick Dilks, a managing partner at EIP who co-founded the firm in 2006.

• Clean-energy investor Altérra aims to foster $250 billion in climate investments worldwide by 2030 and is looking to developing countries as it strives to meet that goal. (WSJ)

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• A proxy advisory firm has advised Tesla investors to vote against a new $1 trillion pay package for CEO Elon Musk. (WSJ)
   
• Bloom Energy shares took off after the company agreed to a $5 billion partnership to use its fuel cells to power AI data centers. (Barron's)
   
• U.S. auto production faces several supply-chain disruptions, including aluminum shortages and geopolitical chip export bans. (WSJ)
   
• Vestiaire Collective is translating the carbon emissions saved by customers’ secondhand purchases into credits. (Trellis)
   
• Barclays signed an agreement with UNDO to permanently remove 6,538 metric tons of CO2 through enhanced rock weathering. (ESG Dive)
   
• More than four out of five companies continued to increase their sustainability-related investments over the past year. (ESG Today)
   
• The world is on track to add nearly two months of dangerous superhot days each year by the end of the century. (AP)
   
• More European companies are emphasizing the need to address climate risk, the European Investment Bank said. (Dow Jones Risk Journal)

WSJ Pro Sustainable Business gives you an inside look at how companies are tackling sustainability. Send comments to bureau chief Perry Cleveland-Peck at perry.cleveland-peck@wsj.com and reporters Clara Hudson at clara.hudson@wsj.com and Yusuf Khan at yusuf.khan@wsj.com. Follow us on LinkedIn at perrycp, clara-hudson and yusuf_khan.