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“You can’t just divest from the eco-right after the election,” contends Johannes Ackva of Founder Pledge.
Johannes Ackva likes a contrarian bet. Back in 2020, when he launched the climate program at Founders Pledge, a nonprofit that connects entrepreneurs to philanthropic causes, he sought out “surgical interventions” to support technologies that didn’t already enjoy the widespread popularity of wind turbines and solar panels, such as advanced nuclear reactors and direct air carbon capture.
By late 2023, however, the Biden administration’s legislative sweep was directing billions to the very range of technologies Ackva previously saw as neglected. So he turned his attention to shoring up those political wins.
The modern climate movement came into its own demanding that the world stop shrinking from inconvenient truths. But as polls increasingly showed the 2024 election trending toward Republicans, Ackva saw few funders propping up advocates with any influence over the GOP. Founders Pledge pumped millions into Deploy/US, a climate group where former Republican Representative Carlos Curbelo of Florida served as the top adviser, which then distributed the money to upward of 30 right-leaning climate groups, including the American Conservation Coalition and the Evangelical Environmental Network.
The bipartisan gamble paid off. In April 2024, Founders Pledge received an anonymous $40 million donation to bolster its efforts. Now an anonymous donor has granted Founders Pledge’s climate fund another $50 million, Heatmap has learned.
Founders Pledge declined to say whether the money came from the same unnamed source or separate donors. But the influx of funding has “radically transformed our ability to make large grants,” Ackva told me, noting that the budget before 2024 came out to about $10 million per year.
“The word exponential is overused,” he said. “But that’s roughly the trajectory.”
Amid the so-called green freeze that followed the Trump administration’s rollback of climate funding, Founders Pledge has joined other climate philanthropies in stepping in to back projects that have lost money. When Breakthrough Energy shuttered its climate program in March, Founders Pledge gave $3.5 million to serve as the primary funding for the launch of the Innovation Initiative, started by former staff from the Bill Gates-backed nonprofit.
Ackva said his organization is looking to invest in climate efforts across the political spectrum. But Founders Pledge’s focus on right-of-center groups wasn’t an election-year gimmick.
“You can’t just divest from the eco-right after the election,” he said. “That’s not an authentic way to build a civil society ecosystem.”
As Republicans in Congress proceed with their gutting of green funding, including through Trump’s One Big, Beautiful Bill Act, Ackva said it’s too soon to say whether the political strategy is paying off.
“If you think of grantmaking as making bets, some bets exceed others sooner, but that doesn’t make them bad bets,” Ackva told me. “Ultimately, philanthropy cannot define how a given policy goes. You can adjust the probabilities, maybe level the bets. But obviously it’s larger forces at play that shape how the One Big, Beautiful Bill gets made.”
The Senate may save or even expand parts of the IRA that support baseload power, e.g. nuclear and geothermal. But regardless, Ackva said, climate advocates are making a mistake training their focus so intently on the fate of this one law.
“It’s kind of the only thing that’s being discussed,” he said.
Meanwhile the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, better known as the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, is set for reauthorization next fall. The Energy Act of 2020 is slated for renewal this year. And funding for the Department of Energy is up for debate as the White House now pushes to expand the Loan Programs Office’s lending authority for nuclear projects by $750 million.
“Those are things we would see as at least as important as the Inflation Reduction Act,” Ackva said.
Given those deadlines, Ackva said he expected other donors to press advocates for plans last year on how to sway Republicans toward more ambitious bills this Congress. But after former Vice President Kamala Harris took over the Democratic ticket last year, he said he’d heard from his grantees “that they were asked what they were going to do with a Harris trifecta.”
“Everyone was betting on Harris to win,” he said. “There’s a very strong ideological lean among climate funders to a degree that was frankly a little bit shocking.”
The partisan divide over climate wasn’t always so pronounced. In 2008, the Republican presidential nominee, John McCain, ran on a more ambitious decarbonization platform than what President Barack Obama proposed in the White House.
There are dueling — though not mutually exclusive — narratives about how the American climate movement over-indexed on one side of the political spectrum. Both stories start in 2010.
The version liberals and leftists will find familiar is one that blames fossil fuel megadonors such as Charles and David Koch for aggressively promoting climate denial among Republican lawmakers.
The version told by Ted Nordhaus, the founder of the Breakthrough Institute think tank where Ackva got his start years before joining Founders Pledge, starts with the failure of the Obama-era cap-and-trade bill to pass through Congress.
When the legislation “went up in flames in 2010,” Nordhaus told me, a bunch of environmental philanthropies hired Harvard professor Theda Skocpol to author a 145-page report on what triggered the blaze.
“The report concluded that the problem is we were too focused on the technocratic, inside-the-Beltway stuff,” Nordhaus summarized. “We needed to build political power so the next time there’s an opportunity to do big climate policy, we would have the political power to put a price on carbon.”
Out of that finding came what Nordhaus called the “two-pronged, boots-on-the-ground” era of the movement, which backed college campus campaigns to divest from fossil fuels and also efforts to prevent new fossil fuel infrastructure such as the Keystone XL pipeline.
Reasonable people could debate the fiduciary merits of scrapping investments in natural gas companies or the value of blocking oil infrastructure whose cancellation spurred more shipments of crude on rail lines that face higher risk of a spill or explosion than pipelines. But once supporting fossil fuel divestment or opposing pipelines became the key litmus tests activists used to determine if a Democrat running for office took climate change seriously, the issue became more ideological.
“That made it impossible for any Democrat to become a moderate on climate, and made it impossible for any Republican to be a moderate on climate,” Nordhaus said. “The Republican Party has its own craziness and radicalism, but a bunch of that is negative polarization.”
To fund an effective “climate right,” Nordhaus said, Founders Pledge should seek out groups that don’t explicitly focus on the climate or environment at all.
“I’d be looking at which groups are all-in on U.S. natural gas, which has been the biggest driver of decarbonization in the U.S. over the last 15 years; which groups are all in and really doing work on nuclear; and which groups are doing work on permitting reform,” Nordhaus said. “That’s how you’re going to make progress with Republicans.”
I asked Ackva where the line would be for funding an eco right. Would Founders Pledge back groups that — like some green-leaning elements of Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s party or allies of France’s Marine Le Pen — support draconian restrictions on immigration in the name of reducing national emissions from the increased population?
“That would not be appropriate,” Ackva told me. “When we say we’re funding the eco right, like when we’re funding groups on the left or in the center, the things they are proposing don’t need to be exactly the things we will be prioritizing, but they need to be plausible, high-impact solutions.”
To Emmet Penney, a senior fellow focused on energy at the right-leaning Foundation for American Innovation, it’s an obvious play. The green left that has long dominated climate policy debates “is premised on aggressive permitting and environmental law that makes it impossible to actually build anything useful toward addressing the things they’re most afraid of.”
“It’s become clear to anyone who wants to build anything that what the environmental left has to offer simply doesn't work,” he told me. “Naturally, more centrist organizations who might not even otherwise be slated as right-wing now look that way and are becoming increasingly attractive to people who are interested in building.”
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Current conditions: Typhoon Ragasa slammed into East Asia as the year’s strongest storm to date, killing 14 and leaving dozens missing in southern Taiwan and forcing more than 400,000 to evacuate in China • Hurricane Gabrielle intensified into the second major hurricane in the Atlantic this season, churning rip currents on East Coast beaches in the U.S. and lashing Europe with heavy rain later this week • Argentina is facing an ongoing drought.
President Donald Trump speaking at the U.N. Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images
In his speech to the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday, President Donald Trump called climate change “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world.” He complained that scientists used to warn the governments about “global cooling … then they said global warming will kill the world.” Yet “all of these predictions made by the United Nations and many others, often for bad reasons, were wrong. They were made by stupid people” from countries with “no chance for success.” He urged other nations that “if you don’t get away from this green scam, your country is going to fail.”
Scientists first suggested over a century ago that the carbon dioxide released from burning fossil fuels could create a greenhouse effect warming the planet and destabilizing the climate norms in which human beings evolved to survive. As global emissions of carbon and other planet-heating gases have surged over the past several decades, the Earth’s average temperature has risen by more than 1 degree Celsius, an increase that the overwhelming majority of scientists around the world attribute to pollution from fossil fuels and agriculture. The Trump administration issued a report written by contrarians who raised the possibility that climate change won’t be as bad as most scientists say, but more than 1,000 peer-reviewed researchers signed onto a letter condemning the findings. In a statement on the president’s UN speech, Gina McCarthy, the Obama-era Environmental Protection Agency chief and the Biden administration’s climate policy director, said Trump “continues to embarrass the U.S. on the global stage and undermine the interests of Americans at home. He’s rejecting our government’s responsibility to protect Americans from the increasingly intense and frequent disasters linked to climate change that unleash havoc on our country.” For more on the basics of climate change, you can consult this explainer by Heatmap’s Jeva Lange.
As part of this week’s New York Climate Week, we’re hosting Heatmap House, a live journalism exploring the future of cities, energy, technology, and artificial intelligence. We’ll also be livestreaming all day for those who aren’t able to join in person. Register here and tune in any time from 10:30 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. EST on Wednesday to catch Heatmap journalists including Robinson Meyer, Emily Pontecorvo, Katie Brigham, and Matthew Zeitlin, in conversation with the likes of Senator Brian Schatz and executives from Amazon, Microsoft, and Duke Energy. We hope you’ll join us!
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Rhode Island’s biggest labor federation has brokered a deal for union workers to carry out the construction on the SouthCoast Wind project, a 2.4-gigawatt offshore turbine array — and won what the Rhode Island AFL-CIO called the first agreement in the nation guaranteeing organized labor handles all the operations and maintenance of the facility. On a panel I moderated for the Climate Jobs National Resource Center on Tuesday evening, Rhode Island’s AFL-CIO president, Patrick Crowley, told me the “labor peace agreement” will help the union organize more workers in the offshore-wind industry. “The labor movement is in this to win, and we’re not ready to give up the fight yet,” he told me. “If developers want to have a winning strategy, they have to partner with organized labor, because we’re going to make sure that, come hell or high water, we get these things built.”
After a federal judge lifted Trump’s stop-work order halting construction on the Revolution Wind farm off Rhode Island’s coast, a project that was 80% complete before the president’s abrupt intervention, Crowley said executives immediately directed workers onto boats to restart work on the turbines.
Microreactor developer Oklo’s stock price has been on a tear for months, surging to $21 billion in September despite no revenue or completed facilities. That’s starting the change. On Tuesday, the company broke ground on its debut nuclear plant at the Idaho National Laboratory. The California startup, which is also seeking to construct the nation’s first nuclear recycling plant, is the only company in the Department of Energy’s newly established Reactor Pilot Program to secure two projects in the federal effort to prove that new reactor technologies – Oklo’s tiny reactors use a different and rarer kind of coolant and fuel than the entire U.S. commercial fleet – can successfully sustain fission reactions by next July.
“As advancements in artificial intelligence drive up electricity demands, projects like this are critical to ensuring the United States can meet that need and remain at the forefront of the global AI arms race,” Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum said in a statement.
Earlier this month, the federal Defense Logistics Agency backed Xerion Advanced Battery Corp. to help the Ohio-based startup’s efforts to commercialize a novel technology for processing cobalt for batteries. Now, as I reported in an exclusive for Heatmap on Tuesday, the company is applying its approach to refining gallium, another key industrial metal over which China has a monopoly grip.
It’s not the so-called DLA’s only push into minerals. On Tuesday, Reuters reported that the agency is seeking to stockpile up to $40 million worth of scandium oxide over the next five years. The agency plans to buy the rare earth element used as an alloying agent used in aerospace, defense, and automotive technologies from mining giant Rio Tinto.
A team of researchers in China found a way to turn clothianidin, a widely used pesticide notorious for accumulating in soil and crops and harming human health, into a nutrient for plants that removes the chemical from the dirt. Scientists at Hunan Agricultural University developed a novel biochar-based catalyst that converts the pesticide residues into ammonium nitrogen, a form of fertilizer that helps crops grow. “Instead of simply eliminating pesticides, we can recycle their nitrogen content back into the soil as fertilizer,” Hongmei Liu, a co-author of the study, said in a press release. “It offers a win–win solution for food safety and sustainable agriculture.”
Rob and Jesse talk to Ember’s Kingsmill Bond about how electricity is reshaping global geopolitics.
A new stack of electricity technologies — including solar panels, batteries, electric vehicles, and power electronics — seem to be displacing fossil fuels across China and the developing world. Are we watching an irresistible technological revolution happen? Or is something weirder going on — something that has far more to do with China’s singular scale and policy goals than physics and economics?
Kingsmill Bond argues that a global electrotech revolution has already begun — and that it will soon sweep Europe and the United States, too. Bond is an energy strategist at Ember, a London-based electricity data think tank. He previously worked for more than 30 years as a financial market analyst and strategist, including at Deutsche Bank and Citibank.
On this week’s show, Rob and Jesse talk with Bond about what the electrotech revolution looks like worldwide in 2025, why electricity will win out against fossil fuels, and how American and European climate policy should respond to this moment — and if they can respond at all. Shift Key is hosted by Robinson Meyer, the founding executive editor of Heatmap, and Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University.
Subscribe to “Shift Key” and find this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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Here is an excerpt from our conversation.
Robinson Meyer: How do we know this is a true solar, battery, EV-led revolution — with the full electrotech, the full beautiful, zero-carbon electrotech stack — and not just the continued march of electrification, which is as happy to accept energy from giant coal plants as it is to accept energy from solar panels.
Kingsmill Bond: It is always fun to debate this, but the point I think you nearly said — countries don’t have solar, but they do have coal — that’s the whole point. Everyone’s got lots of solar today. Unless you’re talking about mine mouth coal and existing assets, solar also beats coal. And that’s why we are spending $400 billion a year on expanding our solar and $40 billion a year, whatever it is, on expanding coal in a very small number of locations.
This coal pathway to development was the China path up to 2000, but they’ve kind of opened up a new pathway that other countries can now take. The classic example now is India, which is clearly taking a very different pathway to that taken by China 20 or 25 years ago. And incidentally, it’s a similar story in the transport market.
Certainly until recently — and indeed, even now for those who haven’t got the memo — are still forecasting that the emerging markets will follow the U.S. development path and have 16 barrels of oil per person per day of demand. But actually, China’s peaked at two and is already falling, and you’re going to see other countries following that path simply because it’s a lot cheaper. Whether or not this was by genius or design or luck, but the Chinese happened to have stumbled into a very, very successful path of finding a cheaper energy source — or a better mousetrap, as it were. I think that that’s what’s now happening across the emerging markets.
If I may make one other point, let us not forget that the emerging markets are going down this path very quickly. And to give you a couple of stats on this, the classic one is the fact that from our calculations, two thirds of the emerging markets, by design, already have a higher share of solar in their electricity system than the United States, which is astonishing given that the United States is a global leader in so many other respects. In terms of electrification, it’s a quarter of the emerging markets, also, ahead of the U.S. — or Europe, actually, for that matter.
And so we are seeing here that the emerging markets are going down a new path, which was not expected. And if you contrast that with the internet, for example — after 2000, internet was a pretty clear, standard graph of the U.S. leads and then Japan follows — and Western Europe, and then China, and then the other markets. But this time around, these folks are streaming into these technologies much earlier than expected.
Mentioned:
Ember’s research on solar-plus-batteries
Oxford’s Doyne Farmer on how clean energy tech will get cheaper
Jesse’s upshift; Rob’s upshift.
This episode of Shift Key is sponsored by …
Hydrostor is building the future of energy with Advanced Compressed Air Energy Storage. Delivering clean, reliable power with 500-megawatt facilities sited on 100 acres, Hydrostor’s energy storage projects are transforming the grid and creating thousands of American jobs. Learn more at hydrostor.ca.
Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.
Xerion is using molten salt to refine the key battery mineral domestically and efficiently.
When John Busbee started his battery technology company in 2010, his strategy was about making just one small part that could be widely used by other manufacturers. He launched Xerion Advanced Battery Corp. at a University of Illinois startup incubator in a bid to commercialize a novel breakthrough in nanostructured foam for the internal components of batteries.
That same logic has since led the company to produce other key materials for the energy transition, including cobalt and, now, gallium, Heatmap has learned.
The same year Busbee started Xerion, some 7,000 miles west across the Pacific, China cut off shipments of rare earth metals to Japan amid a geopolitical spat over contested islands. The move shocked the democratic world and made apparent a troubling fact — that over the preceding few decades, China had seized nearly full control of the global supply of these key metals for magnets and electronics. In the years since, Beijing has used export restrictions on rare earths and other minerals to the U.S. and its allies as a geopolitical cudgel, leading Busbee and others to look for ways to rewire global supply chains away from China.
Xerion had previously experimented with molten salt electrolysis, a process that involves running an electrical current through salt that’s been heated to somewhere from 800 to 1,600 degrees Fahrenheit — hot enough to achieve a liquid state, corrosive enough to eat through rock ore but leave behind the desired metals.
Ultimately the team at Xerion found that this method could be used to process cobalt, which is sourced mostly from Chinese-controlled mines in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The molten salt would eat away at the igneous rock containing the bluish battery metal, leaving behind the mineral. The company opened its pilot cobalt-refining facility in Dayton, Ohio, in April, and reached its goal of producing 5 metric tons for the year.
Now Xerion is expanding into producing gallium. The U.S. has no domestic industry to produce the soft, silvery metal, and imports of the raw material – widely used in solar cells, nuclear sensors, electric vehicle batteries, and semiconductors – have skyrocketed by nearly threefold since 2020. China banned exports to the U.S. in December.
“Gallium was low-hanging fruit,” Busbee told me. “It’s in all the radars. It's in all the missiles. It’s in all the planes. All the new chargers that are really compact are made with gallium nitride. It’s also in the cell phones. And it’s something where China has the market cornered.”
The U.S. stopped producing its own gallium in 1987, according to a U.S. Geological Survey report. Before then, the metal came as a byproduct of turning bauxite into aluminum; in China, where the vast majority of global production moved, the government requires alumina refineries to also extract gallium. As alumina processing disappeared in the U.S., there was no market incentive for refineries to invest in the complex process of also extracting gallium, which makes up a tiny fraction of 1% of the total bauxite ore.
At least one major proposed rare earths mine in the U.S., the Sheep Creek site in Montana, boasts large deposits of gallium, and U.S. Critical Materials Corp., the project’s Salt Lake City-based developer, inked a deal to work on building a pilot plant to test its own refining technology with the Idaho National Laboratory this summer. But the project is still at an early stage.
The benefit of using molten-salt electrolysis, Busbee said, is that it provides a shortcut. “I tell people I’m kind of dumb and stubborn,” he said. “What I mean by dumb is that I wasn’t in the industry, so I didn't know that it was widely known that you don’t use this method because it’s so aggressively corrosive that it’s a pain in the butt. And by stubborn I mean that, once we picked that, we stuck with it and spent 10 years optimizing these incredibly corrosive molten salts for the battery space.”
Since the molten salt will eat through nearly everything the Ohio-based Xerion isn’t looking to collect, the process can pull gallium out of mining waste and other sources with low concentrations of the metal.
“It’s a one-step process,” Busbee told me. “A lot of people dissolve in acid, then have to evaporate it and recrystallize it. Sometimes there are multiple rounds. There can be 15 to 100 steps. Ours is one step.”
Asked what the catch might be, Busbee laughed. “It’s been a pinch-me technology,” he said. “As we keep going further, we keep finding good things.”
There’s still some waste rock left behind after the process, and the company said it’s figuring out useful ways to sell that material.
Despite its 15 years in operation, Xerion’s bid to enter the critical minerals market is new enough that many analysts were unfamiliar with the company and its approach. BloombergNEF declined to comment. Benchmark Mineral Intelligence, the London-based battery metals consultancy, cautioned that Xerion’s claims of “very high recoveries” of materials “seems to be in a lab environment rather than at scale.”
“With respect to Xerion’s original cobalt line, my understanding is this is still at pilot stage, so difficult to compare against industry production,” William Talbot, the lead cobalt analyst at Benchmark, told me via email.
But Ryan Alimento, an energy analyst at the Breakthrough Institute, said the ability of molten salt to refine minerals to much higher concentrations than water-based solutions is real.
“The advantage of molten salt is exactly what Xerion says,” he told me. Still, he said, opening a pilot plant is just “the first stage in the entrepreneurial valley of death.”
“There’s still a lot more steps needed along the way,” Alimento said. “When you have a company introducing a new processing technology like this that really diverts from the norm, it requires a lot of capital.”
Xerion has raised “a little over $100 million” from venture capitalists and family offices, Busbee said. As the company moves into manufacturing, however, he told me he plans to tap into more large institutional investors. That may offer some promise. Critical minerals are undergoing something of a dealmaking boom as investors clamber for stakes in companies whose metals could win the bonus tax credits the Biden administration offered for domestically-produced materials or avoid the trade penalties the Trump administration has slapped on imports from adversary nations.
President Donald Trump has also used the military to invest directly into rare earths production. The Department of Defense bought a stake in MP Materials, the only active rare earths producer in the U.S., in what The Economist described as the federal government’s biggest intervention in a private company since nationalizing the railroads during World War I. While it’s not a direct ownership stake, the federal Defense Logistics Agency earlier this month awarded Xerion funding through the Small Business Innovation Research program to carry out tests on the economic viability of its technology. Xerion said it expects to complete the first phase of the testing in the first quarter of next year, and plans to pursue grants for the second and third phase analyses.
“This is definitely a priority for the U.S., which is good because what companies need is unambiguous and long-sustained government support for something like this,” Alimento said. “It does not surprise me that a company like Xerion would be thriving in this kind of industrial-policy ecosystem.”