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We’re now a quarter of the way through the 21st century, and it’s indisputable that climate is one of the most important stories of our time. That’s our philosophy here at Heatmap, but just about everything around us illustrates it, too — from government policy and tech to movies and reality TV.
And of course — or maybe, especially — books.
It’s been about 17 years since the term “cli-fi” (or “climate fiction”) was first coined, and in the meantime, books that touch on climate themes in both fiction and nonfiction have taken off like the Keeling Curve. In 2025, we’ll be reading novels that imagine life in San Francisco after years of deluge and investigative reports into subjects such as how companies have gotten away with dumping forever chemicals into the environment for so long. There will be new natural histories to dive into — on the desert, forests, prairies, and even on the chemical compound CO2 — as well as new frames of thinking about climate change and how we approach its solutions.
Because so many 2025 books will touch on climate themes, I’ve set aside a section of honorable mentions at the end of this list that are also worth checking out. The division doesn’t indicate quality; I chose the primary 18 based on my subjective excitement and to showcase different genres, publishers, and authors. It might be in the appendix that you find a book on the topic you’re personally most excited about (Arctic exploration? Solar geoengineering? Florida-set family dramas?) for next year.
Finally, if you want to see all these books in one place or judge them by their (excellent) covers, you can browse our curated list on Bookshop here.
The U.S. government’s Fifth National Climate Assessment section on the Southwest reads like an apocalyptic horror story: “Heat-related mortality,” “increased wildfire risks,” and “longer and more severe droughts” all make it into the opening few paragraphs. The truth is that the hottest and driest region of the United States is home to 60 million people, many of whom will have to adapt to a more extreme future in the coming years. In New Mexico-born journalist Kyle Paoletta’s debut book, American Oasis, he traces the allure of places like Albuquerque, Phoenix, El Paso, and Las Vegas back to the Athapaskan migration from the sub-Arctic around 1100 BCE and through the heydays of Arizona Highways, a magazine from the 1950s, while also charting what lies ahead for those who are drawn to making the desert, however impossibly, their home. Preorder it here.
Speaking of the American desert, on the fiction side of things this winter comes Madeleine Watts’ latest novel, Elegy, Southwest. Watts made a name for herself as a writer of cli-fi after the release of her 2021 novel, The Inland Sea, set against the backdrop of Australia’s fires and floods, and she returns this year with a road trip novel that follows Eloise, a doctoral student studying the Colorado River and climate change. As part of her research, Eloise flies to Las Vegas for a road trip through the Southwest with her husband, Lewis, to whom the novel is addressed. Along the way, Eloise begins to believe she’s pregnant, while Lewis struggles with the fresh grief of losing his mother. As Watts told an interviewer of her process for The Inland Sea, “I wanted to write … about what it’s like to live in the experience of a changing climate that is not always a tangible part of your day-to-day but that’s already there – it’s in the air all around you.” Expect a similar treatment this go-round. Preorder it here.
Eric Puchner’s new novel, Dream State, is the story of two marriages set over 50 years. With the book opening in 2004, that naturally requires some speculation about the future — in this case, the future of “a rapidly warming Montana.” As The Indypendent writes in an early review, “The looming climate crisis — declining snowfall, depleted wildlife, raging seasonal wildfires, and abnormally warm temperatures — is writ large in the book, forming a blistering backdrop, highlighting newfound restrictions on what both residents and short-term visitors can now see and do in the area.” The novel has earned praise from Pulitzer Prize-winner Adam Johnson, who called it “a masterpiece,” as well as author Lynn Steger Strong, who has a climate book of her own on the list below. Preorder it here.
Four years ago, Argentinean author Agustina Bazterrica burst onto Americans’ radars with the English-language translation of her 2017 novel Tender Is the Flesh, a book that imagines a future in which animals have become toxic to humans, leading us to resort to industrialized cannibalism. (Critics have described it, vividly, as “splatterpunk.”) This year, Bazterrica turns her attention from factory farming to the climate catastrophe, telling the story of a member of a “Sacred Sisterhood” cloistered in a mysterious convent who is prompted to reflect on her life outside its walls when a new acolyte arrives. Don’t expect Bazterrica to soften her critiques of capitalism here, though it’s not all doom and gloom; early readers have said The Unworthy “ends on a light note of hope.” Preorder it here.
Charlotte McConaghy’s follow-up novel to her critically acclaimed 2020 debut, Migrations, is set on a fictional research island, Shearwater, located between Australia and Antarctica. Dominic Salt, the caretaker of the island’s seed vault, has called the refuge home for the past eight years — ever since fleeing Australia’s accelerating natural disasters, hoping to find a safer place to raise his three children. But with rising sea levels now threatening the island, Dominic and his family have just seven weeks left before they plan to move on. Just before their departure, Dominic’s oldest daughter discovers a woman who has shipwrecked on shore, and the tension — and mystery — starts to grow. Wild Dark Shore has earned a starred review from Kirkus, which calls it a “terrific thriller.” Preorder it here.
Climatologist, World Weather Attribution co-founder, and 2024 Trailblazing Women in Climate laureate Friederike Otto does not mince words about who is most impacted by extreme weather — and who needs to be involved in the solutions. “If we leave the issue of climate change to white men, it’ll continue to be treated as a physical problem with technological solutions,” she has said, adding, “The more diverse the people working on it, the closer we get to implementing these solutions and making progress on climate change.” Her new book, Climate Injustice, elaborates on her thesis further, using the stories of real people in the Global South to illustrate how exploitation, sexism, and colonialism have created a crisis with unequal impacts. Preorder it here.
Everyone who works in the climate space is familiar with the question posed in the title of this book. Entomologist Douglas W. Tallamy is one of the leading proponents of the native gardens movement, and in How Can I Help?, he answers a query implied in his own earlier book, 2009’s Bringing Nature Home: that “unless we restore native plants to our suburban ecosystems, the future of biodiversity in the United States is dim.” How Can I Help? is structured to address some of the most common questions Tallamy encounters during his lectures about how individuals can become directors of their own miniature national parks at home. Despite the daunting challenge of biodiversity loss, Tallamy offers actionable ideas for helping the planet, with conservation beginning in your backyard. Preorder it here.
If I had to make one prediction for 2025, it’d be that we will hear a lot more about per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances — that is, the “forever chemicals” commonly known as PFAS. The chemicals are found in everything from our dental floss to our clothes, but perhaps most disturbingly, they’re also found in our drinking water. In Poisoning the Well, The Hill staff writers Sharon Udasin and Rachel Frazin follow how PFAS got into our environment in the first place — a story of corporate greed and cover-ups that will be familiar to anyone aware of the fossil fuel playbook. Preorder it here.
Journalist Malcolm Harris’ last book was an “encyclopedic,” 700-page history of the city of Palo Alto, which became a fixture of best-of-the-year lists after it came out last February. Hot on its heels is Harris’ follow-up, What’s Left (which slow readers will be relieved to hear is less of a time commitment, at 320 pages). Harris’ intention with his new work is to explore “our remaining options for saving the world,” all of which involve varying degrees of collective action but which escalate from “progressive” to “socialist” to “revolutionary.” It’s one that you can be sure will have people talking. Preorder it here.
Alan Weisman’s hugely successful 2007 book, The World Without Us, speculated about humanity’s legacy if we suddenly disappeared. (Slate named it in 2019 as one of the 50 best nonfiction books in the past quarter-century.) Now, Weisman turns his attention to helping us stick around. “I am working on a book with kind of a vast topic, which is what are humanity’s best and most realistic hopes for getting through this very difficult century that we have,” he told Bangladesh’s Business Standard in 2022, while visiting the country during the research stage of his new project, Hope Dies Last. Weisman’s book took him all over the world — including the Korean de-militarized zone, the Netherlands, and the Marshall Islands — as he looked to speak with people across disciplines and professions about how we can approach our future. Bill McKibben has described the result as “a nonfiction companion to Kim Stanley Robinson’s Ministry for the Future.” Preorder it here.
In 1999, 24-year-old environmentalist Terence Unity Freitas traveled to Colombia to support the Indigenous U’wa people in resisting Occidental Petroleum, which was interested in drilling to extract some 1.5 billion barrels of oil from beneath the cloud forest. During what was supposed to be a weeklong visit, Freitas was kidnapped by the Armed Revolutionary Forces of Colombia (better known as FARC) along with two other Americans; their bodies were later found, bound and shot, just over the border in Venezuela. Twenty years later, Abby Reyes — the author of this memoir and Freitas’ partner at the time of his death — was recognized as a victim in Colombia’s truth and reconciliation process, resurfacing old griefs, reflections, and questions. “I bring the reader along in my demand for truth before the tribunal while awakening our collective awareness of what the truth demands of all of us in this era of ecological collapse and social transformation,” Reyes has said of her book. Preorder it here.
In Susanna Kwan’s debut novel, Awake in the Floating City, San Francisco is almost entirely underwater. Years of Biblical rain mean most people have already evacuated, but Bo — who lost her mother to the waters — lingers long past when sensible people have fled. Then one day, she receives a note from her neighbor, Mia, a 130-year-old woman who doesn’t want to leave the city, either; together, the two become the last people left in San Francisco. “What post-apocalyptic vision dares be so gorgeous?” marvels the author Meng Jin in one of the book’s early blurbs. Preorder it here.
Identical twin sister arborists teach the Women’s Tree Climbing Workshop. While that sounds like the beginning of a fairy tale, it’s the delightfully real-life starting point of journalist Marguerite Holloway’s Take to the Trees. “I was there to be in trees and to better understand them,” she writes of her attendance at the climbing workshop. “Trees and forests are facing existential threats because of climate change, but it can be a struggle to grasp the extent of the danger.” While not all of us have the time, ability, or inclination to take to such “gut-lurching” heights to learn more, we can read Take to the Trees, which records Holloway’s experience overcoming her fears and learning to appreciate the threat to American forests. Preorder it here.
Natural history is one of my favorite genres, and I’m especially excited for Sea of Grass by Minnesota Star Tribute journalists Dave Hage and Josephine Marcotty about one of the more neglected ecosystems of the genre: the American prairie. The grassland, which makes up a vast swath of the inner United States, is an incredible self-sustaining marvel — and nearly as biodiverse as a tropical rainforest. Yet many people today still either share European settlers’ disinterested view of the landscape or adopt a purely utilitarian one — which is why, after 200 years of plows, drainages, and nitrogen fertilizers, the effects have been “catastrophic.” Still, plenty of people who live on the prairie understand the importance of protecting such a special ecosystem, and Hage and Marcotty follow the effort to work alongside the land, not just against it. Sea of Grass earned a coveted blurb from McKibben, in which he calls the book “well worth the read.” Preorder it here.
We’ve been attempting to predict the weather for as long as humans have existed. Satellites, radars, and computers helped us make a significant leap forward from the days of farmer’s almanacs, but advances in artificial intelligence, drones, and the proliferation of home weather stations have created previously unimaginable opportunities for accuracy. (It’s a tech frontier we’ve covered quite a bit here at Heatmap, as well). In his book, Journalist Thomas E. Weber dives into the wild — and wildly important — world of forecasting, which will hit shelves just in time for hurricane season. Preorder it here.
Climate scientist and Shift Key guest Kate Marvel structured her highly anticipated first book around nine different emotional lenses for looking at climate change. That might seem like an odd angle for a scientist, since researchers are specifically taught not to bring emotion into their work. Still, she contends that just as there is no one way to feel about climate change, there is no one emotion we can tap to guide our response to it, either. From hope to pride to love, Marvel urges readers to get deep into their feels in Human Nature, which also touches on “Greek mythology,” “witches,” “geophysical fluid dynamics,” and “romantic comedies” — though according to Marvel, you won’t find “despair” in its pages. A 120,000-copy initial print run suggests the publisher, Ecco, believes this one will be a hit. Preorder it here.
Addressing climate change will require us to address how we eat, which accounts for a third of our carbon emissions. How to ameliorate that is one of the most significant questions we’re currently staring down as a species — and the topic of journalist and Heatmap contributor Michael Grunwald’s next book. Though the answers he finds might not always fit into our comfortable narratives — Grunwald recently ruffled feathers with a related piece for The New York Times defending industrial agriculture’s high yields on small parcels of land as our “best hope” — We Are Eating the Earth seems certain to reshape how its readers think about food, policy, and our thrice-daily consumptions. I can’t wait to be challenged by it. Preorder it here.
Science journalist Peter Brannen’s last book was about the five times life on our planet almost ended in mass extinctions. His follow-up, The Story of CO2 Is the Story of Everything, will zero in on the collection of molecules that have allowed life to exist in the first place. Of course, the great irony of carbon dioxide is that while it has made our planet habitable, fluctuations in its presence in the atmosphere are also responsible for things like almost killing our ancestors all off in an event known as the Great Dying — and now, of course, we have put our thumb on that scale. By looking backward, often by many millions of years, Brennen gives us a glimpse of our future. You’ll definitely want to preorder this book, if only because it will look great on the shelf next to Brennen’s other Eric Nyquist-designed cover. Preorder it here.
The Edge of Water, by Olufunke Grace Bankole (Feb. 4), a novel about a Nigerian immigrant to New Orleans whose destiny is shaped by a hurricane; Ends of the Earth Journeys to the Polar Regions in Search of Life, the Cosmos, and Our Future, by Neil Shubin (Feb. 4), about what we can learn about life and our future from our world’s most extreme landscapes; Dimming the Sun: The Urgent Case for Geoengineering, by Thomas Ramge (March 4), which makes the case for solar geoengineering to turn down the heat on a warming planet; Bad Nature, by Ariel Courage (April 1), an ecological disaster road-trip novel with a patricide plot; Shelter and Storm: At Home in the Driftless, by Tamara Dean (April 8), a memoir about living through the era of climate uncertainty; The Float Test, by Lynn Steger Strong (April 8), a family drama set against the backdrop of a sweltering Florida summer; Atomic Dreams: The New Nuclear Evangelists and the Fight for the Future of Energy, by Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow (April 8), about the political reversal over nuclear’s place in the energy transition; Phytopolis: The Living City, by Stefano Mancuso (April 22), about how we can adapt our cities, greenly, to the challenges of the future; Carbon: The Book of Life, by Paul Hawken (March 18), about the element both responsible for life and perhaps the biggest threat against it; A Year of Compassion: 52 Weeks of Living Zero-Waste, Plant-Based, and Cruelty-Free, by Colleen Patrick-Goudreau (March 25), about how to protect the planet with small acts of kindness from home; The Lost Trees of Willow Avenue: A Story of Climate and Hope on One American Street, by Mike Tidwell (March 25), a chronicle of record year for climate change as seen on a single Washington, D.C., block; Ocean: Earth’s Last Wilderness, by David Attenborough and Colin Butfield (May 6), the story of one of the planet’s most critical features, co-authored by one of its most beloved natural historians; Arctic Passages: Ice, Exploration, and the Battle for Power at the Top of the World, by Kieran Mulvaney (May 13), about what the age of Arctic exploration can reveal to us about the future of the pole; Hot Takes: Every Journalist’s Guide to Covering Climate Change, by Sadie Babits (June 2), a handbook for incorporating climate science into your reporting.
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The failure of the once-promising sodium-ion manufacturer caused a chill among industry observers. But its problems may have been more its own.
When the promising and well funded sodium-ion battery company Natron Energy announced that it was shutting down operations a few weeks ago, early post-mortems pinned its failure on the challenge of finding a viable market for this alternate battery chemistry. Some went so far as to foreclose on the possibility of manufacturing batteries in the U.S. for the time being.
But that’s not the takeaway for many industry insiders — including some who are skeptical of sodium-ion’s market potential. Adrian Yao, for instance, is the founder of the lithium-ion battery company EnPower and current PhD student in materials science and engineering at Stanford. He authored a paper earlier this year outlining the many unresolved hurdles these batteries must clear to compete with lithium-iron-phosphate batteries, also known as LFP. A cheaper, more efficient variant on the standard lithium-ion chemistry, LFP has started to overtake the dominant lithium-ion chemistry in the electric vehicle sector, and is now the dominant technology for energy storage systems.
But, he told me, “Don’t let this headline conclude that battery manufacturing in the United States will never work, or that sodium-ion itself is uncompetitive. I think both those statements are naive and lack technological nuance.”
Opinions differ on the primary advantages of sodium-ion compared to lithium-ion, but one frequently cited benefit is the potential to build a U.S.-based supply chain. Sodium is cheaper and more abundant than lithium, and China hasn’t yet secured dominance in this emerging market, though it has taken an early lead. Sodium-ion batteries also perform better at lower temperatures, have the potential to be less flammable, and — under the right market conditions — could eventually become more cost-effective than lithium-ion, which is subject to more price volatility because it’s expensive to extract and concentrated in just a few places.
Yao’s paper didn’t examine Natron’s specific technology, which relied on a cathode material known as “Prussian Blue Analogue,” as the material’s chemical structure resembles that of the pigment Prussian Blue. This formula enabled the company’s batteries to discharge large bursts of power extremely quickly while maintaining a long cycle life, making it promising for a niche — but crucial — domestic market: data center backup power.
Natron’s batteries were designed to bridge the brief gap between a power outage and a generator coming online. Today, that role is often served by lead-acid batteries, which are cheap but bulky, with a lower energy density and shorter cycle life than sodium-ion. Thus, Yao saw this market — though far smaller than that of grid-scale energy storage — as a “technologically pragmatic” opportunity for the company.
“It’s almost like a supercapacitor, not a battery,” one executive in the sodium-ion battery space who wished to remain anonymous told me of Natron’s battery. Supercapacitors are energy storage devices that — like Natron’s tech — can release large amounts of power practically immediately, but store far less total energy than batteries.
“The thing that has been disappointing about the whole story is that people talk about Natron and their products and their journey as if it’s relevant at all to the sodium-ion grid scale storage space,” the executive told me. The grid-scale market, they said, is where most companies are looking to deploy sodium-ion batteries today. “What happened to Natron, I think, is very specific to Natron.”
But what exactly did happen to the once-promising startup, which raised over $363 million in private investment from big name backers such as Khosla Ventures and Prelude Ventures? What we know for sure is that it ran out of money, canceling plans to build a $1.4 billion battery manufacturing facility in North Carolina. The company was waiting on certification from an independent safety body, which would have unleashed $25 million in booked orders, but was forced to fold before that approval came through.
Perhaps seeing the writing on the wall, Natron’s founder, Colin Wessells, stepped down as CEO last December and left the company altogether in June.
“I got bored,” Wessels told The Information of his initial decision to relinquish the CEO role. “I found as I was spending all my time on fundraising and stockholder and board management that it wasn’t all that much fun.”
It’s also worth noting, however, that according to publicly available data, the investor makeup of Natron appears to have changed significantly between the company’s $35 million funding round in 2020 and its subsequent $58 million raise in 2021, which could indicate qualms among early backers about the direction of the company going back years. That said, not all information about who invested and when is publicly known. I reached out to both Wessels and Natron’s PR team for comment but did not receive a reply.
The company submitted a WARN notice — a requirement from employers prior to mass layoffs or plant closures — to the Michigan Department of Labor and Economic Opportunity on August 28. It explained that while Natron had explored various funding avenues including follow-on investment from existing shareholders, a Series B equity round, and debt financing, none of these materialized, leaving the company unable “to cover the required additional working capital and operational expenses of the business.”
Yao told me that the startup could have simply been a victim of bad timing. “While in some ways I think the AI boom was perfect timing for Natron, I also think it might have been a couple years too early — not because it’s not needed, but because of bandwidth,” he explained. “My guess is that the biggest thing on hyperscalers’ minds are currently still just getting connected to the grid, keeping up with continuous improvements to power efficiency, and how to actually operate in an energy efficient manner.” Perhaps in this environment, hyperscalers simply viewed deploying new battery tech for a niche application as too risky, Yao hypothesized, though he doesn’t have personal knowledge of the company’s partnerships or commercial activity.
The sodium-ion executive also thought timing might have been part of the problem. “He had a good team, and the circumstances were just really tough because he was so early,” they said. Wessells founded Natron in 2012, based on his PhD research at Stanford. “Maybe they were too early, and five years from now would have been a better fit,” the executive said. “But, you know, who’s to say?”
The executive also considers it telling that Natron only had $25 million in contracts, calling this “a drop in the bucket” relative to the potential they see for sodium-ion technology in the grid-scale market. While Natron wasn’t chasing the big bucks associated with this larger market opportunity, other domestic sodium-based battery companies such as Inlyte Energy and Peak Energy are looking to deploy grid-scale systems, as are Chinese battery companies such as BYD and HiNa Battery.
But it’s certainly true that manufacturing this tech in the U.S. won’t be easy. While Chinese companies benefit from state support that can prop up the emergent sodium-ion storage industry whether it’s cost-competitive or not, sodium-ion storage companies in the U.S. will need to go head-to-head with LFP batteries on price if they want to gain significant market share. And while a few years ago experts were predicting a lithium shortage, these days, the price of lithium is about 90% off its record high, making it a struggle for sodium-ion systems to match the cost of lithium-ion.
Sodium-ion chemistry still offers certain advantages that could make it a good option in particular geographies, however. It performs better in low-temperature conditions, where lithium-ion suffers notable performance degradation. And — at least in Natron’s case — it offers superior thermal stability, meaning it’s less likely to catch fire.
Some even argue that sodium-ion can still be a cost-effective option once manufacturing ramps up due to the ubiquity of sodium, plus additional savings throughout the batteries’ useful life. Peak Energy, for example, expects its battery systems to be more expensive upfront but cheaper over their entire lifetime, having designed a passive cooling system that eliminates the need for traditional temperature control components such as pumps and fans.
Ultimately, though, Yao thinks U.S. companies should be considering sodium-ion as a “low-temperature, high-power counterpart” — not a replacement — for LFP batteries. That’s how the Chinese battery giants are approaching it, he said, whereas he thinks the U.S. market remains fixated on framing the two technologies as competitors.
“I think the safe assumption is that China will come to dominate sodium-ion battery production,” Yao told me. “They already are far ahead of us.” But that doesn’t mean it’s impossible to build out a domestic supply chain — or at least that it’s not worth trying. “We need to execute with technologically pragmatic solutions and target beachhead markets capable of tolerating cost premiums before we can play in the big leagues of EVs or [battery energy storage systems],” he said.
And that, he affirmed, is exactly what Natron was trying to do. RIP.
They may not refuel as quickly as gas cars, but it’s getting faster all the time to recharge an electric car.
A family of four pulls their Hyundai Ioniq 5 into a roadside stop, plugs in, and sits down to order some food. By the time it arrives, they realize their EV has added enough charge that they can continue their journey. Instead of eating a leisurely meal, they get their grub to go and jump back in the car.
The message of this ad, which ran incessantly on some of my streaming services this summer, is a telling evolution in how EVs are marketed. The game-changing feature is not power or range, but rather charging speed, which gets the EV driver back on the road quickly rather than forcing them to find new and creative ways to kill time until the battery is ready. Marketing now frequently highlights an electric car’s ability to add a whole lot of miles in just 15 to 20 minutes of charge time.
Charging speed might be a particularly effective selling point for convincing a wary public. EVs are superior to gasoline vehicles in a host of ways, from instantaneous torque to lower fuel costs to energy efficiency. The one thing they can’t match is the pump-and-go pace of petroleum — the way combustion cars can add enough fuel in a minute or two to carry them for hundreds of miles. But as more EVs on the market can charge at faster speeds, even this distinction is beginning to disappear.
In the first years of the EV race, the focus tended to fall on battery range, and for good reason. A decade ago, many models could travel just 125 or 150 miles on a charge. Between the sparseness of early charging infrastructure and the way some EVs underperform their stated range numbers at highway speeds, those models were not useful for anything other than short hauls.
By the time I got my Tesla in 2019, things were better, but still not ideal. My Model 3’s 240 miles of max range, along with the expansion of the brand’s Supercharger network, made it possible to road-trip in the EV. Still, I pushed the battery to its limits as we crossed worryingly long gaps between charging stations in the wide open expanses of the American West. Close calls burned into my mind a hyper-awareness of range, which is why I encourage EV shoppers to pay extra for a bigger battery with additional range if they can afford it. You just had to make it there; how fast the car charged once you arrived was a secondary concern. But these days, we may be reaching a point at which how fast your EV charges is more important than how far it goes on a charge.
For one thing, the charging map is filling up. Even with an anti-EV American government, more chargers are being built all the time. This growth is beginning to eliminate charging deserts in urban areas and cut the number of very long gaps between stations out on the highway. The more of them come online, the less range anxiety EV drivers have about reaching the next plug.
Super-fast charging is a huge lifestyle convenience for people who cannot charge at home, a group that could represent the next big segment of Americans to electrify. Speed was no big deal for the prototypical early adopter who charged in their driveway or garage; the battery recharged slowly overnight to be ready to go in the morning. But for apartment-dwellers who rely on public infrastructure, speed can be the difference between getting a week’s worth of miles in 15 to 20 minutes and sitting around a charging station for the better part of an hour.
Crucially, an improvement in charging speed makes a long EV journey feel more like the driving rhythm of old. No, battery-powered vehicles still can’t get back on the road in five minutes or less. But many of the newer models can travel, say, three hours before needing to charge for a reasonable amount of time — which is about as long as most people would want to drive without a break, anyway.
An impressive burst of technological improvement is making all this possible. Early EVs like the original Chevy Bolt could accept a maximum of around 50 kilowatts of charge, and so that was how much many of the early DC fast charging stations would dispense. By comparison, Tesla in the past few years pushed Supercharger speed to 250 kilowatts, then 325. Third-party charging companies like Electrify America and EVgo have reached 350 kilowatts with some plugs. The result is that lots of current EVs can take on 10 or more miles of driving range per minute under ideal conditions.
It helps, too, that the ranges of EVs have been steadily improving. What those car commercials don’t mention is that the charging rate falls off dramatically after the battery is half full; you might add miles at lightning speed up to 50% of charge, but as it approaches capacity it begins to crawl. If you have a car with 350 miles of range, then, you probably can put on 175 miles in a heartbeat. (Efficiency counts for a lot, too. The more miles per kilowatt-hour your car can get, the farther it can go on 15 minutes of charge.)
Yet here again is an area where the West is falling behind China’s disruptive EV industry. That country has rolled out “megawatt” charging that would fill up half the battery in just four minutes, a pace that would make the difference between a gasoline pit stop and a charging stop feel negligible. This level of innovation isn’t coming to America anytime soon. But with automakers and charging companies focused on getting faster, the gap between electric and gas will continue to close.
On the need for geoengineering, Britain’s retreat, and Biden’s energy chief
Current conditions: Hurricane Gabrielle has strengthened into a Category 4 storm in the Atlantic, bringing hurricane conditions to the Azores before losing wind intensity over Europe • Heavy rains are whipping the eastern U.S. • Typhoon Ragasa downed more than 10,000 trees in Yangjiang, in southern China, before moving on toward Vietnam.
The White House Office of Management and Budget directed federal agencies to prepare to reduce personnel during a potential government shutdown, targeting employees who work for programs that are not legally required to continue, Politico reported Wednesday, citing a memo from the agency.
As Heatmap’s Jeva Lange warned in May, the Trump administration’s cuts to the federal civil service mean “it may never be the same again,” which could have serious consequences for the government’s response to an unpredictable disaster such as a tsunami. Already the administration has hollowed out entire teams, such as the one in charge of carbon removal policy, as our colleague Katie Brigham wrote in February, shortly after the president took office. And Latitude Media reported on Wednesday, the Department of Energy has issued a $50 million request for proposals from outside counsel to help with the day-to-day work of the agency.
At the Heatmap House event at New York Climate Week on Wednesday, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer kicked things off by calling out President Donald Trump’s efforts to “kill solar, wind, batteries, EVs and all climate friendly technologies while propping up fossil fuels, Big Oil, and polluting technologies that hurt our communities and our growth.” The born and raised Brooklynite praised his home state. “New York remains the climate leader,” he said, but warned that the current administration was pushing to roll back the progress the state had made.
Yet as Heatmap’s Charu Sinha wrote in her recap of the event, “many of the panelists remained cautiously optimistic about the future of decarbonization in the U.S.” Climate tech investors Tom Steyer and Dawn Lippert charted a path forward for decarbonization technology even in an antagonistic political environment, while PG&E’s Carla Peterman made a case for how data centers could eventually lower energy costs. You can read about all these talks and more here.
Nearly 100 scientists, including President Joe Biden’s chief climate science adviser, signed onto a letter Wednesday endorsing more federal research into geoengineering, the broad category of technologies to mitigate the effects of climate change that includes the controversial proposal to inject sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere to reflect the sun’s heat back into space. In an open letter, the researchers said “it is very unlikely that current” climate goals “will keep the global mean temperature below the Paris Agreement target” of 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial averages. The world has already warmed by more than 1 degree Celsius.
Earlier this month, a paper in the peer-reviewed journal Frontiers argued against even researching technologies that could temporarily cool the planet while humanity worked to cut planet-heating emissions. But Phil Duffy, Biden’s former climate adviser, said in a statement to Heatmap that the paper “opposes research … that might help protect or restore the polar regions.” He went on via email, “As the climate crisis accelerates, we all agree that we need to rapidly scale up mitigation efforts. But the stakes are too high not to also investigate other possible solutions.”
President Trump and Prime Minister Keir Starmer. Leon Neal/Getty Images
UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer plans to skip the United Nations annual climate summit in Brazil in November, the Financial Times reported on Wednesday. He will do so despite criticizing his predecessor Rishi Sunak a few years ago for a “failure of leadership” after the conservative leader declined to attend the annual confab. One leader in the ruling Labour party said there was a “big fight inside the government” between officials pushing Starmer to attend the event those “wanting him to focus on domestic issues.”
Polls show approval for Starmer among the lowest of any leaders in the West. But he has recently pushed for more clean energy, including signing onto a series of nuclear power deals with the U.S.
The Tennessee Valley Authority has assumed the role of the nation’s testbed for new nuclear fission technologies, agreeing to build what are likely to be the nation’s first small modular reactors, including the debut fourth-generation units that use a coolant other than water. Now the federally-owned utility is getting into fusion. On Wednesday, the TVA inked a deal with fusion startup Type One Energy to develop a 350-megawatt plant “using the company’s stellarator fusion technology.” The deal, first brokered last week but reported Tuesday in World Nuclear News, promises to deploy the technology “once it is commercially ready.” It also follows the announcement just a few days ago of a major offtake agreement for fusion leader Commonwealth Fusion Systems, which will sell $1 billion of electricity to oil giant Eni.
Climate change is good news for foreign fish. A new study in Nature found that warming rivers have brought about the introduction of new invasive species. This, the researchers wrote, shows “an increase in biodiversity associated with improvement of water in many European rivers since the late twentieth century.”