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“People talk about global warming, or they talk about climate change, but they never talk about nuclear warming.”
Donald Trump is slipping. I don’t mean in the polls (although he’s slipping there, too), but he’s slipping where it really matters: branding.
Dismiss Trump and his gold Stymie Extra Bold font as tacky and tasteless if you want, but you can’t claim that the namesake behind Trump Ice, Trump Vodka, Trump University, Trump Airlines, Trump Steaks, and the Trump footlong hotdog doesn’t know how to make something stick. He arguably won the 2016 Republican primary on the power of branding his opponents as Low Energy, Lyin’, Little, and Crooked — but lately, his heart hasn’t seemed in it. I mean, “Kamabla”? Come on.
Still, sometimes you can see flashes of his former self, such as last night when Trump appeared in a “conversation” with Elon Musk on Twitter, the social media platform now a year into its own rocky rebrand as X. Musk’s justification for the call was to give listeners “a feel for what Donald Trump is like in a conversation” in a non-adversarial setting (as if Trump doesn’t do friendly media appearances all the time). But the lengthy, wide-ranging interview also offered a decent opportunity to hear Trump speak about policy without the usual teleprompter.
That included some of Trump’s newly Musk-friendly thoughts about climate.In addition to spouting some seriously dubious emissions science — Bill McKibben dubbed their two-hour chat “the Dumbest Climate Conversation of All Time” — Trump and Musk also touched on the problems facing the buildout of nuclear energy.
Here is the relevant part of the conversation (I’ve omitted some of the exchange in brackets, but you can read the whole 61-page transcript here if you like):
Trump: You know, the one thing that I don’t understand is that people talk about global warming, or they talk about climate change, but they never talk about nuclear warming. And for me, that’s an immediate problem because you have, as I said, five countries where you have major nuclear and, you know, probably some others are getting there and that's very dangerous. [...]
Musk: Yeah, and actually, there’s the bad side of nuclear, which is a nuclear war, very bad side. But there’s also, I think — nuclear electricity generation is underrated. And it’s actually, you know, people have this fear of nuclear electricity generation, but it’s actually one of the safest forms of electricity generation. [...]
Trump: Maybe they’ll have to change the name. The name is just, it’s a rough name. There are some areas, like when you see what happened — bad branding, the branding problem. We’ll have to rebrand it. We’ll have to give it a good name. We’ll name it after you or something.
Let’s say right off the bat, they are getting into some real stuff here. Nuclear war is, indeed, “very bad”! To give Trump credit on the branding front, too, “nuclear warming” is a pretty creative way of saying “a mass detonation of atomic bombs that ends all life on Earth.” (And possibly a clever play on nuclear winter.)
Perhaps more importantly, though, nuclear is the largest source of carbon-free energy in the U.S. is generally considered crucial to balancing out intermittent renewables as the grid decarbonizes and electricity demand blows up. Talking about nuclear in a serious way will be important — which is tricky if you buy that it has “a rough name.”
Not everybody does, of course. Bloomberg’s Steve Hou disputed Trump’s theory (on Musk’s X, no less), “Nuclear doesn’t have a branding problem. It has a NIMBY problem that everyone’s ok with it in theory as long as the nuclear plant’s in someone else’s neighborhood.” Most Americans support nuclear power — more than offshore oil and gas drilling, fracking, or coal mining. It’s the rare issue both Democrats and Republicans can agree on.
But that doesn’t mean nuclear doesn’t have a branding problem. Why else would Americans not want a nuclear plant in their backyard if not for anxiety about radiation (or, relatedly, the Soviet unsightliness of cooling towers)? Trump went on in his conversation with Musk to cite the 2011 Fukushima nuclear accident in Japan and, seemingly, Chernobyl (“in Russia, where they had a problem, where they, you know, a lot of bad things happened”) as the reasons why Americans are, in his opinion, rightfully jittery about nuclear energy.
Musk pushed back on Trump’s examples, asserting that nuclear energy is “not as scary as people think” and that “Hiroshima and Nagasaki were bombed, but now they’re, like, full cities again.” Seeing as Musk mostly just let Trump say stuff during their conversation, his moment of objection is telling: Trump’s distrust of nuclear energy suggests possible policy implications that people on the right might not like. (Trump has expressed far more enthusiasm, however, for building up our nuclear arsenal.)
Many in climate communications or the nuclear industry have thought long and hard about how to make nuclear energy more palatable to the public, with strategies ranging from creating imagery invoking the atom (rather than the more obvious and ominous hourglass-shaped cooling tower) to hiring Miss America as an industry advocate. Last fall, John Marshall, the CEO and founder of the Potential Energy Coalition, explained on a podcast that his group had found the term “new nuclear” tests as less intimidating to the public.
So sure, we may need something like a Reddy Kilowatt of nuclear energy to improve messaging. That’s where Trump’s creativity runs out, though. As Heatmap’s own polling suggests, rebranding nuclear power as “Musk power” will probably not help.
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Did a battery plant disaster in California spark a PR crisis on the East Coast?
Battery fire fears are fomenting a storage backlash in New York City – and it risks turning into fresh PR hell for the industry.
Aggrieved neighbors, anti-BESS activists, and Republican politicians are galvanizing more opposition to battery storage in pockets of the five boroughs where development is actually happening, capturing rapt attention from other residents as well as members of the media. In Staten Island, a petition against a NineDot Energy battery project has received more than 1,300 signatures in a little over two months. Two weeks ago, advocates – backed by representatives of local politicians including Rep. Nicole Mallitokis – swarmed a public meeting on the project, getting a local community board to vote unanimously against the project.
According to Heatmap Pro’s proprietary modeling of local opinion around battery storage, there are likely twice as many strong opponents than strong supporters in the area:
Heatmap Pro
Yesterday, leaders in the Queens community of Hempstead enacted a year-long ban on BESS for at least a year after GOP Rep. Anthony D’Esposito, other local politicians, and a slew of aggrieved residents testified in favor of a moratorium. The day before, officials in the Long Island town of Southampton said at a public meeting they were ready to extend their battery storage ban until they enshrined a more restrictive development code – even as many energy companies testified against doing so, including NineDot and solar plus storage developer Key Capture Energy. Yonkers also recently extended its own battery moratorium.
This flurry of activity follows the Moss Landing battery plant fire in California, a rather exceptional event caused by tech that was extremely old and a battery chemistry that is no longer popular in the sector. But opponents of battery storage don’t care – they’re telling their friends to stop the community from becoming the next Moss Landing. The longer this goes on without a fulsome, strident response from the industry, the more communities may rally against them. Making matters even worse, as I explained in The Fight earlier this year, we’re seeing battery fire concerns impact solar projects too.
“This is a huge problem for solar. If [fires] start regularly happening, communities are going to say hey, you can’t put that there,” Derek Chase, CEO of battery fire smoke detection tech company OnSight Technologies, told me at Intersolar this week. “It’s going to be really detrimental.”
I’ve long worried New York City in particular may be a powder keg for the battery storage sector given its omnipresence as a popular media environment. If it happens in New York, the rest of the world learns about it.
I feel like the power of the New York media environment is not lost on Staten Island borough president Vito Fossella, a de facto leader of the anti-BESS movement in the boroughs. Last fall I interviewed Fossella, whose rhetorical strategy often leans on painting Staten Island as an overburdened community. (At least 13 battery storage projects have been in the works in Staten Island according to recent reporting. Fossella claims that is far more than any amount proposed elsewhere in the city.) He often points to battery blazes that happen elsewhere in the country, as well as fears about lithium-ion scooters that have caught fire. His goal is to enact very large setback distance requirements for battery storage, at a minimum.
“You can still put them throughout the city but you can’t put them next to people’s homes – what happens if one of these goes on fire next to a gas station,” he told me at the time, chalking the wider city government’s reluctance to capitulate on batteries to a “political problem.”
Well, I’m going to hold my breath for the real political problem in waiting – the inevitable backlash that happens when Mallitokis, D’Esposito, and others take this fight to Congress and the national stage. I bet that’s probably why American Clean Power just sent me a notice for a press briefing on battery safety next week …
And more of the week’s top conflicts around renewable energy.
1. Queen Anne’s County, Maryland – They really don’t want you to sign a solar lease out in the rural parts of this otherwise very pro-renewables state.
2. Logan County, Ohio – Staff for the Ohio Power Siting Board have recommended it reject Open Road Renewables’ Grange Solar agrivoltaics project.
3. Bandera County, Texas – On a slightly brighter note for solar, it appears that Pine Gate Renewables’ Rio Lago solar project might just be safe from county restrictions.
Here’s what else we’re watching…
In Illinois, Armoracia Solar is struggling to get necessary permits from Madison County.
In Kentucky, the mayor of Lexington is getting into a public spat with East Kentucky Power Cooperative over solar.
In Michigan, Livingston County is now backing the legal challenge to Michigan’s state permitting primacy law.
On the week’s top news around renewable energy policy.
1. IRA funding freeze update – Money is starting to get out the door, finally: the EPA unfroze most of its climate grant funding it had paused after Trump entered office.
2. Scalpel vs. sledgehammer – House Speaker Mike Johnson signaled Republicans in Congress may take a broader approach to repealing the Inflation Reduction Act than previously expected in tax talks.
3. Endangerment in danger – The EPA is reportedly urging the White House to back reversing its 2009 “endangerment” finding on air pollutants and climate change, a linchpin in the agency’s overall CO2 and climate regulatory scheme.