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Former President Trump wants to know: Would you rather be electrocuted or eaten by a shark?
On Sunday, during a rally in Las Vegas, the Republican nominee floated the question for what is
at least the second time this campaign season (an odd choice, perhaps, given that Nevada is hardly shark territory, and therefore his supporters there are unlikely to have given the question much thought).
Trump’s fear of sharks is
well documented at this point, and I myself have given that question a fair bit of thought, as well. Personally, I’d choose electrocution because of its merciful speed, but unfortunately for both me and Trump, “electrocution” isn’t a realistic option in the scenario he went on to describe. According to Trump, an unidentified “they” want to make boats all-electric, which — according to the representative of a “boat company” Trump spoke to in “South Carolina” — would require a battery so heavy that “it can’t float.”
As Trump goes on:
“I said, let me ask you a question. And he said nobody ever asked this question. And it must be because of MIT, my relationship to MIT. Very smart. I say, ‘What would happen if the boat sank from its weight and you’re in the boat, and you have this tremendously powerful battery, and the battery is now underwater, and there’s a shark that’s approximately 10 yards over there.”
Can you believe nobody ever asked this question?! “By the way, a lot of shark attacks lately, you notice that?,” Trump briefly digressed before returning to his main point:
“... Do I get electrocuted? If the boat is sinking, water goes over the battery, the boat is sinking — do I stay on top of the boat and get electrocuted or do I jump over by the shark and not get electrocuted? Because, I will tell you, he didn’t know the answer. He said, ‘You know, nobody’s ever asked me that question.’ I said, ‘I think it's a good question.’”
Luckily for Trump,
I answered his question last year. And, as the former president ought to be reassured, while all-electric boats are still in their relative infancy (and no mysterious “they” is trying to make them all-electric, anyway), boats more generally have been using batteries for over a century.
Furthermore, marine architects actually design their boats with the understanding that they may get wet. It’s true! The electric boat manufacturers I spoke with
for my article told me that their designs typically meet a waterproofing standard similar to what is required for submarines, and that the high-voltage batteries on board are kept in puncture-resistant shells to prevent exposure even if the boat were to get incredibly mangled.
While electric shock
is a danger in water, electric shock drowning is usually caused by faulty wiring at a dock or a marina. However, this overwhelmingly happens in lakes and rivers; saltwater, where most sharks live, is a better conductor of electricity than human bodies, so it will go around a swimmer to ground unless they grab something that is electrified, such as a dock ladder or a boat propeller.
All this is a long way of saying: If your boat — electric or otherwise — is sinking, electrocution might not even be an
option for a swift, toothless death. You’ll have to deal with the shark 10 yards away, whether you’d rather or not.
And for that, I can offer no reassurances. After all, as a “very smart” person recently observed, there have indeed been
a lot of shark attacks lately.
Jeva is a founding staff writer at Heatmap. Her writing has also appeared in The Week, where she formerly served as executive editor and culture critic, as well as in The New York Daily News, Vice, and Gothamist, among others. Jeva lives in New York City.
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With a brutal heat dome still threatening parts of the United States, one more thing about this summer has become clear: Cities are struggling to protect their most vulnerable citizens from extreme temperatures.
Just last week, on Juneteenth, over 82 million Americans were under active National Weather Service extreme heat alerts — but, due to the national holiday, many publicly operated cooling centers were closed. While Boston had opened 14 new facilities in partnership with the Centers for Youth and Families, for instance, none of them stayed open Wednesday.
The same thing happened in New York, where more than 200 cooling centers were closed for the holiday, most of them libraries. While other heat preparedness measures were still in place — Gov. Kathy Hochul announced free admission for state parks — residents counting on a facility near home had to change plans last minute. On Sunday, New York turned 45 public schools into cooling centers, this time because the public libraries were closed due to budget cuts.
In Chicago, only one cooling center was open during the holiday. The lack of cooling spaces available sparked action from homelessness advocates, who are urging the city to offer more cooling centers that are open 24/7 and also to make those facilities available when the heat index is above 80 degrees Fahrenheit.
Because cooling centers are often multi-purpose spaces, data on their usage is limited. In Boston, 245 people visited cooling centers from June 18 to 20, the mayor’s office told me. New York City’s Department of Emergency Management could only say that six people visited four of the schools open Sunday.
Emergency response services also attended more heat-related calls this past week. John Chisholm, chief of the Concord Fire Department, told The New York Times that the department received more calls than usual from seniors struggling with the heat on Tuesday. In New Hampshire, 39 individuals called 911 due to the heat on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday — more than the total amount of calls the service received in all of June last year.
Cooling companies also struggled to meet demands. An HVAC company in Hartford, Connecticut told USA Today that it received about 100 calls for service per day last week — numbers usually only seen during peak summer temperatures in August. To protect its technicians, the company had to turn down requests from clients that would have required work in an attic.
Throughout the week, cities canceled activities like food markets, street fairs, Little League practices, and field trips, were due to the heat. Instead, people flocked to beaches. In Massachusetts, the number of people heading to the coast was so high on Wednesday that some were forced to head back home due to intense traffic and lack of parking spaces. One exception was New York’s annual Mermaid Parade, which went on as scheduled.
Northwest Louisiana is about to be awash in direct air capture. Heirloom announced today that it’s moving its half of the Department of Energy-funded Project Cypress DAC hub from coastal Calcasieu Parish inland to Shreveport — and that it will be building a second facility, capable of removing 17,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide annually, on the same site. Once the two facilities reach full scale, they will have the capacity to suck up a combined 317,000 metric tons of CO2 per year.
Project Cypress, one of two regional DAC hubs that’s been announced thus far, is a partnership between Bay Area-based Heirloom, the Swiss DAC company Climeworks, and project developer Battelle. As per the initial plan, Climeworks will still build out its portion of Project Cypress in southwest Louisiana, and together with Heirloom’s Shreveport plant, the two facilities will pull a combined megaton of CO2 out of the atmosphere every year.
Those are the basic facts, but still, I had a lot of questions. Why make the move at all? What does it mean for Project Cypress, for the Calcasieu community, and for Climeworks? Here’s what Heirloom told me.
Why Shreveport?
Heirloom was already in the planning phase for its 17,000 ton facility in Shreveport prior to its selection for the DAC hubs program, a spokesperson told me. Thus, “it became clear that co-locating our portion of the Project Cypress Hub in the same location made a lot of sense from a cost and operational efficiency perspective.”
Will this make Project Cypress more expensive?
At this early stage it’s hard to say. But Heirloom and Climeworks will now need to develop their own distinct CO2 transport and storage systems, infrastructure that could have been shared were the two facilities close together.
Heirloom, for its part, expects its new 17,000 ton facility to be operational by 2026, while its larger Project Cypress plant is planned to come online in 2027. Initially, this larger facility will remove 100,000 metric tons of CO2 annually, eventually ramping up to 300,000 metric tons. For both projects, Heirloom is partnering with the carbon management company CapturePoint to permanently sequester CO2 in underground wells.
But storing carbon is not the only logistical challenge involved. The companies will now need to undertake separate community planning and engagement processes, a daunting task even when they had just one to figure out. And yet, the Heirloom spokesperson told us, because planning for Project Cypress is still in its early stages, any additional impacts will be “minimal.”
Did the Department of Energy approve the change?
The DOE administers the DAC Hub program that awarded Project Cypress $50 million in March, so this is no small question. The program is “meant to spur the development of clean energy capabilities across geographical regions, not necessarily in one specific location,” the Heirloom spokesperson told me, and said “the Department of Energy has been incredibly supportive of Heirloom’s expansion into North West Louisiana.” (When we asked DOE, a representative said the agency knew of the move but didn’t provide any further details.)
All this comes on the heels of a big year for Heirloom, which uses limestone powder to absorb CO2 from the atmosphere. Late last year it unveiled its first commercial DAC facility, which is capable of capturing 1,000 metric tons annually. The Shreveport plants thus represent a massive scale-up.
Heirloom wouldn’t disclose its cost per metric ton of CO2 removed, but the spokesperson said it’s currently “in the high hundreds of dollars,” and that it has an eye toward getting below $100 per metric ton by 2035, the widely accepted metric for commercial viability. So far, the company said, it has “sold a substantial portion of the capacity from both facilities to voluntary buyers.” Customers include major players in the voluntary carbon removal market, including Microsoft, Stripe, Klarna, JPMorgan Chase and Meta. Louisiana is also providing Heirloom with a set of economic incentives worth around $10 million, the company said.
Editor’s note: This piece has been updated to include a response from the Department of Energy.
While climate change policy is typically heavily polarized along party lines, nuclear energy policy is not. The ADVANCE Act, which would reform the nuclear regulatory policy to encourage the development of advanced nuclear reactors, passed the Senate today, by a vote of 88-2, preparing it for an almost certain presidential signature.
The bill has been floating around Congress for about a year and is the product of bipartisanship within the relevant committees, a notable departure from increasingly top-down legislating in Washington. The House of Representatives has its own nuclear regulatory bill, the Atomic Energy Advancement Act, which the House overwhelmingly voted for in February.
The resulting bill — a.k.a. the one that just passed — is a compromise between the House bill and the ADVANCE Act originally introduced in 2023, has been stapled to the “Fire Grants and Safety Act,” a bipartisan bill that reauthorizes a gaggle of federal firefighting programs that has already passed the House.
The nuclear piece of it is designed to align the Nuclear Regulatory Commission around so-called “advanced” nuclear reactors, a catch-all term that covers a number of designs and concepts that are typically smaller than the existing light water reactor fleet and would, ideally, be largely factory-built to reduce costs. So far, the NRC has only approved one advanced reactor design, put forward by the nuclear startup NuScale, but plans to actually build it fell through due to escalating costs. Another advanced nuclear project, Bill-Gates-backed TerraPower, has started construction ahead of receiving approval from the NRC.
The ADVANCE Act would eliminate some fees for applicants going through the NRC approval process; instruct the NRC to develop specific rules for “microreactors,” which might only have 20 or so megawatts of capacity and could be used for single sites or rural areas; establish prizes for advanced reactors; and “streamline” the NRC process for advanced nuclear reactors. That last bit would involve beefing up the Commission with additional staffing, change its mission statement to be more supportive of nuclear energy’s benefits (as opposed to merely its risks), and come up with a way to make it easier to develop nuclear reactors on brownfield sites such as decommissioned coal plants.
The Nuclear Energy Institute said in a statement in April that the bill would “improve our ability to get more nuclear reactors approved and on the grid more quickly.” That is exactly what some environmental groups are unhappy about, however. “Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s apparent embrace of new nuclear energy development represents a stark betrayal of the clean, safe renewable energy options like wind and solar that he claims to champion,” Wenonah Hauter, executive director of Food & Water Watch, said in a statement last week.
The ADVANCE Act is just one of a flurry of legislative and executive actions to support the nuclear energy industry. Nuclear power qualifies for a number of Inflation Reduction Act tax credits and the beefed up Loan Programs Office has committed up to $1.5 billion for the re-opening of the Palisades Nuclear Plant in Michigan.
