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A conversation with the author of The Cactus Hunters: Desire and Extinction in the Illicit Succulent Trade
It was questionable if we needed a second season of Tiger King — or, let’s be honest, a first season. Regardless, if Netflix ever decides it’s interested in a story that features surprisingly charming criminals, IWT violations, and yes, even possibly murder (but without the tabloid tone and mullets), producers might look in the future to Jared D. Margulies’ delightful debut, The Cactus Hunters: Desire and Extinction in the Illicit Succulent Trade.
Wait, illicit succulent trade? you might be wondering. Oh yes.
From the cliffs of California and the deserts of Brazil to the markets of Seoul and the private greenhouses of Czechia, Margulies follows the extraction and relocation of plants so rare that they might only exist in one valley or mountainside in the world. Weaving in ample philosophy and research about what drives these sorts of obsessions — as well as his personal reflections as he, in turn, is captivated by the lovable, spiky plants — The Cactus Hunters is just the right balance of edgy and academic.
Last week, I caught up with Margulies about the process of researching the book, being mistaken for an undercover cop by his subjects, and the lie that is “the green thumb,” among other topics. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
You open The Cactus Hunters with a story about how you were going to study the illegal trade of tiger bones when you came across a story about saguaro cactus rustling that piqued your interest and sent you on this journey. What most stands out to you as the differences between the illegal trade of animals and animal products and the world of illegal cactus trading?
To clarify, I never actually got around to studying the illegal trade in tiger bones. I had encountered it a little bit in my past research on human-wildlife conflicts.
But there are a lot of important differences: One of the things that made the illegal plant trade so interesting to study, compared to illegal trade in animals, is that it receives a lot less attention, so there was just a lot more to learn that people hadn’t already researched. But also, the way that this material and these plants can move around the world — there are so many more options available because of the nature of plants. So if what you’re after is the genetics of the plant, to be able to grow them somewhere else in the world, there’s not just the one plant but there’s the cacti propagate, for instance. Pups. Their seeds. You can make cuttings of plants. None of these things are really available to people interested in illegal trade and animals. That affects supply chains and how these things can move around the world.
Also, because of the lack of attention to illegal plant trade compared to animal trade, the subject is a lot less criminalized. I would argue that my access to informants and research participants was a lot better because it did happen that, every now and then, people thought I was a cop. Or maybe, like, an undercover detective. But usually within pretty short order, they realized that wasn’t the case and I was generally interested in trying to understand their perspectives. I think that it would be a lot harder to develop trust within certain trades that are a lot more heavily criminalized.
Over the course of the book, you encounter the Indiana Jones of plants and the Robin Hood of cacti, among others. Can you talk a little about why these enthusiasts, who clearly care deeply about conservation, sometimes break the law by smuggling seeds or entire cacti out of the places where they naturally grow?
One of the fascinating things that really gripped me was this seeming contradiction, where you have people who are made out as conservation villains by certain actors seeing themselves as unsung conservation heroes. The reason for that is, for a lot of these collectors, they saw their community as really passionate people who wanted to get access to the plants that become objects of their desires. By and large, the people who want these plants aren’t trying to do harm to the species in the world, and they care a lot about them. But they also recognize that in their desire is something fairly insatiable and that people are going to go to lengths to get the plant that they have to go to.
For a lot of these collectors, they might see engaging in a kind of illegal activity as still a socially acceptable behavior, if it meant it got material out into the world in a way that people might want it. And the goal there, the long-term goal, is to try to reduce demand on wild harvesting of plants and wild populations. If you get a little bit of material out into the communities that delight in these plants, then you can start grafting them, propagating them, growing them from seed, and, in theory, get that material out into the world.
I wanted to take that perspective seriously. It’s a hard thing to study empirically and so it was important for me to try to be open to a really diverse set of opinions about the right way to do conservation.
You leave most of the sources in the book, including those working within the law, anonymous. Why did you make that decision?
The really short answer is, I was part of a larger research project called BIOSEC, which was run by Professor Rosaleen Duffy at the University of Sheffield in the Department of Politics and International Relations, and we were using a fairly symmetrical ethics approval process, or what in the U.S. we would call an institutional review board approval. Because a number of us were studying illicit economies, in order to ensure research-subject protection and anonymity and security, we were required to make all of our sources anonymous.
But this caused some issues because, on the one hand, it meant that everyone in the book is anonymous, even if they’re people who are law enforcement officials or botanists who would have probably really enjoyed having their names in the book. I regret that.
Most interesting, though, were the number of collectors who were mad at me because they’re also anonymous. One of the reasons for that was they saw anonymity as being suggestive of wrongdoing and for a lot of these people, they don’t feel like what they’re doing is wrong, necessarily, even if it’s against the law. They wanted their story told. I think one of the reasons I had good access to the kinds of interlocutors I had was because they felt like I was providing a space for them to get their version of the story out into the world.
You were asked to be an expert witness in a case against a South Korean smuggler who took thousands of plants from the California coast. How do you navigate moments like this, when your position as an illicit trade researcher is perhaps in tension with your own ethical code?
This was a really difficult decision for me, and I write about this. I went back and forth about whether or not to serve as an expert witness, which in this case just required writing a statement. I never had to go to court or, you know, be on a witness stand — thank goodness. But I go back and forth about if I would do it again.
I think that in the end, I chose to do it because I realized that my testimony would only serve to probably reduce the sentence that this person was facing. And I don’t say that because I think that what they were doing was okay. It was really bad and really harmful to this species of plant. I just don’t think that criminalization and incarceration actually do rehabilitative work or serve much function. It costs us a lot of money as taxpayers and causes harm.
It was complicated; I guess that’s how I would leave it. I debated whether or not to include [the story] in the book but I felt like, in the end, it would be wrong not to include it. I think that if people eventually found out I had served in that capacity, they might felt like I was trying to not disclose something. But yeah, I have some ambiguous feelings about it. In the end, what I was asked to actually do was very limited: I was just asked to put a value on these plants. But as I wrote in my letter to the judge, that value in monetary terms is such an arbitrary thing. The price of those plants has declined precipitously since I wrote that, and it had already gone down a lot since the person who sold them stole them. How interesting, though, that the court of law — at least in the United States — in order to assess the damage done to the state, it had to be valued in monetary terms.
I really liked the inclusion of the story. It’s interesting for a researcher of illicit and illegal trade to all of a sudden be dragged into the concrete legal system, and have it, you know, ask something of you.
Sometimes academics are hard on ourselves in that we think we put in all this work and do all this writing and no one actually reads it. And that’s not true. People do read your work when you publish it and you should think about who those people might be. They might be district attorneys for the state of California. People will use your work, and you should think from the outset about what the social implications of that might be. It was a big lesson for me.
At the end of the book, you write that your experiences in the cactus and succulent community have left you with hope that meaningful change is possible “not through the repressions of desire but through its celebration.” After spending so much time among people that some might call poachers, what makes you optimistic?
We have so many examples from other illicit economies where prohibition doesn’t work. I am concerned by a tendency to move in that direction. Given that we’re talking about plants — you know, as far as we know, this conversation could be different in 50 years — but we’re not having to really think about the welfare issues of, say, illegal trade in animals. There are pragmatic solutions to these problems. This material could get out into the world so that people who want these plants can get it in a way that doesn’t harm wild-growing species.
There’s still a ways to go in working through regulatory conventions to support those efforts. And importantly, in doing so, supporting the people who should have the most support, which I would argue are the communities in places in the world that have lived with these plants the longest.
I see hopeful promise in this, and I saw a whole lot of love. I really did. I saw a lot of love between people and plants, and what that can do for people in moving into developing more careful relations with plants and other species. I don’t have a large collection of cacti and succulents, but I do have some, and I have like a cactus right now that’s in flower. Do you want to see it?
Yes!
This is where I think it’s fun, to think about what plants can teach us—
Oh, it’s gorgeous!
This is a Mammillaria laui. Named for Alfred Lau, who I write about in one of the chapters of the book — a German who lived in Mexico, who has a lot of different species named after him. This is Mammillaria laui, subspecies subducta. It’s got this gorgeous crown of pink flowers.
I love having these plants. Specifically, I’ve started a small collection of plants that are associated with particular people that I wrote about, or that I thought about. Bringing some of that social history to our plants, I think, is a really nice thing that people can do. Learn about where our plants come from and the histories of how they got to where we are.
That’s kind of what set me off on this whole journey, anyway. I think there’s a lot of opportunity for thinking thoughtfully about the place of these plants in the world and how they travel and maybe, hopefully, that can help move us towards a more ethical kind of relation.
Are you worried now that once you collect all of the plants that are connected to your book, you’ll throw your whole collection out?
I don’t think I have a strong collector tendency, per se. I have been accused of being a low-key hoarder before. I’m excited to think about how I’m going to slowly develop a collection over time. Yeah, but your reference — the worst thing that can happen to a collector is completing a collection. Freud wrote about this in the context of completing his collection of statues and dying days later. This one collector who I went to see, I thought I was going to see a giant greenhouse of cacti, but I found a bunch of Mexican chili plants. Because he’d just tossed [the cacti collection] off, he was done with it. I don’t see myself going down that road but one never knows.
For someone reading this interview who might be interested in collecting, where would you say to start?
We need to get over this idea that cacti and succulent plants are great house plants because they don’t require any care. It’s not true. Everyone I know who’s had a succulent has killed it very quickly.
I killed mine.
Yeah, if you just throw a succulent on, like, a north-facing windowsill, it’s not going to do well, especially if you ignore it.
Also, get over the idea that there are natural people in the world with a green thumb — I think that is also nonsense. We just need to spend time learning about what these plants need. One of the ways you can do that is by paying attention to them.
In terms of obtaining material — you know, so much plant material can also just be found for free, gifted from friends or colleagues or the community. A lot of collector clubs, like, say, the Cactus and Succulent Society of America here in the U.S., I believe may even send you free seeds of cacti, and stuff like that.
The thing that I want to start doing is trying to grow cacti from seed. They’re slow-growing plants but I think it’d be really fun to actually watch that process unfold. And it’s quite easy to obtain seeds for a lot of these plants. Just, you know, be careful where you’re buying stuff from. Reputable nurseries are a good source. But be wary of buying from unknown people on the internet. That might be where people start to get into trouble.
Is there anything I haven’t asked you about that you’d like to let me know about your book or your experience writing it before I let you go?
I’m not too prescriptive at the end of the book about what I think the answer is. Some people may find that frustrating, like, “Oh, but you didn’t tell us like what should we do” or “What’s the right response?” One of the reasons for that was I just wanted to let people develop some of their own thoughts about this. But also it’s because the work isn’t done.
I’m developing some work right now dealing with illegal succulent trade in South Africa with some colleagues, both in South Korea but also in South Africa. I’m doing a new project on illicit Venus flytrap harvesting and the carnivorous plant trade. I’m trying to continue the process of thinking and learning with plants. But the work continues.
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The new climate politics are all about affordability.
During the August recess, while members of Congress were back home facing their constituents, climate and environmental groups went on the offensive, sending a blitz of ads targeting vulnerable Republicans in their districts. The message was specific, straightforward, and had nothing to do with the warming planet.
“Check your electric bill lately? Rep. Mark Amodei just voted for it to go up,” declared a billboard in Reno, Nevada, sponsored by the advocacy group Climate Power.
“They promised to bring down prices, but instead our congressman, Derrick Van Orden, just voted to make our monthly bills go up,” a YouTube ad told viewers in Wisconsin’s 3rd district. “It removes clean energy from the electric grid, creating a massive rate hike on electricity,” the voiceover says, while the words “VAN ORDEN’S PLAN: ELECTRICITY RATE HIKE” flash on screen. The ad, paid for by Climate Power, the League of Conservation Voters, and House Majority Forward, a progressive campaign group, was shown more than a million times from August 13 to 27, according to Google’s ad transparency center.
Both were part of a larger, $12 million campaign the groups launched over the recess in collaboration with organizations including EDF Action and Climate Emergency Advocates. Similar billboards and digital ads targeted Republicans in more than a dozen other districts in Arizona, California, Colorado, Iowa, Michigan, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Texas. There were also TV spots, partnerships with Instagram influencers, bus stop posters, and in-person rallies outside district offices — all blaming Republicans in Congress for the increasing cost of food, healthcare, and energy.
Courtesy of Climate Power
As others have observed, including Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin back in March, rising utility rates and the broader cost of living crisis are becoming a political liability for Republicans and President Trump. Clean energy advocates are attempting to capitalize on that, trying to get Americans to connect the dots between their mounting electricity bills and their representatives in Congress who voted to cut support for renewable energy.
Some of this is run-of-the-mill politicking, but it’s not only that. It also represents a strategic shift in how the climate movement talks about the energy transition.
It’s not new for green groups to make the argument that renewable energy can save people money. Relying on “free” wind and sun rather than fuels that are subject to price volatility has always been part of the sell, and the plummeting cost of solar panels and wind turbines have only made that pitch more compelling.
But it is new for the affordability argument to come first — above job creation, economic development, reducing pollution, and, of course, tackling climate change.
For most of the past four years, the climate movement has gone all in on trying to build an association in the American mind between the transition to clean energy and jobs. “When I think of climate change, I think of jobs,” then-candidate Joe Biden said during one of his 2020 campaign speeches.
It made sense at the time, Daniel Aldana Cohen, a sociologist at the University of California, Berkeley, told me. Just two years earlier, the Sunrise Movement had emerged as a political force with a headline-grabbing rally in Nancy Pelosi’s office demanding “green jobs for all.” The group was joined by then-newly elected Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who soon introduced her framework for a Green New Deal that would offer a “just transition” for fossil fuel workers, ensuring them a place in the new clean energy economy.
The fossil fuel industry had seeded divisions between labor and environmental groups for decades by arguing that regulations kill jobs, and Democrats would have to upend that narrative if they wanted to make progress on climate. But the rationale was also more pressing: Unemployment was skyrocketing due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and whoever won the presidency would be responsible for rebuilding the U.S. workforce.
Fast forward to the end of Biden’s first year in office, however, and the unemployment rate had snapped back to pre-pandemic levels. Meanwhile, inflation was rising fast. Even though the Democrats managed to name their climate bill the “Inflation Reduction Act,” the administration and the climate movement continued talking about it in terms of jobs, jobs, jobs.
Cohen co-directs the Climate and Community Institute, a progressive think-tank founded in 2020, and admitted that “from the very start, we would just model every policy with jobs numbers,” partly because modeling the effects of policies on cost of living was a lot more complicated. Now he sees two issues with that approach. For one, it was always going to take time for new manufacturing jobs to materialize — much longer than an election cycle. For another, when unemployment is low, “everybody experiences inflation, but extremely few people experience a good new green job,” Cohen said.
During a recent panel hosted by the Institute for Policy Studies, Ben Beachy, who was a special assistant to Biden for climate policy, expressed some regret about the jobs push. “It wasn't addressing one of the biggest economic concerns of most people at that point, which was the rent is too damn high,” he said. But Beachy also defended the strategy, noting that all of the policies addressing cost of living in Biden’s big climate bill, like money for housing, public transit, and childcare, had been stripped out to appease West Virginia Democrat Joe Manchin. “So we were left without a strong policy leg to stand on to say, this is going to lower your costs.”
When the moderator asked what message Beachy thinks climate candidates should run on today, Beachy replied, “affordability, affordability, affordability.”
Jesse Lee, a senior advisor at Climate Power who also worked as a senior communications advisor in the Biden White House, echoed Beachy’s account of what went wrong post-IRA. The cost of living crisis makes it almost impossible to talk about anything else now, he told me. “If you don't start off talking about that, you’ve lost people before you’ve even begun,” he said.
Average U.S. electricity rates jumped 10% in just the year from 2021 to 2022, and have continued to rise faster than inflation. All evidence suggests the trend will continue. Utilities have already requested or received approval for approximately $29 billion in rate increases this year, according to the nonprofit PowerLines, compared to roughly $12 billion by this time last year. And these increases likely don’t reflect the expected costs associated with ending tax credits for wind and solar, hobbling wind and solar development, and keeping aging, expensive coal plants online.
In mid-July, Climate Power issued a strategy document advising state and local elected officials how to talk about clean energy based on the group’s polling. A post-election poll found that “more than half of Americans (51%) say the main goal of US energy policies should be to lower energy prices,” and that 85% “believe policymakers should do more to lower energy costs.” A more recent poll found that telling voters that “cutting clean energy means America produces less energy overall, and that means families will pay even more to keep the lights on,” was the most persuasive among a variety of arguments for clean energy.
This tracks with our own Heatmap Pro opinion polling, which found that the top perceived benefit of renewables in the U.S. is “lower utility bills” — though while 75% of Democrats believe that argument, only 56% of Republicans do. An affordability frame also aligns with academic research on clean energy communication strategies, which has found that emphasizing cost savings is a more effective and enduring message than job creation, economic development, or climate change mitigation.
The pivot to affordability isn’t just apparent in district-level campaigns to hold Republicans accountable. Almost every press release I’ve received from the climate group Evergreen Action this month has mentioned “soaring power bills” or “Trump’s energy price hike” in reference to various actions the administration has taken to hamstring renewables. Even clean energy groups, which at first attempted to co-opt Trump’s “energy dominance” frame, can no longer parrot it with a straight face. After Trump issued a stop work order on Orsted’s offshore Revolution Wind project, which is 80% built, the American Clean Power Association accused the administration of “raising alarms about rising energy prices while blocking new supply from reaching the grid.”
Several people I spoke to for this story pointed to the example of Mikie Sherill, the Democrat running for governor in New Jersey, who last week vowed to freeze utility rates for a year if elected. She immediately followed that statement with a promise to “massively expand cheaper, cleaner power generation,” including solar and batteries.
Dan Crawford, the senior vice president of Echo Communications Advisors, a climate-focused strategy firm, declared in a recent newsletter that Democrats should “become the party of cheap electricity.” He mused that we may be at an inflection point “where the old politics of clean-vs.-polluting makes way for a new debate of cheap-vs.-expensive.”
Debate is probably too tame a term — the claim to affordability is becoming a full-on messaging war. Last week, President Trump took to social media to declare that states that get power from wind and solar “are seeing RECORD BREAKING INCREASES IN ELECTRICITY AND ENERGY COSTS,” — a claim that has no basis in reality. The Trump administration is leaning heavily on affordability arguments to justify keeping coal plants open. In defense of canceling Revolution Wind, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum told Fox News that “this is part of our drive to make sure we’ve got affordable, reliable energy for every American … These are the highest electric prices in the country coming off of these projects.” On Thursday, Energy Secretary Chris Wright posted a news story about his agency rescinding a loan for an offshore wind transmission project, writing that “taxpayers will no longer foot the bill for projects that raise electricity prices and ultimately don't work.”
Clean energy proponents aren’t just going up against Trump — the fossil fuel industry has leaned on affordability as a rhetorical strategy for a long time, Joshua Lappen, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Notre Dame studying the energy transition, told me. Lappen, who lives in California, said cost has been at the forefront of conflicts over climate policy in the state for a while. At the moment, it’s driving a fight over oil refinery closures that threaten to drive up gas prices even more. “I took a trip over the weekend and drove through the Central Valley,” Lappen told me, “and there are placards zip-tied to every gas pump at Chevron stations that are highlighting that state climate policy is increasing the cost of gas.”
I asked Lee, of Climate Power, how the climate movement could make a convincing case when clean energy has become so politically charged. He’s not worried about that right now. “I don’t think we necessarily need to win a debate about what’s cheaper,” he said. “All we have to do is say, Hey, we're in favor of more energy, including wind and solar, and it's nuts, nuts to be taking wind and solar and batteries off the table when we have an energy crisis and when utility rates have gone up 10%.”
That may work for now, at least at the national level. Americans tend to blame whoever is in office for the economic pains of the moment, even though presidents have little influence on prices at the pump and it can take years for policy changes to make their way into utility rates.
But there’s a difference between defensively blaming rising energy costs on the administration’s efforts to block renewables, and making a positive case for the energy transition on the same grounds. While there is an argument for the latter, it’s a lot harder to convey.
The factors pushing up energy prices, such as necessary grid modernization and disaster-related costs, likely aren’t going away, whether or not we build offshore wind farms. Meanwhile, the savings that large-scale wind and solar projects offer won’t be experienced as a reduction in rates — they won’t be experienced at all because they’re measured against a counterfactual world where renewables don’t get built. That’s a lot trickier to communicate in a pithy campaign. People may end up blaming the wind farms either way.
This dilemma is a hallmark of the so-called “mid-transition,” Lappen told me. The term was coined by his advisor, the energy engineer and sociologist Emily Grubert, and Sara Hastings-Simon, a public policy professor at the University of Calgary. The two argue that the mid-transition is a period where fossil fuel systems persist alongside the growing clean energy sector.
“Comparisons of the new system to the old system are likely to rest on experience of a world less affected by climate change, such that concerns about lower reliability, higher costs, and other challenges might be perceived as inherent to zero-carbon systems, versus energy systems facing consequences of climate change and long-term underinvestment,” they write.
To Cohen, advocates need to go a lot further than rhetoric to link clean energy with affordability. “We need to rebuild the brand and then rebuild the investment priorities of climate action so that working class communities see and literally touch direct, tangible benefits in their life,” he said. He described a “green economic populism” with much more public investment in helping renters access green technologies that will lower their bills, for example, or in fixing up homes that have deferred maintenance so that they can eventually make energy efficiency improvements.
It’s not about abandoning industrial policy or research and development, Cohen told me, but rather about a shift in emphasis. He pointed to Sherill’s approach. “She's not just saying, oh, clean energy will automatically lower bills if you just unleash it. She's like, I'm going to assertively use the government to guarantee a price freeze, and then I’m going to backfill that with clean energy policies to bring down prices over time.”
To be fair, the IRA did contain policies that would have produced more tangible benefits. The $7 billion Solar for All program would have delivered the benefits of residential solar — i.e. energy bill savings — to low-income households all over the country. The remainder of the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, of which Solar for All was a part, was set to make a range of other green home upgrades more accessible to the working class, and the Green and Resilient Retrofit Program would have done the same for low-income housing developments and senior living centers. Electric school bus grants and urban tree-planting programs would have brought cleaner, cooler air to communities.
These were big, ambitious programs that were never going to produce results in the span of two years, and now the Trump administration has made every effort to ensure they never do. Whether they would have paid political dividends eventually, we’ll never know. But a successful energy transition may depend on giving it another shot.
On fusion’s big fundraise, nuclear fears, and geothermal’s generations uniting
Current conditions: New Orleans is expecting light rain with temperatures climbing near 90 degrees Fahrenheit as the city marks the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina • Torrential rains could dump anywhere from 8 to 12 inches on the Mississippi Valley and the Ozarks • Japan is sweltering in temperatures as high as 104 degrees.
The Environmental Protection Agency is preparing to propose a new Clean Water Act rule that would eliminate federal protections for many U.S. waterways, according to an internal presentation leaked to E&E News. If finalized, the rule would establish a two-part test to determine whether a wetland received federal regulations: It would need to contain surface water throughout the “wet season,” and it would need to be touching a river, stream, or other body of water that flows throughout the wet season. The new language would require fewer wetland permits, a slide from the presentation showed, according to reporter Miranda Willson. Two EPA staffers briefed on the proposal confirmed the report.
The new rule follows the 2023 Supreme Court decision in Sackett v. EPA, which said that only waterways “with a ‘continuous surface connection’ to a ‘relatively permanent’ body of water” fell under the Clean Water Act’s protections, according to E&E News. What “relatively permanent” means, however, the court didn’t say, nor did Biden’s EPA. The two EPA staffers, who were granted anonymity to avoid retribution, “said they believed the proposal was not based in science and could worsen pollution if finalized,” Willson wrote.
Investors are hot on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology spinoff promising to make fusion energy a reality. Commonwealth Fusion Systems netted an eye-popping $863 million in its latest fundraising round. In a press release Thursday, the company said that its “oversubscribed round of capital is the largest amount raised among deep tech and energy companies since” its $1.8 billion financing deal in 2021. Commonwealth Fusion will use the funds to complete its demonstration project and further develop its proposed first power plant in Virginia. To date, the company said, it has raised close to $3 billion, “about one-third of the total capital invested in private fusion companies worldwide.” It’s a sign that investors recognize Commonwealth Fusion “is making fusion power a reality,” CEO Bob Mumgaard said.
The fusion industry has ballooned over the past six years. “It is finally, possibly, almost time” for the technology to arrive, Heatmap’s Katie Brigham wrote last year, noting: “For the ordinary optimist, fusion energy might invoke a cheerful Jetsons-style future of flying cars and interplanetary colonization. For the cynic, it’s a world-changing moment that’s perpetually 30 years away. But investors, nuclear engineers, and physicists see it as a technology edging ever closer to commercialization and a bipartisan pathway towards both energy security and decarbonization.”
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A record 75 gigawatts of new generating capacity hooked up to the U.S. power grid last year, a 33% surge from the previous year, thanks to new federal regulations aimed at streamlining the process. That’s according to new data from the consultancy Wood Mackenzie published Thursday. The report found that the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s Order No. 2023, issued in July 2023, along with other reforms by independent system operators, have had a “considerable impact on processing interconnection agreements, by driving improvements through reducing speculative projects and clearing queue backlogs.” While connections increased, regional grid operators received 9% fewer new project entries and saw a 51% uptick in non-viable projects since 2022.
Solar and storage technologies made up 75% of all interconnection agreements in 2024, equaling about 58 gigawatts. Wood Mackenzie projected that the sectors will retain a similar market share in 2025. Natural gas saw an increase in interconnection requests since 2022, adding 121 gigawatts of capacity. New gas applications are already breaking annual records this year. But overall the number of gas projects that successfully hook up to the grid is down 25% since 2022.
Almost 200 people have left the Nuclear Regulatory Commission since President Donald Trump’s inauguration in January, according to new estimates published Thursday in the Financial Times. Of the 28 officials in senior leadership positions, nearly half are working in an “acting” capacity, and only three of the five NRC commissioner roles are filled. “It is an unprecedented situation with some senior leaders having been forced out and many others leaving for early retirement or worse, resignation,” Scott Morris, the former NRC deputy executive director of operations, who retired in May, told the newspaper. “This is really concerning for the staff and is one of the factors causing many key staff and leaders to leave the agency they love ... creating a huge brain drain of talent.”
The exodus comes as Trump is pressing the agency to dramatically overhaul and speed up its review and approval process for new reactors. Supporters of the president’s effort say the NRC has stymied the nuclear industry for decades, and a future buildout of new reactors requires clearing house. But skeptics of the burn-it-all-down approach warn that the atomic energy industry’s success in avoiding major accidents since the 1979 partial meltdown at Three Mile Island is owed to NRC oversight, and that the agency’s processes have actually protected nuclear developers by avoiding frivolous lawsuits and not-in-my-backyard types.
Geothermal giant Ormat has reigned over the global industry of harvesting energy from hot underground reservoirs for the past 60 years. Now a new generation of companies is promising to tap the Earth’s heat even in places without water by using fracking technology to drill much deeper, vastly expanding the potential for geothermal. And Ormat has placed a big bet on one. On Thursday, the company inked a strategic partnership with Houston-based Sage Geosystems. As part of the deal, Sage will build its first commercial power plant at an existing Ormat facility in Nevada or Utah, significantly speeding up the timeline for the debut generating station. Sage CEO Cindy Taff told me the plant could be online by next year. “Ormat’s chosen a winner,” Yakov Feygin, a researcher at the Center for Public Enterprise who co-authored a report on next-generation geothermal, told me.
A majority of U.S. voters are still unfamiliar with geothermal power, according to a new poll from Data for Progress I reported on this week. When exposed to details about how the technology works, however, support grows among voters across the political spectrum. Republicans in particular are supportive.
A recent poll shows a lack of familiarity with geothermal.Data for Progress
The Grammy- and Oscar-award winning New Orleans jazz and funk singer Jon Batiste released a new song to mark the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, the catastrophic storm that flooded his home city. Dubbed “Petrichor,” a word that describes the scent of earth after rain, the lyrics unfold like a haunting hymn over a driving beat. “Help me, Lord / They burning the planet down / No more second linin' in the street / They burning the planet down, Lord / Help me, Lord / No more plants for you to eat.” In an interview published in The Guardian, Batiste said the song was meant to be a statement. “You got to bring people together. People power is the way that you can change things in the world,” he said. “It’s a warning, set to a dance beat.”
How the Migratory Bird Treaty Act could become the administration’s ultimate weapon against wind farms.
The Trump administration has quietly opened the door to strictly enforcing a migratory bird protection law in a way that could cast a legal cloud over wind farms across the country.
As I’ve chronicled for Heatmap, the Interior Department over the past month expanded its ongoing investigation of the wind industry’s wildlife impacts to go after turbines for killing imperiled bald and golden eagles, sending voluminous records requests to developers. We’ve discussed here how avian conservation activists and even some former government wildlife staff are reporting spikes in golden eagle mortality in areas with operating wind projects. Whether these eagle deaths were allowable under the law – the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act – is going to wind up being a question for regulators and courts if Interior progresses further against specific facilities. Irrespective of what one thinks about the merits of wind energy, it’s extremely likely that a federal government already hostile to wind power will use the law to apply even more pressure on developers.
What’s received less attention than the eagles is that Trump’s team signaled it could go even further by using the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, a separate statute intended to support bird species flying south through the U.S. from Canada during typical seasonal migration periods. At the bottom of an Interior press release published in late July, the department admitted it was beginning a “careful review of avian mortality rates associated with the development of wind energy projects located in migratory flight paths,” and would determine whether migratory birds dying because of wind farms qualified as “‘incidental’ takings” – harm or death – under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act.
While not stated explicitly, what this means is that the department appears to be considering whether to redefine these deaths as intentional under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, according to Ben Cowan, a lawyer with the law firm Troutman Pepper Locke.
I reached out to Cowan after the eagle investigation began because his law firm posted a bulletin warning that developers “holding active eagle permits” might want to prepare for “subpoenas that may be forthcoming.” During our chat earlier this month, he told me that the eagle probe is likely going to strain financing for projects even on private lands that wouldn’t require any other forms of federal sign-off: “Folks don’t want to operate if they feel there’s a significant risk they might take an eagle without authorization.”
Cowan then voiced increasing concern about the migratory bird effort, however, because the law on this matter could be a quite powerful – if legally questionable – weapon against wind development.
Unlike the Endangered Species Act or the eagle protection law, there is currently no program on the books for a wind project developer to even obtain a permit for incidental impacts to a migratory bird. Part of the reason for the absence of such a program is the usual federal bureaucratic struggle that comes with implementing a complex statute, with the added effect of the ping-pong of federal control; the Biden administration started a process for permitting “incidental” impacts, but it was scrapped in April by the Trump team. Most protection of migratory birds under the law today comes from voluntary measures conducted by private companies and nonprofits in consultation with the federal government.
Hypothetically, hurting a migratory bird should be legally permissible to the federal government. That’s because the administration loosened implementation of the law earlier this year with an Interior Department legal opinion that stated the agency would only go after harm that was “intentional” – a term of art under the statute.
This is precisely why Cowan is fretting about migratory birds, however. Asked why the wind industry hasn’t publicly voiced more anxiety about this potential move, he said industry insiders genuinely hope this is “bluster” because such a selective use of this law “would be so beyond the pale.”
“It’s basically saying the purpose of a wind farm is to kill migratory birds, which is very clearly not the case – it’s to generate renewable electricity,” Cowan told me, adding that any effort by the Interior Department would inevitably result in lawsuits. “I mean, look at what this interpretation would mean: To classify it as intentional take would say the purpose of operating a wind farm would be to kill a bird. It’s obviously not. But this seems to be a way this administration is contemplating using the MBTA to block the operation of wind farms.”
It’s worth acknowledging just how bonkers this notion is on first blush. Is the federal government actually going to decide that any operating wind farm could be illegal? That would put entire states’ power supplies – including GOP-heavy states like Iowa – in total jeopardy. Not to mention it would be harmful overall to take operating capacity offline in any fashion at a moment when energy demand is spiking because of data centers and artificial intelligence. Even I, someone who has broken quite a few eye-popping stories about Trump’s war on renewables, struggle to process the idea of the government truly going there on the MBTA.
And yet, a door to this activity is now open, like a cleaver hanging over the industry’s head.
I asked the Interior Department to clarify its timeline for the MBTA review. It declined to comment on the matter. I would note that in mid-August, the Trump administration began maintenance on a federal dashboard for tracking regulations such as these and hasn’t updated it since. So we’ll have to wait for nothing less than their word to know what direction this is going in.