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Is international cooperation or technological development the answer to an apocalyptic threat?
Christopher Nolan’s film Oppenheimer is about the great military contest of the Second World War, but only in the background. It’s really about a clash of visions for a postwar world defined by the physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer’s work at Los Alamos and beyond. The great power unleashed by the bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki could be dwarfed by what knowledge of nuclear physics could produce in the coming years, risking a war more horrifying than the one that had just concluded.
Oppenheimer, and many of his fellow atomic scientists, would spend much of the postwar period arguing for international cooperation, scientific openness, and nuclear restriction. But there was another cadre of scientists, exemplified by a former colleague turned rival, Edward Teller, that sought to answer the threat of nuclear annihilation with new technology — including even bigger bombs.
As the urgency of the nuclear question declined with the end of the Cold War, the scientific community took up a new threat to global civilization: climate change. While the conflict mapped out in Oppenheimer was over nuclear weapons, the clash of visions, which ended up burying Oppenheimer and elevating Teller, also maps out to the great debate over global warming: Should we reach international agreements to cooperatively reduce carbon emissions or should we throw our — and specifically America’s — great resources into a headlong rush of technological development? Should we massively overhaul our energy system or make the sun a little less bright?
Oppenheimer’s dream of international cooperation to prevent a nuclear arms race was born even before the Manhattan Project culminated with the Trinity test. Oppenheimer and Danish physicist Niels Bohr “believed that an agreement between the wartime allies based upon the sharing of information, including the existence of the Manhattan Project, could prevent the surfacing of a nuclear-armed world,” writes Marco Borghi in a Wilson Institute working paper.
Oppenheimer even suggested that the Soviets be informed of the Manhattan Project’s efforts and, according to Martin Sherwin and Kai Bird’s American Prometheus, had “assumed that such forthright discussions were taking place at that very moment” at the conference in Potsdam where, Oppenheimer “was later appalled to learn” that Harry Truman had only vaguely mentioned the bomb to Joseph Stalin, scotching the first opportunity for international nuclear cooperation.
Oppenheimer continued to take up the cause of international cooperation, working as the lead advisor for Dean Acheson and David Lilienthal on their 1946 nuclear control proposal, which would never get accepted by the United Nations and, namely, the Soviet Union after it was amended by Truman’s appointed U.N. representative Bernard Baruch to be more favorable to the United States.
In view of the next 50 years of nuclear history — further proliferation, the development of thermonuclear weapons that could be mounted on missiles that were likely impossible to shoot down — the proposals Oppenheimer developed seem utopian: The U.N. would "bring under its complete control world supplies of uranium and thorium," including all mining, and would control all nuclear reactors. This scheme would also make the construction of new weapons impossible, lest other nations build their own.
By the end of 1946, the Baruch proposal had died along with any prospect of international control of nuclear power, all the while the Soviets were working intensely to disrupt America’s nuclear monopoly — with the help of information ferried out of Los Alamos — by successfully testing a weapon before the end of the decade.
With the failure of international arms control and the beginning of the arms race, Oppenheimer’s vision of a post-Trinity world would come to shambles. For Teller, however, it was a great opportunity.
While Oppenheimer planned to stave off nuclear annihilation through international cooperation, Teller was trying to build a bigger deterrent.
Since the early stages of the Manhattan Project, Teller had been dreaming of a fusion weapon many times more powerful than the first atomic bombs, what was then called the “Super.” When the atomic bomb was completed, he would again push for the creation of a thermonuclear bomb, but the efforts stalled thanks to technical and theoretical issues with Teller’s proposed design.
Nolan captures Teller’s early comprehension of just how powerful nuclear weapons can be. In a scene that’s pulled straight from accounts of the Trinity blast, most of the scientists who view the test are either in bunkers wearing welding goggles or following instructions to lie down, facing away from the blast. Not so for Teller. He lathers sunscreen on his face, straps on a pair of dark goggles, and views the explosion straight on, even pursing his lips as the explosion lights up the desert night brighter than the sun.
And it was that power — the sun’s — that Teller wanted to harness in pursuit of his “Super,” where a bomb’s power would be derived from fusing together hydrogen atoms, creating helium — and a great deal of energy. It would even use a fission bomb to help ignite the process.
Oppenheimer and several scientific luminaries, including Manhattan Project scientists Enrico Fermi and Isidor Rabi, opposed the bomb, issuing in their official report on their positions advising the Atomic Energy Commission in 1949 statements that the hydrogen bomb was infeasible, strategically useless, and potentially a weapon of “genocide.”
But by 1950, thanks in part to Teller and the advocacy of Lewis Strauss, a financier turned government official and the approximate villain of Nolan’s film, Harry Truman would sign off on a hydrogen bomb project, resulting in the 1952 “Ivy Mike” test where a bomb using a design from Teller and mathematician Stan Ulam would vaporize the Pacific Island Elugelab with a blast about 700 times more powerful than the one that destroyed Hiroshima.
The success of the project re-ignited doubts around Oppenheimer’s well-known left-wing political associations in the years before the war and, thanks to scheming by Strauss, he was denied a renewed security clearance.
While several Manhattan Project scientists testified on his behalf, Teller did not, saying, “I thoroughly disagreed with him in numerous issues and his actions frankly appeared to me confused and complicated.”
It was the end of Oppenheimer’s public career. The New Deal Democrat had been eclipsed by Teller, who would become the scientific avatar of the Reagan Republicans.
For the next few decades, Teller would stay close to politicians, the military, and the media, exercising a great deal of influence over arms policy for several decades from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which he helped found, and his academic perch at the University of California.
He pooh-poohed the dangers of radiation, supported the building of more and bigger bombs that could be delivered by longer and longer range missiles, and opposed prohibitions on testing. When Dwight Eisenhower was considering a negotiated nuclear test ban, Teller faced off against future Nobel laureate and Manhattan Project alumnus Hans Bethe over whether nuclear tests could be hidden from detection by conducting them underground in a massive hole; the eventual 1963 test ban treaty would exempt underground testing.
As the Cold War settled into a nuclear standoff with both the United States and the Soviet Union possessing enough missiles and nuclear weapons to wipe out the other, Teller didn’t look to treaties, limitations, and cooperation to solve the problem of nuclear brinksmanship, but instead to space: He wanted to neutralize the threat of a Soviet first strike using x-ray lasers from space powered by nuclear explosions (he was again opposed by Bethe and the x-ray lasers never came to fruition).
He also notoriously dreamed up Project Plowshare, the civilian nuclear project which would get close to nuking out a new harbor in Northern Alaska and actually did attempt to extract gas in New Mexico and Colorado using nuclear explosions.
Yet, in perhaps the strangest turn of all, Teller also became something of a key figure in the history of climate change research, both in his relatively early awareness of the problem and the conceptual gigantism he brought to proposing to solve it.
While publicly skeptical of climate change later in his life, Teller was starting to think about climate change, decades before James Hansen’s seminal 1988 Congressional testimony.
The researcher and climate litigator Benajmin Franta made the startling archival discovery that Teller had given a speech at an oil industry event in 1959 where he warned “energy resources will run short as we use more and more of the fossil fuels,” and, after explaining the greenhouse effect, he said that “it has been calculated that a temperature rise corresponding to a 10 percent increase in carbon dioxide will be sufficient to melt the icecap and submerge New York … I think that this chemical contamination is more serious than most people tend to believe.”
Teller was also engaged with issues around energy and other “peaceful” uses of nuclear power. In response to concerns about the dangers of nuclear reactors, he in the 1960s began advocating putting them underground, and by the early 1990s proposed running said underground nuclear reactors automatically in order to avoid the human error he blamed for the disasters at Chernobyl and Three Mile Island.
While Teller was always happy to find some collaborators to almost throw off an ingenious-if-extreme solution to a problem, there is a strain of “Tellerism,” both institutionally and conceptually, that persists to this day in climate science and energy policy.
Nuclear science and climate science had long been intertwined, Stanford historian Paul Edwards writes, including that the “earliest global climate models relied on numerical methods very similar to those developed by nuclear weapons designers for solving the fluid dynamics equations needed to analyze shock waves produced in nuclear explosions.”
Where Teller comes in is in the role that Lawrence Livermore played in both its energy research and climate modeling. “With the Cold War over and research on nuclear weapons in decline, the national laboratories faced a quandary: What would justify their continued existence?” Edwards writes. The answer in many cases would be climate change, due to these labs’ ample collection of computing power, “expertise in numerical modeling of fluid dynamics, and their skills in managing very large data sets.”
One of those labs was Livermore, the institution founded by Teller, a leading center of climate and energy modeling and research since the late 1980s. “[Teller] was very enthusiastic about weather control,” early climate modeler Cecil “Chuck” Leith told Edwards in an oral history.
The Department of Energy writ large, which inherited much of the responsibilities of the Atomic Energy Commission, is now one of the lead agencies on climate change policy and energy research.
Which brings us to fusion.
It was Teller’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory that earlier this year successfully got more power out of a controlled fusion reaction than it put in — and it was Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm who announced it, calling it the “holy grail” of clean energy development.
Teller’s journey with fusion is familiar to its history: early cautious optimism followed by a realization that it would likely not be achieved soon. As early as 1958, he said in a speech that he had been discussing “controlled fusion” at Los Alamos and that “thermonuclear energy generation is possible,” although he admitted that “the problem is not quite easy” and by 1987 had given up on seeing it realized during his lifetime.
Still, what controlled fusion we do have at Livermore’s National Ignition Facility owes something to Teller and the technology he pioneered in the hydrogen bomb, according to physicist NJ Fisch.
While fusion is one infamous technological fix for the problem of clean and cheap energy production, Teller and the Livermore cadres were also a major influence on the development of solar geoengineering, the idea that global warming could be averted not by reducing the emissions of greenhouse gas into the atmosphere, but by making the sun less intense.
In a mildly trolling column for the Wall Street Journal in January 1998, Teller professed agnosticism on climate change (despite giving that speech to oil executives three decades prior) but proposed an alternative policy that would be “far less burdensome than even a system of market-allocated emissions permits”: solar geoengineering with “fine particles.”
The op-ed placed in the conservative pages of the Wall Street Journal was almost certainly an effort to oppose the recently signed Kyoto Protocol, but the ideas have persisted among thinkers and scientists whose engagement with environmental issues went far beyond their own opinion about Al Gore and by extension the environmental movement as a whole (Teller’s feelings about both were negative).
But his proposal would be familiar to the climate debates of today: particle emissions that would scatter sunlight and thus lower atmospheric temperatures. If climate change had to be addressed, Teller argued, “let us play to our uniquely American strengths in innovation and technology to offset any global warming by the least costly means possible.”
A paper he wrote with two colleagues that was an early call for spraying sulfates in the stratosphere also proposed “deploying electrically-conducting sheeting, either in the stratosphere or in low Earth orbit.” These were “literally diaphanous shattering screens,” that could scatter enough sunlight in order to reduce global warming — one calculation Teller made concludes that 46 million square miles, or about 1 percent of the surface area of the Earth, of these screens would be necessary.
The climate scientist and Livermore alumnus Ken Caldeira has attributed his own initial interest in solar geoengineering to Lowell Wood, a Livermore researcher and Teller protégé. While often seen as a centrist or even a right wing idea in order to avoid the more restrictionist policies on carbon emissions, solar geoengineering has sparked some interest on the left, including in socialist science fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future, which envisions India unilaterally pumping sulfates into the atmosphere in response to a devastating heat wave.
The White House even quietly released a congressionally-mandated report on solar geoengineering earlier this spring, outlining avenues for further research.
While the more than 30 years since the creation of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the beginnings of Kyoto Protocol have emphasized international cooperation on both science and policymaking through agreed upon goals in emissions reductions, the technological temptation is always present.
And here we can perhaps see that the split between the moralized scientists and their pleas for addressing the problems of the arms race through scientific openness and international cooperation and those of the hawkish technicians, who wanted to press the United States’ technical advantage in order to win the nuclear standoff and ultimately the Cold War through deterrence.
With the IPCC and the United Nations Climate Conference, through which emerged the Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Agreement, we see a version of what the postwar scientists wanted applied to the problem of climate change. Nations come together and agree on targets for controlling something that may benefit any one of them but risks global calamity. The process is informed by scientists working with substantial resources across national borders who play a major role in formulating and verifying the policy mechanisms used to achieve these goals.
But for almost as long as climate change has been an issue of international concern, the Tellerian path has been tempting. While Teller’s dreams of massive sun-scattering sheets, nuclear earth engineering, and automated underground reactors are unlikely to be realized soon, if at all, you can be sure there are scientists and engineers looking straight into the light. And they may one day drag us into it, whether we want to or not.
Editor’s note: An earlier version of this article misstated the name of a climate modeler. It’s been corrected. We regret the error.
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The company says its first Optimus robots will start rolling off the line in “2026.”
Tesla is a car company everywhere except Wall Street. It delivered some 1.7 million cars in 2024, which were built in factories in Texas, California, Germany, and China. These car sales (and leases and sales of regulatory credits) generated some $77 billion in revenue. Its gross margin on these cars is about 18.5%, or around $14 billion.
When Tesla reported its first quarter earnings, it announced a more than 70% decline in profits, continued falling sales, and ahit to its business from the trade war with China. But its stock climbed the next day, and is now trading at around $350 a share, from $238 before the report, giving it an overall value of over $1 trillion. By some metrics, Tesla makes up more than half of the overall value of the automotive industry.
That’s because it’s not valued like a car company. The company’s investors are putting a huge stake on future innovations that largely spring from the head of Elon Musk, the company’s chief executive. These include promised self-driving cars and a self-driving taxi service, as well as the Optimus humanoid robot, which Musk has said could turn into a $10 trillion business. (For reference, Walmart’s annual revenue is just under $650 billion; Walmart is also worth less than Tesla today.) So far, all we know about the Optimus is that it can dance.
One reason analysts and shareholders cheered its most recent results is because Musk committed to spending less time in Washington trying to reshape the federal government and more time with the company that makes up the lion’s share of his immense personal wealth. But just getting more of Musk’s time is the easy test. A more consequential challenge for the thesis that Tesla can be more than just a company that sells cars to people who drive them is its upcoming robotaxi pilot in Austin, Texas, scheduled for next month.
While Google’s Waymo already has a fully autonomous taxi system available in a few areas of a few cities, Musk has repeatedly promised that Tesla could reach full autonomy globally far more cheaply than Waymo — or, as he puts it, “Waymo needs ‘way mo’ money to succeed 😂.”
But the initial rollout of the robotaxi may be modest. Adam Jonas, a bullish Tesla analyst with Morgan Stanley, wrote in a note to clients on Friday after a conversation with Tesla’s head of investor relations that the Austin debut will “have 10-20 cars” and “plenty of tele-ops to ensure safety levels.”
Another future Tesla business, its Optimus robot, might be able to open up its factory to tours for investors sometime in the last three months of the year, Jonas reported, with commercialization coming by the middle of 2026 at a cost of around $20,000 per unit. The company aims to produce “several thousand” robots by the end of this year, he said. (Though you should be skeptical of any and all dates and deadlines given by Tesla — Musk has been promising an imminent fleet of autonomous Teslas for over five years.) Right now, Jonas wrote, about 12 are being produced at a time, more or less by hand.
And that’s just the mechanics. The software for humanoid autonomy also isn’t there yet: “Tesla admits both intelligence and cost ‘need to come a long way’ to unlock the true potential of humanoid robots,” Jonas wrote. “The neural nets for Optimus are far larger than for cars given greater degrees-of-freedom and far more open-ended tasks.”
Tesla also has more prosaic worries for these next generation businesses. Company officials told Jonas that they’re in an “incredibly competitive” hiring market, especially compared to Chinese companies, which “own the supply chain” for advanced technologies.
While Tesla and Musk are eager to tell the public that the company is orienting itself toward an AI-driven robotic future, some of its other corporate actions may reflect the more present-day concerns of brand management. Tesla sales have declined sharply overseas, and its showrooms have become sites for protest, driven by anger over Musk’s role in the Trump administration.
The company said Friday that it would welcome a new member of its board: Jack Hartung, president and chief strategy officer of Chipotle, a brand with its own history of crisis, stock market volatility, and precarious executive leadership. While it’s unlikely Tesla will get involved in the food business anytime soon, it may benefitfrom learning from Chipotle’s struggles over the last few years of giving people what they expect.
At least one target of Chris Wright’s grant review may run into some sticky statutory issues.
The Department of Energy announced on Thursday that it’s reviewing some 179 awards made by the Biden administration worth $15 billion to ensure they were “consistent with Federal law and this Administration’s policies and priorities.”
But what happens when federal law and Trump’s priorities are at odds?
In the case of at least one awardee, the major U.S. steel producer Cleveland Cliffs, the DOE’s review process may become a mechanism to take funding that is statutorily designated for projects that reduce greenhouse gas emissions and channel it into long-lived fossil fuel assets.
Lourenco Goncalves, the CEO of Cleveland Cliffs, a major U.S. steel producer, said on an earnings call last week that the company was in the process of renegotiating its $500 million award under the Industrial Demonstrations Program. The DOE program funded 33 projects to decarbonize heavy industry, including cement, steel, aluminum, and glass production, with first-of-its-kind or early-scale commercial technologies.
Cleveland Cliffs was originally going to use the money to replace its coal-fired blast furnace at a steel plant in Middletown, Ohio, with a new unit that ran on a mix of hydrogen and natural gas as well as new electric furnaces. Now, the company is working with the Department of Energy to “explore changes in scope to better align with the administration’s energy priorities,” Goncalves told investors. The project would no longer assume the use of hydrogen and “would instead rely on readily available and more economical fossil fuels.”
The CEO later clarified that the company planned to “reline” its blast furnace at Middletown, extending its life, “now that the project is changing scope.”
But the Inflation Reduction Act, which created the Industrial Demonstrations Program, says the funds must be used for “the purchase and installation, or implementation, of advanced industrial technology,” which it defines as tech “designed to accelerate greenhouse gas emissions reduction progress to net-zero.”
“I don’t know at this point what Cleveland Cliffs can confidently say they’re going to do to substantially reduce greenhouse gasses and also deliver gains in public health and jobs to local communities, which is a prerequisite for IDP grant money,” Yong Kwon, a senior advisor for the Sierra Club’s Industrial Transformation Campaign, told me.
The memo announcing the Department of Energy’s review says that it has already reached some “concerning” findings, though it does not describe what was concerning or provide any further detail about the awards under review.
Compared to his peers at other agencies, Energy Secretary Chris Wright has been noticeably quiet about the Department of Government Efficiency’s efforts to slash funding across the Department of Energy. But in March, Axiosobtained documents that said more than 60% of grants awarded under the Industrial Demonstrations Program were being targeted. The following month, CNN reported that Cleveland Cliffs’ Middletown project was on the list slated for termination, noting that it would have secured 2,500 jobs and created more than 100 new, permanent jobs in JD Vance’s hometown.
At the time, Energy Department spokesperson Ben Dietderich told CNN that “no final decisions have been made” about the funding and that “multiple plans are still being considered.” Now it appears the Department may be negotiating with Cleveland Cliffs to develop a cheaper and more politically palatable project.
Meanwhile, House Republicans have also introduced a bill that would rescind any money from the Industrial Demonstrations Program that isn’t obligated, meaning that if the Department of Energy can find a way to legally terminate its contracts with companies, Congress may claw back the money.
The Industrial Demonstrations Program was the Biden administration’s “missing middle” grant program, designed to support projects that were past the early experimental stage, in which case they were no longer candidates for funding from the Advanced Research Projects Agency, but were also not ready for mass deployment, like those supported by the Loan Programs Office. In the case of Cleveland Cliffs, the funding was also aimed at making the U.S. a leader in the future of steelmaking, retaining thousands of jobs, saving the company money, and enabling it to command a higher price for its products.
“If you’re going to maintain blast furnaces, it means you have one foot in a technology that is now quickly becoming outdated that the rest of the global steel industry is transitioning away from,” Kwon told me.
David Super, an expert in administrative law at Georgetown University, told me in an email that if the Department of Energy provides and Cleveland Cliffs accepts funding that does not comply with statute, “the Department officials involved could be in violation of the Antideficiency Act and Cleveland Cliffs could be required to return the money, a modified contract notwithstanding.” The Antideficiency Act prohibits federal employees from obligating funds for projects that are not authorized by law.
Super added that the law also specifies that the money be awarded “on a competitive basis.” As Cleveland Cliffs won the competition with its hydrogen project, allowing it to use the money for a different project at the company’s plant “would thus violate the requirement of competitive awards and would allow the unsuccessful bidders to challenge this funding award.”
Neither Cleveland Cliffs nor the Department of Energy responded to a request for comment.
Leaks to the press have signaled that the Department of Energy may be taking a similar approach with the hydrogen hubs, potentially terminating contracts to develop renewable energy-based projects — all of which are in blue states — while allowing natural gas-based projects in red states to continue.
It is still not clear how the agency will handle its $3.5 billion direct air capture hubs, which news outlets have reported may also be under threat. On Friday, however, the oil and gas company Occidental, which was awarded a contract to develop a DAC hub in Texas, announced that the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company is considering investing up to $500 million in the project as part of a new joint-venture agreement. The press release notes that the agreement was signed during President Trump’s visit to the United Arab Emirates.
Last week, Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska said during a confirmation hearing for Kyle Haustveit, the nominee to head the Office of Fossil Energy, that two carbon capture projects in her state were “in limbo” due to the agency’s spending review. The same day, in another hearing, Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida accused Wright of having frozen $67 billion worth of funds and asked him to commit to releasing it.
Wright denied this. “We’re not withholding any funds and we’ve paid every invoice we’ve had for work done and funds that are due,” he replied. But he went on to clarify that the agency is “engaging with” recipients “to make sure American taxpayer monies are being spent in thoughtful, reasonable ways.”
According to efficiency department data, the DOE has “terminated” 39 contracts worth $60 million and five grants worth $3.4 million. The contracts include news subscriptions, various technical support services, and a $22 million contract with consulting firm McKinsey for “rapid response deliverables” for the Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations, the department that runs the Industrial Demonstrations Program. The grants include three Advanced Research Projects Agency awards to explore using geologic stores of hydrogen, and another to reduce methane emissions from natural gas flares.
On budget negotiations, Climeworks, and DOE grants
Current conditions: It’s peak storm season in the U.S., with severe weather in the forecast for at least the next six days in the Midwest and East• San Antonio, Texas, is expected to hit 108 degrees Fahrenheit today• Monsoon rains have begun in Sri Lanka.
The House Budget Committee meeting to prepare the reconciliation bill for a floor vote as early as next week appears to be a go for Friday, despite calls from some Republicans to delay the session. At least three GOP House members, including two members of the Freedom Caucus, have threatened to vote no on the budget because a final score for the Energy and Commerce portion of the bill, which includes cuts to Medicaid, won’t be ready from the Congressional Budget Office until next week. That is causing a “math problem” for Republicans, Politico writes, because the Budget Committee “is split 21-16 in favor of Republicans, and Democrats are expecting full attendance,” meaning Republicans can “only lose two votes if they want to move forward with the megabill Friday.” Republican Brandon Gill of Texas is currently out on paternity leave, further reducing the margin for disagreement.
House Speaker Mike Johnson is also contending with discontent in the ranks over cuts to clean energy tax credits. “It’s not as bad as I thought it was going to be, but it’s still pretty bad,” New York Republican Andrew Garbarino, a co-chair of the House Bipartisan Climate Solutions Caucus, told Politico on Thursday. But concerns about the cuts, which would heavily impact Republican state economies and jobs, do not appear to be a “red line” for many others, including Georgia’s Buddy Carter, whose district benefits from Inflation Reduction Act credits for a Hyundai car and battery plant that is among the targets for elimination. You can learn more about the cuts Republicans are proposing to the IRA in our coverage here.
The Swiss carbon removal company Climeworks is preparing for significant cuts to its workforce, citing the larger economic landscape and the Trump administration’s lack of consistent support. The company currently has 498 employees, but is undergoing a consultation process, indicating it is looking to cut more than 10% of its workforce at once, SwissInfo.ch reports. “Our financial resources are limited,” Climeworks’ co-founder and managing director Jan Wurzbacher said in comments on Swiss TV.
Though Interior Secretary Doug Burgum is a known proponent of carbon capture, and there had been excitement in the industry that Trump’s attempts to expedite federal permitting would benefit carbon storage sites, the administration has also hollowed out the Department of Energy’s carbon removal team, my colleague Katie Brigham has reported. The ongoing funding cuts and uncertainty have made it difficult to get information from the government that could affect Climework’s Project Cypress in Louisiana, although Wurzbacher stressed that “we are not currently aware that our project would be stopped.”
Energy Secretary Chris Wright announced in a Thursday memo that the department will be reviewing at least $15 billion worth of grants awarded to “power grid and manufacturing supply chain projects” under the Biden administration, Reuters reports. “With this process, the Department will ensure we are doing our due diligence, utilizing taxpayer dollars to generate the largest possible benefit to the American people and safeguarding our national security,” Wright said in his statement.
The memo goes on to note that the DOE plans to prioritize “large-scale commercial projects that require more detailed information from the awardees for the initial phase of this review, but this process may extend to other DOE program offices as the reviews progress.” Projects that don’t meet the DOE’s standards could be denied, as could projects of grantees who fail to “respond to information requests within the provided time frame, does not respond to follow-up questions in a timely manner.” As of last week, Wright told lawmakers, “we’ve canceled zero” existing projects so far, E&E News writes; the agency will reportedly be reviewing at least 179 different awards during its audit.
The number of National Weather Service offices ending 24-hour operations and severe weather alerts is increasing. On Thursday, The San Francisco Chronicle confirmed that California’s Sacramento and Hanford offices, which provide information to more than 7 million people in the Central Valley, have been forced to reduce service due to “critically reduced staffing.”
Eliminating 24-hour service is especially concerning for the Central Valley and surrounding foothills, where around-the-clock weather updates can be critical. “These are offices that have both dealt with major wildfire episodes most of the past 10 years, and we are now entering fire season,” Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at UCLA and UC Agriculture and Natural Resources, told the Chronicle. “That’s a big, big problem.” Swain additionally shared on LinkedIn a map he’d put together of regions in the U.S. that no longer have full-service weather coverage, including “a substantial chunk of Tornado Alley during peak tornado season and the entirety of Alaska’s vast North Slope region.” The NWS is additionally seeking to fill 155 vacancies in coastal states that could face risks as the Atlantic hurricane season begins at the end of the month, The Washington Post reports. An estimated 500 of 4,200 NWS employees have been fired or taken early retirements since the start of Trump’s term.
Heatmap’s “most fascinating” EV of 2025 just got pushed back to 2026. The Ram 1500 Ramcharger — which has a 140-mile electric range as well as a V6 engine attached to a generator to power the car when the battery runs out — is now set to launch in the first quarter of next year due to “extending the quality validation period,” Crain’s Detroit Business reported this week. Parent company Stellantis also pushed back the launch of its fully electric Ram 1500 REV until summer 2027, with a planned model year of 2028. “Our plan ensures we are offering customers a range of trucks with flexible powertrain options that best meet their needs,” Stellantis spokeswoman Jodi Tinson told Crain’s in an email. Though you now have even longer to wait, you can read more about the car Jesse Jenkins calls “brilliant” here.
GMC
The 2026 GMC Hummer EV just got even more ridiculous. “Thanks to the new Carbon Fiber Edition,” the 9,000-pound car “can zoom to 60 miles per hour in 2.8 seconds,” InsideEVs reports.