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When Donald Trump met with a group of oil executives at Mar-a-Lago last month, his message was somewhere between “refreshingly blunt” and “blatant shakedown.” Attendees
spilled to The Washington Post that Trump told the executives they should raise a billion dollars for his campaign so he could make them even richer by reducing their taxes and removing regulations on their industry.
One can’t help but wonder if any of them thought to themselves that as appealing as that kind of deal might be, there’s no reason for them to be desperate. After all, the Biden years have actually been quite good for the fossil fuel industry.
That applies to the fossil fuel industry’s political allies as well: While Republicans are appalled at the enormous sums the administration and congressional Democrats have directed to renewable energy development and other climate-focused programs, fossil fuels are doing just fine. In the immediate term, the president’s political opponents can barely find anything to complain about, which was probably key to the Biden administration’s political strategy all along.
Republican frustration was on clear display at a
hearing Thursday of the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability, where GOP members went through the motions of grilling Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm over what they like to call “the Biden administration’s war on energy.” Their attempts to portray the administration’s throttling the production of fossil fuels were so absurd that at times Granholm seemed to struggle to keep from laughing out loud. One member was upset about the demise of incandescent light bulbs. Another said they “know a guy” who, for some reason, had to pay $8,000 to put an electric vehicle charger in his garage (the secretary was at a loss to explain that). And a third wanted to know whether the DOE is reverse-engineering technology from unidentified aerial phenomena, what we used to refer to call UFOs (the secretary didn’t give much of an answer — clearly she’s in on the conspiracy).
“Can you clarify whether the Department of Energy has been involved in any such efforts either historically or currently to analyze reverse-engineering materials from or related to UAPs?” asked Rep. Anna Paulina Luna of Florida.
“I have no knowledge of that,” Granholm replied.
“There have been documented sightings of metallic spheres over DOE facilities,” Luna continued later. “What investigations have been conducted in regards to these sightings and what conclusions do you guys have about the nature and origins of these objects?”
“I’d be happy to follow up with you on that,” Granholm replied diplomatically.
Predictable congressional buffoonery notwithstanding, this is the curious situation in which we find ourselves: On one hand, this administration has done more to advance green energy than any that came before. The 2022 Inflation Reduction Act was the most significant piece of climate legislation in history, and if the administration’s climate initiatives are successful, this could be the key turning point in America’s contribution to climate change. On the other hand, the U.S. has never exported more oil than it
did last year and overtook Australia and Qatar to become the world’s leading producer of liquified natural gas. The fossil fuel industry has been booming since Joe Biden took office, and still is.
The immediate topic of the Oversight Committee hearing was the administration’s decision to pause new approvals for liquid natural gas export projects so it can complete a review of the analysis that underpins those approvals. The pause doesn’t affect existing exports or projects under construction, but it has been hailed by many climate activists as an important step in the right direction.
The administration has
framed the pause in the context of its climate efforts, and the environmental impact of LNG is complicated; while burning gas creates lower emissions than burning coal or oil, the processes involved in exporting LNG — lowering the temperature of the gas until it becomes a liquid, moving it onto boats, moving the boats across the ocean, turning the liquid back into a gas — create their own emissions that make LNG not a particularly climate-friendly option.
In addition, there’s the question of environmental justice. “It is deeply disturbing to me that fossil fuel production is at a record high under the current administration,” said Rep. Rashida Tlaib at the hearing, noting the high rates of asthma and cancer in the area she grew up in and represents in Detroit. “LNG exports perpetuate, I think, systematic environmental racism,” she said, noting that the processing facilities are often sited in areas that are mostly minority and poor.
Nevertheless, the temporary pause on new approvals won’t hinder the booming LNG industry much, especially in the short run. As Granholm said, “We have exploded in our authorizations. This pause only applies to new ones coming down the pike.” The U.S. exported 88.9 million metric tons of LNG
in 2023; just eight years ago exports were almost nothing.
And yet keep repeating “War on energy!” knowing that facts seldom play too much of a role in political persuasion.
Polling shows that more voters trust Donald Trump on a range of questions related to energy production and prices, and the imaginary lack of fossil fuel production is such an urgent problem to solve that Trump has promised that he will be a dictator on “day one” in order to do two things: “I want to close the border, and I want to drill, drill, drill.”
It can appear to be the best of both worlds for Republicans: They get the fossil fuel production they want, and outside of a hearing room where they can be directly shot down, they can still make at least some political hay out of energy. They would probably add that while oil and gas production is up at the moment, Democrats are still hoping to phase out fossil fuels over the long run. Which is true.
Democrats have the harder political task: They want to show that they’re addressing climate change, but in a way that doesn’t cause any inconvenience or higher retail prices for gasoline. That has always been part of the green energy dream — that we could get more energy for less money, even as we’re saving the planet. In some ways that’s what’s happening as the price of renewables has continued to drop. But all it takes is a momentary spike in gasoline prices to send angry voters back into the arms of whoever promises to bring them down.
While most coverage of the buzzy fusion energy industry — including my own — tends to focus on the startups promising to build commercial reactors within the next decade, a whole host of supporting industries will also need to mature in order to make that long-held scientific dream a reality. Isotope production is one of the biggest. No matter a company’s technical approach to fusion, it likely demands hydrogen and lithium isotopes — the former to fuel reactors, and the latter to breed more of that fuel.
That’s where Marathon Fusion comes in. The San Francisco-based seed-stage startup is developing isotope separation technology for two key purposes: recycling tritium — an extremely rare hydrogen isotope — from reactor exhaust so it can be reused as fusion fuel, and enriching lithium-6, which is needed to breed new tritium. On Thursday, the company announced that it succeeded in using its plasma centrifuge technology to enrich lithium-6 and hydrogen isotopes in the lab. (It can’t yet test the tech on actual tritium, which is expensive, radioactive, and tightly regulated by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, so Marathon is validating its separation physics using the non-radioactive proxies deuterium and protium.) Marathon now plans to raise a Series A based on the results.
“People have wondered for a very long time when fusion is going to come, and everyone’s waiting on the big scientific announcements,” Marathon’s CEO Kyle Schiller told me. But while the industry waits for those breakthroughs, he argued, it’s high time to start commercializing the infrastructure fusion will need to become an actual commercial industry. “Ultimately, what we’re doing is reactor agnostic. Everyone’s going to need it.”
In the near term at least, most fusion companies plan to use deuterium-tritium plasmas to power the fusion reaction. But the process is inherently inefficient — only a small fraction of the fuel actually fuses in the reaction, while the rest gets expelled, even though it still contains valuable, unburned tritium that can be captured and reused.
Today, neither tritium nor the lithium-6 needed to make more of it are produced at anything close to the scale even a single commercial fusion reactor would require to get up and running. And existing isotope separation technologies — largely designed for small-volume defense programs and experimental reactors — aren’t sufficient to bridge the gap.
“When you have a single fusion power plant, that’s going to need about 1,000 times more lithium than anyone is producing today in any country,” Schiller told me, referring to lithium-6. “It would be totally prohibitive to build a fusion power plant at those economics.”
And while it’s at least possible to produce enough of this isotope to supply a future fusion industry by enriching lithium mined from rock, tritium presents a more fundamental problem. Because it’s radioactive and decays relatively quickly, it doesn’t occur naturally in meaningful quantities. Today it’s produced commercially as a byproduct of some fission reactors, but that supply amounts to just a few kilograms per year. A single 1-gigawatt commercial fusion reactor, by contrast, would need an estimated 56 kilograms annually. Meeting that demand will require fusion companies to breed their own tritium inside the reactor, a process that involves fusion-generated neutrons hitting lithium-6 nuclei, splitting them into tritium and helium.
It will also necessitate recycling the substantial amount of tritium that passes through the reactor without burning up. That’s where Marathon’s plasma centrifuge comes in. Centrifuges themselves are nothing new — engineers have used them for decades to separate uranium isotopes for nuclear fuel, spinning the gas at such high speeds that isotopes with different masses separate. Plasma centrifuges work on the same principle and have been studied since the Manhattan Project, but no one has yet successfully commercialized the approach for lithium and hydrogen.
Part of the reason is that, until recently, there simply wasn’t much demand for these isotopes. But the raw materials also present a physics challenge: Lithium and hydrogen isotopes have very similar masses. Separating them thus requires spinning the plasma so rapidly that, historically, the resulting heat has undermined the separation process itself. To address this, Marathon’s proprietary centrifuge tech uses a “partially ionized” plasma, in which some atoms have been stripped of their electrons while others remain neutral. The company says this configuration allows the centrifuge to operate at lower temperatures.
The materials testing lab Covalent has certified Marathon’s lithium-6 enrichment. The company hasn’t had its hydrogen separation results independently verified, though an MIT nuclear engineering professor has reviewed the device’s design. As a participant in ARPA-E’s Vision OPEN program, which solicits and supports ambitious energy projects, Marathon has also presented its hydrogen separation methodology and results at the ARPA-E fusion programs meeting in June.
Now, Schiller told me, the challenge is scaling up the technology’s core systems. “We need bigger magnets, better cooling, bigger power systems, and so that’s a buildout that’s going to take time and more capital,” he said. “But as far as the science is concerned, we feel like it’s at the point where we’re ready to make those kinds of commitments.”
Marathon is now looking to raise capital to build its first commercial pilot facility, with the goal of reaching full-scale production by 2029. Schiller told me the company expects its first full-scale facility to produce tens of tons of lithium-6 per year — enough, he says, to fuel a new gigawatt-scale fusion plant roughly every two years. Marathon also plans to recover and repurpose about 560 kilograms of tritium annually — roughly the amount that cycles through a 1-gigawatt reactor’s fuel system each year, most of which exits in the reactor’s exhaust without ever fusing.
Once fusion reactors are operating at scale, Marathon has a few other tricks up its sleeve. The startup also plans to build an “isotope production” business, using the copious volume of high-energy neutrons generated by fusion to manufacture valuable isotopes. The company madeheadlines last year with its claim that fusion-generated neutrons could transmute mercury into an unstable isotope that eventually decays into gold — potentially doubling a fusion reactor’s economic output (and proving the old alchemists right). But that work is still theoretical, based on computer simulations rather than peer-reviewed or experimentally validated work.
Marathon certainly has plenty to keep it busy in the near term, though. “There is a really amazing opportunity right now to say, look, the fusion supply chain is ready to go. We can start scaling up,” Schiller told me. “The science will progress in parallel, and we really want to land this together — not wait another 10 years after scientific results come in.”
Current conditions: Temperatures in Sicily and southern Italy are approaching 100 degrees Fahrenheit as a heat dome settles over the north-central Mediterranean • After pounding Okinawa and injuring two people on Japan’s remote southern islands, Typhoon Saudel is barreling west toward China • A geomagnetic storm known as a coronal hole could create a visible aurora from New York to Idaho, causing minor disruptions to technological devices such as GPS.
THE TOP FIVE
1. A catastrophic flash flood on the Nepali-Chinese border kills more than 330 people
The aftermath. Prabin RANABHAT / AFP via Getty Images
It’s like something out of an apocalyptic disaster film. From a camera situated on a cliffside overlooking the Rasuwagadhi border checkpoint in a valley between Nepal and Tibet, you watch as several — then dozens — of people start running away from the building. Birds fly across the screen in the same direction. Finally, after a few seconds, you see what they’re trying to escape: A giant wall of gray, muddy water crashing into the roughly six-story building like an ocean wave against a sand castle. In other videos, cars, trees, and homes disappear under the roar of a river of mud and rocks. Goliath boulders roll like basketballs. Men run for their lives. An avalanche on the Chinese side of the border “triggered a wall of water with no warning,” wrote The Kathmandu Post, an English-language daily in the Nepali capital, declaring this “one of Nepal’s deadliest disasters in decades.” By Thursday morning, the death toll counted at least 332, with hundreds more people still missing. Nepal’s disaster authority told the Indian broadcaster NDTV that a “chunk of snow and rock broke off near a glacier zone” on the border and either “fell into a glacial lake or blocked the river channel” resulting in a surge that swelled into a wave of glacial ice, meltwater, and debris. While initial reports suggested the avalanche started with an earthquake, a U.S. Geological Survey analysis found that the avalanche itself set off a magnitude 5.2 landslide.
2. Trump moves to ban more foreign grid equipment
Last month the Federal Communications Commission banned the use of new types of foreign-made inverters, the equipment needed to patch solar panels and batteries onto the grid, citing the need to protect the U.S. artificial intelligence buildout from Chinese sabotage. Now the White House is stepping in to block foreign imports of yet more types of grid equipment. In an executive order Wednesday, President Donald Trump said that “continued United States reliance on foreign sources of bulk-power system electric equipment with these potential national security vulnerabilities also creates a supply chain vulnerability that could eliminate the supply of these products in the United States as a result of disruptions in international trade.” In particular, the order will affect transformers, which are facing a years-long backlog as manufacturers struggle to keep up with demand from both the data center buildout and repairs to the grid after extreme weather mangles power equipment. The Biden administration had sought to increase the energy efficiency standards for transformers, paralyzing manufacturers who opposed the regulation and could not make investments into new assembly lines to meet surging demand until the fate of the rule was resolved. The Biden-era Department of Energy ultimately withdrew its proposal. While the Trump administration policy now will further protect those domestic factories, the import restrictions could, in the meantime, make obtaining the equipment primarily made overseas more difficult.
3. Trump plans to fast-track drilling in the Arctic
The Trump administration is set to speed up permitting reviews for oil and gas drilling in the Arctic. On Wednesday, Public Domain broke news that the Department of the Interior is planning to publish a categorical exclusion to the National Environmental Policy Act “that would make it easier for the oil and gas industry to conduct seismic surveys, obtain rights of way, and drill new exploration wells” in the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska, a nearly 36,000-square-mile area on the continent’s northern Arctic Ocean coast.
The proposal, which the Interior Department confirmed, comes as a particularly devastating blow to the Native Village of Nuiqsut, which had brokered a deal with the Biden administration to create a nearly million-acre caribou reserve to foster a herd on which the indigenous residents have long depended. But former Nuiqsut Mayor Rosemary Ahtuangaruak told the public-lands-focused investigative site that new drilling activity around the village has already changed the herd’s migration patterns. “All of the contractual agreements that were supposed to guide how development is going to occur have been ripped out of the books,” she said. “We feel that it doesn’t matter that we have a unique DNA, a small community of 500 people, that are just being totally disregarded and sacrificed for the greed of development.”
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4. Exclusive: AAA for rooftop solar repair inks two big expansion deals
Back in May, I told you about Otovo, the new startup from the former chief executive of defunct rooftop solar giant Sunnova. Instead of installing solar panels, the new company repairs rooftop photovoltaic units, in addition to batteries and generators — a sort of AAA for home energy equipment. Otovo started in Norway, targeting millions of homeowners across Europe with solar panels from installers that went out of business and left customers without maintenance service. The company has mounted a global expansion into the United States by buying smaller solar companies and maintenance providers. On Thursday, Otovo plans to announce two deals to make its latest acquisitions: Oahu-based PV Hawaii and Mr. Elektro in Norway and Sweden. The combined value of the deals — which are being reported first in this newsletter — is about $4.6 million. “PV Hawaii and Mr. Elektro bring licensed, experienced local teams that strengthen how we serve customers, and they extend our platform into Hawaii for the first time while deepening our reach across Norway and Sweden,” Otovo CEO John Berger told me in a statement.
5. A kidney transplant won a mining giant a contract in world’s likely next countr
Bougainville President Ishmael Toroama.DAVID GRAY/AFP via Getty Images
You read that right. Unless you (like, uh, some people…) are familiar with late 20th century Melanesian geopolitics, you may not know the story of Bougainville. The island province off Papua New Guinea long had a troubled history. Ethnically, its people are related to those of the Solomon Islands, but German colonial borders hemmed the mineral-rich isle into the territory controlled by Port Moresby. In the 1970s, Anglo-Australian mining giant Rio Tinto built the Panguna mine in the center of the island. Pollution and labor violations plagued the open-pit copper and gold mine, ultimately fueling a separatist rebellion. A conflict, known as the Bougainvillean Civil War, erupted in 1988 and lasted for 10 years, only ending with a peace accord that allowed for a referendum on independence. In 2019, the autonomous province voted nearly unanimously in favor of breaking away from Papua New Guinea. The non-binding vote has yet to be ratified by the parliament in Port Moresby. But the leaders of Bougainville expect to become the world’s newest country by 2030.
To fund its sovereignty, the island wants to reopen Panguna. Last November, Ishmael Toroama, the president of Bougainville, signed a memorandum of understanding with Lloyds Metals and Energy. The Indian iron-ore miner won the deal “despite warnings from Bougainville’s majority state-owned mining company, Bougainville Copper, that Lloyds lacked the technical and financial capacity of rival bidders,” the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project reported in a major new investigation. Just a month earlier, Toroama confirmed to OCCRP, “he accepted an offer from Lloyds’ managing director Balasubramanian Prabhakaran to arrange for his wife to travel to India and have a life-saving kidney operation at no cost to the president.” Toroama told OCCRP that the gift did not weigh on his decision to select the Mumbai-based Lloyds for the project.
THE KICKER
The first step in the Department of Energy’s effort to propel new reactor technologies to market was a pair of pilot programs to speed up development of projects from both power and fuel producers. The next step is the “nuclear launch pad” initiative at the Idaho National Laboratory’s National Reactor Innovation Center. This week, the agency announced the first 12 companies to participate in the new program, which bills itself as providing “flexible technical and regulatory frameworks designed to fast-track paths from concept to deployment.” The list includes microreactor developers Antares Nuclear, Atlas Atomics, Oklo, Valar Atomics, Scaled Atomics, and two projects from Deployable Energy; fuel makers Forge Atomics, Hexium, Lightbridge Corporation, Raven-Flint Nuclear, and Sublime Nuclear; and medical isotope startup Nusano. “These selections show a strong and growing interest from developers ready to move their technologies forward,” Brad Tomer, the director of the National Reactor Innovation Center, said in a statement. Meanwhile, another startup spinning out from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced a big initial funding round. Apollo Atomics — which aims to build next-generation pressurized water reactors, the type of reactor that makes up the bulk of the global fleet — announced a $31 million seed financing round, NucNet reported.
Rob talks with Amanda Levin, head of climate science and policy at the Natural Resources Defense Council, about why we shouldn’t give up on renewable subsidies just yet.
Two years ago, Donald Trump made an outlandish campaign promise: He would cut Americans’ power bills in half.
It was a ridiculous, impossible pledge — but even so, the affordability problem didn’t need to get this bad. A new report, out this week from the Natural Resources Defense Council, looks at the economic, environmental, and public health costs of Trump’s regulatory and legislative clean energy policies, including his rollback of the wind and solar tax credits.
The report’s author, Amanda Levin, joins Rob on this episode of Shift Key. Levin is a Director of Policy Analysis at the NRDC’s Science Office. They discuss why Trump’s repeal will have long-term effects, the underrated public health impacts of the rollback, and why Levin believes the credits should be restored.
Shift Key is hosted by Robinson Meyer, the founding executive editor of Heatmap News.
Subscribe to “Shift Key” and find this episode on Apple Podcasts,Spotify,Amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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Here is an excerpt from their conversation:
Robinson Meyer: So you’ve said that we should have tax credits that buy down the cost of technologies while we’re installing them. We had Lily Bermel on Shift Key a few weeks ago with her report, and she looked at a different set of questions here, and I think it’s worth kind of talking about them in a second. But her view of the data — which I would say I’ve also heard now from some solar developers, who obviously represent the interests of their industry — but her view of the data was like, look, there’s a lot of solar and batteries that are about to get built as developers rush to hit a deadline, rush to hit the deadline in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Her view is, if you look at this from an emissions perspective, you don’t need wind and solar tax credits. So really ,money would be better spent elsewhere. It would be better spent buying down the cost of clean firm technologies like advanced geothermal, like fusion, perhaps, that can run 24/7 and start to push gas out of the system.
You’ve written an op-ed for Heatmap kind of taking issue with some of those claims, and I want to actually lean into that disagreement. Why should the U.S. restore wind and solar tax credits? Because I would say we’ve learned one thing, actually, in the past month since Lily was on the show. It is that deficit concerns are going to be even more pressing for lawmakers, it seems like, in 2029, even in 2027, than they were in 2024 or 2022, because interest rates are going to be high. They seem to be getting higher. Among the crises that Democrats will have promised to solve is this deficit crisis that is of Trump’s own creation. And so why should a scarce dollar go to wind and solar tax credits?
Amanda Levin: I think it’s important to remember that renewables have a lot of benefits, and not all of them are reflected in the decisions that a utility might make on behalf of its customers. Renewables both lower pollution, which can help reduce the costs and the burden that we have both from public health pollution as well as from climate pollution. They also can enhance energy security and increase economic opportunities.
But I think importantly, it’s a recognition of, one, we need to build a lot of energy fast, and we want to build it clean, as well. And that is going to take quite a bit of money up front. Even if wind and solar are some of the cheapest, lowest cost options over the life of their investment, when looking at something more simplistic, like a levelized cost of energy, it doesn’t mean that they don’t have large upfront costs that need to then be recovered from someone. And in the structure of many of our states, that someone is going to be ratepayers. And often the way that we recover money through electricity bills and rates is not progressive. It’s pretty regressive. So I think the way that we see the kind of tax credits playing into this is it’s an essential part of ensuring that as we transition towards a cleaner system, it remains affordable for everyone by moving costs off of ratepayers, who are going to be much more regressively taxed, and putting them onto the federal government, when we know that we need to be spending more on clean energy to meet our growing load, and also just to invest in our grid that is, in many cases, reaching the end of its life for certain investments.
And so I think to that kind of question of what are we trying to solve here? Obviously, wind and solar, we still see that they are being built, and they make up the bulk of anything that’s going to be built in the next decade. But we’re definitely not building enough.
There was a paper that I was part of at the beginning of 2025 that found that in order to meet our climate commitments, we would need to quadruple the amount of wind, solar, and battery storage that was being added to the system compared to recent day records. The IRA got us basically halfway there. And if you look at where we are now with Trump, we’ve basically lost that halfway there. But what we know is, if we want to actually tackle our societal challenges — climate, health, everything — and affordability, we’re going to both need to build a lot of clean energy, but also we can’t put that on the backs of ratepayers. We need to explore other ways to mitigate the near-term affordability shock that will come from just having to invest in our system.
You can find a full transcript of the episode here.
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The aftermath. Prabin RANABHAT / AFP via Getty Images
Bougainville President Ishmael Toroama.DAVID GRAY/AFP via Getty Images
