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Hell is shopping for eco poop bags.
As much as I’m aware that blaming the climate crisis on individual consumer choices is a favorite smokescreen of large corporations and fossil fuel companies, it still totally kills me to buy single-use plastic bags. So when my household recently ran out of the 900 black disposable litter bags we’d bought on Wirecutter’s recommendation eons ago, I decided to be a Good Person and replace them with the most environmentally friendly option I could find. I mean, how hard could it be?
Hoo boy.
What started out as a naïve quest to find the greenest pet waste receptacle has become my Joker origin story. It’s turned me into Mark Ruffalo in Dark Water, except instead of taking on Dupont, I’m hounding companies with names like The Original Poop Bag and Doggy Do Good for the chemical makeup of their “green” bags. I’ve been red-pilled on advanced recycling. And, worst of all, I still haven’t actually bought a replacement — because the entire “green,” “biodegradable,” “plant-based,” “compostable” pet waste bag industry is built on misdirections, half-truths, and outright lies.
This might seem like a ridiculous thing to have spent my time obsessing over (and I don’t entirely disagree with you). But the greenwashing and obfuscation around these bags is part of a bigger story. Plastics are the fossil fuel industry’s last stand. The renewable energy transition, albeit in fits and starts, is here. Seeing the writing on the wall, companies like ExxonMobil, Shell, and Saudi Aramco are heavily investing in petrochemicals, which are used to make plastic and are expected to make up half of oil demand growth between now and 2050, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA). As Armco president and CEO Amin Nasser has reassured his cohorts, oil demand from petrochemicals is expected to remain high “no matter which energy transition scenario plays out.”
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
This story starts with much cuter villains: my cats.
Meet the adorable antiheroes of this story, Marinka and Virginia:
This whole piece is just an excuse to show you a picture of my cats.Jeva Lange/Heatmap
These two cutie pies don’t know it, but they diligently contribute to the 5.1 million tons of feces produced by America’s dogs and cats every year. One estimate of the dog sector alone found that disposing of all that waste adds some 500 million single-use bags to U.S. landfills annually.
The evils of single-use plastic bags have already been drilled into most of our heads by now: They take years to break down and when they do, they don’t decompose but rather turn into tiny microplastics that end up in the soil, waterways, food chain, and even our bloodstreams and breast milk. There is one seemingly great and trendy way to get around this: compostable bags!
Alas, if something sounds too good to be true, it is. For one thing, the “compostable” claims made by eco-friendly pet companies are wildly misleading. Though brands like to imply that their bags decompose and disappear like any other yard waste, these products only break down within a year under the extremely specific conditions of a commercial composting facility — very, very few of which even accept pet waste in the first place. As a result, the FTC has flagged that “compostable claims for these products are generally untrue.”
A "compostable" poop bag available on Chewy.com...Chewy.com
...and why you should always read the fine print.Chewy.com
Companies love to exploit consumers’ lack of knowledge around these terms and processes, though, and are mostly free to do so since the language isn’t strongly regulated. Often brands will brag that their compostable bags meet the “ASTM D6400 standard,” which just means they meet the industrial composting standard — again, pretty useless for us in this context. (Touting the ASTM D6400 standard is also often a way for brands to hide that their bags are made with virgin fossil fuels … more on that soon).
The bigger question when it comes to composting pet waste is, do we even want to? Dogs and cats are meat eaters, which means their poop contains parasites and bacteria like roundworms and hookworms, which can last for years in the soil and even be passed onto humans if used as a fertilizer for edible plants. While maybe this doesn’t sound like it could be that big of a problem, it is: “A study by the Bureau of Sanitation found that 60% of the bacteria in a Marina Del Rey, [California,] waterway was because of animals, domesticated and feral,” the Los Angeles Times reports. Gross.
This is one time you’ll ever hear me say that dog people have it better, though. Done correctly, dog owners actually can home compost dog waste if they’re so inclined. That said, a major downside of compostable bags is that they seem to lead some people to the impression that they can litter trails and parks with their “green” bags since the bags will eventually “go away.” As previously discussed: No, they won’t.
Cat waste, however, never basically should end up in your garden: Felines carry the parasite Toxoplasma gondii, which can be passed onto humans via compost but has been found to kill wildlife, including the sea otters in California. “Toxoplasma infections contribute to the deaths of 8 percent of otters that are found dead, and is the primary cause of death in 3 percent,” The New York Times explains. While feral cats used to be blamed for spreading the parasite, new evidence shows house cats almost certainly are, too — through their waste.
So compostable pet waste bags are out. As one municipality put it, dog and cat poop should be treated like what it is: not a fertilizer, but a pollutant. That means it needs to be sequestered, one way or another, in a landfill.
Just going to nip this one in the bud. For the same reason that composting pet waste isn’t advisable due to parasites and bacteria in four-legged meat-eaters’ feces, flushable pet waste bags and litter aren’t a safe or responsible choice, either.
Many waste treatment facilities don’t kill Toxoplasma, so putting cat poop in the toilet just expedites its journey into your local waterway. Indeed, in responding to an utterly unhinged email I sent them about cat waste, the California Association of Sanitation Agencies confirmed that “the only thing that should be flushed is human waste and toilet paper.”
Biodegradable pet waste bags are what radicalized me.
At first glance, these bags appear to be the best option. A number of them come on the recommendation of the sustainability website Treehugger. The product websites usually feature blogs full of reassuring information about how harmful plastic waste is, or boast 1% for the Planet certifications, or mention something about being made of cornstarch. Even the bags are green!
And almost all of them, despite their lofty claims, are made using virgin fossil fuels.
Polybutylene Adipate Terephthalate, or “PBAT,” is a biodegradable plastic made from the petrochemicals butanediol, purified terephthalic acid (PTA), and adipic acid. Translation: Fossil fuels must be extracted in order to make any bag that contains PBAT, which is virtually all of them.
Companies are exceptionally sneaky about this, though. Some of the brands boast outright about using PBAT as a traditional plastic alternative, likely assuming customers have no idea what the acronym means and won’t bother looking it up. Yet as Alice Judge, a former veterinarian and co-founder of the U.K.-based sustainable pet website Pet Impact, found in her own investigation, PBAT rarely makes up less than 60% of these supposedly “plant-based” pet waste bags. “There is some really concerning greenwashing and outright lying” going on in the industry, she told me. “We’ve found brands that are very big, reputable brands even saying explicitly ‘100% plant-based’ and in the same sentence saying ‘made from cornstarch and PBAT.’”
"Zero plastic" — but contains a fossil fuel-derived chemical called PBAT.Sirwaggingtons.com
PBAT is typically combined with cornstarch or sugarcane, so a “plant-based” bag advertising those ingredients can often be a tip-off that a fossil fuel product is also involved. Additionally, companies will frequently flag on their packaging that they meet the ASTM D6400 or BPI standards, though these have no provisions against certifying biodegradable products that contain PBAT.
Pet waste bag companies appear to go out of their way to avoid these admissions. Doggy Do Good, a popular sustainable pet waste company, told me in an email they use a “proprietary bio-based material” for “60.9% of the composition of their bags” — that is, the expected amount of PBAT — and added that “this fully biodegradable copolymer is an excellent alternative to polyethylene.” When I pressed to clarify if their proprietary “biodegradable copolymer” in question was PBAT, as I suspected, they stopped replying to my emails. The Original Poop Bag, another green bag company, didn’t answer me at all when I asked if their bags contained the fossil fuel product.
Despite these avoidance tactics, biodegradable bag companies aren’t using PBAT because they nefariously want to ruin the planet. It’s just the dirty secret of the pet waste bag business. As Judge explained in a blog post, “All poo bags have to include PBAT for strength and structure. If they were 100% plant-based, they would turn to mush very quickly when wet, lack strength, and tear easily (some qualities you really don’t want in a poo bag!).”
Fair enough. It’s the lack of transparency that is the problem: Most of these companies are selling fossil fuel-based products to customers who think they’re buying bags made from corn.
What's the other 62%?Doggydogood.com
Ultimately, there are two ways to think about the impact of the pet waste bags you buy: the impact of the materials used to make them and the impact of their disposal. If the latter is your biggest concern — what happens to bags after they’ve been used — biodegradable and “plant-based” bags are still probably the best, if imperfect, option available on the market. You can throw them in the trash (where they belong because again, pet poop is a pollutant) but also know at least that they’ll eventually biodegrade in a landfill (it should be noted, though, that everything is technically biodegradable, and the word means nothing without specification about the timeline and conditions).
From an “input” perspective — what the bags are made of, and how — biodegradable and “plant-based” bags are a little less exciting. They require less virgin fossil fuel than buying a bag entirely made out of traditional single-use plastic, though some research has suggested there is “no real difference in lifetime emissions between” products made with traditional plastic and those made from bioplastics. By another estimate, greenhouse gas emissions “are typically higher for bio-based plastics than recycled and virgin plastics” because “corn requires large amounts of energy, space, and water to grow industrially” and “turning the corn starch (once cultivated) into a polymer requires considerable energy.”
There is one major exception to all of this: Avoid “oxo-biodegradable” products. These are banned in the EU because they break down, sure — but into toxic microplastics.
Though they’re comparatively rare, you can find “recycled plastic” pet waste bags on the market. They apparently cut down on virgin fossil fuels by recycling plastic that’s already been extracted. (Judge’s company, Pet Impact, sells its own poo bag made from recycled ocean plastic, oyster shell waste, and “about 25 to 30%” virgin fossil fuels).
Even 100% recycled materials have their problems.
But while recycled plastic sounds great, it has — you guessed it — its own complications.
“Chemical” or “advanced” plastic recycling is the current sweetheart of the oil and gas industry, despite evidence that recycling plastic isn’t nearly as good as it’s chalked up to be. For one thing, the process of converting old plastics into new plastics is incredibly emissions-intensive and thus requires the burning of fossil fuels to generate the required energy. The recycling process can also spew cancer-causing chemicals into the air that disproportionately poison low-income communities of color, like those in “Cancer Alley.”
This is a problem that stretches far beyond the humble poo bags: Hundreds of companies now sell everything from clothes to shoes to shampoo bottles on the boast that they’re made from recycled plastics. Yet “by feigning ‘recycling’ (really, downcycling) of plastic pollution, companies can divert attention from their role in perpetuating this crisis while pulling in profits,” stresses the advocacy group Plastic Pollution Coalition. Recycled plastic can be just another smokescreen when what’s really needed is a reduction of single-use plastics altogether.
But it was reducing single-use plastics that got me into this whole mess in the first place.
In March 2020, a month when nothing else of note was happening, New York City banned single-use carryout plastic bags, joining San Francisco and a number of other towns around the country. But like many pet owners, grocery store plastic bags had been our go-to litter scooping bags. As we became more conscious of single-use plastics in some parts of our lives, it led us to buy … a bunch of single-use plastics to use for our pets.
As the pandemic wore on, my husband and I eventually decided to fly across the country with Marinka and Virginia in order to be with our families. There, my stepmother introduced us to a revolutionary new poop bag. It didn’t require the extraction of any new fossil fuels, and while it doesn’t break down in a landfill, it also won’t poison any otters.
The name of this holy grail of poop bags? Trash.
Empty bread bags can become the perfect chutes for scoops of litter. Plastic packaging gets a second life as a final resting place for kitty unmentionables. Bags of dry cat food, once exhausted, can be refilled.
This isn’t a perfect solution, either (for example, “produce bags aren’t engineered to be particularly durable, nor to hold in liquids or odors,” Wirecutter warns with the confidence of experience). But if I’ve learned anything in this mad, scatological journey, it’s that there is no perfect solution. What satisfies one person’s environmental concerns — about greenhouse gas emissions, fossil fuel extraction, or waste and pollution — might not satisfy someone else’s. And at a certain point, you have to make a choice, and likely a compromise, and then move on to focusing on the things that make a bigger difference, like what you drive, where you get your power from, or what you eat.
All this is to say, the trash method works for me because it makes single-use plastics destined for the landfill anyway into twice-use plastics. And at least it allows me not to think about cat poop anymore.
I think I’ve done enough of that to last me a lifetime.
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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.”