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The U.S. is too enmeshed in the global financial system for the rest of the world to solve climate change without us.
The United States is now staring down the barrel of what amounts to a full repeal of the Inflation Reduction Act’s energy tax credits and loan authorities. Not even the House Republicans who vocally defended the law, in the end, voted against President Trump’s “One Big, Beautiful Bill.” To be sure, there’s no final outcome yet — leading Republican senators don’t seem satisfied with the bill headed their way, and energy sector lobbyists are ready to push harder. But the fact that House Republicans were willing to walk away from billions of dollars of public spending for their districts and perhaps $1 trillion worth of economic growth is a flashing red sign that Trump’s politics have capsized the once-watertight argument that the IRA would be too important to American businesses and communities to be destroyed.
The Biden Administration touted the IRA as the United States’ marquee investment not just in reducing emissions and promoting economic development, but also in bringing back American manufacturing to compete against China in the market for advanced technologies. The Trump administration takes this apparent conflict with China seriously ― the threat of economic decoupling looms large ― but seems to have no desire to compete the way the Biden administration did. Rather than commit to the solar, wind, battery, grid, and electric vehicle investments that are laying the foundation for a manufacturing revival, the Trump administration has doubled down on the conjoined ideas that America should be self-sufficient and should play to its strengths: critical minerals, nuclear, natural gas, and even coal. Never mind that Trump’s tariff policy and his party’s deep cuts to energy-related spending will stop these plans, too, in their tracks. “Energy dominance” has always been a smokescreen ― of fossil fuels, by fossil fuels, for fossil fuels.
While Republicans attempt to shut down America’s entire scientific research apparatus, the rest of the world moves on. The demise of the Inflation Reduction Act would decisively surrender the global market for all types of commercialized clean energy sources (and nuclear energy, too) to Chinese companies. Chinese companies already dominate the input sectors for these technologies, whether it’s processing and refining mineral products such as polysilicon, gallium, and graphite, or producing infrastructure commodities such as steel and aluminum. The end of Biden’s climate and infrastructure laws will also leave the American car industry in the dust, as the rest of the world shifts gears toward purchasing more efficient and cheaper electric vehicles ― particularly Chinese brands such as BYD. (Ford’s CEO drives a Xiaomi electric vehicle and “doesn’t want to give it up.”) Consider it a sign of the times that Ethiopia recently banned the import of gas-powered vehicles. Electrification is in, combustion is burnt out.
It’s not just China that benefits. In November, the Net Zero Industrial Policy Lab at Johns Hopkins estimated that the repeal of the IRA leaves up to $80 billion in clean technology manufacturing investment opportunities for other countries to seize between now and 2032, the law’s intended sunset year. Those countries aren’t just the likely (read: wealthier) suspects such as Japan, South Korea, or the European Union. The abdication of U.S. leadership would also boost electric vehicle and battery manufacturing capacity in Morocco, Mexico, India, Indonesia, and elsewhere across Southeast Asia; solar power-related manufacturing further across Southeast Asia; and wind power-related manufacturing in Brazil, Mexico, South Africa, India, and Canada.
These countries won’t just benefit from investors looking to build outside the United States. A Trump-induced fall in American imports of these technologies and their inputs may also drive some degree of global disinflation, insofar as these countries can secure input goods no longer flowing into the American market at cheaper prices. The writing has been on the wall since the early Biden administration that failing to invest meant investing in failure. This is what the Trump administration is poised to do, to the detriment of American technological capabilities and standards of living.
Just because the United States might be dropping out of the race for global decarbonization, however, does not mean that the rest of the world can choose to ignore the United States in return. The Trump administration can still play spoiler with every other country’s efforts to decarbonize ― even China’s ― for one overarching reason: the mighty dollar. The United States may be hemorrhaging the political capital that coordinating the energy transition requires, but it still controls the currency of decarbonization itself.
It’s hard to overstate how central the management of the U.S. dollar is to the management of global decarbonization. Let’s sketch out some of the key dynamics. First, the dollar is the world’s primary trade currency. Because most global trade is denominated and invoiced in dollars, fluctuations in the value of the dollar relative to the value of other currencies will affect the price of importing both essential commodities and capital goods in other countries. Any volatility in the prices of oil, critical minerals, food, or machinery ― including the inputs to energy systems ― is most likely measured in a currency that every other country needs to earn through trade or borrow from investors. Efforts to denominate commodity trade in other currencies, such as the Chinese renminbi, are not likely to scale up rapidly, however, thanks to the network effect of the dollar system: Market actors will only ditch the dollar if most of their counterparties do.
Second, then, the dollar is the world’s dominating financial currency. Countries seeking foreign investment must issue debt at rates and on terms that foreign investors, many of whom measure their returns in dollars, judge as safe relative to the returns on U.S. Treasury bonds, conventionally the world’s premier “safe asset.” How the U.S. Federal Reserve moves interest rates influences how every other central bank does; higher rates in the U.S. usually push up Treasury bond yields and, as other central banks also raise rates or stockpile dollars, make borrowing for investment and for refinancing debt more expensive across the whole world ― particularly for large-scale energy and adaptation infrastructure projects. The U.S. Federal Reserve also manages the dollar swap lines and repurchase (or “repo”) facilities that provide dollar liquidity to the rest of the world during a financial crisis, as in the Great Recession and the subsequent Eurozone financial crisis, or a sudden dollar cash shortage, as in 2019.
Finally, the United States maintains a comprehensive sanctions regime that operates through cross-border dollar payments systems and “clearing-house” facilities such as SWIFT, which processes interbank payments, and CHIPS, which handles over 90% of all dollar-denominated transactions globally. When the United States wants to cut target companies and whole countries out of the dollar financial system, it prevents SWIFT from processing targeted entities’ cross-border transactions and U.S.-based financial institutions from accepting them.
The Obama administration and first Trump administration used U.S. control over SWIFT and CHIPS to administer sanctions against Iran, and the Biden administration did the same to Russia. The U.S. Departments of Treasury and Commerce also administer what’s known as a “secondary sanctions” regime that imposes these financial penalties on unrelated third-parties that violate initial sanctions. And the Department of Commerce enforces export controls that restrict technology transfer to foreign targets. The Biden administration combined these authorities to limit the ability of both U.S. and foreign companies to export certain technologies to targeted Chinese companies.
Perhaps ironically, some of these dynamics don’t bite the way they used to during the Biden administration, when the dollar was expensive relative to other currencies. Trump’s inflationary and growth-destroying budget, trigger-happy tariffs, and neglect of the fracking sector have driven a sharp depreciation in the dollar and destabilized the market for U.S. Treasury debt. Some cuts to U.S. interest rates are likely given the elevated probability of a recession. All of these factors ― undeniably a bad look for the United States ― should support emerging market financial conditions by lowering the cost of commodity imports, raising the attractiveness of sovereign debt to foreign investors, and help stave off potential debt crises.
But easier global financial conditions in the short term do not diminish the threat the Trump administration continues to pose to global economic stability. The danger that the Trump administration expands the American sanctions regime implemented via the global dollar invoicing system and export controls remains undiminished. What’s more, the tension between the president and Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell should alert foreign central banks that their access to the American dollar liquidity facilities is ultimately contingent on the Federal Reserve’s independence from Trump’s influence. During the first Trump administration, the European Union and China alike started strategizing how to derisk their dependence on the dollar; U.S. policymakers should not be surprised if those governments are now dusting off those playbooks.
The dollar’s dominance is in part an effect of the gargantuan size of the U.S. consumer market. Trump’s tariff threats had governments across the world scrambling to cut deals with the United States to preserve their market access ― including by promising to purchase U.S. natural gas.
The view outside the U.S. seems to be that there is no easy replacement for the U.S. consumer. As the Australian Strategic Policy Institute put it, “US household spending in 2023 reached $19 trillion, double the level of the European Union and almost three times that of China. … there are no obvious markets to replace [U.S. consumers].” Indian journalist M. Rajshekhar notes that China, too, needs external markets to absorb its products, and that it cannot count on other Global South countries to let Chinese goods flood their markets. Americans are the motor that keeps the global economy spinning.
The inability to sell goods to the United States is a threat to decarbonization abroad not just because it gives Trump an avenue to hawk natural gas, but also because U.S. consumer spending provides the world with a source of the dollars with which decarbonization is financed in the first place. And to the extent that the IRA would have supported U.S. consumer demand for clean energy technologies and electric vehicles, its de facto repeal ― while a source of potential disinflation for Global South producers ― snuffs out a key demand signal for the production of inputs to those sectors across the Global South.
Where the Global South’s clean energy transition is concerned, natural gas unfortunately remains an important alternative to coal in the absence of widespread renewable energy deployment. The U.S. is the world’s largest exporter of liquified natural gas, the use of which has doubled since 2009 as global demand for the fuel rose sharply. Countries across Europe and Asia depend on U.S. gas for domestic power and industrial uses ― particularly after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Large energy importing countries like India increasingly rely on gas to meet energy demand spikes. Over the longer term, industry leaders expect LNG demand to rise 60% by 2040, particularly on the back of persistent Asian demand. Although planned U.S. LNG export capacity is already on track to double between now and 2028, the Trump administration is supporting the buildout of even more capacity to meet this expected global demand.
Becoming dependent on “molecules of U.S. freedom” for industrial growth and for transitioning off of coal may once have seemed like a smart decision across emerging markets, particularly when prices were lower. But it has now left dependent Global South countries uniquely vulnerable to energy import price and power market shocks caused by erratic U.S. policy and volatile (dollar-denominated) natural gas prices. Will the gas-dependent countries in Europe and Asia be able to access enough Chinese imports, invest sufficiently in local clean technology, and kick their LNG fix in time to meet their emissions reduction goals? Europe might; for the rest, this question is one worth following over the coming years.
The truth is that the United States has always had a unique opportunity to weaponize these aspects of dollar dominance in the interest of playing global spoilsport. As Chen Chris Gong, a researcher at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, argues in her forthcoming (not yet peer-reviewed) paper on “The geoeconomics of transitioning to the post-fossil world,” Global South countries have an urgent reason to decarbonize built into their politics, whether their governments recognize it or not. So long as much of the Global South is dependent on imported fossil fuels for energy, “local people’s livelihood and firms’ survival are made vulnerable to compound cycles of dollar capital flow and cycles of basic commodity trade.” If the Global South cannot fully avoid the United States, their governments can at least sidestep it. Countries powered by clean energy, importing less fuel, and generating their own power are far more insulated from the dollar cycle and the dollar system, simple as that.
In contrast, as Gong highlights, the only incentives for the United States to pursue decarbonization come from the pressure of competing with China ― a competition that Republicans, for all their bluster, may not actually want to win ― or the pressure of mass consumer demand for a clean economy ― for which Democrats are not exactly fighting tooth and nail ― and the profits both promise. It’s darkly funny that the Inflation Reduction Act’s defenders are seizing on these exact reasons in their attempts to protect the law in the Senate when neither sufficiently moved House Republicans to reconsider.
For posterity, then, we should add another reason, even if it won’t convince Republicans to change tack: The looming repeal of the Inflation Reduction Act portends a future where Trump and his Republican party happily use their control over the global economy to drag the rest of the world down with the United States. “Energy dominance” may always have been formless bluster, but the United States’ financial dominance remains sharp enough to cut ― if not global emissions, then global standards of living.
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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.”