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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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The fundamentals are the same — it’s the tone that’s changed.
At some point in the past month, the hydrogen fuel cell developer Plug Power updated its website. Beneath a carousel explaining the hydrogen ecosystem and solutions for transporting fuel, the company’s home page now contains a section titled “Hydrogen at Work.”
“Hydrogen is key to energy independence, providing clean, reliable power while reducing reliance on imported fuels,” the text in this new box reads. “Plug’s hydrogen and fuel cell solutions strengthen the energy grid and enhance national security, positioning the U.S. as a leader in the global energy transition.”
It is fairly ordinary website copy, but to a keen reader, the text jumps out as an obvious Trump 2.0 tell. Plug Power — like many green economy companies — has pivoted to meet the political and economic moment, where “energy independence” and “energy dominance” are in and “climate” and “sustainability” are out.
“I am actually shocked every time I look at the website of a climate tech company that still uses the language from 12 months ago, from four months ago — that doesn’t do them any good,” Peter Atanasoff, the managing director and vice president of Scratch Media and Marketing, which helps B2B technology companies and climate tech businesses achieve growth and recognition, told me.
The shift in language is more significant than just brands chasing the latest buzzwords.
The first Trump administration saw broad-based pushback from the business community against Trump’s more inflammatory positions, especially by consumer-facing brands that played to the pussy hat-wearing, brunch-and-protest attitudes of the time. The CEOs of Facebook (now Meta), Nike, and Google issued statements of disappointment when the U.S. pulled out of the Paris Climate Agreement in 2017, and Tesla CEO Elon Musk even dropped out of the president’s business council over the decision. It was, needless to say, a very different time.
During Trump’s second term, he promised “retribution.” Many of the more moderate voices from his first administration are long gone, and there’s a palpable fear among nonprofits and businesses of drawing the wrong kind of attention from Washington, losing grant funding for saying the wrong thing. “The real trigger” for resulting differences in branding between the first and second Trump administrations has been “the change of tone and change of economic policy,” Atanasoff told me. “It is explicit opposition to any of these technologies."
The administration has launched an all-out assault not just on climate policy, but also on the very language of the energy transition. In a February memo obtained by E&E News, the Federal Emergency Management Agency listed 34 words to be erased from official documentation, including “global warming,” “carbon footprint,” “net zero,” and even “green.” As I’ve covered for Heatmap, farmers applying for Department of Agriculture grants have been encouraged to resubmit proposals with climate-focused language removed and “refocus … on expanding American energy production.” And at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, scientists have quickly learned to pivot to talking about “air pollution” rather than emissions, contending with a banned-words list of their own.
Lobbyists and clean energy companies that want to be in the administration’s good graces have adapted, as well. That has changed the tenor of green business at large. Alexander Bryden, who runs the Washington, D.C. office of Browning Environmental Communications, told me over email that tweaking brand language is “typical after any change of administration, particularly when there are significant shifts in policy.” But especially for organizations in the public eye, “it’s more important than ever to highlight the historic and potential economic benefits of environmental solutions — and show how they are supported by, and benefit, people across the political spectrum.”
The actual fundamentals of green business haven’t changed, though. On the contrary, in the first quarter of 2025, venture capitalists and private equity firms invested more than $5 billion in climate tech startups in the U.S., a 65% increase from the same period a year earlier, according to PitchBook data. While there are certainly obstacles like supply chain uncertainty and tariffs to contend with, especially for clean energy manufacturing, on the whole “it’s still a great time to start a climate startup,” Tommy Leep, the founder of the software-focused venture firm Jetstream, told my colleague Katie Brigham last November. His caveat? “Just don’t call it a climate startup.”
Roger Ballentine, the president of the management consulting service Green Strategies and the chairman of the White House Climate Change Task Force under President Bill Clinton, explained this thinking to me. “It’s what I refer to as climate capitalism, which is the realization that by incorporating climate change and its risks and opportunities into your business strategy, you’re actually going to be a more successful, more profitable, and more competitive company,” he said. Even with the recent economic turbulence, “That hasn’t changed. That’s not going to change.”
Where you do see adjustments, however, is “around the edges,” per Ballentine. Companies are attempting to match the frequency of the administration and, in turn, the broader policy ecosystem — a frequency that tends to be aggressive, assertive, and heavy on words like “dominance” and “security.” It might also take the form of decreasing the volume at which companies had previously shouted their climate bona fides.
Anya Nelson, the senior vice president of public relations at Scratch M+M, said her team has also advised touting “American-made production” in brand messaging, and reframing copy to focus on “the positive impacts and immediate business benefits” of the companies, rather than more idealistic messaging about climate goals that may have had stronger resonance during the Biden administration.
At this point, you may have noticed that I haven’t quoted any corporate brand officers. That’s not because I didn’t try to talk to any. (Even Plug Power, my example at the beginning of this story, didn’t respond to a request for comment on the change in their messaging.) Though the sudden prevalence of terms like “energy dominance” becomes conspicuous once you start to look for them, no one wants to draw the wrong kind of attention from the administration. It’s part of a greater trend of clamming up that my colleagues and I have experienced across sectors in our reporting, and at a time when even the word “green” can give you a black mark, I can’t say I don’t understand.
Ballentine, the Green Strategies president, dismissed reading too much into how language itself changes under President Trump. “If yesterday a new technology company was touting itself as a climate solution, and now it’s touting itself as a way to achieve energy dominance — I don’t care,” he said.
His thinking was more pragmatic. “Good business remains good business,” Ballentine went on. “Around the edges, will things change? Yes. General belt tightening? Yes. Fundamental change of direction? No.”
It might sound like branding agencies are encouraging companies to “play along” with the administration, but Nelson of Scratch M+M stressed that wasn’t what she was trying to say. At the end of the day, “your end goal is to be a viable company, right?” she said. “To be a thriving company that is going to change the world, first and foremost, you need to make sure you don’t go out of business.” The message might be more accurately summarized as “read the room.”
A report from Heatmap’s San Francisco Climate Week event with Tom Steyer.
Last Thursday at San Francisco Climate Week, Heatmap hosted an event with a lineup of industry leaders and experts to discuss the most promising up-and-coming climate tech innovations amidst a backdrop of tariff and tax credit uncertainty.
Guests at Heatmap's event, Climate Tech's Next Winners.Sean Vranizan
First up, Heatmap executive editor Robinson Meyer sat down with Tom Steyer, the billionaire investor and co-founder of Galvanize Climate Solutions, to explore the most promising climate technologies to scale. “No one's going to adopt new technologies to be nice,” Steyer noted. “They're gonna adopt new technologies because they're better, because they're a better deal, because they're cheaper or in some ways solve a pain point for the customer.” Steyer went on to emphasize that there is at least one “transformational and disruptive” idea for every six verticals in the climate industry — for example, measuring carbon sequestration in nature with machine learning andAI, a concept that was “literally unimaginable 5 years ago.”
Tom Steyer and Robinson Meyer.Sean Vranizan
As for the Trump-sized elephant in the room, Steyer encouraged climate tech startups to focus on “good leadership” as well as the willingness to adapt in this uncertain moment. “You’re gonna have hard times, and the world is going to change, and you’re going to have to figure out what to do,“ he said. Steyer also noted that all Americans, not only those working in climate tech, should understand the energy transition as a background condition of their careers. “If you want to be a screenwriter (...) be a screenwriter. But it’s really important that you put [the energy transition] into your screenwriting. If you‘re a banker (...) be a banker with an awareness of this issue. Bank the good stuff, not the bad stuff,” Steyer explained. He finished up the discussion with a remembrance of the late Pope Francis, a “tremendous human being for the planet.”
Sam D'Amico and Nico Lauricella.Sean Vranizan
Also on Thursday was a lightning talk between Nico Lauricella, Heatmap’s CEO and editor in chief, and Sam D’Amico, the founder and CEO of Impulse Labs, which sponsored the event. D'Amico explained that in addition to being an induction stove, Impulse’s Cooktop is “a way to get battery storage into people's homes” — a “concept car” for using batteries in appliances to create a more decentralized grid. Lauricella and D’Amico also discussed the impacts of Trump’s tariffs on clean tech companies like Impulse, with D’Amico advising other founders in the room to build prototypes based on the supply chain and to make sure they have options in terms of where their products are manufactured so they can keep up with changing trade policies.
Impulse's high-power Cooktop on display at the event.Sean Vranizan
Lastly, Heatmap News staff writer Katie Brigham hosted a panel with Gabriel Kra, managing director and co-founder at Prelude Ventures, Clea Kolster, partner and head of science at Lowercarbon Capital, and Rajesh Swaminathan, partner at Khosla Ventures. The group spoke about the unique circumstances facing investors in the climate technology space, what their firms are looking for when investing in the newest climate innovations, and how AI fits into the picture.
Katie Brigham, Clea Kolster, Gabriel Kra, and Rajesh Swaminathan.Sean Vranizan
All three panelists acknowledged that it’s a delicate time for clean tech investors and companies alike. “Volatility and uncertainty are the enemies of running and planning a business,” warned Kra. The true cost of the tariffs is therefore extremely high, Kra explained. Kolster agreed that things are generally gloomy in the investment space, but also highlighted the technologies that are currently thriving. Carbon removal, she pointed out, “is going better than ever. Contracts are being inked right now, in the past few weeks.” The companies and technologies she’s excited about, Kolster added, are building “cheaper, better, faster,” as Steyer pointed out earlier in the evening.
Swaminathan added that there will always be a certain element of risk when it comes to investing in emerging technologies. “Clean tech companies have so many single points of failure,” he said. “And you have to prop up each part with the right leadership team. You have to have strong pillars so that [your company] doesn’t break.”
Guests following the discussion.Sean Vranizan
Sean Vranizan
Sean Vranizan
Sean Vranizan
Sean Vranizan
Sean Vranizan
Guests at SFCW
Sean Vranizan
Thank you to our presenting sponsor, Impulse, as well as our supporting sponsor, V2 Communications, and our event host, IndieBio.
On DOJ lawsuits, reconciliation, and solar permitting
Current conditions: A month out from the start of hurricane season, the North Atlantic Ocean is about 2 degrees Fahrenheit cooler than it was this time last year• Passenger ferry crossings between New Zealand’s North and South Island remain suspended through Friday afternoon due to a severe windstorm• Thunderstorms are expected to settle over Louisville, Kentucky, this afternoon, leading to a potentially wet Kentucky Derby on Saturday at Churchill Downs.
The Justice Department filed lawsuits this week against Hawaii, Michigan, New York, and Vermont to block the states’ climate-motivated lawsuits against fossil fuel companies. The government’s lawsuit against Hawaii and Michigan, filed on Wednesday, seeks to block the states from suing major oil and gas companies over alleged climate damages, which the DOJ argues obstructs the Environmental Protection Agency’s authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. On Thursday, the DOJ also filed suit against New York and Vermont over their climate superfund laws, which would require fossil fuel companies to pay for damages caused by climate change, calling it a “transparent monetary-extraction scheme.” Attorney General Pamela Bondi argued all four laws are “burdensome and ideologically motivated” and “threaten American energy independence and our country’s economic and national security.”
The House Natural Resources Committee released its portion of Republicans’ budget package on Thursday evening. The proposal goes to markup next week, and is subject to change, but includes several significant measures across its 96 pages. Some include:
In a statement slamming the bill, Lydia Weiss, the senior director of government relations at The Wilderness Society, said the proposals in sum will “fund tax cuts for the rich while doing nothing to help the average American taxpayer.” You can read the full contents of the bill here.
The Bureau of Land Management has approved a new solar project in Yuma County, Arizona, after a temporary halt on permitting. The move “appears to be the first utility-scale solar facility on federal acreage approved by the Trump administration,” my colleague Jael Holzman writes in The Fight. The BLM additionally released a draft environmental review of a separate solar project, also in Arizona.
As Jael notes, “The fact BLM is willing to admit other solar projects could advance later on is significant after the sputtering seen in the earliest days of the Trump administration.” Her caveat, however, is that it’s unclear if this means solar permitting is a beneficiary of the president’s “energy dominance” agenda, or if “at any moment, a news cycle or disgruntled legislator could steal the president’s ear and make him angry at solar power.”
A view of Punta Gorda, Florida, in 2024 after Hurricane Milton.Joe Raedle/Getty Images
The major reinsurance company Swiss Re has released a lengthy report about the upward trend of insured losses in the United States. Among its findings:
Read more of Swiss Re’s findings in the report here.
The Trump administration has ordered the National Science Foundation to stop awarding new grants or supplying funds for existing grants “until further notice,” according to an email reviewed by Nature. Before the funding freeze, NSF leadership had recently directed its staffers to return grant proposals concerning “topics or activities” not “in alignment with agency priorities” to their applicants.
In the past two weeks, the NSF has terminated $739 million worth of grants, Nature adds. As one NSF staffer told the publication, the Trump administration is “butchering the gold standard merit review process that was established at NSF over decades.” Colin Carlson, who is researching pandemic-causing viruses at Yale University with a team of 50 funded by a $12.5 million NSF grant, said the freeze will “destroy people’s labs.” The NSF has also contributed enormously to climate science over the years, including funding the first major ice core drilling project in Greenland in 1980 to study historical carbon dioxide data, and more recently, using advanced climate modeling to predict extreme weather events better.
“Saying that the U.S. is striving for energy dominance except in the clean energy sector is like opening a steakhouse and forgetting the meat.” —Former Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm, writing for Heatmap about why real energy dominance requires preserving the IRA.