7/3/2025
“Google Bets Billions on Fusion Breakthrough”: This Secretive Deal Could Power the Entire U.S. for Centuries
Massachusetts-based energy startup Commonwealth Fusion Systems has announced a groundbreaking partnership with Google to provide 200 megawatts of electricity from its future ARC power plant, marking a significant step toward realizing the potential of fusion energy as a clean and sustainable power source. In the realm of renewable energy, one of the most ambitious and promising ventures is the development of fusion power. Recently, Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS), a Massachusetts-based energy startup, announced a groundbreaking partnership with Google. This collaboration aims to supply 200 megawatts of electricity from its future ARC power plant in Chesterfield County, Virginia. As the world grapples with the urgent need for sustainable energy solutions, this partnership could herald a new era of clean energy. Commonwealth Fusion Systems has set its sights on a bold vision: to transform the energy landscape by harnessing the power of nuclear fusion. Founded in 2018, CFS has already raised over $2 billion in funding, demonstrating significant investor confidence. At the heart of their strategy is the SPARC reactor, currently under construction in Devens, Massachusetts. This prototype aims to achieve what’s known as net energy gain or Q>1, where the reactor produces more energy than it consumes.
7/2/2025
The White House took down the nation’s top climate report. You can still find it here
The website that hosts the most recent edition of the National Climate Assessment has gone dark. The sprawling report is the most influential source of information about how climate change affects the United States. The National Climate Assessment is widely used by teachers, city planners, farmers, judges and regular citizens looking for answers to common questions such as how quickly sea levels are rising near American cities and how to deal with wildfire smoke exposure. The most recent edition had a searchable atlas that allowed anyone to learn about the current and future effects of global warming in their specific town or state. On Monday, the government website that hosts all of that information stopped working. The Trump administration had already halted work on the next edition of the report, and fired all the staff who worked on it. The White House did not respond to questions about why the climate report website was taken down, or whether the administration plans to create the next edition of the climate assessment as Congress mandates. Congress requires the federal government to publish the National Climate Assessment every four years. The last edition was published in 2023, and underscored the degree to which climate change is expensive, deadly and preventable.
7/1/2025
‘Climate is our biggest war’, warns CEO of Cop30 ahead of UN summit in Brazil
“Climate is our biggest war. Climate is here for the next 100 years. We need to focus and … not allow those [other] wars to take our attention away from the bigger fight that we need to have.” Ana Toni, the chief executive of Cop30, the UN climate summit to be held in Brazil this November, is worried. With only four months before the crucial global summit, the world’s response to the climate crisis is in limbo. Fewer than 30 of the 200 countries that will gather in the Amazonian city of Belém have drafted plans, required by the 2015 Paris agreement, to stave off the worst ravages of climate breakdown. And that crisis is escalating. In the last two years, for the first time, global land temperatures soared to more than 1.5C above pre-industrial levels – breaching the limit that governments have promised at multiple climate meetings to keep. Meanwhile, the US president, Donald Trump, has withdrawn from the Paris agreement and is intent on expanding fossil fuels and dismantling carbon-cutting efforts. The EU is mired in tense arguments over its plans. China, the world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, is rumored to be considering weak targets that would condemn the world to much greater heating.
6/6/2025
Earth’s atmosphere hasn’t had this much CO2 in millions of years
Earth’s atmosphere now has more carbon dioxide in it than it has in millions — and possibly tens of millions — of years, according to data released Thursday by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and scientists at the University of California San Diego. For the first time, global average concentrations of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas emitted as a byproduct of burning fossil fuels, exceeded 430 parts per million (ppm) in May. The new readings were a record high and represented an increase of more than 3 ppm over last year. The measurements indicate that countries are not doing enough to limit greenhouse gas emissions and reverse the steady buildup of C02, which climate scientists point to as the main culprit for global warming. Carbon dioxide, like other greenhouse gases, traps heat from the sun and can remain in the atmosphere for centuries. As such, high concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere contribute to higher global temperatures and other negative consequences of climate change, including rising sea levels, melting polar ice, and more frequent and severe extreme weather events. Atmospheric carbon dioxide has risen sharply since preindustrial times, owing mostly to human activities that pump greenhouse gases into the air.
Nuclear fusion record smashed as German scientists take ‘a significant step forward’ to near-limitless clean energy
A recently concluded experimental campaign at the Wendelstein 7-X stellarator at the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics (IPP) in Greifswald, Germany has smashed previous fusion records and set a new benchmark for reactor performances. Nuclear fusion offers a tantalizing promise of unlimited clean energy. By smashing together isotopes (or different versions) of hydrogen at incredibly high temperatures, the resulting superheated plasma of electrons and ions fuses into heavier atoms, releasing a phenomenal amount of energy in the process. However, while this fusion reaction is self-sustaining under the extraordinary temperatures and pressures within stars, recreating these conditions on Earth is a huge technical challenge — and current reactor concepts still consume more energy than they are able to produce. Stellarators are one of the most promising reactor designs, so named for their mimicry of reactions in the sun. They use powerful external magnets to control the high-energy plasma within a ring-shaped vacuum chamber and maintain a stable, high pressure. Unlike simpler tokamak reactors — which pass a high current through the plasma to generate the required magnetic field — stellarators’ external magnets are better at stabilizing the plasma through the fusion reactions, a feature that will ultimately be necessary when translating the technology to commercial power plants.
5/22/2025
Here’s how fusion energy could power your home or an AI data center
The artificial intelligence boom has sent energy demand soaring. Some of the supercomputers sucking up all that power are helping to find new energy sources. Fusion energy is the process of forcing two hydrogen atoms to combine and form one helium atom, which releases huge amounts of power. It uses a stellarator, a type of fusion reactor invented in the 1950′s that produces heat. Until now, the technology was too difficult to deploy commercially. But this old concept has brand new potential. Type One Energy, a startup based in Tennessee, claims to have proven that fusion energy will be able to produce electricity in the next decade. “It’s going to create heat that’s going to boil water, make steam, run a turbine and put fusion electrons on the power grid on a 24/7 reliable basis,” said Type One CEO Christofer Mowry. AI has made it all practical.
5/20/2025
The world’s ice sheets just got a dire prognosis, and coastlines are going to pay the price
The world’s ice sheets are on course for runaway melting, leading to multiple feet of sea level rise and “catastrophic” migration away from coastlines, even if the world pulls off the miraculous and keeps global warming to within 1.5 degrees Celsius, according to new research. A group of international scientists set out to establish what a “safe limit” of warming would be for the survival of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets. They pored over studies that took data from satellites, climate models and evidence from the past, from things like ice cores, deep-sea sediments and even octopus DNA. What they found painteda dire picture. The world has pledged to restrict global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels to stave off the most catastrophic impacts of climate change. However, not only is this limit speeding out of reach — the world is currently on track for up to 2.9 degrees of warming by 2100. But the most alarming finding of the study, published Tuesday in the journal Communications Earth and Environment, is that 1.5 might not even be good enough to save the ice sheets.
5/9/2025
Two-thirds of global warming caused by world’s richest 10%, study finds
The wealthiest 10 percent of the world’s people are responsible for two-thirds of the global warming since 1990, according to researchers. The way in which the rich consume and invest has substantially increased the risk of heatwaves and droughts, wrote the researchers of a study published on Wednesday in the monthly peer-reviewed scientific journal Nature Climate Change. This is the first study to quantify the impact of concentrated private wealth on extreme climate events. “We link the carbon footprints of the wealthiest individuals directly to real-world climate impacts,” lead author Sarah Schoengart, a scientist at the public university of ETH Zurich, told the AFP news agency. “It’s a shift from carbon accounting toward climate accountability.” Compared with the global average, for example, the richest 1 percent contributed 26 times more to once-a-century heatwaves and 17 times more to droughts in the Amazon, according to the study. Emissions from the wealthiest 10 percent in China and the United States – which together account for nearly half of global carbon pollution – each led to a two- to threefold rise in heat extremes.
5/5/2025
Scientific societies to do climate assessment after Trump administration dismissed authors
Two major US scientific societies have announced they will join forces to produce peer-reviewed research on the climate crisis’s impact days after Donald Trump’s administration dismissed contributors to a key Congress-mandated report on climate crisis preparedness. On Friday, the American Meteorological Society (AMS) and the American Geophysical Union (AGU) said that they will work together to produce over 29 peer-reviewed journals that will cover all aspects of climate change including observations, projections, impacts, risks and solutions. The collaboration comes just days after Trump’s administration dismissed all contributors to the sixth National Climate Assessment, the US government’s flagship study on climate change. The dismissal of nearly 400 contributors had left the future of the study in question; it had been scheduled for publication in 2028. The NCA had been overseen by the Nasa-supported Global Change Research Program – a key US climate body which the Trump administration also dismissed last month. The reports, which have been published since 2000, coordinated input from 14 federal agencies and hundreds of external scientists.
4/29/2025
White House dismisses authors of major climate report
The Trump Administration has dismissed the scientists working on the country’s flagship climate report, a move that threatens to curtail climate science and make information about global warming less available to the public. The National Climate Assessment is the most trustworthy and comprehensive source of information about how global warming affects the United States. It answers common questions about how quickly sea levels are rising near American cities, how much rain is normal for different regions and how to deal with wildfire smoke exposure. The assessment is mandated by Congress, and its sixth edition was supposed to be released in late 2027. About 400 volunteer authors had already started work. They included top scientists as well as economists, tribal leaders and climate experts from non-profit groups and corporations.
4/25/2025
Many decarbonization advocates have warned that President Trump’s freezes on Inflation Reduction Act spending and other governmental grants for clean energy development may not be temporary impediments but could dramatically derail sustainability initiatives across the commercial and industrial energy transition. One recent stat indicates that they may be right, although some of the cancelled deals involved companies that were already on the way out. Environmental policy non-profit group E2, which tracks clean energy project investment, has released a new tracking report warning that nearly $8 billion in planned projects were cancelled in the first quarter of 2025. Some of the withdrawal of clean energy investments was likely due to uncertainty over tax credits and incentives and was triple the financial impact of cancelled projects over the previous 30 months, according to E2. Some good news: About $1.6 billion in new solar, electric-vehicle infrastructure and transmission equipment factors were announced last month alone. Those include plans by Tesla to invest $200 million in a battery manufacturing factory near Houston.
3/30/2025
Earth losing fresh water and may have hit irreversible tipping point due to climate change
The Earth is getting drier and may have hit a tipping point for how much water is stored in soil because of climate change. So great is the decline in soil moisture that it has outpaced Greenland’s melting ice sheets in its contribution to sea level rise and changes to the wobble in Earth’s rotation. That’s according to a new study in the journal Science, which suggests more than 2,614 gigatonnes of moisture was lost from our planet between 2000 to 2016. It’s a trend that scientists think led to a major shift in land-based water storage — sources like groundwater, rivers, lakes, soil moisture and ice — from 1992. The researchers estimated between 2000 to 2002, soil moisture loss was about 1,614 Gt, equivalent to a 1.95 millimetre per year rise in sea level. That’s compared to a 900 Gt loss of ice in Greenland from 2002 to 2006, which contributes to about 0.8mm of sea level rise annually. Global soil moisture levels have not recovered, and a further 1,009 Gt was lost from 2003 to 2016.
3/20/2025
Last decade was Earth’s hottest ever as CO2 levels reach an 800,000-year high, says UN report
Last year was the hottest year on record, the top 10 hottest years were all in the past decade and planet-heating carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere are at an 800,000-year high, a report Wednesday said. In its annual State of the Climate report, the World Meteorological Organization laid bare all the markings of an increasingly warming world with oceans at record high temperatures, sea levels rising and glaciers retreating at record speed. “Our planet is issuing more distress signals,” said António Guterres, United Nations Secretary-General. He noted that the report says the international goal of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.8 Fahrenheit) since pre-industrial times is still possible. “Leaders must step up to make it happen — seizing the benefits of cheap, clean renewables for their people and economies,” he said. The report attributed the heating to human activity — like the burning of coal, oil and gas — and in a smaller part to the naturally occurring El Nino weather phenomenon. An El Nino formed in June 2023 and dissipated a year later, adding extra heat and helping topple temperature records. In 2024, the world surpassed the 1.5 C limit for the first time — but just for a single year. Scientists measure breaching the climate goal as Earth staying above that level of warming over a longer time period.
2/19/2025
Nuclear fusion reactor sets a new world record – taking us closer towards limitless clean energy
A world record for nuclear fusion has been smashed after an ‘artificial sun’ reactor was able to maintain a plasma for more than 22 minutes. The WEST reactor, in southern France, is at the forefront of efforts to produce huge amounts of energy from the nuclear reaction when two atoms fuse. But, to have a hope of powering the world’s homes in the future, the reaction needs to be long-lasting in order to keep churning out energy. Now, by smashing the 20-minute mark, the WEST reactor has taken a stride towards running for longer – one of the three ‘golden conditions’ to achieve nuclear fusion. Plasma is created when the two fuels used in the reactor, deuterium and tritium, are heated to more than 50 million degrees Celsius. It is the ‘fourth state’ after a material goes through the stages of solid, liquid and gas, and it takes the super-hot centre of a special reactor to achieve it. Plasma must be maintained within the reactor chamber, without it dispersing, cooling and returning to gas form. The WEST reactor prevents plasma from escaping by using magnetic fields to confine it in one place.
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