This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here.

Voters have elected Donald Trump to a second term in the White House.

In the days leading up to the election, I kept thinking about what four years means for climate change right now. We’re at a critical moment that requires decisive action to rapidly slash greenhouse-gas emissions from power plants, transportation, industry, and the rest of the economy if we’re going to achieve our climate goals.

The past four years have seen the US take climate action seriously, working with the international community and pumping money into solutions. Now, we’re facing a period where things are going to be very different. A Trump presidency will have impacts far beyond climate, but for the sake of this newsletter, we’ll stay focused on what four years means in the climate fight as we start to make sense of this next chapter. 

Joe Biden arguably did more to combat climate change than any other American president. One of his first actions in office was rejoining the Paris climate accord—Trump pulled out of the international agreement to fight climate change during his first term in office. Biden then quickly set a new national goal to cut US carbon emissions in half, relative to their peak, by 2030.

The Environmental Protection Agency rolled out rules for power plants to slash pollution that harms both human health and the climate. The agency also announced new regulations for vehicle emissions to push the country toward EVs.

And the cornerstone of the Biden years has been unprecedented climate investment. A trio of laws—the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the CHIPS and Science Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act—pumped hundreds of billions of dollars into infrastructure and research, much of it on climate.

Now, this ship is about to make a quick turn. Donald Trump has regularly dismissed the threat of climate change and promised throughout the campaign to counter some of Biden’s key moves.

We can expect to see a dramatic shift in how the US talks about climate on the international stage. Trump has vowed to once again withdraw from the Paris agreement. Things are going to be weird at the annual global climate talks that kick off next week.

We can also expect to see efforts to undo some of Biden’s key climate actions, most centrally the Inflation Reduction Act, as my colleague James Temple covered earlier this year.

What, exactly, Trump can do will depend on whether Republicans take control of both houses of Congress. A clean sweep would open up more lanes for targeting legislation passed under Biden. (As of sending this email, Republicans have secured enough seats to control the Senate, but the House is uncertain and could be for days or even weeks.)

I don’t think the rug will be entirely pulled out from under the IRA—portions of the investment from the law are beginning to pay off, and the majority of the money has gone to Republican districts. But there will certainly be challenges to pieces, especially the EV tax credits, which Trump has been laser-focused on during the campaign.

This all adds up to a very different course on climate than what many had hoped we might see for the rest of this decade.

A Trump presidency could add 4 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions to the atmosphere by 2030 over what was expected from a second Biden term, according to an analysis published in April by the website Carbon Brief (this was before Biden dropped out of the race). That projection sees emissions under Trump dropping by 28% below the peak by the end of the decade—nowhere near the 50% target set by Biden at the beginning of his term.

The US, which is currently the world’s second-largest greenhouse-gas emitter and has added more climate pollution to the atmosphere than any other nation, is now very unlikely to hit Biden’s 2030 goal. That’s basically the final nail in the coffin for efforts to limit global warming to 1.5 °C (2.7 °F) over preindustrial levels.

In the days, weeks, and years ahead we’ll be covering what this change will mean for efforts to combat climate change and to protect the most vulnerable from the dangerous world we’re marching toward—indeed, already living in. Stay tuned for more from us.

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Related reading

Trump wants to unravel Biden’s landmark climate law. Read our coverage from earlier this year to see what’s most at risk. 

It’s been two years since the Inflation Reduction Act was passed, ushering in hundreds of billions of dollars in climate investment. Read more about the key provisions in this newsletter from August. 

Another thing

Jennifer Doudna, one of the inventors of the gene-editing tool CRISPR, says the tech could be a major tool to help address climate change and deal with the growing risks of our changing world. 

The hope is that CRISPR’s ability to chop out specific pieces of DNA will make it faster and easier to produce climate-resilient crops and livestock, while avoiding the pitfalls of previous attempts to tweak the genomes of plants and animals. Read the full story from my colleague James Temple.

Keeping up with climate  

Startup Redoxblox is building a technology that’s not exactly a thermal battery, but it’s not not a thermal battery either. The company raised just over $30 million to build its systems, which store energy in both heat and chemical bonds. (Heatmap)

It’s been a weird fall in the US Northeast—a rare drought has brought a string of wildfires, and New York City is seeing calls to conserve water. (New York Times)

It’s been bumpy skies this week for electric-plane startups. Beta Technologies raised over $300 million in funding, while Lilium may be filing for insolvency soon. (Canary Media)

→ The runway for futuristic electric planes is still a long one. (MIT Technology Review)

Meta’s plan to build a nuclear-powered AI data center has been derailed by a rare species of bee living on land earmarked for the project. (Financial Times)

The atmospheric concentration of methane—a powerful greenhouse gas—has been mysteriously climbing since 2007, and that growth nearly doubled in 2020. Now scientists may have finally figured out the culprits: microbes in wetlands that are getting warmer and wetter. (Washington Post)

Greenhouse-gas emissions from the European Union fell by 8% in 2023. The drop is thanks to efforts to shut down coal-fired power plants and generate more electricity from renewables like solar and wind. (The Guardian)

Four electric school buses could help officials figure out how to charge future bus fleets. A project in Brooklyn will aim to use onsite renewables and smart charging to control the costs and grid stress of EV charging depots. (Canary Media)

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here.

On an overcast day in early October, I picked up a rental car and drove to Devens, Massachusetts, to visit a hole in the ground.

Commonwealth Fusion Systems has raised over $2 billion in funding since it spun out of MIT in 2018, all in service of building the first commercial fusion reactor. The company has ambitions to build power plants, but currently the goal is to finish putting together its first demonstration system, the SPARC reactor. The plan is to have it operating by 2026.

I visited the company’s site recently to check in on progress. Things are starting to come together around the hole in the floor where SPARC will eventually be installed. Looking around the site, I found it becoming easier to imagine a future that could actually include fusion energy. But there’s still a lot of work left to do. 

Fusion power has been a dream for decades. The idea is simple: Slam atoms together and use the energy that’s released to power the world. The systems would require small amounts of abundant fuel and wouldn’t produce dangerous waste. The problem is, executing this vision has been much slower than many had hoped.

Commonwealth is one of the leaders in commercial fusion. My colleague James Temple wrote a feature story, published in early 2022, about the company’s attempts to bring the technology to reality. At the time, the Devens location was still a muddy construction site, with the steel and concrete just starting to go into the ground.

Things are much more polished now—when I visited earlier this month, I pulled into one of the designated visitor parking spots and checked in at a reception desk in a bustling office building before beginning my tour. There were two main things to see: the working magnet factory and the cluster of buildings that will house and support the SPARC reactor.

We started in the magnet factory. SPARC is a tokamak, a device relying on powerful magnets to contain the plasma where fusion reactions take place. There will be three different types of magnets in SPARC, all arranged to keep the plasma in position and moving around in the right way.

The company is making its own magnets powered with tape made from a high-temperature superconductor, which generates a magnetic field when an electric current runs through it. SPARC will contain thousands of miles’ worth of this tape in its magnets. In the factory, specialized equipment winds up the tape and tucks it into metal cases, which are then stacked together and welded into protective shells.  

After our quick loop around the magnet factory, I donned a helmet, neon vest, and safety glasses and got a short safety talk that included a stern warning to not stare directly at any welding. Then we walked across a patio and down a gravel driveway to the main complex of buildings that will house the SPARC reactor.

Except for some remaining plywood stairs and dust, the complex appeared to be nearly completed. There’s a huge wall of glass on the front of the building—a feature intended to show that the company is open with the community about the goings-on inside, as my tour guide, chief marketing officer Joe Paluska, put it.  

Four main buildings surround the central tokamak hall. These house support equipment needed to cool down the magnets, heat up the plasma, and measure conditions in the reactor. Most of these big, industrial systems that support SPARC are close to being ready to turn on or are actively being installed, explained Alex Creely, director of tokamak operations, in a call after my tour.

When it was finally time to see the tokamak hall that will house SPARC, we had to take a winding route to get there. A maze of concrete walls funneled us to the entrance, and I lost track of my left and right turns. Called the labyrinth, this is a safety feature, designed to keep stray neutrons from escaping the hall once the reactor is operating. (Neutrons are a form of radiation, and enough exposure can be dangerous to humans.) 

Finally, we stepped into a cavernous space. From our elevated vantage point on a metal walkway, we peered down into a room with gleaming white floors and equipment scattered around the perimeter. At the center was a hole, covered with a tarp and surrounded by bright-yellow railings. That empty slot is where the star of the show, SPARC, will eventually be installed.

While there’s still very little tokamak in the tokamak hall right now, Commonwealth has an ambitious timeline planned: The goal is to have SPARC running and the first plasma in the reactor by 2026. The company plans to demonstrate that it can produce more energy in the reactor than is needed to power it (a milestone known as Q>1 in the fusion world) by 2027.

When we published our 2022 story on Commonwealth, the plan was to flip on the reactor and reach the Q>1 milestone by 2025, so the timeline has slipped. It’s not uncommon for big projects in virtually every industry to take longer than expected. But there’s an especially long and fraught history of promises and missed milestones in fusion. 

Commonwealth has certainly made progress over the past few years, and it’s getting easier to imagine the company actually turning on a reactor and meeting the milestones the field has been working toward for decades. But there’s still a tokamak-shaped hole in suburban Massachusetts waiting to be filled. 

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Related reading

Read our 2022 feature on Commonwealth Fusion Systems and its path to commercializing fusion energy here. 

In late 2022, a reactor at a national lab in the US generated more energy than was put in, a first for the industry. Here’s what meeting that milestone actually means for clean energy. 

There’s still a lot of research to be done in fusion—here’s what’s coming next. 

Another company called Helion says its first fusion power plant is five years away. Experts are skeptical, to say the least.

Another thing

Generative AI will add to our growing e-waste problem. A new study estimates that AI could add up to 5 million tons of e-waste by 2030. 

It’s a small fraction of the total, but there’s still good reason to think carefully about how we handle discarded servers and high-performance computing equipment, according to experts. Read more in my latest story. 

Keeping up with climate  

New York City will buy 10,000 induction stoves from a startup called Copper. The stoves will be installed in public housing in the city. (Heatmap)

Demand is growing for electric cabs in India, but experts say there’s not nearly enough supply to meet it. (Rest of World)

Pivot Bio aims to tweak the DNA of bacteria so they can help deliver nutrients to plants. The company is trying to break into an industry dominated by massive agriculture and chemical companies. (New York Times)

→ Check out our profile of Pivot Bio, which was one of our 15 Climate Tech Companies to Watch this year. (MIT Technology Review)

At least 62 people are dead and many more are missing in dangerous flooding across Spain. (Washington Post) 

A massive offshore wind lease sale this week offered up eight patches of ocean off the coast of Maine in the US. Four sold, opening the door for up to 6.8 gigawatts of additional offshore wind power. (Canary Media)

Climate change contributed to the deaths of 38,000 people across Europe in the summer of 2022, according to a new study. (The Guardian)

→ The legacy of Europe’s heat waves will be more air-conditioning, and that could be its own problem. (MIT Technology Review)

There are nearly 9,000 public fast-charging sites in the US, and a surprising wave of installations in the Midwest and Southeast. (Bloomberg)

Some proposed legislation aims to ban factory farming, but determining what that category includes is way more complicated than you might think. (Ambrook Research)

Generative AI could account for up to 5 million metric tons of e-waste by 2030, according to a new study.

That’s a relatively small fraction of the current global total of over 60 million metric tons of e-waste each year. However, it’s still a significant part of a growing problem, experts warn. 

E-waste is the term to describe things like air conditioners, televisions, and personal electronic devices such as cell phones and laptops when they are thrown away. These devices often contain hazardous or toxic materials that can harm human health or the environment if they’re not disposed of properly. Besides those potential harms, when appliances like washing machines and high-performance computers wind up in the trash, the valuable metals inside the devices are also wasted—taken out of the supply chain instead of being recycled.

Depending on the adoption rate of generative AI, the technology could add 1.2 million to 5 million metric tons of e-waste in total by 2030, according to the study, published today in Nature Computational Science. 

“This increase would exacerbate the existing e-waste problem,” says Asaf Tzachor, a researcher at Reichman University in Israel and a co-author of the study, via email.

The study is novel in its attempts to quantify the effects of AI on e-waste, says Kees Baldé, a senior scientific specialist at the United Nations Institute for Training and Research and an author of the latest Global E-Waste Monitor, an annual report.

The primary contributor to e-waste from generative AI is high-performance computing hardware that’s used in data centers and server farms, including servers, GPUs, CPUs, memory modules, and storage devices. That equipment, like other e-waste, contains valuable metals like copper, gold, silver, aluminum, and rare earth elements, as well as hazardous materials such as lead, mercury, and chromium, Tzachor says.

One reason that AI companies generate so much waste is how quickly hardware technology is advancing. Computing devices typically have lifespans of two to five years, and they’re replaced frequently with the most up-to-date versions. 

While the e-waste problem goes far beyond AI, the rapidly growing technology represents an opportunity to take stock of how we deal with e-waste and lay the groundwork to address it. The good news is that there are strategies that can help reduce expected waste.

Expanding the lifespan of technologies by using equipment for longer is one of the most significant ways to cut down on e-waste, Tzachor says. Refurbishing and reusing components can also play a significant role, as can designing hardware in ways that makes it easier to recycle and upgrade. Implementing these strategies could reduce e-waste generation by up to 86% in a best-case scenario, the study projected. 

Only about 22% of e-waste is being formally collected and recycled today, according to the 2024 Global E-Waste Monitor. Much more is collected and recovered through informal systems, including in low- and lower-middle-income countries that don’t have established e-waste management infrastructure in place. Those informal systems can recover valuable metals but often don’t include safe disposal of hazardous materials, Baldé says.

Another major barrier to reducing AI-related e-waste is concerns about data security. Destroying equipment ensures information doesn’t leak out, while reusing or recycling equipment will require using other means to secure data. Ensuring that sensitive information is erased from hardware before recycling is critical, especially for companies handling confidential data, Tzachor says.

More policies will likely be needed to ensure that e-waste, including from AI, is recycled or disposed of properly. Recovering valuable metals (including iron, gold, and silver) can help make the economic case. However, e-waste recycling will likely still come with a price, since it’s costly to safely handle the hazardous materials often found inside the devices, Baldé says. 

“For companies and manufacturers, taking responsibility for the environmental and social impacts of their products is crucial,” Tzachor says. “This way, we can make sure that the technology we rely on doesn’t come at the expense of human and planetary health.”

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here.

As a climate reporter, I’m all too aware of the greenhouse-gas emissions that come from food production. And yet, I’m not a vegan, and I do enjoy a good cheeseburger (at least on occasion). 

It’s a real problem, from a climate perspective at least, that burgers taste good, and so do chicken sandwiches and cheese and just about anything that has butter in it. It can be hard to persuade people to change their eating habits, especially since food is tied up in our social lives and our cultures. 

We could all stand to make some choices that could reduce the emissions associated with the food on our plates. But the longer I write about agriculture and climate, the more I think we’re also going to need to innovate around people’s love for burgers—and fix our food system not just in the kitchen, but on the farm. 

If we lump in everything it takes to get food grown, processed, and transported to us, agriculture accounts for between 20% and 35% of annual global greenhouse-gas emissions. (The range is huge because estimates can vary in what they include and how they account for things like land use, the impact of which is tricky to measure.) 

So when it came time to put together our list of 15 Climate Tech Companies to Watch, which we released earlier this month, we knew we wanted to represent the massive challenge that is our food system. 

We ended up choosing two companies in agriculture for this year’s list, Pivot Bio and Rumin8. My colleague James Temple and I spoke with leaders from both these businesses at our recent Roundtables online event, and it was fascinating to hear from them about the problems they’re trying to solve and how they’re doing it. 

Pivot Bio is using microbes to help disrupt the fertilizer industry. Today, applying nitrogen-based fertilizers to fields is basically like putting gas into a leaky gas tank, as Pivot cofounder Karsten Temme put it at the event. 

Plants rely on nitrogen to grow, but they fail to take up a lot of the nitrogen in fertilizers applied in the field. Since fertilizer requires a ton of energy to produce and can wind up emitting powerful greenhouse gases if plants don’t use it, that’s a real problem.

Pivot Bio uses microbes to help get nitrogen from the air into plants, and the company’s current generation of products can help farmers cut fertilizer use by 25%. 

Rumin8 has its sights set on cattle, making supplements that help them emit less methane, a powerful greenhouse gas. Cows have a complicated digestive system that involves multiple stomachs and a whole lot of microbes that help them digest food. Those microbes produce methane that the cows then burp up. “It’s really rude of them,” quipped Matt Callahan, Rumin8’s cofounder and counsel, at the event. 

In part because of the powerful warming effects of methane, beef is among the worst foods for the climate. Beef can account for up to 10 times more greenhouse-gas emissions than poultry, for example. 

Rumin8 makes an additive that can go into the food or water supply of dairy and beef cattle that can help reduce the methane they burp up. The chemical basically helps the cows use that gas as energy instead, so it can boost their growth—a big benefit to farmers. The company has seen methane reductions as high as 90%, depending on how the cow is getting the supplement (effects aren’t as strong for beef cattle, which often don’t have as close contact with farmers and may not get as strong a dose of the supplement over time as dairy cattle do). 

My big takeaway from our discussion, and from researching and picking the companies on our list this year, is that there’s a huge range of work being done to cut emissions from agriculture on the product side. That’s crucial, because I’m personally skeptical that a significant chunk of the world is going to quickly and voluntarily give up all the tasty but emissions-intensive foods that they’re used to. 

That’s not to say individual choices can’t make a difference. I love beans and lentils as much as the next girl, and we could all stand to make choices that cut down our individual climate impact. And it doesn’t have to be all or nothing. Anyone can choose to eat a little bit less beef specifically, and fewer meat and animal products in general (which tend to be more emissions-intensive than plant-based options). Another great strategy is to focus on cutting down your food waste, which not only reduces emissions but also saves you money. 

But with appetites and budgets for beef and other emissions-intensive foods continuing to grow worldwide, I think we’re also going to need to see a whole lot of innovation that helps lower the emissions of existing food products that we all know and love, including beef. 

There’s no one magic solution that’s going to solve our climate problem in agriculture. The key is going to be both shifting diets through individual and community action and adopting new, lower-emissions options that companies bring to the table. 

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Related reading

If you missed our Rountables event “Producing Climate-Friendly Food,” you can check out the recording here. And for more details on the businesses we mentioned, read our profiles on Pivot Bio and Rumin8 from our 2024 list of 15 Climate Tech Companies to Watch. 

There are also some fascinating climate stories from the new, food-focused issue of our print magazine: 

• Some companies want to make food out of thin air, with the help of microbes.
• Food demand in Africa is on the rise—indigenous crops could help feed people while also being more climate resilient. 
• The world is seeing record-breaking temperatures, and farmworkers are especially vulnerable to the worsening conditions. Researchers are developing a sensor to help protect them.

Another thing

As more EVs hit the roads, there’s a growing concern about battery fires, which are a relatively rare but dangerous occurrence. 

Aspen Aerogels is making super-light materials that can help suppress battery fires, and the company just got a huge boost from the US Department of Energy. Read more about the $670.6 million loan and the details of the technology in my latest story. 

Keeping up with climate  

Hurricane Milton disrupted the supply of fresh drinking water, so a Florida hospital deployed a machine to harvest it out of the air. (Wired) 

There may be a huge supply of lithium in an underground brine reservoir in Arkansas. Using this source of the crucial battery metal will require companies to scale up new ways of extracting it. (New York Times)

There’s been a flurry of new deals between Big Tech and the nuclear industry, but Amazon is going one step further with its latest announcement. The company is supporting development of a new project rather than just agreeing to step in once electricity is ready. (Heatmap)
→ Here’s why Microsoft is getting involved in a plan to revive a nuclear reactor at Three Mile Island. (MIT Technology Review)

Japan’s most popular rice is in danger because of rising temperatures. Koshihikari rice has a low tolerance for heat, and scientists are racing to breed new varieties that can handle a changing climate. (New York Times)

There are some pretty straightforward solutions that could slash methane emissions from landfills, including requiring more sites to install gas-capture systems. Landfills are the third-largest source of the powerful greenhouse gas. (Canary Media)

Heat pump sales have slowed in the US and stalled in Europe. The technology is struggling in part because of high interest rates, increasing costs, and misinformation about the appliances. (Washington Post)
→ Here’s everything you need to know about how heat pumps work. (MIT Technology Review)

A company making fire-suppressing battery materials just got a $670.6 million loan commitment from the US Department of Energy.

Aspen Aerogels makes insulating materials that can be layered inside an EV’s battery to prevent or slow heat and fires from spreading within the pack. The company is building a new factory in Georgia to produce its materials, and the DOE’s Loan Programs Office will provide the massive loan to help it finish building the plant. 

As more EVs hit the roads, concern is growing about the relatively rare but dangerous problem of battery fires. While gas-powered cars catch fire at higher rates, battery fires can be harder to put out and are at greater risk of reigniting, creating dangerous situations for drivers and first responders. Materials like Aspen Aerogels’ thermal barriers can help improve battery safety.

“I think the goal is to really make sure that they’re helping to achieve critical battery safety goals that we all share,” says Jigar Shah, director of the Loan Programs Office.

Automakers including General Motors, Toyota, and Audi already buy Aspen Aerogels materials to use in their vehicles. If the new factory starts as planned and ramps to full capacity, it could supply material for over two million EVs annually.

When a lithium-ion battery is damaged or short-circuits, it can go into a process called thermal runaway, a feedback loop of heat and chemical reactions that can lead to a fire or explosion. Electric vehicles’ battery packs are made up of many small battery cells wired together—so there’s a risk that a problem in one cell can spread to the rest of the pack.

The thermal barriers the company makes can be tucked between cells, creating an obstacle that can suppress that spread. Depending on how an automaker uses the materials, aerogel insulation can at a minimum slow down the propagation of thermal runaway, giving a driver enough time to get out of the car. Or automakers can use the materials to design batteries that can confine a bad cell or a group of cells, so “instead of having a car-melting fire, you have a more isolated event,” Young says. 

Aerogels are very good at insulating to maintain hot or cold temperatures, since they’re mostly made of microscopic pockets of air. Aspen won research grants from NASA to explore the use of its materials for spacesuits and other applications in the early 2000s, and it has sold materials for equipment in facilities including oil refineries and liquefied-natural-gas terminals in the decades since, says Don Young, the company’s CEO.

The company began using its aerogels in battery materials in 2021. The start was a partnership with General Motors, Young says—the automaker was having issues with Chevy Bolt batteries catching fire at the time. 

While aerogels can help with the severity of battery fires, they can’t entirely prevent thermal runaway events. “Currently, we are not aware of any commercial technology that reliably prevents thermal runaway,” says In Taek Song, a researcher at LG Chem and part of a team that recently published research on safety devices for lithium-ion batteries, via email. Lithium-ion batteries contain flammable materials and can store a lot of energy. 

Automakers and battery manufacturers already put some measures in place to lower the risk of thermal runaway, including battery management systems that can detect and control battery conditions to prevent fires before they occur. Thermal insulation materials—including those made with aerogels—are part of the growing arsenal that can limit the damage if thermal runaway does occur.

One potential drawback to those materials is that they add bulk to a battery, which reduces energy density—the amount of energy that a battery can store in a certain volume or weight. Higher energy density translates to longer range for an EV, a crucial selling point for many drivers. The benefit of aerogels is that they’re super-light, since they’re mostly air—so they don’t limit energy density as much as other materials might. 

Aspen’s thermal barriers are typically between one and four millimeters thick and can be stacked between cells. Depending on the automaker and vehicle in question, the cost to incorporate it in an EV runs between $300 and $1,000, Young says. 

The market is ramping up quickly. When the company began selling its battery materials in 2021, it did roughly $7 million in sales. In 2023 it had reached $110 million, and that’s on track to more than double again in 2024, Young says. 

Aspen Aerogels currently makes materials for EV batteries at its factory in Rhode Island, which also makes materials for other businesses, including the oil and gas industry. “We’re just busting at the seams of that plant,” Young says. The DOE loan will support construction of a new facility in Georgia, which will be entirely dedicated to making material for EV batteries. The plan is to have that facility running by early 2027, Young says. 

“This loan is to really get them at scale for their first commercial facility in Georgia,” Shah says. The company will need to meet certain financial and technical requirements to finalize the funding. 

“This loan is critically important to us, to help us with the completion of that project,” Young says. 

Correction: A caption has been updated to correctly identify the material pictured as a thermal barrier.

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here.

We get to celebrate a very special birthday today—The Spark just turned two! 

Over the past couple of years, I’ve been bringing you all the news you need to know in climate tech and digging into some of the most fascinating and thorny topics from energy and transportation to agriculture and policy. 

In light of this milestone, I’ve been looking back at some of the most popular editions of this newsletter, as well as some of my personal favorites—and it’s all got me thinking about where climate tech will go next. So let’s look back together, and I’ll also share what I’m going to be watching out for as we go forward.

It’s prime time for batteries

It will probably be a surprise to absolutely nobody that the past two years have been filled with battery news. (In case you’re new and need a quick intro to my feelings on the topic, you can read the love letter to batteries I wrote this year for Valentine’s Day.) 

We’ve covered how abundant materials could help unlock cheaper, better batteries, and how new designs could help boost charging speeds. I’ve dug into the data to share how quickly batteries are taking over the world, and how much faster we’ll need to go to hit our climate goals.

The next few years are going to be make-or-break for a lot of the alternative batteries we’ve covered here, from sodium-ion to iron-air and even solid-state. We could see companies either fold or make it to the next stage of commercialization. I’m watching to see which technologies will win—there are many different options that could break out and succeed. 

A nuclear renaissance 

One topic I’ve been covering closely, especially in the past year, is nuclear energy. We need zero-emissions options that are able to generate electricity 24-7. Nuclear fits that bill. 

Over the past two years, we’ve seen some major ups and downs in the industry. Two new reactors have come online in the US, though they were years late and billions over budget. Germany completed its move away from nuclear energy, opting instead to go all in on intermittent renewables like solar and wind (and keep its coal plants open). 

Looking ahead, though, there are signs that we could see a nuclear energy resurgence. I’ve written about interest in keeping older reactors online for longer and opening up plants that have previously shut down. And companies are aiming to deploy new advanced reactor designs, too. 

I’m watching to see how creative the industry can get with squeezing everything it can out of existing assets. But I’m especially interested to see whether new technologies keep making progress on getting regulatory approval, and whether the new designs can actually get built. 

Material world forever

I’ll never stop talking about materials—from what we need to build all the technologies that are crucial for addressing climate change to how we can more smartly use the waste after those products reach the end of their lifetime. 

Recently, I wrote a feature story (and, of course, a related newsletter bringing you behind the scenes of my reporting) about how one rare earth metal gives us a look at some of the challenges we’ll face with sourcing and recycling materials over the next century and beyond. 

It’s fitting that the very first edition of The Spark was about my trip inside a battery recycling factory. Over the past two years, the world of climate tech has become much more tuned in to topics like mining, recycling, and critical minerals. I’m interested to see how companies continue finding new, creative ways to get what they need to build everything they’re trying to deploy. 

Milestones … and deadlines

Overall, the last couple of years have been some of the most exciting and crucial in the race to address climate change, and it’s only going to ramp up from here. 

Next year marks 10 years since the Paris Agreement, a landmark climate treaty that’s guided most of the world’s ambitions to limit warming to less than 2 °C (3.7 °F) above preindustrial levels. In the US, 2027 will mark five years since the Inflation Reduction Act was passed, ushering in a new era of climate spending for the world’s largest economy. 

The last two years have been a whirlwind of new ideas, research, and technologies, all aimed at limiting the most damaging effects of our changing climate. I’m looking forward to following all the progress of the years to come with you as well. 

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Another thing

If you’re reading this, I’m willing to bet that you probably eat food. So you should join us for the latest edition of our subscriber-only Roundtables virtual event series, where I’ll be speaking with my colleague James Temple about creating climate-friendly food. 

Joining us are experts from Pivot Bio and Rumin8, two of our 2024 Climate Tech Companies to Watch. It’s going to be a fascinating discussion—subscribers, register to join us here! 

And one more 

The growing energy demands of artificial intelligence represent a challenge for the grid. But the technology also offers an opportunity for energy tech, according to the authors of a new op-ed out this week. Check it out for more on why they say that AI and clean energy need each other. 

Keeping up with climate  

Hurricane Milton reached wind speeds of over 160 miles per hour, making it a Category 5 storm. It’s hitting the gulf coast of Florida in the coming days. See its projected path and the rainfall forecast. (Washington Post) 
→ Tampa Bay has seen destructive hurricanes, but there hasn’t been a direct hit in decades. The metro area is home to over 3 million people. (Axios)

Other regions are still reeling from Hurricane Helene, which dumped rainfall in western North Carolina in particular. The storm upends ideas of what a climate haven is. (Scientific American)
→ Two studies suggest that climate change significantly boosted rainfall from the storm. (NBC News)

If you have an EV, it’s best to keep it out of flood zones during hurricanes when possible. Batteries submerged in salt water can catch fire, though experts say it’s relatively rare. (New York Times)

The risk of winter blackouts in Great Britain is at the lowest in years, even though the country has shut down its last coal plant. The grid is expected to have plenty of energy, in part because of investment in renewables. (The Guardian)

Voters in Kazakhstan have approved a plan to build the country’s first nuclear power plant. The country has a complicated relationship with nuclear technology, since it was a testing ground for Soviet nuclear weapons. (Power) 

Revoy wants to bring battery swapping to heavy-duty trucks. The company’s batteries can reduce the amount of diesel fuel a conventional truck needs to drive a route. (Heatmap)
→ I wrote earlier this year about another company building batteries into trailers in an effort to clean up distance trucking. (MIT Technology Review)

Sales of new electric vehicles in Germany have plummeted, dropping nearly 37% in July 2024 from the same month one year ago.

One of the main reasons traces back to mid-December 2023, when the German government gave less than one week’s notice before ending its subsidy program for electric vehicles. The program had given drivers small grants (up to around €6,000) toward the purchase of new battery-electric and plug-in hybrid cars.

The end of the subsidy program isn’t the only factor contributing to Germany’s EV slowdown, but the abrupt axing certainly had an effect: While many countries across Europe saw steady or growing sales of new EVs in the past year, Germany’s sales fell. It’s not just Germany ending these subsidy programs, either. Sweden and New Zealand have also scrapped their schemes and seen a resulting slowdown or drop in sales. This all comes at a time when the world needs to dramatically ramp up efforts to move to zero-emissions vehicles and pull fossil-fuel-powered ones off the roads to address climate change.

Experts are now cautioning that ending these support systems too soon could jeopardize progress on climate change. As EVs continue to enter the mainstream, the question facing policymakers is how to decide when the technology is ready to stand on its own—something that will likely vary in each market.

Money can be a powerful tool to persuade people to adopt a new technology. “Cost is the main driver,” says Robbie Orvis, senior director for modeling and analysis at Energy Innovation, a policy research firm specializing in energy and climate.

A government’s toolbox to support new tech includes economic incentives, standards and rules, and research and development support. Generally, a mix of those things will be most effective at boosting new technologies, Orvis says.

Economic incentives can either make a new technology cheaper or make the incumbent one more expensive. Either way, they help level the playing field early on in a technology’s development, Orvis says. This pattern played out with solar power—the cost of solar panels is 90% lower than it was just a decade ago, in part because of government programs that subsidized their production. 

Eventually, as the new technology scales, costs should drop until the point when you don’t need incentives anymore and can instead turn to other tools like mandates, he says.

Electric vehicles are being produced in much greater numbers and are much closer in cost to gas-powered ones than they were just a few years ago, but there’s still a difference in the sticker price.

Today, the cost of owning an EV over its entire lifetime rivals the lifetime cost of a gas-powered car. However, electric vehicles often have a higher up-front price and deliver savings over time in the form of cheaper maintenance and operating costs. Gas-powered cars can be cheaper initially but bring higher maintenance and fueling costs over time. 

To bridge this gap, governments around the world have encouraged buyers to purchase EVs by offering subsidies that would make the initial price difference negligible.

Many EV markets in the West have plans for mandates in the future, with some kicking in roughly a decade from now. The European Union, along with some US states, will mandate that all new vehicles sold be zero-emissions by 2035. The question is when governments can safely sunset subsidy programs.

The German government announced in December 2023 that it would be halting EV subsidies, with virtually immediate effect. The move came after the country faced a budget crisis. Germany had paid out €10 billion for 2.1 million electric vehicles since 2016, and the announcement called the program a success. 

This abrupt change contributed to a drop in EV sales in the country in the first half of 2024, according to analysis by the European Federation for Transport and Environment.

The end of German EV subsidies came too early, says Peter Mock, regional lead for Europe at the International Council on Clean Transportation. Most manufacturers are still far from the emissions targets they’re expected to hit by 2025. The sales slump for EVs raises questions about whether manufacturers will be able to hit those targets on time, and some in the auto industry are loudly raising doubts over whether the targets are feasible at all.

Electric vehicles have become much more common on roads around the world, but they’re still a minority option in most markets, reaching 18% of new-vehicle sales globally in 2023.  

Germany’s EV market is in an early, somewhat delicate place. Battery-electric vehicles made up just over 20% of new-vehicle sales in Germany before incentives ended in 2023. This point, Mock explains, falls at what many economists call the chasm separating early adopters (who are often willing to spend more) from majority customers.

Ending a subsidy program will basically always have an effect on sales, though. Even if EVs were significantly cheaper than gas-powered cars, if you took away a big incentive you’d likely see a sales slump, Energy Innovation’s Orvis says. “People still care about the cost,” he adds.

Take Sweden, which ended EV incentives at the end of 2022. The country saw an immediate slump in its sales from December 2022 to January 2023, but the market has roughly leveled out. One reason: The transition there was significantly farther along, with roughly 35% of new vehicles sold being battery-electric in August 2024. If you lump in plug-in hybrids, the share of plug-in vehicles is nearly 50%. Because the market was farther along, there’s not as much concern that the country will see a major stall in moving toward zero-emissions vehicles from fossil-fuel ones, Mock says.

One potential way to address concerns about subsidy cost is to pair them with fees on the incumbent technology. These are sometimes called feebate programs, and they work by adding a fee to a high-emissions vehicle while providing a subsidy for a low-emissions one, Mock says. 

Each country, and even each region within the same country, will have its own unique transition to a new mode of driving. “Each market has to be convinced,” says Robbie Andrew, a senior researcher at the Center for International Climate Research in Norway, who compiles EV sales data.

One key consideration for policymakers in each area should be the speed with which subsidies are sunsetted, Mock says. Giving automakers and consumers a firm schedule in advance can ensure that there’s less of a dramatic shock to the market. Ramping down support slowly over time can also be better than cutting a subsidy to zero in one swoop. 

The German government is already taking steps to improve its falling EV sales. In early September, the government agreed on measures that would allow companies to deduct part of the value of electric vehicles from tax consideration. 

Taking our collective foot off the pedal now when it comes to EV adoption likely won’t doom the technology, but it could be a major setback. And ultimately, what matters is not only that the world adopts technologies to cut emissions in the transportation sector—the speed at which we do so will have massive implications for climate change as well. The longer we drive polluting vehicles, the more emissions will wind up in the atmosphere. And the higher those pollution levels, the more we’ll feel the effects of a warming world. 

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here.

In February 2024, a broken utility pole brought down power lines near the small town of Stinnett, Texas. In the following weeks, the fire reportedly sparked by that equipment grew to burn over 1 million acres, the biggest wildfire in the state’s history.

Anything from stray fireworks to lightning strikes can start a wildfire. While it’s natural for many ecosystems to see some level of fire activity, the hotter, drier conditions brought on by climate change are fueling longer fire seasons with larger fires that burn more land.

This means that the need to spot wildfires earlier is becoming ever more crucial, and some groups are turning to technology to help. My colleague James Temple just wrote about a new effort from Google to fund an AI-powered wildfire-spotting satellite constellation. Read his full story for the details, and in the meantime, let’s dig into how this project fits into the world of fire-detection tech and some of the challenges that lie ahead.

The earliest moments in the progression of a fire can be crucial. Today, many fires are reported to authorities by bystanders who happen to spot them and call emergency services. Technologies could help officials by detecting fires earlier, well before they grow into monster blazes.

One such effort is called FireSat. It’s a project from the Earth Fire Alliance, a collaboration between Google’s nonprofit and research arms, the Environmental Defense Fund, Muon Space (a satellite company), and others. This planned system of 52 satellites should be able to spot fires as small as five by five meters (about 16 feet by 16 feet), and images will refresh every 20 minutes.

These wouldn’t be the first satellites to help with wildfire detection, but many existing efforts can either deliver high-resolution images or refresh often—not both, as the new project is aiming to do.

A startup based in Germany, called OroraTech, is also working to launch new satellites that specialize in wildfire detection. The small satellites (around the size of a shoebox) will orbit close to Earth and use sensors that detect heat. The company’s long-term goal is to launch 100 of the satellites into space and deliver images every 30 minutes.

Other companies are staying on Earth, deploying camera stations that can help officials identify, confirm, and monitor fires. Pano AI is using high-tech camera stations to try to spot fires earlier. The company mounts cameras on high vantage points, like the tops of mountains, and spins them around to get a full 360-degree view of the surrounding area. It says the tech can spot wildfire activity within a 15-mile radius. The cameras pair up with algorithms to automatically send an alert to human analysts when a potential fire is detected.

Having more tools to help detect wildfires is great. But whenever I hear about such efforts, I’m struck by a couple of major challenges for this field. 

First, prevention of any sort can often be undervalued, since a problem that never happens feels much less urgent than one that needs to be solved.

Pano AI, which has a few camera stations deployed, points to examples in which its technology detected fires earlier than bystander reports. In one case in Oregon, the company’s system issued a warning 14 minutes before the first emergency call came in, according to a report given to TechCrunch.

Intuitively, it makes sense that catching a blaze early is a good thing. And modeling can show what might have happened if a fire hadn’t been caught early. But it’s really difficult to determine the impact of something that didn’t happen. These systems will need to be deployed for a long time, and researchers will need to undertake large-scale, systematic studies, before we’ll be able to say for sure how effective they are at preventing damaging fires. 

The prospect of cost is also a tricky piece of this for me to wrap my head around. It’s in the public interest to prevent wildfires that will end up producing greenhouse-gas emissions, not to mention endangering human lives. But who’s going to pay for that?

Each of PanoAI’s stations costs something like $50,000 per year. The company’s customers include utilities, which have a vested interest in making sure their equipment doesn’t start fires and watching out for blazes that could damage its infrastructure.

The electric utility Xcel, whose equipment allegedly sparked that fire in Texas earlier this year, is facing lawsuits over its role. And utilities can face huge costs after fires. Last year’s deadly blazes in Hawaii caused billions of dollars in damages, and Hawaiian Electric recently agreed to pay roughly $2 billion for its role in those fires. 

The proposed satellite system from the Earth Fire Alliance will cost more than $400 million all told. The group has secured about two-thirds of what it needs for the first phase of the program, which includes the first four launches, but it’ll need to raise a lot more money to make its AI-powered wildfire-detecting satellite constellation a reality.

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Now read the rest of The Spark

Related reading

Read more about how an AI-powered satellite constellation can help spot wildfires faster here. 

Other companies are aiming to use balloons that will surf on wind currents to track fires. Urban Sky is deploying balloons in Colorado this year. 

Satellite images can also be used to tally up the damage and emissions caused by fires. Earlier this year I wrote about last year’s Canadian wildfires, which produced more emissions than the fossil fuels in most countries in 2023. 

Another thing

We’re just two weeks away from EmTech MIT, our signature event on emerging technologies. I’ll be on stage speaking with tech leaders on topics like net-zero buildings and emissions from Big Tech. We’ll also be revealing our 2024 list of Climate Tech Companies to Watch. 

For a preview of the event, check out this conversation I had with MIT Technology Review executive editor Amy Nordrum and editor in chief Mat Honan. You can register to join us on September 30 and October 1 at the MIT campus or online—hope to see you there!

Keeping up with climate  

The US Postal Service is finally getting its long-awaited electric vehicles. They’re funny-looking, and the drivers seem to love them already. (Associated Press)

→ Check out this timeline I made in December 2022 of the multi-year saga it took for the agency to go all in on EVs. (MIT Technology Review)

Microsoft is billing itself as a leader in AI for climate innovation. At the same time, the tech giant is selling its technology to oil and gas companies. Check out this fascinating investigation from my former colleague Karen Hao. (The Atlantic)

Imagine solar panels that aren’t affected by a cloudy day … because they’re in space. Space-based solar power sounds like a dream, but advances in solar tech and falling launch costs have proponents arguing that it’s a dream closer than ever to becoming reality. Many are still skeptical. (Cipher)

Norway is the first country with more EVs on the road than gas-powered cars. Diesel vehicles are still the most common, though. (Washington Post) 

The emissions cost of delivering Amazon packages keeps ticking up. A new report from Stand.earth estimates that delivery emissions have increased by 75% since just 2019. (Wired)

BYD has been dominant in China’s EV market. The company is working to expand, but to compete in the UK and Europe, it will need to win over wary drivers. (Bloomberg)

Some companies want to make air-conditioning systems in big buildings smarter to help cut emissions. Grid-interactive efficient buildings can cut energy costs and demand at peak hours. (Canary Media)

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here.

One way to know where a field is going? Take a look at what the sharpest new innovators are working on.

Good news for all of us: MIT Technology Review’s list of 35 Innovators Under 35 just dropped. And a decent number of the people who made the list are working in fields that touch climate and energy in one way or another.

Looking through, I noticed a few trends that might provide some hints about the future of climate tech. Let’s dig into this year’s list and consider what these innovators’ work might mean for efforts to combat climate change.

Power to the people

Perhaps unsurprisingly, quite a few innovators on this list are working on energy—and many of them have an interest in making energy consistently available where and when it’s needed. Wind and solar are getting cheap, but we need solutions for when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing.

Tim Latimer cofounded Fervo Energy, a geothermal company hoping to provide consistently available, carbon-free energy using Earth’s heat. You may be familiar with his work, since Fervo was on our list of 15 Climate Tech Companies to Watch in 2023.

Another energy-focused innovator on the list is Andrew Ponec of Antora Energy, a company working to build thermal energy storage systems. Basically, the company’s technology heats up blocks when cheap renewables are available, and then stores that heat and delivers it to industrial processes that need constant power. (You, the readers, named thermal energy storage the readers’ choice on this year’s 10 Breakthrough Technologies list.)

Rock stars

While new ways of generating electricity and storing energy can help cut our emissions in the future, other people are focused on how to clean up the greenhouse gases already in the atmosphere. At this point, removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere is basically required for any scenario where we limit warming to 1.5 °C over preindustrial levels. A few of the new class of innovators are turning to rocks for help soaking up and locking away atmospheric carbon. 

Noah McQueen cofounded Heirloom Carbon Technologies, a carbon removal company. The technology works by tweaking the way minerals soak up carbon dioxide from the air (before releasing it under controlled conditions, so they can do it all again). The company has plans for facilities that could remove hundreds of thousands of tons of carbon dioxide each year. 

Another major area of research focuses on how we might store captured carbon dioxide. Claire Nelson is the cofounder of Cella Mineral Storage, a company working on storage methods to better trap carbon dioxide underground once it’s been mopped up.  

Material world

Finally, some of the most interesting work on our new list of innovators is in materials. Some people are finding new ones that could help us address our toughest problems, and others are trying to reinvent old ones to clean up their climate impacts.

Julia Carpenter found a way to make a foam-like material from metal. Its high surface area makes it a stellar heat sink, meaning it can help cool things down efficiently. It could be a huge help in data centers, where 40% of energy demand goes to cooling.

And I spoke with Cody Finke, cofounder and CEO of Brimstone, a company working on cleaner ways of making cement. Cement alone is responsible for nearly 7% of global greenhouse-gas emissions, and about half of those come from chemical reactions necessary to make it. Finke and Brimstone are working to wipe out the need for these reactions by using different starting materials to make this crucial infrastructural glue.

Addressing climate change is a sprawling challenge, but the researchers and founders on this list are tackling a few of the biggest issues I think about every day. 

Ensuring that we can power our grid, and all the industrial processes that we rely on for the stuff in our daily lives, is one of the most substantial remaining challenges. Removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere in an efficient, cheap process could help limit future warming and buy us time to clean up the toughest sectors. And finding new materials, and new methods of producing old ones, could be a major key to unlocking new climate solutions. 

To read more about the folks I mentioned here and other innovators working in climate change and beyond, check out the full list.

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Now read the rest of The Spark

Related reading

Fervo Energy (cofounded by 2024 innovator Tim Latimer) showed last year that its wells can be used like a giant underground battery.

A growing number of companies—including Antora Energy, whose CEO Andrew Ponec is a 2024 innovator—are working to bring thermal energy storage systems to heavy industry.

Cement is one of our toughest challenges, as Brimstone CEO and 2024 innovator Cody Finke will tell you. I wrote about Brimstone and other efforts to reinvent cement earlier this year.

Another thing

We need a whole lot of metals to address climate change, from the copper in transmission lines to the nickel in lithium-ion batteries that power electric vehicles. Some researchers think plants might be able to help. 

Roughly 750 species of plants are so-called hyperaccumulators, meaning they naturally soak up and tolerate relatively high concentrations of metal. A new program is funding research into how we might use this trait to help source nickel, and potentially other metals, in the future. Read the full story here.

Keeping up with climate  

A hurricane that recently formed in the Gulf of Mexico is headed for Louisiana, ending an eerily quiet few weeks of the season. (Scientific American)

→ After forecasters predicted a particularly active season, the lull in hurricane activity was surprising. (New Scientist)

Rising sea levels are one of the symptoms of a changing climate, but nailing down exactly what “sea level” means is more complicated than you might think. We’ve gotten better at measuring sea level over the past few centuries, though. (New Yorker)

The US Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office has nearly $400 million in lending authority. This year’s election could shift the focus of that office drastically, making it a bellwether of how the results could affect energy priorities. (Bloomberg)

What if fusion power ends up working, but it’s too expensive to play a significant role on the grid? Some modelers think the technology will remain expensive and could come too late to make a dent in emissions. (Heatmap)

Electric-vehicle sales are up overall, but some major automakers are backing away from goals on zero-emissions vehicles. Even though sales are increasing, uptake is slower than many thought it would be, contributing to the nervous energy in the industry. (Canary Media)

It’s a tough time to be in the business of next-generation batteries. The woes of three startups reveal that difficult times are here, likely for a while. (The Information)