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The imminent closure of Duke University’s herbarium sparked an outcry in the natural sciences community. But the loss to climate science could be even worse.
Kathleen Pryer did not watch March Madness this year.
That isn’t unusual in and of itself — Pryer describes herself as “not a basketball person,” though that might still raise a few eyebrows this time of year at Duke University, her place of employment. But the professor of biology has been a bit distracted lately. For the past few months, she’s been on defense, fending off a loss of her own: the pending closure of the school’s herbarium.
A herbarium (or plural, herbaria) is a collection of preserved plants, typically dried and mounted on sheets of rigid paper. The oldest existing collection in the world, the Gherardo Cibo herbarium in Rome, dates back to the mid 1500s; many U.S. collections are well over a century old. Browsing digitized herbaria online, one can easily get sucked in by their unintended whimsy; though the preserved plants are scientific specimens, traditionally collected by botanists to be used in the study of taxonomy during Western biology’s golden age of naming things, the pages remind me more of the pale, beautiful botanical illustrations in my childhood copy of Thumbelina.
Duke’s herbarium turns 103 this year and contains 825,000 specimens, making it one of the largest collections in the country. But back in mid-February, Susan Alberts, Duke’s dean of natural sciences, sent an email to Pryer, who curates the herbarium, and four other associated faculty members to inform them that “it’s in the best interests of both Duke and the herbarium to find a new home or homes for these collections.”
Though there had long been rumblings about the future of Duke’s herbarium — calls for “strategic plans,” hand-wringing about funds, worry about hiring new staff — the news came as both a shock and a slap in the face to the faculty, chief among them Pryer. “It’s some kind of little stinky plot,” she told me, adding, “I didn’t just roll over when it happened. I reached out to absolutely everybody I could think of.”
The news of Duke’s herbarium closure ricocheted through the tight-knit natural sciences community. Mason Heberling, an associate curator in the Section of Botany at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, told me it should be a “wake-up call” for other researchers. The Duke herbarium is prestigious and hardly a “languishing collection,” he explained; researchers and faculty can easily slip into taking their herbaria for granted. “I’ve realized now that a huge part of my job as a curator will need to be explaining why these collections are important,” he said.
Swiftly, botanists and curators came to Duke’s defense. Opinion pieces and quotes decrying Duke’s decision appeared in the pages of The New York Times and Science. A petition went up on Change.org urging the school to reconsider its decision. Online fora burbled with discontent. “This may be the single worst thing to ever happen to Southeastern botany,” one post on Reddit read, with 64 additional comments piling on the administration for being “profit-obsessed business assholes.” “They could probably fund the entire thing with the salary of one head [basketball] coach,” grumbled another commenter.
The criticism of Duke’s decision is rooted in both a romantic nostalgia about herbaria — the same way you might feel fondly about hand-painted globes or cabinets of curiosities — and a very modern sense of scientific urgency. Researchers have only recently started leveraging the collections as invaluable pieces of data in the greater picture of climate change. “Herbaria are, in many ways, one of our best places to understand nature across space, time, and species,” Charles Davis, the curator of vascular plants at the nation’s largest private herbaria, at Harvard University, told me. “These collections are snapshots of events and occurrences in space and time that you just can’t easily replicate anywhere else. In fact, I would argue it’s impossible.”
Think of it this way: Worldwide, there are about 3,600 herbaria located in 193 different countries that collectively hold about 400 million specimens. Botanists estimate as much as half of the planet’s undiscovered flora could be found in herbaria backlogs. Barbara Thiers, the editor of the Index Herbariorum, a digital guide to the world’s collections, told me that when she was the director of the New York Botanical Garden Herbarium, “we had a huge room filled with unidentified species; I think there were 35,000 or 40,000 specimens in there.” That wasn’t for lack of effort — Thiers said that for many of the plant groups, there simply aren’t any working experts or published literature for curators to consult.
Because the climate is changing so fast, many plants in herbaria will go extinct before they’re formally discovered and named, a process known as a “dark extinction.” “It’s a very sobering feeling to touch the leaves of a tree that doesn’t exist anymore,” Erin Zimmerman, an evolutionary biologist and author of the forthcoming book Unrooted: Botany, Motherhood, and the Fight to Save an Old Science, told me, recalling coming across such a specimen in an herbarium while doing her own research. She likened herbaria to a library, but in her description I also heard echoes of a church: “The specimens are sometimes very old; you have to be very gentle with them, which just adds to the sense of holding something precious,” she went on.
Dwindling biodiversity is only the most obvious way herbaria are critical to 21st-century science. “Phenology, whether it’s when plants flower or when birds migrate, is one of the most important signals of climate change response,” Davis, the Harvard curator, said. Still, our long-term datasets aren’t very robust; research on how plants are changing with warming climates typically dates back only 25 to 30 years, tends to concentrate on the U.S. and Western Europe, and centers on easily observable phenomena, like the leafing out of woody trees. Researchers can turn to herbaria for centuries-old records of where certain plants grew and when they flowered, helping to bridge gaps in our understanding.
Heberling, of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, tracks environmental changes in his research, but he didn’t start using herbaria until well after he’d obtained his Ph.D. Only then did he realize “herbarium specimens are incredible archives of the past,” he told me.
“You can look at the tiny pores, the stomata, on the leaves” of a plant in a herbarium and “see how that has changed over time with increased carbon dioxide,” Heberling said. Scientists have even used this method to create CO2 records.
Admittedly, climate science is still a relatively cutting-edge use case for the herbarium; according to Davis’ research, “global change biology” remains one of the least popular ways to leverage herbaria, well behind “taxonomic monographs” and “species distributions” that still dominate the field. Still, “there are things that, five to 10 years ago, I’d never even imagined we’d be doing today with herbarium specimens,” he told me.
As a result, Duke’s herbarium closure has made some question the university’s commitment to climate research — something that Alberts, the school’s natural sciences dean, emphatically refuted when I raised the question with her. She told me that a rough search revealed that only 23 of the 2,000 papers published by Duke researchers over the past few decades on climate change contained the word “herbarium” anywhere in them. “With my knowledge about all of the climate change research that’s been going on at Duke, the herbarium is not really central to whether or not Duke studies climate change,” she said.
For her part, Pryer has bristled at the administration’s insinuations that the herbarium is of limited use to students and faculty on campus. “You don’t measure a collection by who uses it,” she told me. “As I’ve been naughty enough to say, it’s not a toilet. People outside — the global community — uses it. That’s how you measure its value; things like 90 refereed publications a year [across all disciplines] cite the Duke collections.” Pryer can quickly tick off the climate projects that have come through the herbarium’s halls, including her recent supervision of a local high schooler’s research paper that found the pink lady’s slipper is flowering in the area 17 days earlier than it used to.
Duke is “not an appropriate home for a herbarium that is this large and valuable” for a number of reasons, according to Alberts, ranging from the need to hire new faculty to manage it (Pryer and several of her colleagues are approaching retirement) to the collection’s current building needing renovations. “I have had people email me saying, ‘I know you have enough money, I know you have the facilities.’ I’m like, ‘I’m sorry, you should tell me who you’re talking to, because we don’t,’” Alberts said. She added that she plans to be personally involved in finding the right home for Duke’s herbarium over the next several years.
After all, it’s not like the potential untapped climate records in the Duke collection are being destroyed (though both Pryer and Davis told me they’ve had deans wonder aloud if they could be, since many herbaria are now digitized). The goal is only to move the collection somewhere where it might be better utilized.
Thiers, though, said this is exactly what makes the natural science community so alarmed. As the collection is split up, ideally, the Index Herbariorum would record where Duke’s specimens get sent so scientists can still find them. But when new collections absorb the materials, curators will weed out duplicates, sending unneeded pages elsewhere — at which point specimens can fall between the cracks. “Before you know it, individual specimens will be lost,” Thiers said. “I can almost guarantee that as these secondary moves happen, people will not keep up with the database records.”
There is also a worst-case scenario everyone seemed nervous to mention: that Duke’s collection, in whole or in part, will end up in storage somewhere. Herbarium specimens are extremely susceptible to insect damage and must be kept in expensive, climate-controlled cabinets and rooms. “If they’re putting boxes in a storage storeroom someplace, they’ll be worthless in no time,” Thiers warned. The unidentified plants and uncollected climate data — all of it could be lost. And the cruelest part? Scientists wouldn’t even know what they are losing; it’s a dark extinction of a dark extinction.
When I spoke with Alberts, she said there were no updates on the administration’s plans for the herbarium. She expressed sympathy, though, for the faculty who oppose the administration’s decision. The herbarium “is their life’s work, and it’s important that they have a voice in this process,” she said.
Pryer is determined to keep fighting, even if this isn’t exactly how she’d pictured spending her golden years at Duke. “It’s having an impact on my research and on my health,” she told me. “It’s been pretty unrelenting. I’m anxious for something to resolve.”
She looked tired. There was a faculty meeting later in the day, and she hoped she’d be able to get more clarity about the administration’s decision then. “I don’t want this to go on forever,” she said. “But I also don’t want there to be a decision that makes Duke look insane.”
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On a late-night House vote, Tesla’s slump, and carbon credits
Current conditions: Tropical storm Chantal has a 40% chance of developing this weekend and may threaten Florida, Georgia, and the Carolinas • French far-right leader Marine Le Pen is campaigning on a “grand plan for air conditioning” amid the ongoing record-breaking heatwave in Europe • Great fireworks-watching weather is in store tomorrow for much of the East and West Coasts.
The House moved closer to a final vote on President Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” after passing a key procedural vote around 3 a.m. ET on Thursday morning. “We have the votes,” House Speaker Mike Johnson told reporters after the rule vote, adding, “We’re still going to meet” Trump’s self-imposed July 4 deadline to pass the megabill. A floor vote on the legislation is expected as soon as Thursday morning.
GOP leadership had worked through the evening to convince holdouts, with my colleagues Katie Brigham and Jael Holzman reporting last night that House Freedom Caucus member Ralph Norman of North Carolina said he planned to advance the legislation after receiving assurances that Trump would “deal” with the Inflation Reduction Act’s clean energy tax credits, particularly for wind and solar energy projects, which the Senate version phases out more slowly than House Republicans wanted. “It’s not entirely clear what the president could do to unilaterally ‘deal with’ tax credits already codified into law,” Brigham and Holzman write, although another Republican holdout, Representative Chip Roy of Texas, made similar allusions to reporters on Wednesday.
Tesla delivered just 384,122 cars in the second quarter of 2025, a 13.5% slump from the 444,000 delivered in the same quarter of 2024, marking the worst quarterly decline in the company’s history, Barron’s reports. The slump follows a similarly disappointing Q1, down 13% year-over-year, after the company’s sales had “flatlined for the first time in over a decade” in 2024, InsideEVs adds.
Despite the drop, Tesla stock rose 5% on Wednesday, with Wedbush analyst Dan Ives calling the Q2 results better than some had expected. “Fireworks came early for Tesla,” he wrote, although Barron’s notes that “estimates for the second quarter of 2025 started at about 500,000 vehicles. They started to drop precipitously after first-quarter deliveries fell 13% year over year, missing Wall Street estimates by some 40,000 vehicles.”
The European Commission proposed its 2040 climate target on Wednesday, which, for the first time, would allow some countries to use carbon credits to meet their emissions goals. EU Commissioner for Climate, Net Zero, and Clean Growth Wopke Hoekstra defended the decision during an appearance on Euronews on Wednesday, saying the plan — which allows developing nations to meet a limited portion of their emissions goals with the credits — was a chance to “build bridges” with countries in Africa and Latin America. “The planet doesn’t care about where we take emissions out of the air,” he separately told The Guardian. “You need to take action everywhere.” Green groups, which are critical of the use of carbon credits, slammed the proposal, which “if agreed [to] by member states and passed by the EU parliament … is then supposed to be translated into an international target,” The Guardian writes.
Around half of oil executives say they expect to drill fewer wells in 2025 than they’d planned for at the start of the year, according to a Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas survey. Of the respondents at firms producing more than 10,000 barrels a day, 42% said they expected a “significant decrease in the number of wells drilled,” Bloomberg adds. The survey further indicates that Republican policy has been at odds with President Trump’s “drill, baby, drill” rhetoric, as tariffs have increased the cost of completing a new well by more than 4%. “It’s hard to imagine how much worse policies and D.C. rhetoric could have been for U.S. E&P companies,” one anonymous executive said in the report. “We were promised by the administration a better environment for producers, but were delivered a world that has benefited OPEC to the detriment of our domestic industry.”
Fine-particulate air pollution is strongly associated with lung cancer-causing DNA mutations that are more traditionally linked to smoking tobacco, a new study by researchers at the University of California, San Diego, and the National Cancer Institute has found. The researchers looked at the genetic code of 871 non-smokers’ lung tumors in 28 regions across Europe, Africa, and Asia and found that higher levels of local air pollution correlated with more cancer-driving mutations in the respective tumors.
Surprisingly, the researchers did not find a similar genetic correlation among non-smokers exposed to secondhand smoke. George Thurston, a professor of medicine and population health at New York University, told Inside Climate News that a potential reason for this result is that fine-particulate air pollution — which is emitted by cars, industrial activities, and wildfires — is more widespread than exposure to secondhand smoke. “We are engulfed in fossil-fuel-burning pollution every single day of our lives, all day long, night and day,” he said, adding, “I feel like I’m in the Matrix, and I’m the only one that took the red pill. I know what’s going on, and everybody else is walking around thinking, ‘This stuff isn’t bad for your health.’” Today, non-smokers account for up to 25% of lung cancer cases globally, with the worst air quality pollution in the United States primarily concentrated in the Southwest.
EPA
National TV news networks aired a combined 4 hours and 20 minutes of coverage about the record-breaking late-June temperatures in the Midwest and East Coast — but only 4% of those segments mentioned the heat dome’s connection to climate change, a new report by Media Matters found.
“We had enough assurance that the president was going to deal with them.”
A member of the House Freedom Caucus said Wednesday that he voted to advance President Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” after receiving assurances that Trump would “deal” with the Inflation Reduction Act’s clean energy tax credits – raising the specter that Trump could try to go further than the megabill to stop usage of the credits.
Representative Ralph Norman, a Republican of North Carolina, said that while IRA tax credits were once a sticking point for him, after meeting with Trump “we had enough assurance that the president was going to deal with them in his own way,” he told Eric Garcia, the Washington bureau chief of The Independent. Norman specifically cited tax credits for wind and solar energy projects, which the Senate version would phase out more slowly than House Republicans had wanted.
It’s not entirely clear what the president could do to unilaterally “deal with” tax credits already codified into law. Norman declined to answer direct questions from reporters about whether GOP holdouts like himself were seeking an executive order on the matter. But another Republican holdout on the bill, Representative Chip Roy of Texas, told reporters Wednesday that his vote was also conditional on blocking IRA “subsidies.”
“If the subsidies will flow, we’re not gonna be able to get there. If the subsidies are not gonna flow, then there might be a path," he said, according to Jake Sherman of Punchbowl News.
As of publication, Roy has still not voted on the rule that would allow the bill to proceed to the floor — one of only eight Republicans yet to formally weigh in. House Speaker Mike Johnson says he’ll, “keep the vote open for as long as it takes,” as President Trump aims to sign the giant tax package by the July 4th holiday. Norman voted to let the bill proceed to debate, and will reportedly now vote yes on it too.
Earlier Wednesday, Norman said he was “getting a handle on” whether his various misgivings could be handled by Trump via executive orders or through promises of future legislation. According to CNN, the congressman later said, “We got clarification on what’s going to be enforced. We got clarification on how the IRAs were going to be dealt with. We got clarification on the tax cuts — and still we’ll be meeting tomorrow on the specifics of it.”
Neither Norman nor Roy’s press offices responded to a request for comment.
The foreign entities of concern rules in the One Big Beautiful Bill would place gigantic new burdens on developers.
Trump campaigned on cutting red tape for energy development. At the start of his second term, he signed an executive order titled, “Unleashing Prosperity Through Deregulation,” promising to kill 10 regulations for each new one he enacted.
The order deems federal regulations an “ever-expanding morass” that “imposes massive costs on the lives of millions of Americans, creates a substantial restraint on our economic growth and ability to build and innovate, and hampers our global competitiveness.” It goes on to say that these regulations “are often difficult for the average person or business to understand,” that they are so complicated that they ultimately increase the cost of compliance, as well as the risks of non-compliance.
Reading this now, the passage echoes the comments I’ve heard from industry groups and tax law experts describing the incredibly complex foreign entities of concern rules that Congress — with the full-throated backing of the Trump administration — is about to impose on clean energy projects and manufacturers. Under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, wind and solar, as well as utility-scale energy storage, geothermal, nuclear, and all kinds of manufacturing projects will have to abide by restrictions on their Chinese material inputs and contractual or financial ties with Chinese entities in order to qualify for tax credits.
“Foreign entity of concern” is a U.S. government term referring to entities that are “owned by, controlled by, or subject to the jurisdiction or direction of” any of four countries — Russia, Iran, North Korea, and most importantly for clean energy technology, China.
Trump’s tax bill requires companies to meet increasingly strict limits on the amount of material from China they use in their projects and products. A battery factory starting production next year, for example, would have to ensure that 60% of the value of the materials that make up its products have no connection to China. By 2030, the threshold would rise to 85%. The bill lays out similar benchmarks and timelines for clean electricity projects, as well as other kinds of manufacturing.
But how companies should calculate these percentages is not self-evident. The bill also forbids companies from collecting the tax credits if they have business relationships with “specified foreign entities” or “foreign-influenced entities,” terms with complicated definitions that will likely require guidance from the Treasury for companies to be sure they pass the test.
Regulatory uncertainty could stifle development until further guidance is released, but how long that takes will depend on if and when the Trump administration prioritizes getting it done. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act contains a lot of other new tax-related provisions that were central to the Trump campaign, including a tax exemption for tips, which are likely much higher on the department’s to-do list.
Tax credit implementation was a top priority for the Biden administration, and even with much higher staffing levels than the department currently has, it took the Treasury 18 months to publish initial guidance on foreign entities of concern rules for the Inflation Reduction Act’s electric vehicle tax credit. “These things are so unbelievably complicated,” Rachel McCleery, a former senior advisor at the Treasury under Biden, told me.
McCleery questioned whether larger, publicly-owned companies would be able to proceed with major investments in things like battery manufacturing plants until that guidance is out. She gave the example of a company planning to pump out 100,000 batteries per year and claim the per-kilowatt-hour advanced manufacturing tax credit. “That’s going to look like a pretty big number in claims, so you have to be able to confidently and assuredly tell your shareholder, Yep, we’re good, we qualify, and that requires a certification” by a tax counsel, she said. To McCleery, there’s an open question as to whether any tax counsel “would even provide a tax opinion for publicly-traded companies to claim credits of this size without guidance.”
John Cornwell, the director of policy at the Good Energy Collective, which conducts research and advocacy for nuclear power, echoed McCleery’s concerns. “Without very clear guidelines from the Treasury and IRS, until those guidelines are in place, that is going to restrict financing and investment,” Cornwell told me.
Understanding what the law requires will be the first challenge. But following it will involve tracking down supply chain data that may not exist, finding alternative suppliers that may not be able to fill the demand, and establishing extensive documentation of the origins of components sourced through webs of suppliers, sub-suppliers, and materials processors.
The Good Energy Collective put out an issue brief this week describing the myriad hurdles nuclear developers will face in trying to adhere to the tax credit rules. Nuclear plants contain thousands of components, and documenting the origin of everything from “steam generators to smaller items like specialized fasteners, gaskets, and electronic components will introduce substantial and costly administrative burdens,” it says. Additionally the critical minerals used in nuclear projects “often pass through multiple processing stages across different countries before final assembly,” and there are no established industry standards for supply chain documentation.
Beyond the documentation headache, even just finding the materials could be an issue. China dominates the market for specialized nuclear-grade materials manufacturing and precision component fabrication, the report says, and alternative suppliers are likely to charge premiums. Establishing new supply chains will take years, but Trump’s bill will begin enforcing the sourcing rules in 2026. The rules will prove even more difficult for companies trying to build first-of-a-kind advanced nuclear projects, as those rely on more highly specialized supply chains dominated by China.
These challenges may be surmountable, but that will depend, again, on what the Treasury decides, and when. The Department’s guidance could limit the types of components companies have to account for and simplify the documentation process, or it could not. But while companies wait for certainty, they may also be racking up interest. “The longer there are delays, that can have a substantial risk of project success,” Cornwell said.
And companies don’t have forever. Each of the credits comes with a phase-out schedule. Wind manufacturers can only claim the credits until 2028. Other manufacturers have until 2030. Credits for clean power projects will start to phase down in 2034. “Given the fact that a lot of these credits start lapsing in the next few years, there’s a very good chance that, because guidance has not yet come out, you’re actually looking at a much smaller time frame than than what is listed in the bill,” Skip Estes, the government affairs director for Securing America’s Energy Future, or SAFE, told me.
Another issue SAFE has raised is that the way these rules are set up, the foreign sourcing requirements will get more expensive and difficult to comply with as the value of the tax credits goes down. “Our concern is that that’s going to encourage companies to forego the credit altogether and just continue buying from the lowest common denominator, which is typically a Chinese state-owned or -influenced monopoly,” Estes said.
McCleery had another prediction — the regulations will be so burdensome that companies will simply set up shop elsewhere. “I think every industry will certainly be rethinking their future U.S. investments, right? They’ll go overseas, they’ll go to Canada, which dumped a ton of carrots and sticks into industry after we passed the IRA,” she said.
“The irony is that Republicans have historically been the party of deregulation, creating business friendly environments. This is completely opposite, right?”