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King Charles III has been called “the real deal” — and also a climate fraud.
At the very least, you’ve got to admit — the “Green King” has a nice ring to it.
This Saturday, for the first time in 70 years, Britain will formally crown a new sovereign, setting off a three-day weekend of celebrations that will cost taxpayers a rumored $125 million. But while King Charles III is tied with his wife, Camilla, as Americans’ second-least-favorite royal — behind only the notorious Prince Andrew — his ascension has also drawn praise from climate activists and historians worldwide, who’ve dubbed him Britain’s “environmentalist king-in-waiting.”
Charles’ more than a half-century of environmental activism will undoubtedly be tempered by what The New Yorker calls the monarchical “convention to not publicly register his own views on matters of political policy, and, indeed, to accept the policies of the government.” But his credentials as the once and future Green King of the United Kingdom are also mixed; for every illegally fished Patagonian toothfish he’d defended in the name of “the poor old albatross,” there’s also a wind turbine he’s blasted as a “blot.”
Here’s an overview of Charles’ mixed green bona fides, in passages from 10 helpful articles from around the web.
It may be tempting to think of the new King, with his bespoke Savile Row suits, Edwardian manners, and royal retinue, as an icon of a previous age. But his speeches, books, and projects do suggest a man ahead of his time. He was advocating concepts such as the circular economy and natural capital years before they captured the public’s imagination, and he’s clearly followed his own principles, converting his farm to organic practices more than 30 years ago.
“Some of these ideas were radical and literally decades ahead of their time. Some you could reprint today and they would be very much of the moment. It’s hard to overstate the role he played in putting these subjects on the agenda,” says Tony Juniper, chair of Natural England, a fellow with the University of Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership, and former executive director of Friends of the Earth and president of the Wildlife Trusts.
From “Prince Charles Was an Environment Radical. What Happens Now He’s King?” by Jonathan Manning for National Geographic, Sept. 23, 2022
[...The] 73-year-old monarch has dedicated a large part of his life to doing something about the environmental issues that, as a youth, so occupied his mind. He has been an outspoken supporter of sustainability, organic farming, renewable energy, and biodiversity. He’s encouraged others to rethink urban design and corporate production. He skips meat a few days a week. His vintage Aston Martin runs on surplus wine and excess cheese whey. Clarence House, where he lived in London as the Prince of Wales, has solar panels. Balmoral, the summer home of the Royal Family in Aberdeenshire in Scotland, features hydroelectric turbines and biomass boilers. And at last year’s COP26, the king warned world leaders that “after billions of years of evolution, nature is our best teacher” when it comes to reducing emissions and capturing carbon, noting that “restoring natural capital, accelerating nature-based solutions, and leveraging the circular bioeconomy will be vital to our efforts.”
[...Unlike] other world figureheads touting climate issues, when it comes to actually believing in the need to tackle climate change, King Charles is the real deal, argues Piers Forster, professor of climate physics at the University of Leeds and a trustee of the United Bank of Carbon.
From “What Charles the ‘Activist King’ Means for the Climate” by Tom Ward for Wired, Sept. 14, 2022
Charles — like his father, Prince Philip, before him — has at times waded into the sticky morass of population growth. In a speech given at the Sheldonian Theater at Oxford University in 2010, then-Prince Charles noted: “When I was born in 1948, a city like Lagos in Nigeria had a population of just 300,000; today, just over 60 years later, it is home to 20 million.”
With population increasing rapidly in Mumbai, Cairo, Mexico City, and cities in other developing countries around the world, Charles said Earth cannot “sustain us all, when the pressures on her bounty are so great.”
[…] There may seem to be a simple logic in laying the blame for climate change on global population, which is now inching toward 8 billion. But there is a long and fraught history of thinkers in developed countries critiquing population growth in developing ones. Betsy Hartman, a professor emerita of development studies at Hampshire College, has said, “In this ideology of ‘too many people,’ it’s always certain people who are ‘too many.’”
From “The Many Paradoxes of Charles III as ‘Climate King’” by Shannon Osaka for The Washington Post, Sept. 13, 2022
[...There] has long been respect for Charles among Indigenous people stretching back more than two decades to April 2001, when the prince traveled to Saskatchewan for a Cree ceremony that bestowed upon him the name Kīsikāwipīsimwa miyo ōhcikanawāpamik, or, “The Sun Watches Over Him in a Good Way.”
Our new monarch has made efforts to visit with Canadian Indigenous leaders in subsequent trips. In 2019, he invited [Perry Bellegarde, former national chief of the Assembly of First Nations] to London and [asked] him to be a part of the Sustainable Markets Initiative, which attempts to push the private sector to make the transition to low-carbon operations.
Charles even consulted with First Nations elders over Zoom during the pandemic to talk about elders’ traditional knowledge.
“He’s got it in terms of sustainable development — that we’re all connected to the land and to the water, and that what affects the animals affects us, and what affects the plants affects us, and what affects the water affects us as human beings,” Bellegarde said.
“I teased him one time in a meeting: ‘I swear to goodness, your Majesty, that you were First Nations in another life.’”
From “Call Him the Green King. Charles Will Have an Environmental Agenda. How Far Can He Push It?” by Allan Woods for The Toronto Star, April 30, 2023
Charles has never acknowledged the monarchy’s full responsibility for the climate crisis. Asked by the BBC last year if the U.K. was doing enough to combat climate change, he replied: ”I couldn’t possibly comment.” And while Charles has acknowledged the general injustice of the monarchy’s colonial legacy, he has not connected that legacy to growing climate injustice around the world.
Climate justice activists from colonized nations say this connection is important, because the very institution that gives Charles a powerful platform to speak on climate change is responsible for creating global crisis conditions in the first place. To truly be considered a “climate king,” they say, Charles would have to not only acknowledge the climate harm done by the monarchy, but take steps to repair it.
From “Stop Calling Charles the ‘Climate King’” by Emily Atkin for Heated, Sept. 14, 2022
The Sustainable Markets Initiative (SMI), which Charles launched in 2020 when he was Prince of Wales, granted BP a “Terra Carta Seal” even though the oil and gas giant had failed to achieve a top score from the sustainability ranking company assessing applicants for the awards.
[…] Clive Russell, a spokesperson for Ocean Rebellion, an activist group that spun out of Extinction Rebellion, said giving BP a seal undermined SMI’s credibility: “How can an initiative co-founded by a world-renowned polluter like BP – a company currently investing £300m in renewables and £3.8bn in new oil and gas – be taken seriously? The SMI should be disbanded. Those involved should hang their heads in shame. This is blatant greenwashing.”
From “King Charles Accused of Helping BP ‘Greenwash’ Its Image With Royal Seal” by Dimitris Dimitraidis and Ben Webster for OpenDemocracy, Nov. 4, 2022
On the eve of today’s Countryside Alliance march in London, it was revealed that the heir to the throne wrote to Tony Blair expressing anger at the government for pursuing plans to outlaw the bloodsport in England.
It is understood the Prince, a passionate hunt supporter, told Blair that he “would not dare attack an ethnic minority in the way that supporters of fox hunting were being persecuted.”
From “Prince: I’ll Leave Britain Over Fox Hunt Ban,” by The Scotsman, Sept. 22, 2002
Addressing a conference of conservationists at St James’s Palace in London, the Prince of Wales announced a meeting of heads of state to take place this autumn in London under government auspices to combat what he described as an emerging, militarised crisis.
“We face one of the most serious threats to wildlife ever, and we must treat it as a battle — because it is precisely that,” said Charles. “Organised bands of criminals are stealing and slaughtering elephants, rhinoceros, and tigers, as well as large numbers of other species, in a way that has never been seen before. They are taking these animals, sometimes in unimaginably high numbers, using the weapons of war — assault rifles, silencers, night-vision equipment, and helicopters.”
From “Prince Charles Calls for a War on Animal Poachers” by Fiona Harvey for The Guardian, May 21, 2013
“[Charles] is understood to be strongly opposed to onshore wind turbines that rise higher than 100 metres because of their visual impact, and none have been erected on land owned by the Duchy of Cornwall, the £700m estate that provides him with a private income. He has lobbied government officials to subsidize other renewable energy sources and is reported to believe that if windfarms should be built at all, they should be far out at sea.
[...] In the past few years, the crown estate has signed a 25-year lease with the renewable energy company RWE for turbines at Little Cheyne Court windfarm in Kent and has agreed lease options with Renewable Energy Systems, which wants to erect 15 turbines in Carmarthenshire, with RWE npower for four turbines in Powys, and with E.ON for 17 turbines on the Billingborough estate in Lincolnshire
[...] “It is hypocrisy,” said Leanne Wood, a candidate for the Plaid Cymru leadership who is campaigning for Welsh energy independence. “[The prince] stands to benefit from wind projects on land in Wales, but opposes them himself. If that is his position there shouldn’t be windfarms on crown estate land.”
From “Prince Charles To Get Funding From ‘Blot on the Landscape’ Windfarms” by Robert Booth for The Guardian, Feb. 28, 2012
From now on, what the King says is less important than what he is seen to do. He now runs a multibillion-pound private corporation and has one of the world’s greatest personal fortunes. How our billionaire king spends his money and what he does with his vast properties and land holdings may fundamentally change the way Britain sees itself – and how the world regards us.
[... He] could start his green reforms of the monarchy by publicly divesting the institution of all fossil fuel interests [...] He could [offer] to the state or the National Trust most of his cold, largely empty, useless castles, palaces and mansions, such as Balmoral and Sandringham. He could then slash the estimated £90,000-a-month heating bills of any that are left – Windsor or Sandringham, for example – by investing heavily in heat pumps, solar power and insulation and then switching his bills to renewable energy providers such as Ecotricity or Good Energy.
[...He could] clear out the old rollers and Bentleys, go entirely electric, and take to bicycles and rail like other modern monarchies [...] If he was brave and fair-minded he could offer the 16 private hectares (39 acres) of Buckingham Palace to London as a new public park [...]
[...] Charles could happily dispose of most of the many thousands of great diamonds, rubies, and other jewels that have been handed personally to royalty over 200 years without anyone caring. The billions of pounds raised from such a sale could be used to establish academies of sustainable farming or permaculture in the Commonwealth countries from which most jewels were looted in colonial times and many of which are still struggling to feed themselves.
Aside from shedding most of his relations, abandoning archaic British empire medals, and generally living less lavishly, he could start hosting vegetarian banquets and end hunting on all royal lands.
At which point, he could do the decent thing and abolish himself.
From “Here’s a Plan for Green King Charles: Sell the Family Silver and Use the Cash to Save the Planet” by John Vidal for The Guardian, Oct. 6, 2022
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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.”