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Russ Vought could jeopardize the next decade of climate science. But who is he?
It is my sincere belief that, as with many aspects of governance, thinking about climate policy bores former President Donald Trump. He is not without his hobbyhorses — wind turbines are ugly bird-killers; it’s freezing in New York, so where the hell is global warming? — but on the whole, I tend to agree with the assessment that he basically believes “nothing” on climate change. Trump simply isn’t all that interested. He prefers to let the others do the thinking for him.
This isn’t a knock on Trump, per se; part of leading a bureaucracy as big and as complicated as the United States government is surrounding yourself with people who can offload some of that thinking for you. But the crucial question then becomes: Who is doing that thinking?
The answer, to a large extent, is Russ Vought.
The name might not immediately ring a bell. Biographical details of the 48-year-old career bureaucrat can be hard to find (“a native of Trumbull, Connecticut,” “the youngest of seven children,” “a die-hard Yankees fan”), giving the impression that Vought came out of nowhere. In a sense, he did: For years, Vought dealt mainly with spreadsheets as he worked first as a budget staffer for Texas Republican Sen. Phil Gramm and Rep. Jeb Hensarling, then later for then-Rep. Mike Pence, and eventually the Heritage Foundation. It was Gramm, though, who gave Vought his outlook on the world: “If you do budget, you do everything.”
After a stint with the Trump transition team, Vought became deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget in 2018, and took over entirely in 2019. At OMB, he famously held up military aid to Ukraine in what became the subject of Trump’s first impeachment. Described as “ideological in the extreme,” “adversarial” with his colleagues, and having an “aggressive personal style” — incongruous, perhaps, with his somewhat nerdy, bespectacled appearance — Vought would reportedly go too far in proposed budget cuts sometimes even for his boss.
After Biden’s win in 2020, Vought launched the Center for American Restoration, a pro-Trump think tank with the mission of renewing “a consensus of America as a nation under God,” and has otherwise kept busy with appearances on conservative-friendly talk shows on One America News Network and Fox News. Steve Bannon has approvingly dubbed him “MAGA’s bulldog,” though he rarely speaks to the mainstream press. (I received a failed delivery message in response to an email to the address listed on the website for the Center for American Restoration; other attempts to contact Vought went unanswered.)
Vought is all but assured to take up a powerful position in a potential incoming Trump cabinet. He “trained up during the first Trump administration, and he is looking to apply those skills that he learned in a second,” said Alex Witt, the senior advisor for oil and gas at Climate Power, a strategic communications group that shared its research on Vought with me.
Vought may not be the most obvious architect for the project of dismantling climate progress, however. In Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s roadmap for the next Republican president, Vought authored the chapter on the Office of the President of the United States — hardly the most climate-y section, given that there are also chapters on reforming the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Energy, and the Department of the Interior. A flurry of new articles about Vought describe him as a Christian nationalist crusader preoccupied with fending off big government and orchestrating an expansion of presidential powers.
But just as Trump advisor Stephen Miller shaped far-right immigration policies from behind the scenes, Vought would be a hidden hand in a future administration dismantling climate progress. In his chapter in Project 2025, for example, Vought proposes moving the National Defense Strategy from under the purview of the Defense Department to the White House and its National Security Council — normal “expansion of presidential powers” stuff. But Vought goes even further, directing the NSC then to “rigorously review” the staff with an eye for “climate change … and other polarizing policies that weaken our armed force.”
Erin Sikorsky, the director of the Center for Climate and Security, told me that such a proposal indicates “a misunderstanding of how connected climate hazards are to the core duties of what the military is focused on.” It could also put the U.S. armed forces on the back foot in conflicts around the world if it’s followed through. As just one example, if the military isn’t engaging with its Indo-Pacific partners “and helping those countries build resilience to climate change, then China is more than happy to step in and address that,” Sikorsky warned. At home, NSC analyses of the domestic impacts of climate change will likely come to a halt, scuttling future coordination between the military and local governments after disasters and hampering mitigation efforts around the country.
The most significant blow on the climate front, however, would come from Vought’s proposal to reinstate Schedule F, a job classification that aims to convert at least 50,000 career civil servants to “at-will” political employees. (Trump used an executive order to implement Schedule F at the very end of his term; President Biden unimplemented it soon after taking office.) The employment classification ostensibly aims to make it easier to replace “rogue” or “woke” civil servants and would-be whistleblowers, a.k.a. “the deep state,” with party-line faithful. But in the words of Vought himself, Schedule F is also necessary because Biden’s “climate fanaticism will need a whole-of-government unwinding.”
The effects of such a decision, experts told me, could range from very bad to disastrous self-sabotage. Schedule F is “designed to be a tool to purge federal agencies of nonpartisan experts” and replace them with “partisan loyalists who would willingly follow any order without question, regardless of whether it was legal, constitutional, or the right thing to do for the people,” Joe Spielberger, the policy counsel at the Project on Government Oversight, an independent and nonpartisan watchdog group, told me. In practice, that might mean firing longtime civil servants perceived as not loyal enough, or even just “creating and perpetuating a climate of fear and intimidation where people are not able or willing to speak out when they see abuse of power and other corruption happening.”
Such a scenario is concerning for employees at agencies like the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration who work on climate modeling. But the expertise of the U.S. civil service is broad and deep; Schedule F could impact everyone from the economists, lawyers, and engineers who work on something like the Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards to the people who sit on the Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee.
“Civil service positions are not classified as political appointees for a reason, which is so that staff, especially scientists, can do work that spans administrations because it is so fundamental to public health and welfare,” Chitra Kumar, the Union of Concerned Scientists’ managing director for climate and energy, told me in an email. The people made fireable under Schedule F, in other words, are the ones who actually know what is going on, whereas “elected officials come and go, often taking a year or more to understand the latest underlying science.”
Reimplementing and expanding Schedule F, however, is apparently one of Vought’s greatest ambitions. Earlier this year, the National Treasury Employees Union obtained documents via a Freedom of Information Act request that showed Vought’s intent to apply the status to much of OMB’s workforce in 2020. As justification for taking an implicit machete to his staff, Vought writes in Project 2025 that “it is the president’s agenda that should matter to the departments and agencies that operate under his constitutional authority,” but that instead, the U.S. civil service is “all too often … carrying out its own policy plans and preferences — or, worse yet, the policy plans and preferences of a radical, supposedly ‘woke’ faction of the country.”
Ann Carlson, the former acting administrator of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and a professor of environmental law at UCLA, strongly refutes Vought’s claim. For one thing, she told me that the great irony of the Schedule F proposal is that it would make it more difficult for the Trump administration to carry out its goals in the long run.
“Part of the problem for a conservative administration is, if you want to roll back policies that are in place, you need people who know how to do that,” Carlson pointed out. She also bristled at the suggestion that civil servants are unable to check their biases at the door: Carlson’s team at NHTSA helped put together the Biden administration’s rules to strengthen fuel economy standards, but it also worked to roll back the Obama administration’s regulations and replaced them with the SAFE standards under Trump. “I don’t actually know, for most of them, which one they preferred,” Carlson said.
Carlson wasn’t the only former political appointee I spoke with who fiercely defended the integrity of her staff. Ron Sanders, a three-year Trump appointee, so vehemently opposed Schedule F when it was briefly implemented in 2020 that he resigned as chairman of the Federal Salary Council. Today, he represents a group of Republican former national security officials who are imploring Congress to find a middle ground between the current status quo and the extreme political loyalty demanded by Schedule F.
When I read Sanders the part of Vought’s Project 2025 chapter that calls for weeding out the “radical, supposedly ‘woke’ faction of the country,” he told me that such thinking is “myopic.” “This is potentially a Republican administration coming in and finding ‘Democrats’ in place,” Sanders said. “You could say the same thing about the Biden administration, but they knew better — they knew that senior career officials appointed in the Trump administration are still politically neutral. It just happened to be a matter of timing.”
It likewise struck me as curious that Vought would push so hard for a policy that would not only hamstring the Trump administration but might also allow future Democratic presidents to carry out purges of perceived conservative government operatives.
The Biden administration has made moves to prevent Schedule F from potentially returning under a different president. Still, Spielberger from the Project on Government Oversight told me that short of a legislative fix by Congress, such actions will only delay reimplementation of the policy by “a matter of months” should Trump be reelected. The damage to climate science from four years of Schedule F, however, could be drastic.
“What we’re going to end up with is an executive branch that’s just uninformed,” Daniel Farber, the director of the Center for Law, Energy, and the Environment at the University of California, Berkeley, stressed to me. Farber’s fear is not just that “a bunch of uninformed ideologues” would be running the show, but also that once government experts are kicked out, it will be difficult to replace them or entice them to return.
“Even after we go back to a Democratic president, you can’t wave a wand and get all those people back,” Farber said. In the first nine months of the Trump administration, for example, the EPA lost more than 700 employees — and that was due to poor morale and high turnover even without the threat of Schedule F.
Schedule F doesn’t just chase out climate-related experts from the government. It also accelerates the revolving door that allows anti-climate zealots actors in. Both the Heritage Foundation and Vought’s think tank, the Center for American Restoration, have taken money from Big Oil groups and executives. Trump has already made his own transactional assurances to the industry if it funds his return to the White House. Schedule F, meanwhile, would open up hundreds if not thousands of positions for unqualified political operatives — essentially creating a “spoils system” where the lines between government and private industry would blur more than they already do.
“Russ Vought is not the problem,” Witt, of Climate Power, told me. “The problem is Donald Trump: Donald and the GOP are bought out by Big Oil, and Vought and other bad actors are a cog in that machine.”
It’s a metaphor that works well for the federal government, too: What happens when you have 50,000 cogs, but the person you’ve deferred to run the machine has fired all the mechanics?
“You take out all that expertise, all the people who understand how the system works?” Carlson, the former NHTSA director, said. “Good luck to you.”
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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.”