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These are the top contenders for the most climate-influential jobs.
If Donald Trump moves back to Washington, D.C., in January 2025, he won’t arrive alone. Though Trump’s first term was marked by a messy transition and bouts of political incompetence, Republican operatives have spent the past four years putting together a plan to hit the ground running if or when he returns — as well as a list of friendly names for plum positions in the would-be Trump administration. Many additional Republicans have quietly (and, often, not so quietly) spent the past few years auditioning for these top roles, typically by signaling their willingness to continue dismantling the regulatory and administrative states.
While nearly all positions in a Trump cabinet have at least some ability to limit or eliminate climate progress, here are some names circulating for the most influential departments.
The past is prologue when it comes to a future Trump administration, making Dan Brouillette an easy guess to head of the Department of Energy: His reappointment would mark a return to the post he left during the presidential transition in 2021.
But Secretary of Energy is nothing if not a competitive position, and Brouillette isn’t treating it like he’s a shoo-in, either. Since 2023, he’s served as the president and CEO of the Edison Electric Institute, a trade association for electric utilities that has taken a more tepid stance on climate policies during his tenure. He’s also spent plenty of time going on TV and speaking to the press against Biden’s (since overturned) pause in approving new export facilities for liquified natural gas — an industry he has history with but that falls well outside his purview EEI. The effect is more a performance for Trump than it is any sort of service for his organization’s members. Brouillette has also repeatedly insisted that the Trump administration won’t gut the Inflation Reduction Act, an oddly blasé attitude about legislation that has significantly benefited the utilities EEI represents.
Bernard McNamee, the author of the Department of Energy section of Project 2025, is another top choice for the DOE. One of the “most overtly political” people to ever be appointed to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, in the words of E&E News, McNamee has said that fossil fuels are “key to our prosperity” and that the renewable push amounts to “tyranny.” His chapter of Project 2025 calls for — among other things — closing the renewable energy offices at the DOE, eliminating energy efficiency standards for appliances, and refocusing the three National Labs run by DOE on “national security issues.”
If Trump doesn’t pick Doug Burgum for vice president, there is a strong chance there could be a home for him at the DOE instead. Many see the governor of North Dakota as a frontrunner for Energy Secretary, suspicions Burgum has reinforced by cozying up to Trump as a political surrogate, even warming up crowds at the candidate’s political rallies. While Burgum “at times [could] seem environmentally conscious” during his gubernatorial tenure, he’s recently shifted to more familiar Republican talking points on the oil and gas industry and reportedly helped connect Trump to would-be donors in the fossil fuel sectors, according to reporting by The New York Times. He has also informally advised the Trump campaign on energy policy.
There might also be a high-ranking position in the DOE for Texas oil and fracking magnate Harold Hamm, who was reportedly a finalist for the position back in 2016. Hamm, a conservative megadonor, briefly broke with Trump during the Republican primary but has since returned to fundraise for his campaign. Trump prizes loyalty, however, which is why Secretary Hamm might be more of a longshot; Hamm may return to being an informal advisor for the administration instead.
South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem seems pretty solidly off the VP shortlist after making national headlines for admitting in her memoir that she killed a puppy, but she may yet fill a role in the administration that is less in the public spotlight. Interior wouldn’t be so far-fetched: Noem played an active part in slashing environmental protections in her state — something that ought to endear her to Trump — and she worked closely with Trump’s Secretary of the Interior to explore returning controversial firework shows to Mount Rushmore. In South Dakota, Noem also rolled the Department of Environment and Natural Resources into the Department of Agriculture and has been actively hostile to the build-out of renewable energy, going so far as to refuse to apply for IRA grant money — an action that signals her uncompromising commitment to the party’s political message to anyone watching.
If not Noem, it’s possible David Bernhardt could return to the position he held under the first Trump administration. He’s used his time out of national politics to promote better swamp management (that’s the metaphorical swamp, not literal swamps, such as the critical beachfront-adjacent wetlands he limited protections for while in office) and to push Trump’s plan to reinstate Schedule F — which will make it easier to fire employees that aren’t deemed loyal enough to the administration — declaring that his own agency had been “overwhelmingly liberal” during his tenure. Bernhardt has adopted skepticism of career civil servants as something of a pet cause, publishing a 2023 book called You Report to Me: Accountability for the Failing Administrative State and filing an amicus brief to the Supreme Court earlier this year that argued, “One would be naïve not to understand how policy drives the ‘science’ at an agency.”
Those familiar with Bernhardt’s thinking, though, see the former secretary as angling for a more ambitious post in a future Trump administration, such as director of the Office of Management and Budget. An OMB appointment would potentially put Bernhardt on a collision course with Russ Vought, another Schedule F proponent, which means that if the former Interior secretary’s apparent angling for a new office doesn’t pan out, he may end up back in a more familiar role.
Trump’s former ambassador to Portugal, George Glass, has also been floated in the Interior conversation. An Oregon businessman, Glass fits the bill as a Westerner — since 1949, just one Interior secretary has not been a resident or native of a state west of the Mississippi. He also sees eye-to-eye with Trump as a China hawk, and while he doesn’t have much of a climate record, he has been a steady donor whose loyalty could be rewarded again with a plum administrative position.
While the Department of Agriculture doesn’t have the same levers to pull as Interior or Energy, the USDA nevertheless oversees one of the most significant sources of planet-warming emissions in the United States. While the Biden administration’s USDA has explicitly pursued an “equitable and climate-smart food and agriculture economy,” the Heritage Foundation instead wants the agency to “play a limited role” that doesn’t “hinder food production or otherwise undermine efforts to meet consumer demand.”
J. D. Vance has emerged as one candidate to get that job done. The Hillbilly Elegy author-turned-Ohio-senator previously invested in an agriculture startup and has taken a particular interest in the farm bill, while at the same time boasts a 0% lifetime score from the League of Conservation Voters. Vance’s name has also been in the hat for VP, and he’s certainly done his best to remain in Trump’s good graces, which could land him a secretary post if he doesn’t ultimately make the cut as a running mate.
There might be a better case, though, that this department ends up in the hands of Sid Miller. Currently serving as the Texas Agriculture Commissioner, Miller was reportedly on the shortlist for the position back in 2016. He has blamed weather-related power outages in his state on renewable intermittency, at one time writing, “to heck with green energy or climate change.” Miller is something of a firebrand, however, alienating even some within his own party, and he could struggle to garner the bipartisan support that will likely be necessary to win confirmation.
Though Trump initially avoided answering a question about the climate during the first presidential debate, he had talking points ready thanks to Andrew Wheeler, his former head of the Environmental Protection Agency. Trump seemingly referred to Wheeler as one of “my top environmental people,” suggesting that in addition to being an informal adviser to the campaign, Wheeler and his work at the EPA remain in high regard with Trump himself. While in the previous administration, Wheeler notably helped to roll back over 100 clean air, water, and environmental regulations.
Wheeler himself has been cagey about whether he’s auditioning for another Trump position, though — this spring, he joined the Holland & Hart law firm as a partner focused on federal affairs. If Wheeler decides to stay in the private sector, Trump might turn instead to Mandy Gunasekara, one of the primary architects of the U.S. withdrawal from the Paris Agreement on climate change and the author of the especially concerning Project 2025 chapter on the EPA.
Gunasekara has bolstered the case for herself by describing how she would curtail the EPA’s powers, eliminate its enforcement office, and “update the 2009 endangerment finding” that greenhouse gases are a threat to public health and the environment — science that has been used as the backbone for the EPA’s climate change regulations for years. Gunasekara has also said that while she believes in human-caused climate change, planetary warming is “overstated” and erroneously claimed that scientific data shows “a mild and manageable climate change in the future.” That rhetoric puts her right in sync with her potential future boss.
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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.”