climate change

nj’s-answer-to-flooding:-it-has-bought-out-and-demolished-1,200-properties

NJ’s answer to flooding: it has bought out and demolished 1,200 properties

climate change, flooding, Housing, New Jersey, Policy / /

The state deals with flooding and sea level rise by buying homes in flood prone areas.

Heavy rains cause flooding in Manville, New Jersey on April 16, 2007. Credit: Bobby Bank

MANVILLE, N.J.—Richard Onderko said he will never forget the terrifying Saturday morning back in 1971 when the water rose so swiftly at his childhood home here that he and his brother had to be rescued by boat as the torrential rain from the remnants of Hurricane Doria swept through the neighborhood.

It wasn’t the first time—or the last—that the town endured horrific downpours. In fact, the working-class town of 11,000, about 25 miles southwest of Newark, has long been known for getting swamped by tropical storms, nor’easters or even just a wicked rain. It was so bad, Onderko recalled, that the constant threat of flooding had strained his parents’ marriage, with his mom wanting to sell and his dad intent on staying.

Eventually, his parents moved to Florida, selling the two-story house on North Second Avenue in 1995. But the new homeowner didn’t do so well either when storms hit, and in 2015, the property was sold one final time: to a state-run program that buys and demolishes houses in flood zones and permanently restores the property to open space.

“It’s pretty traumatic to watch your childhood home be bulldozed,” said Onderko, 64 and now the mayor of this 2.5-square-mile borough, which sits at the confluence of two rivers and a placid-looking brook that turns into a raging river when a storm moves through.

Blue Acres

His boyhood property—now just a grass lot—is one of some 1,200 properties that have been acquired across New Jersey by the state’s Blue Acres program, which has used more than $234 million in federal and state funds to pay fair market value to homeowners in flood-prone areas who, like the Onderko family, had grown weary of getting flooded over and over again.

Images of brown water flowing past partially submerged houses.

Flooding in Manville following a Nor’Easter in 2007 Credit: Bobby Bank

The program, started in 1995, is considered a national model as buyouts are an increasingly important tool for dealing with climate-related flooding. A report this month by Georgetown Climate Center said the program has achieved “significant results” by moving quicker than federal buyout programs, providing a stable source of state funding and shepherding homeowners through the process.

In addition, a report last month by the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Environmental Defense Fund warns that communities may well have to come up with new ways to pay for such initiatives as the Trump Administration continues to downsize government and cut programs.

Already, the NRDC said, billions of dollars in previously approved Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) resilience grants have been cancelled.

“We need to do a lot of things very differently,” said Rob Moore, an NRDC director who worked on the report, which suggests that states and counties consider using revenue from municipal bonds, local fees and taxes, revolving loan funds, and leveraging insurance payouts to offset some of the reductions in federal funding.

But Moore said the problem goes beyond funding uncertainty, as the science is showing that the impacts of climate change are “outpacing our efforts to adapt.”

The report, released Nov. 18, cited the Charlotte-Mecklenburg County Storm Water Services, which has acquired some 500 homes in North Carolina in its buyout program, relying largely on stormwater utility fees to fund the sales. New Jersey’s program, Moore said, is a “wonderful example” of a plan that raised money with three bond issues while building a staff that developed a lot of expertise over the years.

Decades of experience may well come in handy as New Jersey, the nation’s most densely populated state, is likely to experience more significant flooding in the years to come.

Future risks

Sea level rose about 1.5 feet along the New Jersey coast in the last 100 years—more than twice the global rate—and a new study by the New Jersey Climate Change Resource Center at Rutgers University predicts a likely increase of between 2.2 and 3.8 feet by 2100, if the current level of global carbon emissions continues.

Torrential rain storms also have led to massive flooding in inland towns—like Manville—as rivers and streams overflow, sending waves of water into the homes of stunned owners. The stronger storms are attributed by scientists to the Earth’s changing climate, with warming oceans causing rising sea levels and fueling more intense atmospheric activity.

“Blue Acres has been a pioneering program,” said Robert Kopp, a climate scientist and professor at Rutgers University, calling buyouts a “very important tool” in how the state deals with the flooding repercussions of climate change.

The program, which so far has benefitted mostly inland rather than coastal communities, is funded with federal money as well as a share of the state’s corporate taxes, providing a consistent infusion of money at a time of uncertainty about the future of federal disaster funding.

Courtney Wald-Wittkop, who manages Blue Acres for the state Department of Environmental Protection, said the program is an important solution for homeowners who have grown weary of repeated flooding. But deciding to give up a home and move away from the flood plain, she said, often takes time. “You have to give them space,” she said, to weigh the financial and personal costs of leaving a home with memories.

She said the program is known for its novel approach of assigning a case manager to every applicant to help them sort through the issues. “It’s really important that we walk hand in hand with these homeowners,” said Wald-Wittkop.

The program’s goals, however, go beyond the needs of homeowners. The idea is to help reshape the community by returning properties to permanent open space, which can better absorb rain water than impervious surfaces such as concrete, asphalt and buildings. That open space, in turn, is managed—mostly with lawn cutting and brush clearing—by the municipality.

Wald-Wittkop said the program is evolving, and that she would like to make the process move more quickly, provide sellers with more housing assistance, especially outside of flood-prone areas and encourage more community involvement in what to do with the newly acquired open space.

“We’ve tried to be as innovative as possible,” she said.

Epic floods

With its history of flooding, Manville is one of the towns that has benefitted the most from the state buyout initiative, with some 120 homes in the town sold to the state for about $22 million between 2015 and 2024. Another 53 buyouts are currently underway, according to Wald-Wittkop.

About an hour south, the city of Lambertville was hit hard by Hurricane Ida when a series of creeks overflowed in 2021, stranding residents and business owners in the popular tourist town wherever they happened to be when the massive downpour began. Hours later, residents emerged to stunning destruction.

An image of a green suburban area with large portions of it covered by brown flood waters.

Satellite image of Manville during the 2021 flooding. Credit: Maxar

“The force of the water was just unbelievable,” recalled Mayor Andrew Nowick, who said 130 properties were damaged and about two dozen homeowners ended up submitting applications for Blue Acre buyouts. Three eventually accepted buyout offers, he said.

The program, he said, can be attractive for sellers who are ready to move on but he said there was a lot of real soul-searching about the advantage of selling versus repairing homes that were filled with family memories. “These are all hard choices,” said the mayor.

Incorporated in 1929, Manville was named with a nod to the Johns-Manville Corp., a now-defunct asbestos manufacturer with jobs that transformed the area from a farming community to a factory town. As Manville grew so did the rest of once-rural Somerset County, with more housing, industry and roads. The result was less farmland and open space to absorb the rain and more impervious surfaces that cause substantial water runoff and flash flooding.

“It’s troubling today to see all the development that has gone on unabated,” said Onderko.

And when Manville floods, it is often epic.

In 1955, Hurricane Diane caused what was called the town’s “worst flood in history,” according to a special edition of the Manville News, which now hangs in Onderko’s office. “RIVER GOING DOWN; BE CALM!” screamed the banner headline. Then-Mayor Frank Baron urged residents not to panic. “You’re not forgotten, no matter where you live,” Baron declared.

Onderko said getting rescued after Hurricane Doria in 1971 was surreal. Their oil tank came loose from all the water, and he recalled seeing the fuel mix in with the water that was flooding the basement as it approached the first floor. “It was something that you will never forget,” he said.

Later, the remains of Hurricane Floyd caused widespread damage in 1999, as did Hurricane Irene in 2011, but the town largely escaped the fury of Superstorm Sandy, which caused catastrophic damage to parts of New Jersey in 2012.

But then came Hurricane Ida in 2021.

Onderko still chokes with emotion when recalling that night in September 2021 when Ida came roaring through. “It was a war zone,” he recalled in an interview at the borough hall, which was inundated with two feet of water in that storm. “The water came so fast. It was a flash flood event. We were just lucky we didn’t have any loss of life.”

For hours, the mayor and rescue personnel went door to door, urging residents to leave. By the next morning, about 10 to 11 feet of water had flooded the central part of town and surrounding neighborhoods. Two homes and a banquet hall exploded from natural gas leaks, and emergency personnel could not even reach them.

“It took a toll on me,” said Onderko, recalling how he had trouble sleeping and felt “kind of powerless” because of the extent of devastation.

Demolishing properties, saving the town

Wendy Byra and her husband, Thomas Kline, had already moved to higher ground.

Their house had flooded twice and they decided to sell their home to the Blue Acres program. The sale was approved in 2015 for a $185,000 buyout. Byra said a number of their neighbors also applied for the buyout, but had mixed feelings about the amount of money they were offered.

“A lot of people weren’t happy,” said Byra, recalling that some neighbors thought they should receive more money for their homes. Byra said she and her husband figured they would have a hard time selling on their own, so they accepted the buyout and moved to a home on higher ground, but still in Manville, where she grew up.

Except when a major flood happens, Onderko said, Manville is a good place to live. So homeowners, even in the two parts of town known for flooding, can go years without having to deal with a water disaster.

Onderko said residents had long relied on a mix of government help in rebuilding after flooding, but two years after Ida hit in 2021, the state said it would use federal funds only for Blue Acres buyouts of flood-prone properties in Manville.

Onderko said he and residents were caught off guard by the change in policy. He also believes that elevation and repair remained viable alternatives for some of the houses. The buyouts take time, he said, and the town loses tax revenue from the properties sold via the Blue Acres program. “It doesn’t help the town to lose [tax] rateables,” said the mayor, who said the town also bears the cost of maintaining the open space.

Now in his third term as mayor, Onderko, who lives in a house on higher ground than his boyhood home, seems more like a property manager than municipal executive as he presides over a town that is a mix of neighborhoods. Some are on higher ground and do not flood, but others are in areas that get caught repeatedly in deluges. There, vacant grass lots left from demolished Blue Acres properties are interspersed with homes that have been elevated, repaired or are still in recovery mode. “It’s very frustrating,” said Onderko.

Looking to the future, the mayor said he believes many more homes will be at risk whenever the next flood happens. And Onderko does not sound especially hopeful about how that will go.

“It’s going to take a miracle to try to save this town,” he said.

This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, non-partisan news organization that covers climate, energy and the environment. Sign up for their newsletter here.

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Trump admin threatens to break up major climate research center

atmospheric science, climate change, Earth science, NCAR, NSF, research, Science / /

UCAR, for its part, has issued a statement indicating that the USA Today article was the first it has heard of the matter.

In many cases where the administration has attempted to take drastic actions like this, courts have ruled that they run afoul of a legal prohibition against “arbitrary and capricious” federal actions. That said, courtroom losses haven’t inhibited the administration’s willingness to try, and the time spent waiting for legal certainty can often accomplish many of its aims, such as disrupting research on politically disfavored subjects and forcing scientists to look elsewhere for career stability.

Scientists, meanwhile, are reacting with dismay. “Dismantling NCAR is like taking a sledgehammer to the keystone holding up our scientific understanding of the planet,” said Texas Tech climate researcher Katharine Hayhoe. “Everyone who works in climate and weather has passed through its doors and benefited from its incredible resources.”

Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, called NCAR a “unique and valuable asset” and emphasized the wide range of research conducted there.

Obviously, shutting down one source of information about climate change won’t alter what’s happening—greenhouse gases will continue to behave as physics dictates, raising global temperatures. But the Trump administration seemingly views everything through the lens of ideology. It has concluded that scientists are its ideological opponents and thus that its own ideologically driven conclusions are equal to the facts produced by science. Because of that perspective, it has been willing to harm scientists, even if the cost will eventually be felt by the public that Trump ostensibly represents.

Story was updated on Dec. 17 to reflect a recently issued statement by the NSF.

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New report warns of critical climate risks in Arab region

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The new WMO report shows that the foundations of daily life across the Arab region, including farms, reservoirs, and aquifers that feed and sustain millions, are being pushed to the brink by human-caused warming.

Across northwestern Africa’s sun-blasted rim, the Maghreb, six years of drought have slashed wheat yields, forcing countries such as Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia to import more grain, even as global prices rise.

In parts of Morocco, reservoirs have fallen to record low levels. The government has enacted water restrictions in major cities, including limits on household use, and curtailed irrigation for farmers. Water systems in Lebanon have already crumbled under alternating floods and droughts, and in Iraq and Syria, small farmers are abandoning their land as rivers shrink and seasonal rains become unreliable.

The WMO report ranked 2024 as the hottest year ever measured in the Arab world. Summer heatwaves spread and persisted across Syria, Iraq, Jordan, and Egypt. Parts of Iraq recorded six to 12 days with highs above 50° Celsius (122° Fahrenheit), conditions that are life-threatening even for healthy adults. Across the region, the report noted an increase in the number of heat-wave days in recent decades while humidity has declined. The dangerous combination speeds soil drying and crop damage.

By contrast, other parts of the region—the United Arab Emirates, Oman, and southern Saudi Arabia—were swamped by destructive record rains and flooding during 2024. The extremes will test the limits of adaptation, said Rola Dashti, executive secretary of the Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia, who often works with the WMO to analyze climate impacts.

Climate extremes in 2024 killed at least 300 people in the region. The impacts are hitting countries already struggling with internal conflicts, and where the damage is under-insured and under-reported. In Sudan alone, flooding damaged more than 40 percent of the country’s farmland.

But with 15 of the world’s most arid countries in the region, water scarcity is the top issue. Governments are investing in desalination, wastewater recycling, and other measures to bolster water security, but the adaptation gap between risks and readiness is still widening.

The worst is ahead, Dashti said in a WMO statement, with climate models showing a “potential rise in average temperatures of up to 5° Celsius (9° Fahrenheit) by the end of the century under high-emission scenarios.” The new report is important, she said, because it “empowers the region to prepare for tomorrow’s climate realities.”

This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, non-partisan news organization that covers climate, energy, and the environment. Sign up for their newsletter here.

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Google CEO: If an AI bubble pops, no one is getting out clean

AI, AI energy, AI infrastructure, AI investment, AI regulation, alphabet, Biz & IT, climate change, deepmind, dotcom bubble, Ed Zitron, Google, Jamie Dimon, Jensen Huang, large language models, machine learning, NVIDIA, openai, Sundar Pichai / /

Market concerns and Google’s position

Alphabet’s recent market performance has been driven by investor confidence in the company’s ability to compete with OpenAI’s ChatGPT, as well as its development of specialized chips for AI that can compete with Nvidia’s. Nvidia recently reached a world-first $5 trillion valuation due to making GPUs that can accelerate the matrix math at the heart of AI computations.

Despite acknowledging that no company would be immune to a potential AI bubble burst, Pichai argued that Google’s unique position gives it an advantage. He told the BBC that the company owns what he called a “full stack” of technologies, from chips to YouTube data to models and frontier science research. This integrated approach, he suggested, would help the company weather any market turbulence better than competitors.

Pichai also told the BBC that people should not “blindly trust” everything AI tools output. The company currently faces repeated accuracy concerns about some of its AI models. Pichai said that while AI tools are helpful “if you want to creatively write something,” people “have to learn to use these tools for what they’re good at and not blindly trust everything they say.”

In the BBC interview, the Google boss also addressed the “immense” energy needs of AI, acknowledging that the intensive energy requirements of expanding AI ventures have caused slippage on Alphabet’s climate targets. However, Pichai insisted that the company still wants to achieve net zero by 2030 through investments in new energy technologies. “The rate at which we were hoping to make progress will be impacted,” Pichai said, warning that constraining an economy based on energy “will have consequences.”

Even with the warnings about a potential AI bubble, Pichai did not miss his chance to promote the technology, albeit with a hint of danger regarding its widespread impact. Pichai described AI as “the most profound technology” humankind has worked on.

“We will have to work through societal disruptions,” he said, adding that the technology would “create new opportunities” and “evolve and transition certain jobs.” He said people who adapt to AI tools “will do better” in their professions, whatever field they work in.

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Corals survived past climate changes by retreating to the deeps

Biology, climate change, corals, evolution, extinction, Florida, mass extinction, Science / /

A recent die-off in Florida puts the spotlight on corals’ survival strategies.

Scientists have found that the 2023 marine heat wave caused “functional extinction” of two Acropora reef-building coral species living in the Florida Reef, which stretches from the Dry Tortugas National Park to Miami.

“At this point, we do not think there’s much of a chance for natural recovery—their numbers are so low that successful reproduction is incredibly unlikely,” said Ross Cunning, a coral biologist at the John G. Shedd Aquarium.

This isn’t the first time corals have faced the borderline of extinction over the last 460 million years, and they have always managed to bounce back and recolonize habitats lost during severe climate changes. The problem is that we won’t live long enough to see them doing that again.

Killer heat waves

Marine heat waves kill corals by messing with the photosynthetic machinery of symbiotic microalgae that live in the corals’ tissues. When the temperature of water goes up too much, the microalgae start producing reactive oxygen species instead of nutritious sugars. The reactive oxygen is toxic to corals, which respond by expelling the microalgae. This solves the toxicity problem, but it also starves the corals and causes them to bleach (the algae are the source of their yellowish color).

The 2023 marine heat wave was not the first to hit the Florida Reef—it was the ninth on record. “Those eight previous heat waves also had major negative effects on coral reefs, causing widespread mortality,” Cunning told Ars. “But the 2023 heat wave blew all other heat waves out of the water. It was 2.2 to four times greater in magnitude than anything that came before it.”

Cunning’s team monitored two Acropora coral species: the staghorn and elkhorn. “They are both branching corals,” Cunning explained. “The staghorn has pointy branches that form dense thickets, whereas elkhorn produces arm-like branches that reach up and grow toward the surface, producing highly complex three dimensionality, like a canopy in the forest.”

He and his colleagues chose those two species because they essentially built the Florida Reef. They also grow the fastest among all Florida Reef corals, which means they are essential for its ability to recover from damage. “Acropora corals were the primary reef builders for the last ten thousand years,” Cunning said. Unfortunately, they also showed the highest levels of mortality due to heat waves.

Coral apocalypse

Cunning’s team found the mortality rate among Acropora corals reached 100 percent in the Dry Tortugas National Park, which is at the southernmost end of the Florida Reef. Moving north to Lower Keys, Middle Keys, and most of the Upper Keys, the mortality stayed at between 98 and 100 percent.

“Once you start moving a little bit further north, there’s the Biscayne National Park, where mortality rates were at 90 percent,” Cunning said. “It wasn’t until the furthest northern extent of the reef in Miami and Broward counties where mortality dropped to just 38 percent thanks to cooler temperatures that occurred there.”

Still, the mortality rate was exceptionally high throughout most of Acropora colonies across the Florida Reef. “What we’re facing is a functional extinction,” Cunning said.

But corals have been around for about 460 million years, and they have survived multiple mass extinction events, including the one that wiped out the dinosaurs. As vulnerable as they appear, corals seemingly have some get-out-of-death card they always pull when things turn really bad for them. This card, most likely, is buried deep in their genome.

Ancestral strength

“There have been studies looking into the evolutionary history of corals, but the difference between those and our work lies in technology,” said Claudia Francesca Vaga, a marine biologist at the Smithsonian Institution.

Her team looked at ultra conserved elements, stretches of DNA that are nearly identical across even distantly related species. These elements were used to build the most extensive phylogenetic tree of corals to date. Based on the genomic data and fossil evidence, Vaga’s team analyzed how 274 stony coral species are related to one another to retrace their common ancestor and reconstruct how they evolved from it.

“We managed to confirm that the first common ancestor of stony corals was most likely solitary—it didn’t live in colonies, and it didn’t have symbionts,” Vaga said.

The very first coral most likely did not rely on algae to produce its nutrients, which means it was immune to bleaching. It was also not attached to a substrate, so it could move from one habitat to another. Another advantage the first corals had was that they were not particularly picky—they could live just as well in the shallow waters as in the deep sea, since they didn’t get most of their nutrients from their photosynthetic symbionts.

Descending from these incredibly resilient ancestors, corals started to specialize. “We learned that symbiosis and coloniality can be acquired independently by stony coral linages and that it happened multiple times,” Vaga said.

Based on her team’s research, past mass extinction events usually wiped out 90 percent of the species living in shallow waters—the ones that were colonial and reliant on symbionts. “But each such extinction triggered a process of retaking the shallows by the more resilient deep-sea corals, which in time evolved symbiosis and coloniality again,” Vaga said.

Thanks to corals’ deep-sea cousins, even the most extreme environmental changes—global warming or sudden, severe variations in the oceans’ acidity or oxygen levels—could not kill them for good. Each mass extinction event they’ve been through just reverted them to factory settings and made them start over from scratch.

The only catch here is time. “We’re talking about four to five million years before coral populations recover,” Vaga said.

Long way back

According to Cunning, the consequence of Acropora corals’ extinction in the Florida Reef is a lower overall reef-building rate, which will lead to reduced biodiversity in the reef’s ecosystem. “There are going to be cascading effects, and humans will be impacted as well. Reefs protect our coastlines by buffering over 90 percent of wave energy,” Cunning said.

In Florida, where coastlines are heavily urbanized, this may translate into hundreds of millions of dollars per year in damages.

But Cunning said we still have means at our disposal to save Acropora corals. “We’re not going to give up on them,” he said.

One option for improving the resilience of corals could be to crossbreed them with species from outside of Florida Reef, ideally ones that live in warmer places and are better adapted to heat. “The first tests of this approach are underway right now in Florida; elkhorn corals were cross bred between Florida parents and Honduran parents,” Cunning said. He hopes this will help produce a new generation of corals that has a better shot at surviving the next heat wave.

Other interventions include manipulating corals’ algal symbionts. “There are many different species of algae with different levels of heat tolerance,” Cunning said. To him, a possible way forward would be to pair the Acropora corals with more heat-tolerant symbionts. “This should alter the bleaching threshold in these corals,” he explained.

Still, even interventions like these will take a very long time to make a difference. “But if four or five million years is the benchmark to beat, then yeah, it’s hopefully going to happen faster than that,” Cunning said.

The upside is that corals will likely pull off their de-extinction trick once again, even if we do absolutely nothing to help them. “In a few million years, they will redevelop coloniality, redevelop symbiosis, and rebuild something similar to the coral reefs we have today,” Vaga said. “This is good news for them. Not necessarily for us.”

Science, 2025.  DOI: 10.1126/science.adx7825

Nature, 2025.  DOI: 10.1038/s41586-025-09615-6

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Jacek Krywko is a freelance science and technology writer who covers space exploration, artificial intelligence research, computer science, and all sorts of engineering wizardry.

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Falling panel prices lead to global solar boom, except for the US

climate change, renewable energy, Science, solar power, syndication / /

The economic case for solar power is stronger than ever.

White clouds drift over a combined wind-solar installation in Shandong province, China. Beijing’s support for a rapid rollout of solar and wind power forms a stark contrast with the growing antipathy of the Trump administration towards renewables. Credit: CFOTO/Future Publishing/Getty Images

To the south of the Monte Cristo mountain range and west of Paymaster Canyon, a vast stretch of the Nevada desert has attracted modern-day prospectors chasing one of 21st-century America’s greatest investment booms.

Solar power developers want to cover an area larger than Washington, DC, with silicon panels and batteries, converting sunlight into electricity that will power air conditioners in sweltering Las Vegas along with millions of other homes and businesses.

But earlier this month, bureaucrats in charge of federal lands scrapped collective approval for the Esmeralda 7 projects, in what campaigners fear is part of an attack on renewable energy under President Donald Trump. “We will not approve wind or farmer destroying [sic] Solar,” he posted on his Truth Social platform in August. Developers will need to reapply individually, slowing progress.

Thousands of miles away on the other side of the Pacific Ocean, it is a different story. China has laid solar panels across an area the size of Chicago high up on the Tibetan Plateau, where the thin air helps more sunlight get through.

The Talatan Solar Park is part of China’s push to double its solar and wind generation capacity over the coming decade. “Green and low-carbon transition is the trend of our time,” President Xi Jinping told delegates at a UN summit in New York last month.

China’s vast production of solar panels and batteries has also pushed down the prices of renewables hardware for everyone else, meaning it has “become very difficult to make any other choice in some places,” according to Heymi Bahar, senior analyst at the International Energy Agency.

In 2010, the IEA estimated that there would be 410 gigawatts (GW) of solar panels installed around the world by 2035. There is already more than four times that capacity, with about half of it in China.

Many countries in Africa and the Middle East, even in petrostates such as Saudi Arabia, are rapidly developing solar power. “It’s a very cheap way to harness the sun,” says Kingsmill Bond, an energy strategist at think-tank Ember.

chart showing global renewables growth

Credit: FT

Its analysis suggests that, helped by rapid growth in solar and wind energy, renewables generated more electricity than coal-fired power plants during the first half of this year.

Progress in energy and other areas has damped some of the pessimism around global warming. In 2015, the UN predicted temperatures would rise by 4° C compared to pre-industrial levels by 2100. It now projects a rise of 2.6° C, if climate policies are followed through.

But for delegates set to gather in Belém, Brazil, next month for the COP30 climate summit, any jubilation will be tempered by the knowledge that the renewables revolution is a long way from being fulfilled. Emissions from the energy sector rose for the fourth straight year in 2024 to a record high, while the slower growth in US renewables means an ambitious target to triple global capacity by 2030 will probably be missed.

“It’s not job done, [IEA analysis] does throw some genuine caution out there,” says Mike Hemsley, deputy director at the Energy Transitions Commission think-tank.

Renewable energy has lowered wholesale power costs, but that has not necessarily fed through into the prices that consumers pay, while users in many countries have not yet switched to electricity for things like transport and domestic heating in the numbers required to reduce fossil fuel usage.

Calculations by the Energy Institute, the sector’s global body, show that the supply of oil, gas, and coal for energy—electricity generation, heating, industrial usage, and transport—in 2024 rose by more than the supply of energy from low-carbon sources, which also includes nuclear and hydropower. That has led some to argue that renewables are merely helping to meet climbing energy demand, rather than replacing fossil fuels.

“The world remains in an energy addition mode, rather than a clear transition,” said Andy Brown, president of the institute, as it launched its report in August.

“Renewables is the place to be”

At a solar farm operated by ReNew, one of India’s biggest green energy companies, hundreds of panels glint in the sharp desert sun of surrounding Rajasthan.

India, the world’s third largest carbon emitter, wants to develop 500 gigawatts of clean-energy capacity by 2030, and earlier this year reached 243 GW—meaning more than half of its current installed power capacity is now from renewables.

“Every group in India is now saying: ‘You know what, renewables is the place to be,” says Sumant Sinha, chair and chief executive of ReNew.

Saudi Arabia, blessed with both oil and sun, has developed around 4.34 GW of solar capacity as it tries to free up more oil for export, rather than burning it in its own power stations. It wants to build up to 130 GW by the end of the decade.

“It’s massive, what’s going on,” Marco Arcelli, chief executive of utility ACWA Power, which is part-owned by the kingdom’s sovereign wealth fund, told the FT earlier this year. The company is developing 30 GW of renewables in Saudi Arabia.

South Africa has authorized at least 6 GW of renewable energy capacity since President Cyril Ramaphosa removed the capacity limit on private electricity providers in 2022, breaking years of reluctance among the ruling African National Congress to challenge the dominance of state monopoly utility Eskom.

factory workers

Workers at the Ener-G-Africa factory in Cape Town test LED lights on solar panels. South Africans are increasingly installing such panels because of the unreliability of normal power supplies.

Credit: Esa Alexander/Reuters

Workers at the Ener-G-Africa factory in Cape Town test LED lights on solar panels. South Africans are increasingly installing such panels because of the unreliability of normal power supplies. Credit: Esa Alexander/Reuters

Middle-class households in the country have also rapidly installed solar panels on their roofs to cope with years of planned rolling blackouts due to power shortages. It is part of a worldwide trend for smaller installations as homes and businesses tire of waiting for governments or big utilities to fix power shortages.

Solar panel installations of less than 1MW accounted for about 42 percent of global installations last year, according to BloombergNEF, almost double the 22 percent recorded in 2015. Factories, mosques, and farms in Pakistan have covered their roofs in Chinese-made solar panels to try to avoid surging tariffs for state-provided power.

“We’ve displaced tens of thousands of diesel generators,” says William Brent, chief marketing officer at Husk Power Systems, which has installed about 400 “mini-grids” of solar and batteries across Nigeria and India. These are helping pharmacies store medicines and shopkeepers keep drinks cool at around half the cost of power from the grid.

The construction of vast solar arrays in deserts and small installations on rooftops have largely been driven by the same underlying trend: falling costs. The huge surfeit of production capacity in China, which produced about eight out of 10 of the world’s solar modules in 2024, has pushed the cost of panels down by almost 90 percent over the past decade and dragged overall capital expenditure costs down 70 percent, according to analysts.

Yet even in places like India, fossil fuels still hold sway. Coal still generates more than 70 percent of the country’s power output and remains politically protected, employing hundreds of thousands directly and many more indirectly in some of India’s poorest regions. “India still has a massive way to go,” says Hemsley at the ETC.

PM Prasad, chair of state-owned Coal India, told the FT earlier this year that it was reopening more than 30 mines and launching up to five new sites, arguing that renewables were not yet capable of meeting fast-growing energy demand.

The painful process of acquiring large tracts of land for solar arrays in a country with millions of smallholder farmers has also led to delays across the renewables sector, many Indian developers grumble. More than 50 GW of renewable power projects are waiting to connect to an overstretched transmission network, estimates the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, a think-tank, and cleantech consultancy JMK Research.

Chart showing relative amount of small solar installations

Credit: FT

Even as solar panels become more popular in Sub-Saharan Africa, millions of homes and businesses still rely on expensive and polluting diesel generators, and roughly 600 million people lack access to power.

Many people also lack the means to pay commercial rates for electricity, even before factoring in the extra levies needed to finance the cost of new transmission lines, a key enabler of renewables projects around the world.

Electricity storage capabilities also need to dramatically improve if countries want to rely more heavily on intermittent wind and solar farms and phase out backup fossil-fuel capacity.

Large-scale batteries are being deployed rapidly—spurred again by China’s prolific manufacturing output. James Mittell, director at developer Actis Energy, says costs have fallen so much that it is already possible in many markets to build large-scale battery and solar systems, which can deliver power with similar consistency to gas-fired power plants, but at lower cost. “It’s a complete game-changer,” he says.

But progress is also mixed on the second phase of any “transition” to renewable power: persuading consumers and industries to switch to equipment that runs on electricity rather than combustion processes using fossil fuels.

The share of electricity in final energy demand has flatlined in the US and the EU over the past few years, with the growth of electric cars offset by the difficulty of getting people to switch away from gas or oil heating systems to low-carbon electric ones such as heat pumps.

“For electricity [generation] we have a success story,” says Bahar, at the IEA. “For other sectors, it’s way more complicated.”

Massive growth in China

China and some parts of Southeast Asia stand out in terms of the portion of energy supplied by electricity increasing—in China’s case, from about 12 percent in 2000 to about 30 percent in 2023—as millions of citizens start driving electric cars and factories switch away from fossil-fueled boilers.

Ember points to data showing that renewables met 84 percent of China’s new electricity demand last year as evidence that coal-powered generation in the country is nearing its peak. “We’re confident renewables can meet all China’s [power] demand growth,” adds Hemsley at the ETC.

But even here, challenges loom. Major electricity market reforms introduced by Beijing in July mean renewable energy developers no longer get a fixed price akin to that received by coal-fired generators and are instead more exposed to market forces.

“They clearly don’t want to harm the build out of renewables, but they just want it to be done on a more commercial basis,” says Neil Beveridge, who leads Bernstein’s energy analysis in Hong Kong.

But the IEA warns it will lower returns and cut the growth of renewables. “That [impact of the reform] is the biggest uncertainty in our outlook,” adds Bahar at the IEA.

A far sharper slowdown is already underway in the US, where incentives introduced as part of former President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act in 2022 are rolled back by the second Trump administration. Tax credits have been cut and major projects blocked—spooking investors and leaving existing developers trying to stay afloat.

workers carrying solar panels

Workers carry solar panels for a project in Lingwu, China. The country accounts for half the world’s installed solar capacity, but its fossil fuel usage also continues to grow.

Credit: Sara Hussein/AFP/Getty Images

Workers carry solar panels for a project in Lingwu, China. The country accounts for half the world’s installed solar capacity, but its fossil fuel usage also continues to grow. Credit: Sara Hussein/AFP/Getty Images

“It’s very difficult to make big capital decisions based on this,” says Reagan Farr, chief executive of Silicon Ranch, a solar developer. “We don’t have a bipartisan energy policy in the US, which is very bad for the industry and our economy.”

Ørsted, the world’s largest offshore wind company, has had to raise an extra $9 billion from investors after Trump’s hostility to the offshore wind sector prevented it from selling a stake in one of its major US projects.

His tariffs on products from China mean higher costs for solar projects. Analysts say more large-scale solar projects are likely to have their permits revoked or reviewed.

Developers are currently rushing to build, as they have until July 2026 to start construction to capture the tail-end of the tax credits. But some projects and companies are bound to fail. “We’re likely facing several more years of uphill battles for many large-scale projects,” says Abby Watson, president at Groundwire Group, a consultancy.

The IEA has halved its forecast for renewables growth by 2030 in the US to around 250 GW as a result of Trump’s policies. Analysts at Carbon Brief estimate the country will emit 7 billion tonnes more CO₂ equivalent by 2030 under Trump’s policies than if the country had met its obligations under the 2015 Paris agreement, which he is withdrawing from.

The reduction in renewables growth comes as the country’s electricity demand is rising due to the growth of data centers, many of which are looking to gas-fired or nuclear power stations because they need constant, steady power.

Gas turbine makers are struggling to keep up with demand, while new nuclear power plants are often delayed.

chart showing continued growth of fossil fuels

Credit: FT

Retail electricity prices have already risen by 5 percent since July, according to the Energy Information Administration, and some experts caution they could rise further if supplies are constrained. “The writing is on the wall,” says Pol Lezcano, director of energy and renewables at the CBRE real estate group.

Supporters of renewable electricity argue that the US is missing out on a revolution in cleaner, cheaper technology sweeping the world, with some likening it to the aging cars on Cuba’s roads.

But the relationship between renewable generation and consumer energy bills is complicated. The free energy from the sun or the wind means that the wholesale price of renewable-generated power is lower, but developers still need to make a return on their investment, and grid operators may need to step in to ensure continuity of supply when the wind and the sun are low.

“Even as the cost of producing electricity from renewables falls, consumers may not see immediate or proportional reductions in their bills, raising questions over the impact of renewables on power affordability,” the IEA said in its latest report.

More broadly, the US’s focus on fossil fuels and pullback of support for clean energy further cedes influence over the future global energy system to China.

The US is trying to tie its trading partners into fossil fuels, pressing the EU to buy $750 billion of American oil, natural gas, and nuclear technologies during his presidency as part of a trade deal, scuppering an initiative to begin decarbonizing world shipping and pressuring others to reduce their reliance on Chinese technology.

But the collapsing cost of solar panels in particular has spoken for itself in many parts of the world. Experts caution that the US’s attacks on renewables could cause lasting damage to its competitiveness against China, even if an administration more favorable to renewables were to follow Trump’s.

“China has run far away in terms of competitiveness,” says Antonio Cammisecra, chief executive of ContourGlobal, an independent power producer.

“The US is capable of rebuilding, but it will take time.”

Additional reporting by Ahmed Al Omran and David Pilling. Data visualization by Jana Tauschinski.

© 2025 The Financial Times Ltd. All rights reserved. Not to be redistributed, copied, or modified in any way.

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Trump and Republicans join Big Oil’s push to shut down climate liability efforts

big oil, climate change, fossil fuel companies, fossil fuels, Oil industry, Policy, syndication / /

another shutdown imminent

Republicans are attempting to foreclose the ability of cities and states to seek damages linked to climate change.

An aerial view of a partially collapsed home in St. Johnsbury, Vt., on July 30, 2024, after flash floods hit the area. Vermont, along with New York, passed climate superfund laws last year, and similar legislation is pending in a handful of other states. Credit: Danielle Parhizkaran/The Boston Globe via Getty Images

As efforts continue to hold some of the world’s largest fossil fuel corporations liable for destructive and deadly climate impacts, backlash from the politically powerful oil and gas industry and its allies in government is on the rise, bolstered by the Trump administration’s allegiance to fossil fuels.

From lobbying Congress for liability protection to suing states over their climate liability laws and lawsuits, attempts to shield Big Oil from potential liability and to shut down climate accountability initiatives are advancing on multiple fronts.

“The effort has escalated dramatically in the past six or seven months,” said Richard Wiles, president of the Center for Climate Integrity, an organization that advocates for holding fossil fuel companies accountable for selling products they knew were dangerously warming the planet.

Pushback to liability initiatives from fossil fuel interests is not new. But the political landscape has shifted dramatically this year as the second Trump administration works to reward loyalists and campaign donors, including fossil fuel interests.

The oil and gas industry spent $445 million during the last election cycle to influence President Donald Trump and Congress, including $96 million on Trump’s re-election campaign, according to the progressive advocacy group Climate Power.

“What has changed is that there is a new administration,” said Lisa Graves, founder and executive director of True North Research, a national investigative watchdog group. And the Trump administration, she said, “is continuing to defend the fossil fuel industry and assail anyone who dares try to hold them accountable.”

Over the past eight years, communities across the country have filed tobacco-style lawsuits targeting ExxonMobil and major players in the fossil fuel industry, seeking to recover damages for localized climate impacts or to force companies to cease greenwashing and other misleading behavior.

More than 30 of these lawsuits brought by municipal, tribal, and state governments are working their way through the courts, and several are now closer than ever to reaching trial.

At the same time, some states are enacting or considering so-called climate superfund legislation that would hold large fossil fuel companies strictly liable for climate damages and require them to help pay for a portion of climate change costs incurred by state governments. Vermont and New York both passed climate superfund laws last year, and similar legislation is pending in a handful of other states.

In response to these budding accountability efforts, the fossil fuel industry, the Trump administration, Republicans in Congress, and GOP attorneys general are mounting what Wiles describes as a “massive orchestrated campaign” to try to stop climate liability laws and lawsuits in their tracks, and to push for legal immunity akin to what gun manufacturers received two decades ago. Trump’s Department of Justice has even filed highly unusual, if not unprecedented, lawsuits against Vermont and New York seeking to overturn their climate superfund statutes.

“It’s just this superbly choreographed effort on the part of the oil industry and its allies to get gun-industry-style legal immunity for all the damage that they’ve caused,” Wiles told Inside Climate News.

Oil industry is lobbying Congress for a liability shield 

Among the climate liability lawsuits inching closer to trial: a consumer protection case brought by Massachusetts against ExxonMobil, and suits seeking damages filed by Honolulu, Hawaii, and Boulder, Colorado.

As reported by The Wall Street Journal earlier this year and confirmed by The New York Times last month, industry representatives are lobbying Congress for a liability shield of some kind.

The details remain unclear. But the American Petroleum Institute, a trade group, reports lobbying on “draft legislation related to state efforts to impose liability on the oil and gas industry,” while disclosures from ConocoPhillips show that the company has lobbied on the matter of “state superfund legislation,” including draft legislation in Congress addressing it.

Neither API nor ConocoPhillips responded to requests for comment.

Pat Parenteau, emeritus professor of law at Vermont Law and Graduate School, told Inside Climate News that he thinks immunity provisions for the fossil fuel industry are unlikely to pass the Senate.

But the fact that the fossil fuel industry is lobbying for legal protections suggests to Wiles that the industry realizes it could be facing serious legal jeopardy. “Let’s be clear. You don’t seek a [liability] waiver unless you know you’re guilty,” Wiles said.

Over the summer, language emerged in a draft House Appropriations Committee spending bill that specifically would prohibit the District of Columbia from using funds to enforce its consumer protection law “against oil and gas companies for environmental claims.” The bill that included this provision passed the committee but was not brought to the full House for a vote.

But climate accountability advocates say the provision was still alarming because it effectively would have shut down DC’s ongoing consumer protection lawsuit against Big Oil. That suit, filed in 2020, alleges that several major oil companies lied to consumers about the climate risks of their products and that they continue to mislead consumers through greenwashing campaigns. In April, the DC Superior Court rejected the companies’ motions to dismiss the suit.

Anne Havemann, deputy director and general counsel at Chesapeake Climate Action Network, said the appropriations provision “is a threat to this ongoing lawsuit.”

“If [DC] can’t use any money to prosecute these cases and advance these cases, then it effectively can’t work on them,” she said.

Big Oil lawyers seek Supreme Court intervention 

A parallel effort to skirt accountability is playing out in the courts. Fossil fuel companies are vigorously defending themselves in climate liability lawsuits, and they have seen some success in recent months getting cases dismissed by state trial courts.

Now Boulder’s lawsuit is back before the nation’s highest court on a fresh petition from the oil company defendants, after Colorado courts, including the state Supreme Court, refused to dismiss the case. The question posed by the companies in their petition is whether federal law precludes such state law claims.

It is unclear whether the Supreme Court will take up the case this time.

In January, the Supreme Court denied a similar petition from oil companies in a case brought by Honolulu. Courts in Hawaii have rejected the companies’ bids to have the case dismissed, and with the Supreme Court declining to intervene, Honolulu’s case is advancing toward a trial.

Parenteau said the prospect of facing a trial and a potential adverse verdict likely has the oil companies extremely worried. “They’re certainly frightened of a trial just from a reputational standpoint,” he said.

The new petition in the Boulder case now offers the Supreme Court another opportunity to step in. Should the justices decide to intervene, legal experts say that it could essentially shut down all climate liability attempts.

“If they do step in, that’s huge. That changes everything,” Parenteau said. “That is the end game.”

“In one fell swoop it could get rid of all of these cases,” said James May, a law professor at Washburn University.

On October 9, over 100 Republican House members submitted an amicus brief to the Supreme Court backing oil companies ExxonMobil and Suncor in their petition to block Boulder’s lawsuit from moving forward. It is the first time that Republicans in Congress have called on the Supreme Court to intervene in this litigation and to shut down not just this one lawsuit but all others like it.

“In recent years, multiple state and local governments have launched a courtroom war against the American energy industry,” the brief asserts in its opening. “It must stop now.”

The 103 Republican House members who signed onto the brief argue that the municipal and state lawsuits against oil and gas companies are trying to “dictate national energy policy” and that only the federal government has the authority to regulate transboundary greenhouse gas emissions.

“They are arguing that it’s solely EPA’s role to regulate greenhouse gases, but the Trump administration is attempting to eliminate that role by revoking the Endangerment Finding. If that revocation goes through and survives in the courts, it will greatly weaken the oil companies’ preemption defense,” Michael Gerrard, founder and faculty director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University, told Inside Climate News.

“This full-court press to block these lawsuits shows that the oil companies and their allies in Congress are really nervous about what would come out if any of these cases actually went to trial,” Gerrard added.

Trump administration on the offensive 

The Trump administration, through its Department of Justice, is fully backing the fossil fuel industry in climate liability litigation, filing amicus briefs, for example, in cases now pending before the US Supreme Court and the Maryland Supreme Court.

But its efforts to shield the industry from accountability extend beyond friend-of-the-court briefs.

Following a White House meeting where oil company executives raised concerns about state climate laws and lawsuits, Trump issued an executive order in April directing Attorney General Pam Bondi to try to put a stop to these legal initiatives.

In response, the DOJ then sued four states, including preemptive suits brought against Hawaii and Michigan before either state had filed such a lawsuit (Hawaii sued major oil companies the next day). The DOJ’s other lawsuits targeted Vermont and New York to try to strike down their climate superfund laws, which are based on the “polluter pays” logic of the Environmental Protection Agency’s Superfund program aimed at forcing polluting companies to remediate damage from toxic waste sites.

Advances in a field known as climate attribution science have made the “polluter pays” aspect of the superfund laws possible, enabling scientists to quantify the individual contributions of major fossil fuel producers to climate impacts such as sea level rise and heat waves.

The DOJ has now filed motions for summary judgment in both of these lawsuits, asking federal courts to permanently block the states’ climate superfund laws.

“Vermont’s flagrantly unconstitutional statute threatens to throttle energy production, despite this Administration’s efforts to unleash American energy. It’s high time for the courts to put a stop to this crippling state overreach,” Acting Assistant Attorney General Adam Gustafson said in a statement issued by the DOJ on September 16.

Havemann, with the Chesapeake Climate Action Network, told Inside Climate News that the current Trump administration seems to be taking a more aggressive approach to protecting the fossil fuel industry and to fighting attempts to hold it accountable.

“The Trump administration has come in and used many different tools in its toolbox to go after these accountability lawsuits and the laws that also seek to hold the biggest polluters accountable for climate damages,” she said. “It’s very much on the radar of the Trump administration in a way that it has not been in the past.”

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

“Enter the Dragon”

With US Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) holding the gavel, climate litigation came up as the subject of a Republican-led congressional hearing this summer before a Judiciary Committee subcommittee.

The hearing’s provocative title: “Enter the Dragon—China and the Left’s Lawfare Against American Energy Dominance.”

Cruz used the hearing to attack climate liability lawsuits and claim that they are a nefarious left-wing plot that is in part funded by, and that benefits, the Chinese Communist Party. “Both China and the Democrats want to bankrupt the American energy industry,” Cruz said during the hearing.

NPR’s Michael Copley reported last month that “Cruz’s office has not offered evidence that China or a China-linked nonprofit that Cruz identified by name has funded climate lawsuits in the United States.”

In response to that reporting, Cruz told Inside Climate News that “NPR deliberately ignored objective facts.”

“The Chinese Communist Party uses cut-outs and ‘nonprofits’ to shape US energy policy, funding propaganda, advocacy, and litigation that harm American workers,” Cruz said in an emailed statement, which was also included in the NPR story after it was published. The “China-linked nonprofit” referenced in the NPR story, Energy Foundation China, does fund some climate initiatives, Cruz said in his statement.

“In January 2024, three House committee chairs opened an investigation into Chinese influence, citing EFC’s ties and funding of groups like [the Natural Resources Defense Council] and RMI,” he added.

A spokesperson for RMI, a nonprofit group working on the global energy transition, said that the organization “does not participate in litigation.” RMI’s “work supported by Energy Foundation China, which is a US-based charitable organization, is focused squarely on the energy transition inside of China,” the spokesperson added.

The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), a nonprofit group that works to protect public health and the environment, does some “work in China for one reason: there’s not a single global environmental problem that can be fixed unless China is part of the solution,” NRDC spokesperson Josh Mogerman said. He added that the organization “does not fundraise in China” and that “money from China does not fund NRDC litigation in the United States, period.”

Cruz, who represents the country’s biggest oil and gas producing state, did not respond to Inside Climate News’ question about whether he supports immunizing oil companies from liability.

GOP attorneys general enter the fray 

During the Cruz-led hearing, the Republican attorney general for the state of Kansas, Kris Kobach, testified as one of the majority witnesses. He referenced the New York and Vermont climate superfund laws, claiming these statutes impose extraterritorial regulation on energy companies, and mentioned that his state and other Republican-led states are suing to try to overturn these state laws.

“We will continue these fights in court as state attorneys general. But we do need some help from Congress,” Kobach said. He suggested that Congress could legislate to expressly preempt state climate laws like the climate superfund laws.

Kobach and 15 other Republican state attorneys general also made this suggestion, along with several other recommendations for congressional action, in a letter addressed to Bondi, the US attorney general.

The June 12 letter references Trump’s executive orders to “unleash” fossil fuels and protect the fossil fuel industry from “state overreach.” The letter says its purpose is to “suggest additional steps” the Department of Justice could take to effectuate these orders and assist in the “fight against anti-energy interests.”

Specifically, the Republican AGs suggest the DOJ could recommend legislation to reinforce federal preemption of state climate liability laws or lawsuits; restrict federal funding for states seeking to impose liability on energy companies; create a right of removal to federal district court for climate suits; and, among other items, stop “activist-funded climate lawsuits” with a liability shield, similar to the law that granted immunity for gun manufacturers.

Wiles, with the Center for Climate Integrity, said it is especially striking to see Republican attorneys general explicitly recommend a similar liability shield for fossil fuel companies. “The attorneys general actually called for Congress to enact a gun-style liability waiver for the oil industry,” he said. “We saw how that [gun industry immunity] ended up. It certainly was not helpful in curbing gun violence or in serving any public interest objective.”

The coordinated litigation strategies and actions of Republican state attorneys general in defense of fossil fuel and other industries stem from an organization called the Republican Attorneys General Association (RAGA), which Graves said was created in the wake of the tobacco industry being held accountable through the 1998 Master Settlement Agreement.

The organization, which currently lists 29 Republican state attorneys general as members, has been funded through donations from conservative judicial activists like Leonard Leo as well as from corporate interests including those in the fossil fuel industry. The American Petroleum Institute gave over $125,000 to RAGA in 2024, and in the first six months of this year Chevron’s Policy, Government and Public Affairs division donated $25,000 to the organization, for example.

Graves describes RAGA as a “pay-to-play organization.”

“It has a pay sheet listing what kind of access you get to attorneys general based on how much you give,” she told Inside Climate News.

“These attorneys general use the prestige of their office and their power and the resources that their taxpayers are providing to serve the interests of industry, select industries that they are most tied to, and that certainly includes the fossil fuel industry,” Graves added.

The Republican Attorneys General Association did not respond to a request for comment.

“A perilous moment”

The intensifying backlash to climate accountability efforts coming from the fossil fuel industry and its political defenders is happening at a time when some political scholars warn that the US is sliding into some form of authoritarianism, which advocates say magnifies the challenges of holding powerful interests to account writ large.

“It’s a perilous moment for democratic norms and institutions,” said Kathy Mulvey, accountability campaign director for the climate and energy program at the Union of Concerned Scientists.

“Anybody who is pursuing policy change or litigation for accountability or enforcement is counting on the courts to be a real backstop for democratic institutions,” Mulvey told Inside Climate News.

Should the fossil fuel industry somehow succeed in securing legal immunity, Wiles said it “would be consistent with the erosion of the rule of law that we’re seeing.”

“No industry should be above the law,” he added.

This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, non-partisan news organization that covers climate, energy, and the environment. Sign up for their newsletter here.

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Antarctica is starting to look a lot like Greenland—and that isn’t good

Antarctica, climate change, glaciers, global warming, Science, syndication / /

Global warming is awakening sleeping giants of ice at the South Pole.

A view of the Shoesmith Glacier on Horseshoe Island on Feb. 21. Credit: Sebnem Coskun/Anadolu via Getty Images

As recently as the 1990s, when the Greenland Ice Sheet and the rest of the Arctic region were measurably thawing under the climatic blowtorch of human-caused global warming, most of Antarctica’s vast ice cap still seemed securely frozen.

But not anymore. Physics is physics. As the planet heats up, more ice will melt at both poles, and recent research shows that Antarctica’s ice caps, glaciers, and floating ice shelves, as well as its sea ice, are just as vulnerable to warming as the Arctic.

Both satellite data and field observations in Antarctica reveal alarming signs of a Greenland-like meltdown, with increased surface melting of the ice fields, faster-moving glaciers, and dwindling sea ice. Some scientists are sounding the alarm, warning that the rapid “Greenlandification” of Antarctica will have serious consequences, including an accelerated rise in sea levels and significant shifts in rainfall and drought patterns.

The Antarctic ice sheet covers about 5.4 million square miles, an area larger than Europe. On average, it is more than 1 mile thick and holds 61 percent of all the fresh water on Earth, enough to raise the global average sea level by about 190 feet if it all melts. The smaller, western portion of the ice sheet is especially vulnerable, with enough ice to raise sea level more than 10 feet.

Thirty years ago, undergraduate students were told that the Antarctic ice sheets were going to be stable and that they weren’t going to melt much, said Ruth Mottram, an ice researcher with the Danish Meteorological Institute and lead author of a new paper in Nature Geoscience that examined the accelerating ice melt and other similarities between changes in northern and southern polar regions.

“We thought it was just going to take ages for any kind of climate impacts to be seen in Antarctica. And that’s really not true,” said Mottram, adding that some of the earliest warnings came from scientists who saw collapsing ice shelves, retreating glaciers, and increased surface melting in satellite data.

One of the early warning signs was the rapid collapse of an ice shelf along the narrow Antarctic Peninsula, which extends northward toward the tip of South America, said Helen Amanda Fricker, a geophysics professor with the Scripps Institute of Oceanography Polar Center at the University of California, San Diego.

Chunks of sea ice on the shore

Stranded remnants of sea ice along the Antarctic Peninsula are a reminder that much of the ice on the frozen continent around the South Pole is just as vulnerable to global warming as Arctic ice, where a long-term meltdown is well underway.

Credit: Bob Berwyn/Inside Climate News

Stranded remnants of sea ice along the Antarctic Peninsula are a reminder that much of the ice on the frozen continent around the South Pole is just as vulnerable to global warming as Arctic ice, where a long-term meltdown is well underway. Credit: Bob Berwyn/Inside Climate News

After a string of record-warm summers riddled the floating Rhode Island-sized slab of ice with cracks and meltwater ponds, it crumbled almost overnight. The thick, ancient ice dam was gone, and the seven major outlet glaciers behind it accelerated toward the ocean, raising sea levels as their ice melted.

“The Larsen B ice shelf collapse in 2002 was a staggering event in our community,” said Fricker, who was not an author of the new paper. “We just couldn’t believe the pace at which it happened, within six weeks. Basically, the ice shelves are there and then, boom, boom, boom, a series of melt streams and melt ponds. And then the whole thing collapsed, smattered into smithereens.”

Glaciologists never thought that events would happen that quickly in Antarctica, she said.

Same physics, same changes

Fricker said glaciologists thought of changes in Antarctica on millennial timescales, but the ice shelf collapse showed that extreme warming can lead to much more rapid change.

Current research focuses on the edges of Antarctica, where floating sea ice and relatively narrow outlet glaciers slow the flow of the ice cap toward the sea. She described the Antarctic Ice Sheet as a giant ice reservoir contained by a series of dams.

“If humans had built those containment structures,” she said, “we would think that they weren’t very adequate. We are relying on those dams to hold back all of that ice, but the dams are weakening all around Antarctica and releasing more ice into the ocean.”

Satellite view of ice cap coverage

A comparison of the average concentration of Antarctic sea ice.

Credit: NASA Earth Observatory

A comparison of the average concentration of Antarctic sea ice. Credit: NASA Earth Observatory

Credit: NASA Earth Observatory

The amount of ice that’s entered the ocean has increased fourfold since the 1990s, and she said, “We’re on the cusp of it becoming a really big number… because at some point, there’s no stopping it anymore.”

The Antarctic Ice Sheet is often divided into three sectors: the East Antarctic Ice Sheet, the largest and thickest; the West Antarctic Ice Sheet; and the Antarctic Peninsula, which is deemed the most vulnerable to thawing and melting.

Mottram, the new paper’s lead author, said a 2022 heatwave that penetrated to the coldest interior part of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet may be another sign that the continent is not as isolated from the rest of the global climate system as once thought. The extraordinary 2022 heatwave was driven by an atmospheric river, or a concentrated stream of moisture-laden air. Ongoing research “shows that there’s been an increase in the number of atmospheric rivers and an increase in their intensity,” she said.

Antarctica is also encircled by a powerful circumpolar ocean current that has prevented the Southern Ocean from warming as quickly as other ocean regions. But recent climate models and observations show the buffer is breaking down and that relatively warmer waters are starting to reach the base of the ice shelves, she said.

New maps detailing winds in the region show that “swirls of air from higher latitudes are dragging in all the time, so it’s not nearly as isolated as we were always told when we were students,” she said.

Ice researcher Eric Rignot, an Earth system science professor at the University of California, Irvine, who did not contribute to the new paper, said via email that recent research on Antarctica’s floating ice shelves emphasizes the importance of how the oceans and ice interact, a process that wasn’t studied very closely in early Greenland research. And Greenland shows what will happen to Antarctic glaciers in a warmer climate with more surface melt and more intense ice-ocean interactions, he added.

“We learn from both but stating that one is becoming the other is an oversimplification,” he said. “There is no new physics in Greenland that does not apply to Antarctica and vice versa.”

Rignot said the analogy between the two regions also partly breaks down because Greenland is warming up at two to three times the global average, “which has triggered a slowing of the jet stream,” with bigger wobbles and “weird weather patterns” in the Northern Hemisphere.

Antarctica is warming slightly less than the global average rate, according to a 2025 study, and the Southern Hemisphere jet stream is strengthening and tightening toward the South Pole, “behaving completely opposite,” he said.

Mottram said her new paper aims to help people understand that Antarctica is not as remote or isolated as often portrayed, and that what happens there will affect the rest of the global climate system.

“It’s not just this place far away that nobody goes to and nobody understands,” she said. “We actually understand quite a lot of what’s going on there. And so I also hope that it drives more urgency to decarbonize, because it’s very clear that the only way we’re going to get out of this problem is bringing our greenhouse gases down as much as possible, as soon as possible.”

This story originally appeared on Inside Climate News.

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the-current-war-on-science,-and-who’s-behind-it

The current war on science, and who’s behind it

climate change, misinformation, Pseudoscience, Science, vaccines / /

A vaccine developer and a climate scientist walk into a bar write a book.

Fighting against the anti-science misinformation can feel like fighting a climate-driven wildfire. Credit: Anadolu

We’re about a quarter of the way through the 21st century.

Summers across the global north are now defined by flash floods, droughts, heat waves, uncontainable wildfires, and intensifying named storms, exactly as predicted by Exxon scientists back in the 1970s. The United States secretary of health and human services advocates against using the most effective tool we have to fight the infectious diseases that have ravaged humanity for millennia. People are eagerly lapping up the misinformation spewed and disseminated by AI chatbots, which are only just getting started.

It is against this backdrop that a climate scientist and a vaccine developer teamed up to write Science Under Siege. It is about as grim as you’d expect.

Michael Mann is a climate scientist at the University of Pennsylvania who, in 1998, developed the notorious hockey stick graph, which demonstrated that global surface temperatures were roughly flat until around the year 1900, when they started rising precipitously (and have not stopped). Peter Hotez is a microbiologist and pediatrician at Baylor College of Medicine whose group developed a low-cost, patent-free COVID-19 vaccine using public funds (i.e., not from a pharmaceutical company) and distributed it to almost a hundred million people in India and Indonesia.

Unlikely crusaders

Neither of them anticipated becoming crusaders for their respective fields—and neither probably anticipated that their respective fields would ever actually need crusaders. But they each have taken on the challenge, and they’ve been rewarded for their trouble with condemnation and harassment from Congress and death threats from the public they are trying to serve. In this book, they hope to take what they’ve learned as scientists and science communicators in our current world and parlay that into a call to arms.

Mann and Hotez have more in common than being pilloried all over the internet. Although they trained in disparate disciplines, their fields are now converging (as if they weren’t each threatening enough on their own). Climate change is altering the habitats, migrations, and reproductive patterns of pathogen-bearing wildlife like bats, mosquitoes, and other insects. It is causing the migration of humans as well. Our increasing proximity to these species in both space and time can increase the opportunities for us to catch diseases from them.

Yet Mann and Hotez insist that a third scourge is even more dangerous than these two combined. In their words:

It is currently impossible for global leaders to take the urgent actions necessary to respond to the climate crisis and pandemic threats because they are thwarted by a common enemy—antiscience—that is politically and ideologically motivated opposition to any science that threatens powerful special interests and their political agendas. Unless we find a way to overcome antiscience, humankind will face its gravest threat yet—the collapse of civilization as we know it.

And they point to an obvious culprit: “There is, unquestionably, a coordinated, concerted attack on science by today’s Republican Party.”

They’ve helpfully characterized “the five principal forces of antiscience “ into alliterative groups: (1) plutocrats and their political action committees, (2) petrostates and their politicians and polluters, (3) fake and venal professionals—physicians and professors, (4) propagandists, especially those with podcasts, and (5) the press. The general tactic is that (1) and (2) hire (3) to generate deceitful and inflammatory talking points, which are then disseminated by all-too-willing members of (4) and (5).

There is obviously a lot of overlap among these categories; Elon Musk, Vladimir Putin, Rupert Murdoch, and Donald Trump can all jump between a number of these bins. As such, the ideas and arguments presented in the book are somewhat redundant, as are the words used. Far too many things are deemed “ironic” (i.e., the same people who deny and dismiss the notion of human-caused climate change claimed that Democrats generated hurricanes Helene and Milton to target red states in October 2024) or “risible” (see Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s claim that Dr. Peter Hotez sought to make it a felony to criticize Anthony Fauci).

A long history

Antiscience propaganda has been used by authoritarians for over a century. Stalin imprisoned physicists and attacked geneticists while famously enacting the nonsensical agricultural ideas of Trofim Lysenko, who thought genes were a “bourgeois invention.” This led to the starvation of millions of people in the Soviet Union and China.

Why go after science? The scientific method is the best means we have of discovering how our Universe works, and it has been used to reveal otherwise unimaginable facets of reality. Scientists are generally thought of as authorities possessing high levels of knowledge, integrity, and impartiality. Discrediting science and scientists is thus an essential first step for authoritarian regimes to then discredit any other types of learning and truth and destabilize their societies.

The authors trace the antiscience messaging on COVID, which followed precisely the same arc as that on climate change except condensed into a matter of months instead of decades. The trajectory started by maintaining that the threat was not real. When that was no longer tenable, it quickly morphed into “OK, this is happening, and it may actually get pretty bad for some subset of people, but we should definitely not take collective action to address it because that would be bad for the economy.”

It finally culminated in preying upon people’s understandable fears in these very scary times by claiming that this is all the fault of scientists who are trying to take away your freedom, be that bodily autonomy and the ability to hang out with your loved ones (COVID) or your plastic straws, hamburgers, and SUVs (climate change).

This mis- and disinformation has prevented us from dealing with either catastrophe by misleading people about the seriousness, or even existence, of the threats and/or harping on their hopeless nature, sapping us of the will to do anything to counter them. These tactics also sow division among people, practically ensuring that we won’t band together to take the kind of collective action essential to addressing enormous, complex problems. It is all quite effective. Mann and Hotez conclude that “the future of humankind and the health of our planet now depend on surmounting the dark forces of antiscience.”

Why, you might wonder, would the plutocrats, polluters, and politicians of the Republican Party be so intent on undermining science and scientists, lying to the public, fearmongering, and stoking hatred among their constituents? The same reason as always: to hold onto their money and power. The means to that end is thwarting regulations. Yes, it’s nefarious, but also so disappointingly… banal.

The authors are definitely preaching exclusively to the converted. They are understandably angry at what has been done to them and somewhat mocking of those who don’t see things their way. They end by trying to galvanize their followers into taking action to reverse the current course.

They advise that the best—really, the only—thing we can do now to effect change is to vote and hope for favorable legislation. “Only political change, including massive turnout to support politicians who favor people over plutocrats, can ultimately solve this larger systemic problem,” they write. But since our president and vice president don’t even believe in or acknowledge “systemic problems,” the future is not looking too bright.

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What climate targets? Top fossil fuel producing nations keep boosting output

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Top producers are planning to mine and drill even more of the fuels in 2030.

Machinery transfers coal at a port in China’s Chongqing municipality on April 20. Credit: STR/AFP via Getty Images

The last two years have witnessed the hottest one in history, some of the worst wildfire seasons across Canada, Europe and South America and deadly flooding and heat waves throughout the globe. Over that same period, the world’s largest fossil fuel producers have expanded their planned output for the future, setting humanity on an even more dangerous path into a warmer climate.

Governments now expect to produce more than twice as much coal, oil and gas in 2030 as would be consistent with the goals of the Paris Agreement, according to a report released Monday. That level is slightly higher than what it was in 2023, the last time the biennial Production Gap report was published.

The increase is driven by a slower projected phaseout of coal and higher outlook for gas production by some of the top producers, including China and the United States.

“The Production Gap Report has long served as a mirror held up to the world, revealing the stark gap between fossil fuel production plans and international climate goals,” said Christiana Figueres, former executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, in a foreword to the report. “This year’s findings are especially alarming. Despite record climate impacts, a winning economic case for renewables, and strong societal appetite for action, governments continue to expand fossil fuel production beyond what the climate can withstand.”

The peer-reviewed report, written by researchers at the Stockholm Environment Institute, Climate Analytics and the International Institute for Sustainable Development, aims to focus attention on the supply side of the climate equation and the government policies that encourage or steer fossil fuel production.

“Governments have such a significant role in setting up the rules of the game,” said Neil Grant, a senior expert at Climate Analytics and one of the authors, in a briefing for reporters. “What this report shows is most governments are not using that influence for good.”

Chart showing growth in fossil fuel production

Credit: Inside Climate News

The report’s blaring message is that these subsidies, tax incentives, permitting and other policies have largely failed to adapt to the climate targets nations have adopted. The result is a split screen. Governments say they will cut their own climate-warming pollution, yet they plan to continue producing the fossil fuels that are driving that pollution far beyond what their climate targets would allow.

The report singles out the United States as “the starkest case of a country recommitting to fossil fuels.” The data for the United States, which draws on the latest projections of the US Energy Information Administration, does not reflect most of the policies the Trump administration and Congress have put in place this year to promote fossil fuels.

Since January, Congress has enacted billions of dollars in new subsidies to oil and gas companies while the Trump administration has forced retiring coal plants to continue operating, expanded mining and drilling access on public lands, delayed deadlines for drillers to comply with limits on methane pollution and fast-tracked fossil fuel permitting while setting roadblocks for building wind and solar energy projects.

In response to the report, White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers said in an email, “As promised, President Trump ended Joe Biden’s war on American energy and unleashed American energy on day one in the best interest of our country’s economic and national security. He will continue to restore American’s energy dominance.”

Chart showing planned fuel production

Credit: Inside Climate News

The Production Gap report assessed the government plans or projections of 20 of the world’s top producers. Some have state-owned enterprises while others are dominated by publicly listed companies. The countries, which were chosen for their production levels, availability of data and presence of clear climate targets, account for more than 80 percent of fossil fuel output. The report models total global production by scaling the data up to account for the rest.

All but three of the 20 nations are planning or projecting increased production in 2030 of at least one fossil fuel. Eleven now project higher production of at least one fuel in 2030 than they did two years ago.

Expected global output of coal, oil, and gas for 2030 is now 120 percent more than what would be consistent with pathways to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) and 77 percent higher than scenarios to keep warming to less than 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit). The greater the warming, the more severe the consequences will be on extreme weather, rising seas and other impacts.

While previous installments of the report were published under the auspices of the United Nations Environment Program, this year’s version was issued independently.

In a sign of the world’s continuing failure to limit fossil fuel use, the modeling scenarios the report uses are becoming obsolete. Because nations have continued to burn more coal, gas and oil every year, future cuts would now need to be even steeper than what is reflected in the report to keep climate targets within reach.

“We’re already going into sort of the red and burning up our debt,” Grant said.

Three nations alone—China, the United States and Russia—were responsible for more than half of “extraction-based” emissions in 2022, or the pollution that comes when the fossil fuels are burned.

Ira Joseph, a senior research associate at the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University, who was not involved in the report, said its focus on supply highlights an important part of understanding global energy markets.

“Any type of tax breaks or subsidies or however you want to call them lowers the break-even cost for producing oil and gas,” Joseph said. Lower costs mean more supply, which in turn lowers prices and spurs more demand. The projections and plans the report is based on, Joseph said, reflect this global give and take.

Chart showing fossil fuel increase by country

Credit: Inside Climate News

The biggest changes since the last report come from a slower projected decline in China’s coal mining and faster expected growth in gas production in the United States. Smaller producers are also expecting sharper increases in gas output.

The report did highlight some bright spots. Two additional governments—Brazil and Colombia—are developing plans that would align fossil fuel production with climate goals, bringing the total to six out of the 20. Germany now expects a more accelerated phase-out of coal production. China is speeding its deployment of wind and solar energy. Some countries have also reduced subsidies for fossil fuels.

Yet these measures clearly fall far short, the report said.

The authors called on governments to coordinate their policies and plan for how they can collectively lower production in a way that keeps climate targets within reach without shocking the economies that depend on the jobs and revenue provided by mining, drilling, and processing the fuels. They pointed to a handful of efforts—called Just Energy Transition Partnerships—to provide financing from wealthy countries to support phasing out coal in developing or emerging economies. These programs have struggled to mobilize much money, however, and the Trump administration has withdrawn the United States from them.

Grant said the policies indicate that government officials are failing to adapt to a more uncertain future.

“Change doesn’t happen in straight lines, but I think if you look at the Production Gap report this year, what you see is that many governments are still thinking in straight lines,” Grant said.

The policies the team examined foresee fossil fuel use remaining steady or declining gradually. The result, Grant argued, could be one of two scenarios: Either fossil fuel use remains high for years, in line with these production plans, or it declines more quickly and governments are unprepared for the sudden drop in sales.

“Those would lead to either climate chaos or significant negative economic impacts on countries,” Grant said. “So we need to try to avoid both of those. And the way to do that is to try to align our fossil fuel production plans with our climate goals.”

This story originally appeared on Inside Climate News.

Photo of Inside Climate News

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Despite congressional threat, National Academies releases new climate report

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The National Academies responded to the EPA’s actions by saying it would prepare a report of its own, which it did despite the threat of a congressional investigation into its work. And the result undercuts the EPA’s claims even further.

Blunt and to the point

The NAS report does not mess around with subtleties, going straight to the main point: Everything we’ve learned since the endangerment finding confirms that it was on target. “EPA’s 2009 finding that the human-caused emissions of greenhouse gases threaten human health and welfare was accurate, has stood the test of time, and is now reinforced by even stronger evidence,” its authors conclude.

That evidence includes a better understanding of the climate itself, with the report citing “Longer records, improved and more robust observational networks, and analytical and methodological advances” that have both allowed us to better detect the changes in the climate, and more reliably assign them to the effects of greenhouse gases. The events attributed to climate change are also clearly harming the welfare of the US public through things like limiting agricultural productivity gains, damage from wildfires, losses due to water scarcity, and general stresses on our infrastructure.

But it’s not just the indirect effects we have to worry about. The changing climate is harming us more directly as well:

Climate change intensifies risks to humans from exposures to extreme heat, ground-level ozone, airborne particulate matter, extreme weather events, and airborne allergens, affecting incidence of cardiovascular, respiratory, and other diseases. Climate change has increased exposure to pollutants from wildfire smoke and dust, which has been linked to adverse health effects. The increasing severity of some extreme events has contributed to injury, illness, and death in affected communities. Health impacts related to climate-sensitive infectious diseases—such as those carried by insects and contaminated water—have increased.

Moreover, it notes that one of the government’s arguments—that US emissions are too small to be meaningful—doesn’t hold water. Even small increments of change will increase the risk of damaging events for decades to come, and push the world closer to hitting potential tipping points in the climate system. Therefore, cutting US emissions will directly reduce those risks.

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The US is trying to kick-start a “nuclear energy renaissance”

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Push to revive nuclear energy relies on deregulation; experts say strategy is misplaced.

In May, President Donald Trump signed four executive orders to facilitate the construction of nuclear reactors and the development of nuclear energy technology; the orders aim to cut red tape, ease approval processes, and reshape the role of the main regulatory agency, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, or NRC. These moves, the administration said, were part of an effort to achieve American independence from foreign power providers by way of a “nuclear energy renaissance.”

Self-reliance isn’t the only factor motivating nuclear power proponents outside of the administration: Following a decades-long trend away from nuclear energy, in part due to safety concerns and high costs, the technology has emerged as a potential option to try to mitigate climate change. Through nuclear fission, in which atoms are split to release energy, reactors don’t emit any greenhouse gases.

The Trump administration wants to quadruple the nuclear sector’s domestic energy production, with the goal of producing 400 gigawatts by 2050. To help achieve that goal, scientific institutions like the Idaho National Laboratory, a leading research institute in nuclear energy, are pushing forward innovations such as more efficient types of fuel. Companies are also investing millions of dollars to develop their own nuclear reactor designs, a move from industry that was previously unheard of in the nuclear sector. For example, Westinghouse, a Pennsylvania-based nuclear power company, plans to build 10 new large reactors to help achieve the 2050 goal.

However, the road to renaissance is filled with familiar obstacles. Nuclear energy infrastructure is “too expensive to build, and it takes too long to build,” said Allison Macfarlane, a science and technology policy expert at the University of British Columbia who used to chair the NRC from 2012 to 2014.

And experts are divided on whether new nuclear technologies, such as small versions of reactors, are ready for primetime. The nuclear energy field is now “in a hype bubble that is driving unrealistic expectations,” said Edwin Lyman, the director of nuclear power safety at the Union of Concerned Scientists, a nonprofit science advocacy organization that has long acted as a nuclear safety watchdog.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration is trying to advance nuclear energy by weakening the NRC, Lyman said. “The message is that it’s regulation that has been the obstacle to deploying nuclear power, and if we just get rid of all this red tape, then the industry is going to thrive,” he added. “I think that’s really misplaced.”

Although streamlining the approval process might accelerate development, the true problem lies in the high costs of nuclear, which would need to be significantly cheaper to compete with other sources of energy such as natural gas, said Koroush Shirvan, a nuclear science researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “Even the license-ready reactors are still not economical,” he said. If the newer reactor technologies do pan out, without government support and subsidies, Shirvan said, it is difficult to imagine them “coming online before 2035.”

It’s déjá vu all over again

Rumblings of a nuclear renaissance give experts a sense of déjà vu. The first resurgence in interest was around 2005, when many thought that nuclear energy could mitigate climate change and be an energy alternative to dwindling supply and rising prices of fossil fuels. But that enthusiasm slowed mainly after the Fukushima accident in 2011, in which a tsunami-triggered power outage—along with multiple safety failures—led to a nuclear meltdown at a facility in Japan. “So, the first nuclear renaissance fizzled out,” said Lyman.

Globally, the proportion of electricity provided by nuclear energy has been dwindling. Although there has been an increase in generation, nuclear energy has contributed less to the share of global electricity demand, dropping to 9 percent in 2024 from a peak of about 17 percent in 2001. In the US, 94 reactors generate about a fifth of the nation’s electricity, a proportion that has held steady since 1990s. But only two of those reactors have come online in the last nearly 30 years.

This renewed push is “a second bite at the apple, and we’ll have to see but it does seem to have a lot more of a headwind now,” said Lyman.

Much of that movement comes from the private sector, said Todd Allen, a nuclear engineer at the University of Michigan. In the last couple of decades, dozens of nuclear energy companies have emerged, including TerraPower, co-founded by Bill Gates. “It feels more like normal capitalism than we ever had in nuclear,” Allen said. Those companies are working on developing the large reactors that have been the backbone of nuclear energy for decades, as well as newer technologies that can bolster the field.

Proponents say small modular reactors, or SMRs, and microreactors, which generate less than 300 megawatts and 20 megawatts, respectively, could offer safer, cheaper, and more flexible energy compared to their more traditional counterparts. (Large reactors have, on average, 900 megawatts of capacity.) One 2022 study found that modularization can reduce construction time by up to 60 percent.

These designs have taken the spotlight: In 2024, a report estimated that the SMR market would reach $295 billion by 2043. In June, Energy Secretary Chris Wright told Congress that DOE will have at least three SMRs running by July of next year. And in July of this year, the Nuclear Energy Agency launched a dashboard to track SMR technologies around the world, which identified 74 SMR designs at different stages around the world. The first commercial SMR in North America is currently being constructed in Canada, with plans to be operational by 2030.

But whether SMRs and microreactors are actually safer and more cost-effective remains to be determined. A 2022 study found that SMRs would likely produce more leakage and nuclear waste than conventional reactors. Studying them, though, is difficult since so few are currently operational.

In part, that may be because of cost. Multiple analyses have concluded that, because of rising construction and operating costs, SMRs might not be financially viable enough to compete for the world’s energy markets, including in developing countries that lack affordable access to electricity.

And recent ventures have hit road bumps: For example, NuScale, the only SMR developer with a design approved by the NRC, had to shut down its operations in November 2023 due to increasingly high costs (though another uprated SMR design was approved earlier this year).

“Nothing is really commercialized yet,” said Macfarlane. Most of the tech companies haven’t figured out expenses, supply chains, the kind of waste they are going to produce or security at their reactors, she added.

Fuel supply is also a barrier since most plants use uranium enriched at low rates, but SMRs and microreactors use uranium enriched at higher levels, which is typically sourced from Russia and not commercially available in the US. So scientists at the Idaho National Laboratory are working to recover enriched uranium from existing reactors and developed new, more cost-effective fuels, said Jess Gehin, the associate laboratory director for the Nuclear Science & Technology Directorate at the INL. They are also using artificial intelligence and modeling simulation tools and capabilities to optimize nuclear energy systems, he added: “We got to reach 400 gigawatts, we need to accelerate all of this.”

Companies are determined to face and surpass these barriers. Some have begun pouring concrete, such as one nuclear company called Kairos Power that began building a demo of their SMR design in Tennessee; the plant is projected to be fully operational by 2027. “I would make the case that we’re moving faster than many in the field, if not the fastest,” Mike Laufer, the company’s CEO and co-founder, told Reuters last year.

Some experts think achieving nuclear expansion can be done—and revel in the progress so far: “I would have never thought we’d be in this position where we’re working so hard to expand nuclear, because for most of my career, it wasn’t that way,” said Gehin. “And I would say each month that goes by exceeds my expectations on the next bigger things that are coming.”

Doing more with less?

Although the Trump administration aims to accelerate nuclear energy through executive orders, in practice, it has not allocated new funding yet, said Matt Bowen, an expert on nuclear energy, waste, and nonproliferation at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy. In fact, the initial White House budget proposed cutting $4.7 billion from the Department of Energy, including $408 million from the Office of Nuclear Energy allocated for nuclear research in the 2026 fiscal year.

“The administration was proposing cuts to Office of Nuclear Energy and DOE more broadly, and DOGE is pushing staff out,” said Bowen. “How do you do more with less? Less staff, less money.”

The Trump administration places the blame for the nuclear sector’s stagnation on the NRC, which oversees licensing and recertification processes that cost the industry millions of dollars each year in compliance. In his executive orders, Trump called for a major reorganization of the NRC. Some of the proposed changes, like streamlining the approval process (which can take years for new plants), may be welcomed because “for a long time, they were very, very, very slow,” said Charles Forsberg, a nuclear chemical engineer at MIT. But there are worries that the executive orders could do more than cut red tape.

“Every word in those orders is of concern, because the thrust of those orders is to essentially strip the Nuclear Regulatory Commission of its independence from the executive branch, essentially nullifying the original purpose,” said Lyman.

Some experts fear that with these new constraints, NRC staff will have less time and fewer resources to do their jobs, which could impact power plant safety in the future. Bowen said: “This notion that the problem for nuclear energy is regulation, and so all we need to do is deregulate, is both wrong and also really problematic.”

The next few decades will tell whether nuclear, especially SMRs, can overcome economic and technical challenges to safely contribute to decarbonization efforts. Some, like Gehin, are optimistic. “I think we’re going to accelerate,” he said. “We certainly can achieve a dramatic deployment if we put our mindset to it.”

But making nuclear financially competitive will take serious commitment from the government and the dozens of companies, with many still skeptical, Shirvan said. “I am quite, I would say, on the pessimistic scale when it comes to the future of nuclear energy in the US.”

This article was originally published on Undark. Read the original article.

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