Current conditions: Cooler air is dropping temperatures on the Pacific Coast and Nevada by as much as 20 degrees Fahrenheit • Hurricane Kiko lost intensity and passed north of Hawaii • The volcano Mount Semeru in East Java, Indonesia, is erupting today for the 19th time this week, spewing an ash plume nearly 2,000 feet high.
THE TOP FIVE
1. Trump disbands climate contrarian group
The Trump administration disbanded a group of five climate contrarians brought together to write the Department of Energy’s controversial report challenging the scientific consensus on the severity of climate change, CNN’s Ella Nilsen reported. In a lawsuit last month, the Environmental Defense Fund and the Union of Concerned Scientists alleged that the formation of the group of researchers — the University of Alabama’s John Christy and Roy Spencer, the Hoover Institution’s Steven Koonin, Georgia Tech professor emeritus Judith Curry, and Canadian economist Ross McKitrick — violated the Federal Advisory Committee Act’s public disclosure rules by failing to promptly disclose its formation and make its meeting and notes available to the public. The litigation also accused the Trump administration of breaking the law by assembling a government working group deliberately designed to represent a one-sided argument, which is prohibited under the same statute. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright confirmed in a September 3 letter that the group was dissolved. Still, the Energy Department has not retracted its assessment.
Wright’s regular messages on X about climate science and clean energy have drawn blowback and corrections appended by followers as Community Notes. “I can’t claim to know what’s happening in Wright’s mind. But I do know what’s happening with his policy — and this weak messaging, in my view, points to the intractability of Wright’s position,” Heatmap’s Robinson Meyer wrote on Tuesday. Wright is both the chief lieutenant in Trump’s culture war against those who advocate for a transition to clean energy and the mouthpiece of the president’s effort to convince the country he’s fulfilling his promise to curb energy prices. Wright’s social media behavior, however, “is not how someone acts when he is focused on energy affordability above all,” Robinson wrote.
2. A copper mega merger just formed a $53 billion giant
The price of copper hit a record high this summer as the Trump administration slapped 50% tariffs on imports of the globally-traded metal needed for new electrical infrastructure and growth in demand far eclipsed any associated increase in supply. Now a mega-merger of two mining giants is set to capture a larger share of the fortunes generated by the new copper boom. Anglo American and Teck Resources inked a deal to merge, creating a mining behemoth with a combined market value of more than $53 billion. It’s one of the largest-ever deals in the mining industry. If completed, the tie-up will form one of the world’s top-five biggest copper producers, with mines stretching from the bottom of the Western Hemisphere in Chile to the top in Canada producing some 1.2 million metric tons of metal per year. More than 70% of that combined production would be copper.
“The energy industry has been dealing with the copper issue for years,” Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin reported in March, when prices were even lower. “More specifically, it’s worrying about how domestic and global production will be able to keep up with what forecasters anticipate could be massive demand.” This deal doesn’t necessarily quell those concerns, since, as The Wall Street Journal noted, it “also illustrates a challenge for bolstering commodity supply: Many miners figure it is easier and cheaper to buy rather than build mines.”
3. Energy Department unveils $134 million in funding for fusion
Wright’s posts about climate change and solar energy may be drawing criticism. But his agency’s support for nuclear energy has largely won praise across the political spectrum. That now includes fusion. On Wednesday, the Energy Department announced $134 million in funding for two programs designed to boost U.S. efforts to harness the type of atomic reaction that powers the sun, long considered the holy grail of clean energy. The agency pledged to give out a combined $128 million through the Fusion Innovative Research Engine to seven teams working on fusion energy science and technology. Another $6.1 million is set to flow to 20 projects through the Innovation network for Fusion Energy program to improve research in materials science, laser technologies, and fusion modeling. “DOE is unleashing the next frontier of American energy,” Wright said in a press release. “Fusion power holds the promise of limitless, reliable, American-made energy—and programs like INFUSE and FIRE ensure our innovators have the tools, talent, and partnerships to make it a reality.”
As I reported in this newsletter last month, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology spinout Commonwealth Fusion just raised one of the biggest venture rounds of the year. In July, Heatmap’s Katie Brigham reported on $10 million funding for the Seattle-area startup Avalanche Energy, which promises to build “micro” fusion reactors.
4. California completes its first solar-covered canal
Shadeless land is a constraint on solar power’s expansion, inspiring high-profile projects in Portugal, Brazil, and China to build vast floating panel arrays on dammed bodies of water, a whole sector of the industry called agrovoltaics that marries farming and solar power production, and recent studies forecasting huge potential to line highways with panels. A new 1.6-megawatt solar installation in California that just came online highlights another option involving a manmade waterway: covering canals. Project Nexus, a $20 million state-funded pilot, has transformed stretches of the Turlock Irrigation District's canal system throughout California's Central Valley into what Canary Media’s Maria Gallucci called “hubs of clean electricity generation in a remote area where cotton, tomatoes, almonds, and hundreds of other crops are grown.”
5. A rich Gulf kingdom backs Trump’s controversial deep-sea minerals push
President Donald Trump stirred a global controversy this year with his executive order directing the U.S. to stockpile minerals obtained through deep-sea mining, an as-yet nonexistent industry still awaiting a global agreement on international regulations that would create a global legal framework for commercially harvesting nodules from as deep as 20,000 feet down. As I previously reported in this newsletter, countries that opposed Trump’s push to unilaterally kick off mining without worldwide agreement on how to regulate the activities ended up siding with China, which opposed the U.S. move, along with conservationists, who say it risked damaging one of the last wildernesses untouched by humans. Yet this week Bahrain placed a big bet on the future of U.S. efforts, the Financial Times reported. The Gulf kingdom and U.S ally backed the California startup Impossible Metals’ plan to explore an area of ocean largely controlled by Beijing. Bahrain is also the first Middle Eastern country to sponsor the measure to legalize deep-sea mining at the obscure United Nations-linked agency, the Jamaica-headquartered International Seabed Authority. The investment is more proof that, as Katie wrote this week, “everybody wants to invest in critical mineral startups.”
THE KICKER
A view of the Russell Glacier in Kangerlussuaq, Greenland, where I visited in 2017. Alexander C. Kaufman
Anyone who has been to northern Greenland can tell you how eerily lifeless the ice cap can seem when you’re looking out to a boundless horizon of treeless frozen expanse. But in what looks like dirt spotted in ice cores taken from the outer edges of the polar cap are diatoms — single-celled algae with outer walls made of glass. Far from a new presence, these non-plant photosynthetic organisms were long believed to be entombed and dormant in ice. But researchers from Stanford University extracted diatoms from ice cores and recreated their environments in a lab. The scientists discovered that diatoms travel through the ice via narrow channels as thin as a strand of hair. “This is not 1980s-movie cryobiology,” Manu Prakash, associate professor of bioengineering in the Schools of Engineering and Medicine and senior author of the paper, said in a press release. “The diatoms are as active as we can imagine until temperatures drop all the way down to -15 [degrees Celsius], which is super surprising.”
A view of the Russell Glacier in Kangerlussuaq, Greenland, where I visited in 2017. Alexander C. Kaufman
