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Climate advocates have never met a solution they couldn’t argue about.
The end of 2024 marks the end of four of the busiest years the climate and clean energy community has seen to date. I think it's safe to say the energy transition is in full swing (despite certain opinions to the contrary), even if it's not yet on a glide path to a future that would avoid devastating climate impacts.
But with progress comes a new kind of conflict: infighting. Which climate solutions are the best climate solutions? How can we implement them the right way? When should other priorities, like affordability and national security, come first, if they should at all? Are those trade-offs even real? Or are they fossil fuel propaganda?
In a fantastic piece for Heatmap last year, researcher Joshua Lappen drew attention to this increasingly combative undercurrent in the climate coalition, inflamed by the debate over whether a compromise on permitting reform would be better for the climate in the long run than no reform at all. That fight — along with the related question of whether conservationists are slowing climate action — continued into 2024. But it wasn’t the only thing climate advocates fought about. Here are four debates that dominated the discourse this year that I think will continue into 2025.
Biden ignited a firestorm of controversy in January when he paused approvals of new liquefied natural gas export terminals until the Department of Energy could re-evaluate LNG’s potential economic and environmental impacts. The move followed protests from environmental groups that had named these facilities their number one climate bogeyman, arguing that new terminals would, as Bill McKibben put it, “install our reliance on fossil fuels for decades to come.”
What followed was much back and forth about whether growing U.S. LNG exports would help or hurt efforts to stop climate change. To be sure, producing and burning natural gas releases planet-warming emissions. But past government and academic studies have found that exporting U.S. natural gas could result in lower global emissions overall by helping other countries replace dirtier fuels such as coal or natural gas from Russia, where the industry has much higher methane emissions. Environmentalists pushed back on that narrative, citing a study by Robert Howarth, a Cornell scientist, which found that producing and transporting LNG could be worse for the climate than coal. Critics then pounced on Howarth's study, accusing him of using flawed assumptions about upstream methane emissions, LNG tanker size, and shipping route distances.
Ultimately, calculating the emissions impact of increased LNG exports requires making a lot of assumptions. How can we know, for example, whether creating a cheap supply of natural gas will displace coal or deter adoption of renewables? As Arvind Ravikumar, an expert in energy emissions modeling, told my colleague Matthew Zeitlin, “There’s no right answer. It depends on who buys, what time frame, which country, and how are they using LNG.”
A week before Christmas, the Biden administration finally put out its long-awaited study. It modeled a number of different scenarios, but found that approving additional LNG exports beyond what’s already in the pipeline would likely produce at least a small increase in emissions by 2050 in all of them. The report also found that demand from U.S. allies in Europe and elsewhere would be met by projects that have already been approved, making additional plants “neither sustainable nor advisable,” as Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm wrote.
The natural gas industry and its supporters were quick to question the results, and they’re about to have a much more sympathetic ear in the Trump administration. But the report gives activists a considerable weapon to use in future lawsuits if Trump tries to put LNG approvals on the fast track.
I checked my phone after dinner one evening in August to find the members of climate X (formerly known as climate Twitter) suddenly at each other's throats over a provocative essay published in Jacobin titled “Obsessing Over Climate Disinformation Is a Wrong Turn.” Written by the environmental sociologist Holly Buck, the essay argues that too much focus on the oil and gas industry’s disinformation campaigns risks dismissing or overlooking legitimate concerns people have about the energy transition. “Fighting disinformation becomes a cheap hack for the hard work of listening to people and learning from them,” wrote Buck. “We have to put resources into a different sort of public engagement with climate change, one that sees publics as competent and nuanced rather than as susceptible marks for memes.”
The message struck a nerve. While many praised the essay, a number of prominent climate activists and journalists with large online followings attacked it, defending the urgency of combating disinformation and accusing Buck of setting up a false dichotomy between this work and public engagement. Aaron Regunberg, a former Rhode Island state representative and lawyer for the nonprofit Public Citizen, wrote a response in Jacobin charging Buck with “arguing with a straw man” and not understanding how insidious the oil industry’s disinformation strategies are.
Buck tried to clarify her view in a followup piece, asserting that she was not denying that disinformation was a “serious obstacle to climate action,” but rather that the act of “fighting disinformation” won’t solve what she sees as underlying problems working against the energy transition: the absence of an engagement apparatus that helps regular people understand their options, and a media ecosystem that “profits from our hate and division.”
What’s clear moving forward is that with a clean energy opponent entering the White House and a mega-billionaire who, with X, literally owns a chunk of the media ecosystem standing by his side, both disinformation and the framework that supports it will stay in the spotlight.
After remaining basically flat for two decades, U.S. electricity demand is set to grow by an average of 3% per year over the next five years, according to the latest forecast from the energy policy consulting firm Grid Strategies. Domestic manufacturing will drive some of the demand, it predicts, but the majority will come from the buildout of data centers, “supercharged” by the rise of artificial intelligence.
On one hand, many of the companies building data centers have ambitious clean energy goals. Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and others have signed landmark deals with advanced nuclear and geothermal power companies, helping to get first-of-a-kind deployments of these technologies financed. If those projects are successful, they could pave the way for cheaper, cleaner, 24/7 power for the rest of us.
But energy-hungry AI is already causing those tech giants to fall behind on their targets and driving major investments in fossil fuel infrastructure. My colleague Matthew Zeitlin has chronicled how electricity demand growth is making it harder to close natural gas and coal plants . In the states that data centers are flocking to, such as Virginia, North Carolina, and Texas, utilities are revising their integrated resource plans to increase the amount of natural gas generation they expect to deliver. Exxon and Chevron are gearing up to build natural gas generation “behind the meter,” i.e. serving data centers directly, so they can meet demand more quickly than if they had to hook up to the grid. The gas pipeline company Williams is also planning a Southeast expansion to serve data center demand. Energy equipment manufacturer GE Vernova is seeing orders for natural gas turbines skyrocket.
There are layers to this debate. Should policymakers require hyperscalers to bring online new sources of clean energy to power their data centers, or will that prove counterproductive and “dampen investment in new industries” — a trade-off familiar to anyone following the back-and-forth over clean hydrogen? And is it possible that all the fuss about data center demand is overblown? Is there even a business case for AI that supports this buildout?
The incoming Trump administration has promised to “unleash U.S. energy dominance” and “make America the AI capital of the world,” so it’s likely this will continue to be one of the top questions for climate hawks for the foreseeable future.
The debate over the state of electric vehicle sales didn’t start in 2024, but headlines this year continued to sow confusion over whether or not EVs are catching on in the way climate advocates — and carmakers — hoped.
Each of the big three automakers, as well as most of the remaining companies serving North America, revised down their EV production plans this year, citing a waning market. In July, General Motors CEO Mary Barra said the company wasn’t going to hit its goal of producing a million EVs per year in North America by 2025. “We’re seeing a little bit of a slowdown here,” she said on CNBC. “The market just isn’t developing. But we will get there.” Ford cancelled plans to produce an electric three-row SUV, delayed its release of an electric medium-sized pickup truck until 2027, and paused production of the F-150 Lightning, and has decided to shift its near-term focus to selling hybrids.
Among non-U.S. automakers, Stellantis delayed the release of a new EV Ram pickup truck and will put out a hybrid version instead. Volkswagen delayed the North America release of an electric sedan. Several luxury automakers, including Aston Martin and Bentley, delayed the release of their first EVs until 2027. Mercedes-Benz once strived to have EVs make up 50% of its sales in 2025 — now it’s trying to hit that mark in 2030. Tesla sales also slowed significantly in the first half of the year. CEO Elon Musk cancelled plans to build a new low-cost EV.
But while sales numbers may not have met individual automakers’ expectations, overall sales continued to grow. “For every sign of an EV slowdown, another suggests an adolescent industry on the verge of its next growth spurt,” Bloomberg reported mid-way through the year. During the third quarter, GM saw record EV sales. Honda’s debut EV, the Prologue, jumped up the charts to become one of the top-selling offerings on the market. After looking at third quarter numbers, Cox Automotive analysts opined that “a 10% [market] share is well within reach.”
We’ll have to see how Trump’s plans to eliminate consumer subsidies for EVs changes that outlook, but expect there to be plenty more fodder for debate.
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Whichever way you cut it, this has been an absolute banner year for nuclear deals in the U.S. It doesn’t much matter the metric — the amount of venture funding flowing to nuclear startups, the number of announcements regarding planned reactor restarts and upgrades, gigawatts of new construction added to the pipeline — it’s basically all peaking. Stock prices are up across all major publicly traded nuclear companies this year, in some cases by over 100%.
“This year is by far the biggest year in terms of nuclear deals that has occurred, probably, since the 70s,” Adam Stein, the director of nuclear innovation at The Breakthrough Institute, told me. “It’s spanning the gamut from bringing a 40-year-old reactor back to things that have not even been proven scientifically yet.”
To name just a few announcements from this year: planning for a 4.4-gigawatt nuclear power complex is now underway in Texas; South Carolina’s state-owned utility is seeking buyers to restart construction on two partially built AP1000 reactors; New York governor Kathy Hochul is looking to build a new reactor in upstate New York; The Tennessee Valley Authority submitted a construction permit for a small modular reactor; Google signed a power purchase agreement with Commonwealth Fusion Systems; and another fusion company, Helion Energy, raised a whopping $425 million round of venture capital. On top of all that there’s the Palisades nuclear power plant in Michigan, which is targeted to restart by year’s end, bringing 800 megawatts of new nuclear power online.
Heading into the second Trump term, there were plenty of indications that the administration would support this technology with increasingly bipartisan appeal. So it wasn’t exactly a surprise that while the One Big Beautiful Bill eviscerated tax credits for solar and wind, it preserved them for both existing and new nuclear facilities. Now that this support is assured, Stein expects the nuclear announcements to keep rolling in. “We might have seen more deals earlier this year if there wasn’t uncertainty about what was going to happen with tax credits. But now that that’s resolved, I expect to hear more later this year,” he told me.
How much of this is, I asked him, is due to data centers and their seemingly insatiable demand for clean, firm power? “Most of it,” he said simply. By way of example, he pointed out how data center load growth has changed the outlooks for two small modular reactor companies in particular. “NuScale has been trying to find their first project for a long time now, after they had to cancel their [Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems] project. Kairos didn’t have a clear buyer for its first-of-a-kind, even though it was building two test reactors,” Stein explained. “Then all of a sudden, they all had additional deals in the works because of data center demand.”
Last year, Kairos inked a 500-megawatt deal with Google to meet the hyperscaler’s growing data center needs, while this year, Texas A&M selected the company — along with three others — to build a reactor at the university’s research and development campus. And while NuScale infamously canceled its first project in 2023 due to rising costs, this year it received approval from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for a new and improved reactor design. Now the company’s CEO, John Hopkins, told Reuters that NuScale is in talks to deploy its tech with five unnamed “tier one hyperscalers.” Its stock is up more than 150% on the year.
That’s a big turnaround for a company that, less than two years ago, was widely considered a cautionary tale — and it’s not the only one in the industry with this type of comeback story. Right before NuScale’s project failed, another nuclear company, X-energy, announced that it would no longer go public due to “challenging market conditions” and “peer company trading performance.” But while X-energy still has yet to IPO, it appears to be doing just fine. In February, the company announced the close of a $700 million Series C follow-on round, coming on the heels of Amazon’s strategic investment last year.
“I think every company has their stories about how things are changing,” Seth Grae, CEO of the advanced nuclear fuel company Lightbridge, told me. Things have moved a lot faster, Grae said, since Trump released a series of executive orders aimed at accelerating nuclear energy deployment. “Just since May, we’ve received this highly enriched uranium [from the Department of Energy], made these fuel samples, got them qualified already at Idaho National Lab. We expect they’ll be in the reactor this year. Grae told me. “Things didn’t used to happen that fast in nuclear.”
Trump’s plans to fast track nuclear development have also raised serious concerns, however, as critics worry that acceleration could lead to laxer safety standards The executive orders call for, among other things, cutting staff at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, just as the industry enters a period of intense activity. In June, the President fired one of the agency’s commissioners, Christopher Hanson, without cause. Another commissioner, Annie Caputo, resigned in July.
But right now, the nuclear industry is mostly basking in optimism. Grae credits the government’s strong support for the surge in nuclear stocks — Lightbridge’s own stock price has jumped 180% this year, while another nuclear fuel company, Centrus Energy, is up even more. The small modular reactor company Oklo is up 285% for the year, on the heels of last year’s 12-gigawatt non-binding deal with the data center company Switch — one of the largest corporate clean power agreements to date.
Last year’s slew of deals involving Oklo, X-energy, and Kairos show that the sector’s momentum had been building well before Trump took office. By 2023, the writing was already on the wall in terms of data center load growth, as grid planners began to predict a sharp rise in electricity demand after over a decade of stagnation. But when I asked Erik Funkhauser of the Good Energy Collective whether the prior two years compared with this one, he concurred with Stein. “Nope,” he told me. “We’re seeing capital infusion at a really, really high pace, as high of a pace as the company’s suppliers can keep up with on projects.”
Still, the party may not go on forever. “I see a potential for a Valley of Death,” Stein told me, similar to what many startups go through when they’re trying to raise later-stage funding rounds.
“If things don’t start to actually move forward with real progress, either getting licenses or building prototypes on time, then all of that investment will be pulled back.” That’s what the U.S. saw during the last so-called “nuclear renaissance” in the late 2000s, he explained, when a rash of large reactors were proposed with only two actually reaching completion.
These were the notorious Vogtle reactors 3 and 4 in Georgia, which finally came online in 2023 and 2024 respectively, running billions over budget and years behind schedule. In order for this latest round of nuclear enthusiasm to avoid the same fate, Stein told me it’s critical that leading projects demonstrate enough early success to maintain developer confidence in the economic and technical viability of new — and old — nuclear technologies.
That being said, the sector will inevitably contract. “Back when we saw this last scale-up, there were three designs that were really competing for attention, and now there are 75. So we’re going to see a lot of failures,” Stein said. The question for venture investors, he told me, is “how many failures of startups that you didn’t invest in are you willing to tolerate before you start to think the whole segment has trouble?”
The second main way this could all fall to pieces, he told me, is if “somebody tries to move too fast,” and that recklessness leads to “either a bankruptcy or an accident or something like that that will send ripples or shock waves through the whole sector.”
Indeed, a metaphorical or literal meltdown in the sector could put a quick halt to this year’s frenzied momentum. But within the next few years, as these announced projects begin to line up their licenses and come online — or fall apart— we’ll soon see whether this latest nuclear revival is a true turning point or just another bubble.
On the Senate’s climate whip, green cement deals, and a U.S. uranium revival.
Current conditions: Flash flooding strikes the Southeastern U.S. • Monsoon rains unleash landslides in southern China • A heat dome is bringing temperatures of up to 107 degrees Fahrenheit to France, Italy, and the Balkans.
An August 5 chart showing last month's record electricity demand peaks.EIA
The United States’ demand for electricity broke records twice last month. Air conditioners cranking on hot days, combined with surging demand from data centers, pushed the peak in the Lower 48 states to a high of 758,053 megawatts on July 28, between 6 p.m. and 7 p.m. EST, data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration’s Hourly Electric Grid Monitor shows. The following day, peak demand set another record, hitting 759,180 megawatts. That’s nearly 2% above the previous record set on July 15, 2024.
The EIA predicted demand to grow by more than 2% per year between 2025 and 2026. Forecasts are even higher in areas with large data centers and factories underway, such as Texas and northern Virginia. The milestone comes as the Trump administration cracks down on solar and wind energy, two of the fastest-growing and quicker-to-build sources of new generation. On Tuesday, The New York Times reported that the Environmental Protection Agency is moving to eliminate $7 billion in spending on grants for solar energy, though when Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo asked the agency, it said only that, “With the passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill, EPA is working to ensure Congressional intent is fully implemented in accordance with the law.”
Senator Brian Schatz, a Democrat from Hawaii, locked down enough votes on Tuesday to replace Illinois Senator Dick Durbin as the Democrats’ whip in the chamber. Durbin, who is retiring next year, has served in the Senate Democrats’ No. 2 position since 2005. In his endorsement on Tuesday, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York called Schatz “a close friend and one of my most valued allies.”
Schatz crusaded for the Inflation Reduction Act and told Heatmap he supported last year’s failed bipartisan permitting reform deal, even as progressive greens campaigned against its giveaways to fossil fuels. In a Shift Key podcast interview with my colleague Robinson Meyer and his co-host, Princeton professor Jesse Jenkins, in February, Schatz pitched a big tent for climate action. “We all have to hang together. It’s the American Clean Power Association. It’s the energy company that does both clean and fossil energy. It’s the transmission and distribution companies. It’s the manufacturers. It’s labor. It’s Wall Street. It’s K Street. Everyone has to hang together and say, not only is this good for business, but there’s something that is foundationally worse for business than any individual policy decision.”
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The Trump administration may be clawing back funding for cleaning up heavy industry, but Big Tech is still inking deals. On Monday, Amazon agreed to buy low-carbon cement from the startup Brimstone. Then on Tuesday, the data center developer STACK Infrastructure announced the completion of “a pilot pour” of green cement from rival startup Sublime. The moves highlight the growing demand for cleaner industrial materials amid increased scrutiny of the energy and pollution linked to server farms.
America’s uranium enrichment went out of business in the early 2000s after the Clinton-era megatons-to-megawatts program essentially ceded the industry to cheap Russian imports made from disassembled atomic weapons. Since banning imports from Russia last year, the U.S. has been ramping up funding for nuclear fuel again, especially as the industry looks to build new types of reactors that rely on fuel other than the low-enriched uranium that virtually all the country’s operating 94 commercial reactors use. On Monday, the Department of Energy announced its first pilot project for advanced nuclear fuels, giving the startup Standard Nuclear the first federal deal. On Tuesday, the agency signed a $1.5 billion deal to restore the so-called Atomic City on the 100-acre parcel of federal land at the former Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plan in Kentucky.
The Trump administration gave permission to the National Weather Service to hire up to 450 meteorologists, hydrologists, and radar technicians after sweeping cuts from the Department of Government Efficiency, CNN’s Andrew Freedman reported. The agency, which was partly blamed for its warnings going unheeded ahead of the deadly Texas floods last month, also received an exemption from the federal hiring freeze.
The move came the same day as a federal judge blocked the administration from diverting billions of dollars in Federal Emergency Management Agency funding for disaster resilience and flood mitigation. The injunction warned FEMA against spending the money on anything else.
Beyond Meat is finally getting beyond meat. The company plans to shed the flesh reference in its name this week as it launches its new Beyond Ground product that promises more protein than ground beef. “With this launch,” Fast Company’s Clint Rainey reported, “Beyond Meat is becoming merely Beyond and turning its focus away from only mimicking animal proteins to letting plant-based proteins speak for themselves. The radical move is cultural, agricultural, and financial.”
Rob and Jesse talk through the proposed overturning of the EPA’s “endangerment finding” on greenhouse gases with Harvard Law School’s Jody Freeman.
The Trump administration has formally declared that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are not dangerous pollutants. If the president gets his way, then the Environmental Protection Agency may soon surrender any ability to regulate heat-trapping pollution from cars and trucks, power plants, and factories — in ways that a future Democratic president potentially could not reverse.
On this week’s episode of Shift Key, we discuss whether Trump’s EPA gambit will work, the arguments that the administration is using, and what it could mean for the future of U.S. climate and energy policy. We’re joined by Jody Freeman, the Archibald Cox Professor of Law at Harvard and the director of Harvard’s environmental and energy law program. She was an architect of the Obama administration’s landmark deal with automakers to accept carbon dioxide regulations.
Shift Key is hosted by Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University, and Robinson Meyer, Heatmap’s executive editor.
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: I just want to make a related question, which is, you can actually say some of the sentences in the DOE report — you can believe tornadoes don’t show any influence from climate change and still believe heatwaves do, and still believe extreme rainfall events do. In fact, you could believe the cost of heat waves getting worse could justify the entire regulatory edifice.
Jody Freeman: What I love about you, Rob, right now, is you’re kind of incensed about little points that might individually sort of be right, maybe each one separately, but none of it adds up to even a chink in the armor. Right? And what’ll have to happen is the scientific community writ large, en masse, is going to have to come back and say, even if one or two or three of these sentences could possibly, plausibly be actually accurate, it does nothing to change the overwhelming —
Jesse Jenkins: It doesn’t matter.
Freeman: Right. What I think is happening is we’re all getting poked and distracted and tweaked into outrage over science, when in fact, the first argument they’re making is the one where they could actually attract some judges and justices to say, Oh wait, maybe you have a little more discretion here to set a threshold level. You know, Maybe it matters that you’re saying nothing we do here in the U.S. will make a difference in the end to global warming, and maybe that is a reason you don’t want to regulate. Hmm, maybe we’ll accept that reason. And that’s what we need, I think, to be more concerned about.
Jenkins: You’re saying, don’t get distracted by the fight over the climate science. That fight is very clear. It’s this legal argument that this isn’t an air pollutant because it’s not a local air pollutant, it mixes globally with all the other CO2, and we can’t, you know, each class of cars is a tiny contributor to that, and so we shouldn’t worry about it —
Freeman: And much of this is a replay, or a rehash of arguments that the George W. Bush administration lost in Massachusetts vs. EPA. So a lot of this is like, let’s take another run at the Supreme Court.
Mentioned:
The EPA Says Carbon Pollution Isn’t Dangerous. What Comes Next?
The EPA on its reconsideration of the endangerment finding
Jody’s story on the change: Trump’s EPA proposes to end the U.S. fight against climate change
Jesse’s upshift (and accompanying video); Rob’s sort of upshift.
This episode of Shift Key is sponsored by …
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Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.