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On the return of geoengineering, climate lawsuits, and a cheaper EV.
Current conditions: Battered Midwest in for more bad weather this weekend • Tornadoes keep hitting the Great Plains • A heat wave in New Delhi that pushed temperatures above 116 degrees Fahrenheit on Friday is expected to last several more days.
Nineteen Republican-led states are asking the Supreme Court to stop Democrat-led states from trying to force oil and gas companies to pay for the impacts of climate change. Rhode Island in 2018 became the first state to sue major oil companies for climate damages and has since been joined by California, Connecticut, Minnesota, and New Jersey. The states pursuing legal action against oil companies are trying to “dictate the future of the American energy industry,” the Republican attorneys general argued in a motion filed this week, “not by influencing federal legislation or by petitioning federal agencies, but by imposing ruinous liability and coercive remedies on energy companies” through the court system.
A month after ordering researchers to stop a cloud brightening experiment due to health and environmental concerns, officials in Alameda, California, determined that the experiment poses no measurable risk to people or wildlife. They found that the saltwater solution being sprayed into air is similar to saltwater, a naturally occurring aerosol. Alameda’s city council plans to reconsider the experiment based on officials’ findings early next month.
The experiment is one of the first tests of a form of geoengineering intended to reflect more solar energy back into space. Sarah J. Doherty, director of the Marine Cloud Brightening Program at the University of Washington, told The New York Times that the report “supports our own evaluation that this is a safe, publicly accessible way to further research on aerosols in the atmosphere.”
The Center for Biological Diversity is suing the Biden administration over its new standards for pollution from coal-fired power plants. The rule, which the EPA finalized last month, curtails coal plants’ discharges of heavy metals into water sources. But it includes exceptions for plants that are slated to retire by 2034. The Center for Biological Diversity called this an “unacceptable” loophole, emphasizing the risks that heavy metal pollution pose to communities and ecosystems. Brett Hartl, the conservation group’s government affairs director, said in a statement that the rule gives the coal industry “a free pass to dump millions of pounds of toxic pollution into this nation’s rivers for another 10 years.”
On Thursday, the Korean automaker Kia revealed the EV3, a small crossover that will start in the $30,000s when it comes to America next year or the year after. While slower than some of its rivals — Kia says it will go 0-60 miles per hour in 7.5 seconds — the EV3 will boast a range of 372 miles, “which blows away most current offerings, especially in that price range,” Andrew Moseman writes at Heatmap. The EV3 is the latest piece of the grand plan put together by Kia (and its owner, Hyundai) to offer an electric crossover at every price point — and a sign that more entry-level EVs might be coming over the horizon.
General Sherman, the world’s largest tree, passed a recent health check by researchers looking for evidence of damage by bark beetles. Both giant sequoias and bark beetles are native to California’s Sierra Nevada range, but the mounting pressures of climate change, including heat, drought, and fire, are weakening the sequoias and leaving them vulnerable to dying from bark beetle infestations. “The most significant threat to giant sequoias is climate-driven wildfires,” Ben Blom, director of stewardship and restoration at Save the Redwoods League, told The Associated Press. “But we certainly don’t want to be caught by surprise by a new threat, which is why we’re studying these beetles now.”
Researchers don’t fully understand how climate change is impacting air travel, but evidence suggests that instability in the jet stream may be contributing to the rise in clear-air turbulence.
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Even if the technology works, the economics might not.
Nuclear fusion, sometimes breathlessly referred to as the “holy grail” of clean energy, capable of providing “near limitless” energy, might actually, finally be on the verge of working. And when that first prototype reactor turns on, the feverish headlines about harnessing the power of the sun and the stars here on Earth will at least be somewhat justified. Fusion is going to be a massive scientific achievement, but in a practical sense, it might not matter.
“We can make it work,” Egemen Kolemen, fusion expert and associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Princeton University, told me. “But at what price?”
Figuring out fusion is one thing, penciling out the economics another. There’s a nontrivial chance that fusion could become a scientific reality but remain too expensive to make a dent in the barriers to decarbonization.
How this plays out largely depends on what the grid looks like by the mid-2030s, when the leading fusion startups think we’ll see the first demonstration reactors come online. President Biden wants to fully decarbonize the electricity sector by 2035. And as ambitious — or, as many say, unrealistic — as that may be, how close we get and how we get there will determine what opportunities remain for fusion.
By the mid-2030s, the cost of building new fission reactors could come down significantly; if The Nuclear Company has its way, we’ll have built a 6 gigawatt fleet of standard nuclear plants by then. Or maybe small, modular reactors will finally prove out, squeezing much of the market space for fusion. And then there’s all the other emergent, grid-firming tech in various stages of development. Think long-duration battery storage, enhanced geothermal, and hydrogen for starters.
“Batteries go down in price, hydrogen goes down, you know, two orders of magnitude, whatever. And then you say, we’re okay, we don’t need an extra [energy] source,” Kolemen told me. “So we have to be very clear that that’s an option as well.”
Needless to say, investors know it’s a gamble. “This is venture, of course there’s a chance that it might not be economically feasible,” Gabriel Kra, managing director and co-founder at climate tech VC Prelude Ventures, told me. “That’s not a reason, in any case, not to try.” Prelude Ventures has invested in two fusion companies, Thea Energy and Xcimer Energy, while venture capitalists on the whole have poured $6.7 billion into fusion since 1992, according to the Fusion Industry Association, the vast majority of that in the past three years.
Many of these same venture firms are also placing big bets on other energy solutions that promise to provide many of the same benefits as fusion, such as Fervo’s enhanced geothermal tech, or Koloma’s artificial intelligence-powered geologic hydrogen detection system, or Form Energy’s long-duration iron-air batteries. But because none of these brand new technologies has yet achieved meaningful scale, creating simple price forecasts or cost curve models isn’t possible.
A refrain I heard a few times, however, is that no matter the energy mix of the future, fusion’s viability isn’t simply a matter of dollars and cents. “Even if fusion doesn’t get as cheap as solar or wind, or even if it doesn’t get as cheap as natural gas, there’s still a huge place for it in the grid,” Kra said.
Siting fusion reactors near dense urban areas, for example, could help solve one of the principal issues with renewables. “Even now, it’s becoming difficult to find sites for solar and wind, and we have a fraction of what we would need,” Jacob Schwartz, a staff research physicist at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, told me. “If you really want a lot of firm power that can be much physically denser than these other resources, you might really want to build fusion.” Siting fusion next to demand centers would also reduce the need to permit and build long transmission lines, which can take a decade or more if it happens at all.
Of course, fission reactors have these advantages too. A paper Schwartz and Kolemen published last year, modeling fusion’s place in various net-zero grid scenarios from 2036 to 2050, found that in most of them, fusion plants would be primarily displacing fission. That is, if they made sense at all. The authors (including Princeton energy systems professor and Heatmap contributor Jesse Jenkins) also found that if the price of competing technologies creates at least a moderate market opportunity for fusion, we could wind up with 100 gigawatts or more of fusion capacity, about the size of the current domestic fission fleet. But if other technologies outperform and drop significantly in price, it’s possible that no commercial fusion plants would get built in that timeframe.
Kra, however, disagrees with a core assumption of the paper — that the U.S. will actually meet our carbon-free energy targets. “I don’t want to be a doomer, but I don’t think we’re going to decarbonize the grid by 2035,” Kra told me. “I think the first fusion plant that comes online, maybe between 2035 and 2040, will be displacing a fossil source at that moment in time.”
Looked at that way, the calculus changes. Fusion could become just another player in the renewables mix, slotting in alongside a plethora of other emergent and established carbon-free technologies to supplant fossil fuels in an all-of-the-above march towards zero emissions. It would still need to be cost-effective, of course, but if it’s framed as a possible successor to fossil fuels as opposed to a rival of existing clean energy sources, that’s a much better sales pitch.
That said, it’s going to take more than just reaching cost-parity with fission for fusion to take off. If that’s all we do, Kolemen told me, “it will have the exact same result, which is that nothing is going to be built.”
And even if fusion doesn’t end up penciling out for the U.S. grid, it may still in other areas of the world with less abundant renewable energy resources and rapid load growth. Phil Larochelle, the leader of Breakthrough Energy Ventures fusion investment strategy, told me that it’s really not the West that stands to benefit the most.
“You’ve got the rest of the world — call it, 80% of the world's population — who are trying to live a life of prosperity, like we do here.” But raising standards of living around the world means a huge increase in energy consumption. “And so then the question is, can you just kind of sneak across the finish line with wind, solar, storage, transmission, geothermal, a bit of natural gas?” Larochelle asked. While he said it should be possible, it wouldn’t allow for the flourishing vision of the future that he hopes to see. “Sustainable abundance for all. That’s, I think, where fusion really shines,” he told me.
Current conditions: Thunderstorms brought widespread flooding to Tampa Bay, Florida • The famous Constantine Arch in Rome was damaged by lightning • Super Typhoon Yagi is now the second-most powerful storm of 2024 and is expected to hit China on Friday.
The Biden administration today is expected to announce $7.3 billion in grants for rural electric cooperatives to finance clean energy projects aimed at bringing reliable, affordable energy to rural Americans. The infusion, which comes from the Empowering Rural America (New ERA) program of the Inflation Reduction Act, is “the largest investment in rural electrification since FDR’s administration,” said White House Deputy Chief of Staff Natalie Quillian. The 16 cooperatives will have projects dotted across 23 states. The projects are expected to create 4,500 permanent jobs and prevent more than 43 million tons of greenhouse gas pollution each year. Biden will announce the news at the Dairyland Power Cooperative in Wisconsin. Dairyland will receive $573 million for solar and wind installations across Wisconsin, Iowa, Minnesota, and Illinois. “One in five rural Americans will benefit from these clean energy investments, thanks to partnerships with rural electric cooperatives like Dairyland,” said Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack in a statement. “Put simply, this is rural power, for rural America.”
Volvo is watering down its commitment to sell only electric vehicles by 2030, aiming instead to have at least 90% of its sales be electric or plug-in hybrid vehicles by that year. CEO Jim Rowan blamed market forces, lack of EV charging infrastructure, and lower-than-expected customer demand for the change. The company said it will invest in plug-in hybrids for growth. “We are resolute in our belief that our future is electric,” Rowan said. “However, it is clear that the transition to electrification will not be linear, and customers and markets are moving at different speeds.” The walk-back follows similar moves from other carmakers including Ford. Volvo was one of the first legacy automakers to commit to a fully-electric future, and as the Financial Timesnoted, it “remains the most bullish about the transition.”
The intense heat wave positioned over the West Coast is bringing dangerously hot temperatures to Southern California. In some areas, temperatures will be 20 degrees above normal for this time of year. Los Angeles will see triple-digit highs through the end of the week. Palm Springs will hit 114 degrees Fahrenheit today. The Woodland Hills neighborhood of L.A. could reach 118 degrees by Friday. “In terms of this summer, it’s going to be the hottest we’ve seen or close to it,” Mike Wofford, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service, told the Los Angeles Times. Cooling centers are open across the state and are listed here. According to the California Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment, average annual temperatures in the state have risen by about 2.5 degrees Fahrenheit since 1895. Seven of the past eight years have been the warmest on record.
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The Ultium electric vehicle battery plant in Spring Hill, Tennessee, has joined the United Auto Workers union. The plant, which employs 1,000 people, is a joint venture between General Motors and LG Energy Solution. The UAW said in a statement that “the workers organized without facing threats or intimidation and won their union once a majority of workers signed cards.” This is the second Ultium plant to unionize, but the first in the South. The other, in Ohio, joined the UAW in 2022. “It could be a big deal,” wrote Jameson Dow at Electrek, “given the developing ‘battery belt’ in the U.S. South, where many companies have decided to build battery plants, with hundreds of billions of dollars in investment and hundreds of thousands of jobs on the docket. If other factories see the success at GM, they might start getting their own ideas and unionization could spread through the industry.”
The results of a new YouGov survey show that drivers are terribly misinformed about the costs, safety, and functionality of electric vehicles. In the survey, 1,000 people who currently drive gas-powered cars were asked to read 10 statements about EVs and identify whether they were true or false. The majority (90%) of participants answered just five or fewer questions correctly, and more than half (57%) of participants scored no higher than two out of 10. In other words, if this test had been scored on an A-F grading scale, nearly everyone would have failed. Sixty-two percent of them said EVs are more expensive to run than internal combustion engine cars (they’re not), 41% thought EVs are more likely to catch fire (they’re not), and 35% believed EVs emit about the same CO2 over their lifetime as ICE vehicles (they don’t).
“This is affecting drivers’ car choices, with people displaying a poor understanding of EVs being less likely to want their next car to be an EV,” concluded the Energy & Climate Intelligence Unit, the nonprofit that commissioned the survey. “Drivers who scored two or less out of 10 were 11 times less likely to want their next car to be an EV than those who scored eight or more out of 10.”
The survey was conducted in the U.K., but many of these myths are common among U.S. drivers, too.
🙌 The Fight, a new Heatmap Plus weekly newsletter from senior reporter Jael Holzman, just launched. It will deliver must-read exclusive scoops and analysis on the local battles and national trends shaping the future of climate action. Check it out. 🙌
There’s a whole clean energy revolution happening — yes, even in Pennsylvania.
Fracking is just about the last thing Kamala Harris wants to talk about right now, which may be understandable. In a CNN interview last week — her first major sit-down since becoming the Democratic Party’s official nominee for president — she changed her earlier campaign position on whether the technique used to extract oil and natural gas should be banned. Cries of “Flip-flopper!” are a staple of shallow campaign coverage. The issue is a bit complicated, and could prove awkward in at least one battleground state. And she’d rather spend her limited time attacking Donald Trump on abortion and other issues where she has a clearer advantage.
But when the fracking issue comes up again — and it will — Harris has a great story to tell, one that most Americans are probably unaware of. There’s a green energy revolution underway, but rather than celebrate it, Harris and many other Democratic politicians tend to tiptoe around the issue, apparently terrified that a single infelicitous sentence could turn the supposedly large numbers of pro-fossil fuel voters against them.
We saw that dynamic in action on CNN, when interviewer Dana Bash homed right in on the fact that, running in the presidential primaries in 2020, Harris said she favored a ban on fracking. “Fracking, as you know, is a pretty big issue, particularly in your must-win state of Pennsylvania,” Bash said. “Do you still want to ban fracking?” Like almost every political reporter, Bash has no interest in the benefits and problems fracking presents, or whether banning it is a good or bad idea. The point is to zing Harris for her apparent flip-flop and speculate on whether it will move votes in one of the few swing states.
Harris was determined to allay the concerns of any pro-fracking voters tuning in. “I would not ban fracking,” she said. “As vice president, I did not ban fracking. As president, I will not ban fracking.” Loud and clear!
She did go on to argue that a fracking ban is unnecessary because the Inflation Reduction Act is creating large numbers of green energy jobs, so “we can grow and we can increase a thriving clean energy economy without banning fracking.” To the casual viewer, it probably seemed like a perfectly good answer, but it was also somewhat beside the point. The reason many would like to ban fracking isn’t that it holds back the creation of green jobs. It’s that it entrenches our reliance on fossil fuels and creates environmental and health problems in the areas where it is deployed.
Of course, all those considerations — jobs, the environment, and where we’re getting our energy now and in the future — are interrelated. Which is why there is an opportunity for Harris to use that question to focus voters’ attention on the transformation now taking place.
With one party saying the only thing that matters in energy is drilling for more fossil fuels and the other telling people not to worry because they won’t stop us drilling for more fossil fuels, how many Americans know about the dramatic increase in renewable energy, especially solar, that is now underway? According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, nearly 50 gigawatts of solar power will be added to the grid this year, accounting for 59% of all new electricity generation:
Wind and solar now generate more electricity than coal. Even more remarkable is how inexpensive solar power has become. Since 1990, the price per kilowatt hour of a solar panel has dropped by 98%, and solar has become the least expensive type of new energy to generate. With all the innovation taking place in the renewable energy world — a good deal of it spurred by the investments made by the Biden administration — energy prices are likely to keep coming down as more and more of our power is generated by renewables.
This is a triumphant story of human ingenuity, thoughtful government action, and the operation of the free market. Harris could use it to describe a glorious future of power that is cheap, clean, and nearly limitless, one she is trying to create and Trump is trying to impede. Given that “We won’t go back” is one of her campaign slogans, it would seem like a perfect fit for her. But like many Democrats, she seems wary of saying anything that might spook the relatively small number of people whose livelihoods depend on fracking.
Consider Pennsylvania, the only swing state where this issue is supposed to matter. From the discussion in the political press, you might think the state’s voters are almost unanimous in their devotion to fracking, but that’s just not true. Even there, the public is closely divided on the issue: Some polls have found majorities of Pennsylvanians opposed to fracking, while others show them split down the middle. And while Pennsylvania produces a lot of natural gas that way, the number of people who actually work in fracking in the state is extremely modest, in the low five figures. Yet the assumption of news coverage is that the contrast between the Biden administration’s emphasis on clean energy and Trump’s opposite “Drill, baby, drill” approach can only redound to Trump’s benefit; as one Wall Street Journalarticle in April was headlined, “A Pennsylvania Fracking Boom Weighs on Biden’s Re-Election Chances.” The Pennsylvanians who are opposed to fracking because of its environmental impacts — or simply see it as something their state no longer needs — are shoved to the periphery of that kind of coverage.
So what if the next time she is asked about why she changed her mind about a fracking ban, Harris took the opportunity to explain to people what the future of energy is actually going to look like, and why it’s so encouraging? She’ll have to do that over the objection (or at the very least the indifference) of the reporters covering her campaign, who neither know nor care about the substance of the climate issue or energy policy. But she should do it anyway. Not only would it be right on the merits, it might even be good politics.