Climate change itself is increasingly fueling climate change. Rising concentrations of greenhouse gases are driving up global temperatures, setting off dangerous feedback loops that we have not fully accounted for in our climate models—or our emissions-reduction goals.

Scientists have long warned that warming would propel further warming in various ways, but a growing number of observations and studies are at last providing a sharper sense of just how powerful these cascading effects could be. And, by extension, they’re showing how much faster the planet may warm in this century.

A study in Environmental Research Letters in September, synthesizing the results of previous papers, found that the additional carbon dioxide and methane released from thawing permafrost, intensifying wildfires, hotter lakes and reservoirs, and wetter, warmer wetlands alone could drive global average temperatures up 0.2 °C to 0.4 °C this century. That would come on top of the 2.6°C of warming above preindustrial levels that modelers are already expecting through 2100. The additional heat could subject many of the world’s cities to monthslong heat waves and expose hundreds of millions of people to flooding. 

None of the models that inform the major UN climate reports, which assess how much the planet will likely warm under various emissions scenarios, account for all these feedback effects. Many of them don’t incorporate any. That leaves a huge blind spot in our understanding of how much the world could actually warm in the coming decades—and how rapidly nations will need to slash emissions to stay within critical boundaries.

A separate analysis published in One Earth in March, which examined what the feedback problem means for our international climate goals, concluded that the world may be much further off track than is widely believed. It found that just three regional sources of warming-driven emissions—thawing permafrost, increasing fires in boreal forests, and warming tropical wetlands—may shorten by as much as 25% the time before the planet consistently breaches the 1.5 °C and 2 °C warming thresholds.

Our climate models and the UN’s reports clearly need to be updated to better represent these effects. Nations must also step up their efforts to reduce emissions to reflect this improving understanding of the dangers we face, says Sam Abernethy, the lead author of the paper and a climate scientist at Spark Climate Solutions, a San Francisco–based nonprofit research group. 

At least some of this is starting to happen. Spark kick-started an initiative, called the Warming-Induced Greenhouse Gas Emissions Model Intercomparison Project, through which more than 20 international teams are running the same set of analyses on different models to develop greater understanding of feedback effects’ potential power. Researchers involved hope that the UN will incorporate those results into its next major climate assessment, due out in 2029. That report will update estimates of the remaining emissions that can be released before the world crosses key temperature thresholds.

But what is already clear is that the planet is rapidly warming and that nations haven’t done nearly enough to cut fossil-fuel pollution. And even if we did manage to halt it, warming-driven emissions could continue. 

So a number of the research groups involved in the recent studies have started to explore what nations could do to get feedback emissions under control. Scientists at the Woodwell Climate Research Center in Massachusetts are, for example, investigating the possibility of preventing fires or rapidly detecting them and putting them out when they threaten to burn the vegetation and soil that help insulate particularly carbon-rich wedges of permafrost (a subject I explored at length in a recent feature story). In addition, the Environmental Defense Fund’s Climate Innovation Initiative has backed lab research on the potential of adding sulfate, iron, or other compounds to wetlands to counteract fast-rising methane emissions. 

Several startups are also exploring possibilities. They’re looking into suppressing the lightning strikes that are igniting more and more fires in high latitudes, placing synthetic mats above permafrost to prevent it from melting, and deploying autonomous drones to quickly suppress potentially high-emissions fires before they burn out of control.

Investigating all these ideas is worthwhile. But researchers are only in the earliest stages of figuring out how big a dent in emissions any such efforts could achieve across sprawling global ecosystems undergoing massive transformations. 

The surest path to reducing the effect of warming-driven warming remains the one we’ve known all along: breaking society’s addiction to fossil fuels. 

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

How much do you know about permafrost?

Maybe, like me, you’ve been aware that this layer of frozen soil is thawing, that it’s important in the global puzzle of climate change … and that’s about the extent of it.  

The great news for both of us is that my colleague James Temple just published two in-depth stories about permafrost. His reporting took him to the boreal forests of Alaska, where he helicoptered into the wilderness to learn more about how this material could affect our climate both now and in the future.

I’d recommend you give both of James’s stories a read. There’s this feature about efforts to tackle the intensifying fires that are threatening permafrost, as well as this look at how researchers are trying to understand the complicated tangle of potential climate effects. Here are three things I took away.

Permafrost is a massive blind spot for climate change

Permafrost is the frozen layer of soil that’s under about 15% of land around the Northern Hemisphere. While technically material needs to be frozen for only two consecutive years to count as permafrost, most of our current permafrost formed during the last ice age.

That means there’s organic material that’s been frozen, and essentially locked away, for thousands of years. But as global temperatures tick up and this layer thaws, microbes are able to break down that organic matter, releasing carbon dioxide and methane—powerful greenhouse gases that drive climate change. Those emissions form a feedback loop, accelerating warming further.

The steady rise in global temperatures has already shrunk the footprint of the Arctic permafrost by about 12% since 1850, and the pace has been picking up in the last 50 years.

The wild thing is, only a minority of the models that have been used in UN climate reports actually take into account the gradual loss of permafrost. And none of them include the abrupt thaw and collapse that can happen after events like heat waves and fires (more on those fires in a moment). There are efforts to make sure future UN reports reflect the growing science, but for now, all this means that we’re probably underestimating how much and how fast the planet is going to warm.

Wildfires can speed up permafrost loss

Fire is a natural part of boreal forests’ life cycle, but they’re getting more intense because of climate change. And crucially, fires can accelerate the thawing of permafrost. By the end of the century, this effect could release the equivalent of 80 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide.

Today, the policy across remote parts of Canada and Alaska is generally to let wildfires burn as long as they’re not threatening human habitats. But some researchers say we should explore fighting these fires to save the carbon trapped in the forests and the permafrost beneath them.  

Researchers at the Woodwell Climate Research Center are developing a map of burn risk and carbon vulnerability across Alaska, essentially highlighting areas where fires are most likely to spread and which areas are home to certain types of permafrost that would release the most emissions. (Yes, apparently there are different types of permafrost. Yedoma is a particularly deep, carbon-dense form from the late Pleistocene era.)

That’s all just the beginning—once we figure out potential targets, the question is what to do about it. Some suggest setting more prescribed fires, something Indigenous groups have done for thousands of years, partly to reduce the danger of massive blazes. Or resources could go to early detection and efforts to put out fires before they grow.

The carbon cycle of permafrost is incredibly complicated

There’s about 1.5 trillion tons of carbon locked away in permafrost, about twice the amount in the atmosphere. We know that permafrost thawing can release greenhouse-gas emissions and drive climate change. But there are complications.  

One particularly big wrinkle: Other effects from permafrost thawing and fire recovery might counteract the carbon lost from those events. For example, as temperatures warm, plants can gradually move north and take hold where they couldn’t have before. Those plants soak up carbon from the atmosphere as they grow, at least partly locking away what was emitted.

Researchers are working to better understand this ecosystem. And the more we learn, the more complicated the picture looks. How much carbon is lost from permafrost, and how much a given area will recover its carbon, depend on a huge array of factors. How severe are the fires that have accelerated local thawing? What’s the local climate and environment? And what kind of permafrost is at stake?

The higher we push the planet’s temperature, the more we mess with complicated natural phenomena that we’re only beginning to understand. 

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

In this age of rising electricity demand, people are trying to squeeze every last bit of power out of every power plant possible.

Over the past few weeks, there’s been big news about nuclear power plants trying to do just that. Constellation, the largest nuclear operator in the US, announced plans to add nearly a gigawatt of new capacity across 11 existing nuclear reactors at six plants. And on October 5, the Department of Energy awarded a $4.2 billion loan to Vistra for previously announced upgrades at three plants.

Pushing existing reactors to produce more could help provide more clean power for data centers, quickly. But just how much additional power can we count on?  

Upgrading equipment at existing nuclear power plants can allow them to reach a higher capacity; the process is called a power uprate. Operators have been doing this since the 1970s in the US, but it’s been less common in recent years as demand for electricity plateaued and cheap natural gas put financial pressure on nuclear power plants. Some plants closed, and putting in more money to produce more electricity didn’t make much sense at others. Between 2001 and 2010, the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission approved over 80 uprates. Between 2011 and 2020, the number was 33.

But with the rise of AI and the related boom in electricity demand, there’s been a shift. We’re seeing shuttered plants like Palisades and Three Mile Island race to reopen. And existing plants are looking to uprate again.

Some uprates are minor, involving changes to instrument setpoints or calculations at the plant. But more major overhauls, which can boost reactor power by as much as 20%, require replacing plant equipment.

Generally, uprates involve using fuel that’s more highly enriched, or a higher volume of fresh fuel, in the nuclear reactor. That helps produce more steam, which is used to turn a turbine and generate electricity. To handle that additional energy, the main turbines and equipment such as pumps, motors, generators, and transformers are upgraded.

The most recent major uprate approved in the US was for three reactors at the Browns Ferry nuclear power plant in Alabama. A $475 million project saw that plant expand its power capacity by 14% between 2018 and 2019.

Things could pick up soon, though. Constellation announced plans this week to spend more than $4.3 billion on uprates to 11 reactors. The additional electricity will be enough to power roughly 700,000 US homes.

Behind it all? Big Tech money. Google agreed to buy electricity from these plants, and the 20-year agreement was a major factor in making the uprates happen. As Joe Dominguez, Constellation’s CEO, told the New York Times: “These are capital intensive, labor intensive projects that require a different price point than the market trades at, frankly.”

Also in the last few weeks, the US Department of Energy shared that it will commit over $4 billion to help finance upgrades and modernization for Vistra nuclear power plants across Pennsylvania and Ohio. Those projects will add 433 megawatts of power capacity, and Meta has already signed on to buy electricity from the plants in a long-term deal.

A note about cost: On a per-kilowatt basis, that Constellation project is less expensive than building a new reactor, but it’s still more expensive than building a new utility-scale solar farm with energy storage or a combined-cycle natural-gas plant.

Even at this high cost, uprates are in high demand. Today, the US nuclear fleet has roughly 98 gigawatts of total power capacity. Depending on who you ask, there’s somewhere between three and eight additional gigawatts on the table from uprates. A pretty significant chunk of the potential uprates in the US are already accounted for—the NRC already expects applications to add 2.4 gigawatts of power to reactors through 2032.

It’s crucial to put these plans (and the total potential for uprates in the US) in perspective, though. PJM, the grid operator that covers much of the East Coast, expects about 30 gigawatts of additional peak demand because of AI by 2030. All the possible nationwide nuclear uprates would cover just a fraction of that.

Making the most of existing nuclear reactors is a relatively easy win at a time when we need all the zero-emissions power we can get. But there’s still a lot of demand, and if we want more nuclear power to meet it, eventually that will require actually building new reactors.

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

This week, we released our 2026 version of our Climate Tech Companies to Watch list. It’s an annual project that the MIT Technology Review team puts together. Our goal is to highlight some of the promising, interesting advances and firms we think are worth paying attention to in the world of climate and energy technology. 

The list is always a little ray of hope for me—there are some fascinating ideas out there for changing how we power our world or moving away from fossil fuels to reduce the greenhouse-gas emissions that cause climate change. 

Our chosen companies tend to reflect several aspects of the current moment. Here are some of the companies we picked and the key themes worth highlighting. 

China is the center of the climate and energy tech world

Forgive me—I know I’ve made this point before. Feel free to call me Captain Obvious. But I think China’s dominance in energy technology is a global trend that bears repeated mentioning.  

China is home to the world’s largest grid, and renewables are coming online more quickly than I can wrap my head around. Contributing to that boom is Envision Energy, a renewables giant appearing on our list for the second time. The company has installed over 100 gigawatts of wind power worldwide, as well as over 50 gigawatt-hours of battery storage.

Like many other Chinese companies right now, Envision is looking beyond the crowded Chinese market and setting its sights abroad, with projects in Germany, Brazil, and Australia and upcoming work in Vietnam.

China is also leading innovation in key technologies. I’ve been fascinated by the potential for next-generation batteries coming out of its companies: All the big ones, along with a host of smaller ones, are racing to develop solid-state batteries. They could be both safer than existing EV batteries and longer in range.

WeLion New Energy is particularly interesting. The battery company announced a big lab result last year, achieving 824 watt-hours per kilogram—more than three times the energy density of a standard lithium-ion battery today. Lab results in battery research are notoriously difficult to scale, but WeLion is also working to deploy semi-solid-state batteries, which could come to fruition faster than purely solid-state cells while still improving on lithium-ion’s performance. 

Everybody wants a piece of the data center pie

We included just three companies from the US on the list, and two of them have received a major boost from Big Tech as companies look to power data centers. (The third, Brimstone, is leaning into another political hot topic, critical minerals.) Technologies that can provide consistent power are in high demand. 

Fervo Energy is bringing next-generation geothermal power to the grid by using horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing to make it practical in more places. The company went public in May, raising $2.2 billion in its IPO, and plans to have a gigawatt’s worth of plants operational by the end of 2030.

X-energy is building helium-cooled small modular nuclear reactors. The reactors’ small size lends flexibility, and the company is currently working on a 320-megawatt cluster of them in collaboration with Amazon in Richland, Washington. (For what it’s worth, I’m interested in what this technology could do for industrial facilities—the company has a deal with Dow that could see it deployed at one of the company’s chemical plants in the early 2030s.)

The grid needs support, and energy storage will be a key piece moving forward

I know, I know—I haven’t stopped talking about batteries since I started writing this newsletter four years ago. But the energy storage market has surpassed even my expectations over that time. And as solar and wind quickly come online, they need storage to help them meet more of the grid’s demand. 

Form Energy is on the list for a third time for its iron-air batteries, which could enable cheaper long-duration energy storage. The company has a massive project in the works, to the tune of 30 gigawatt-hours, which will be used to help power a Google data center. It could be the world’s largest battery project in terms of capacity by the time it comes online, which is expected to happen in phases between 2028 and 2031.

Taking another tack, Energy Dome is using compressed carbon dioxide to store energy on the grid. This technology is already cheaper than lithium-ion batteries for longer durations (think 10 hours or more), and the company is working to scale quickly. I covered the company in 2022, before it had its first commercial plant running. Now it has plans for over 30 gigawatt-hours’ worth of plants around the world, including one with Google in Ireland that’s slated to come online in 2028.

And Moment Energy is working to use the million EV batteries that are expected to reach the end of their life by 2030. The company has a facility in Vancouver, British Columbia, that repurposes used batteries for backup power.

This year hasn’t been all sunshine and rainbows for climate tech. But I’m hopeful that some of the companies on this list, and the technologies they build, will keep nudging us in the right direction. 

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

If you want to install a big battery in New York City, you have to cut through a notoriously tough tangle of regulations. That’s made it difficult to get large energy storage projects on the grid.

Faced with those obstacles, some startups are getting creative, finding ways to use relatively small batteries in unexpected places, from induction stovetops to food carts. By deploying these more consumer-focused batteries, the companies are helping people directly, cutting pollution or power bills. And these units, while small on their own, could add up to a lot of capacity.

Large, utility-scale battery installations are coming online quickly around the world. But there’s been some pushback from communities—especially population-dense ones like NYC—because of concerns about relatively rare but high-profile battery fires.

“The number-one challenge that large-scale centralized energy storage providers have is the fact that their benefits are abstract and their costs are concrete,” said David Hammer, cofounder of PopWheels, at a New York Climate Week event on September 24.

PopWheels built a battery-swapping system for delivery drivers who zip around the city on e-bikes. Drivers swap out depleted batteries for fresh ones at a cabinet, avoiding the need to stop and charge. There are about 50 cabinets across New York City, and about 2,500 batteries in circulation, Hammer says.

The company recently started providing its batteries to food cart operators, allowing them to replace the gas generators they currently rely on. About four of its batteries can supply five kilowatt-hours of electricity, enough to roughly cover a day’s operation for many carts.

Others are looking inside homes. Copper, for example, is a company building induction stoves with integrated batteries. The appliances allow residents to cook if the power goes out, and they could also help homeowners avoid expensive electrical upgrades, because the battery provides some of the power when the stove is in use. “We’re not just selling a battery for resilience—we’re selling it for cost savings,” Sam Calisch, cofounder and CEO of Copper, said at the event.  

Other companies, like Every Electric and David Energy are selling plug-in batteries for homes and businesses. Every’s battery is designed to be plugged in to an air-conditioning unit. The company provides the batteries and pays customers to reduce use during high-stress times. David Energy has a similar business model, but focuses on businesses like laundromats, parking garages, and gyms.

Because all these companies’ batteries are small or even integrated into another device, they don’t generally require grid upgrades or extensive permitting processes. Just plug them in and enjoy the benefits—similar to the growing model of balcony solar, with small modules that plug in and help offset a home’s or business’s energy demand.

The move toward more distributed batteries could be a huge change for the grid. “This is the biggest thing to happen in the power grid sector in the last 20 years,” says James McGinniss, cofounder and CEO of David Energy.

If every stove in America were shipped with a battery, it would add up to tens of gigawatts of power, Calisch said. That’s capacity that can be aggregated and tapped when the grid is stressed.

As batteries continue to get cheaper, they’ll likely find their way into more corners of our lives, bringing along many benefits. Cleaner air, cheaper power bills—there’s a lot to like. That being said, the need for large-scale energy storage isn’t going to go away—larger installations will do the crucial work of supporting intermittent renewables like wind and solar, so they can help meet more of our quickly growing electricity demand.

 But I’m interested to see how far an aggregated horde of stoves, e-bikes, and window AC units could go in helping the grid. The grid is getting more congested, especially in dense cities like New York. Anything that could help avoid summer blackouts is welcome.

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

This week, world leaders descended on Manhattan for the UN General Assembly. It’s also New York Climate Week—investors, policymakers, advocates, and journalists are colliding at panels, talks, and fancy dinners.

With so many climate voices in one place, the discourse can feel a little louder than usual. This year, the unavoidable topic is artificial intelligence.

There’s been a growing tension bubbling up about AI’s impacts on climate and climate tech. Depending on where you stand, you might point to AI’s potential for advancing research, or to the way funding and attention from Big Tech is trickling into energy startups. Or you might focus on the emissions-heavy natural-gas buildout that’s unfolding to meet the sector’s electricity demand.

Everyone seems to agree that AI is important. The big question for those in the climate world, and the conversation I’m constantly having and hearing this week, involves how you see its influence unfolding.

UN Secretary-General António Guterres highlighted the AI and climate crossover in a speech on the first day of the assembly. “The climate crisis fuels instability and displacement,” Guterres said. “Artificial intelligence could help solve all these challenges, or it could make them worse.”

It feels relevant that this year is the first that the world has really had to grapple with the fact that climate goals are slipping out of reach. A recent report from the UN Environment Program said that the world has nearly passed the point where we could possibly keep warming to less than 1.5 °C above preindustrial levels.

Since we’ve essentially missed this target, the report lays out the need not only to quickly and drastically reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, but also to employ carbon removal to help suck up emissions that have already been released into the atmosphere.

The billion-dollar question is whether AI could help with any of this. 

The energy-intensive technology is certainly shining a spotlight on the need to build out electricity supplies and shore up grid reliability. The result is more attention and money for energy technologies, some of which happen to be low- or zero-emissions.

As I’ve covered before, startups across the energy and climate sectors are benefiting. Firms in nuclear, geothermal, wind, and solar power have signed deals with the likes of Google, Meta, and others looking to power their new or growing data centers.

Global climate-tech investment from venture capital hit $26 billion in the first half of 2026, according to data from Currence, a finance tracker for the industry. That’s 55% higher than last year, and products and services for data centers are getting a massive slice of that pie.

But as a Semafor piece about the report points out, some sectors are slipping through the cracks: Carbon management and low-carbon fuels saw VC investment plummet this year. These are important solutions for addressing climate change but may not be able to sell themselves to a data center.

So far, the data center buildout has come with a hefty emissions toll. A few years ago, Microsoft, Google, and Meta all had ambitious goals to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. Now they’ve all seen emissions rise, largely because of data centers that are needed to power AI.

Some people are optimistic. AI could help speed up progress in areas like the search for new catalysts, as Evelyn Wang, MIT’s VP of energy and climate, pointed out during a panel. And data centers won’t add to climate and water problems forever, Wang told the Associated Press. (She puts the timeline at about a decade until data centers no longer add to planet-warming emissions.)

But a whole lot of natural gas is coming online to meet the immediate demand created by new data centers. And once those power plants are built, they have a decades-long lifetime. 

That’s partly why public pushback to AI is growing—people are seeing more pollution and noise near these data centers and the power plants that provide them with electricity. Overall, what I’m hearing this week is that many in the climate sector are skeptical of AI, at best. 

“AI leaders are now on thin ice when it comes to license to operate and sinking deep underwater when it comes to public support,” said UN climate chief Simon Stiell in a speech this week. “Tech titans need to start showing why the benefits of AI outweigh its skyrocketing costs—for the many, not just the tiny few.” 

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

Each year, the editorial team at MIT Technology Review puts together a list of 35 innovators under 35—a group of researchers, inventors, and other young minds worth following.

The team worked on the newest edition of the list for months, and the final slate includes nine individuals from all over the world in the climate and energy category. Each one has a fascinating story and is tackling an important challenge.

I think it’s worth zooming out and considering the energy and climate awardees as a group. Taken together, these innovators and their work can tell us something about where climate tech is at this moment—and where it’s heading.

AI is the dominant technology story, both for its potential and its challenges.

We split the innovators into four main categories this year: biotech, climate and energy, computing and robotics, and AI. It probably won’t surprise you that AI features heavily in the work of many innovators in other categories.

Climate innovator Jae-Won Chung, for example, built software to make AI more energy-efficient. By measuring the energy demands of open-source models, he hopes the industry can better understand and address the impact of AI. (If this work sounds familiar, it’s because we spoke with him last year for our investigation into AI’s energy demands.)

But AI also has the potential to improve many areas of research. Jing Wei is using AI to track pollution more effectively, essentially using machine learning to fill in gaps in data from disparate sources like satellites and weather stations. Zhonghua Zheng developed AI climate models that work better for cities, a well-known blind spot for traditional models.

We need better ways to get the critical materials used to build new technologies.

As we begin to rely on new technologies to power our world, we’ll see a major shift in the materials we need to build them.

Lithium is a prime example: The metal underpins lithium-ion batteries, which are crucial not only for electric vehicles, but also for large-scale energy storage on the grid. We could face lithium shortages as soon as this decade, and the prospect of supply crunches applies to other critical minerals, too—copper is another one to watch closely.

Brine is currently the cheapest source of lithium, but the process to get the metal out can take months and harm the local environment. Mohammad Alkhadra is the cofounder and CEO of Lithios, a startup working to quickly and efficiently extract lithium from brines.

Hardrock ore is the most common source of lithium, but it’s more expensive than brine. Benjamin Mowbray cofounded and serves as CTO for Rock Zero, which is working to extract lithium from hardrock ore.

Addressing climate change will require overhauling all corners of our society, sometimes in surprising ways.

To reach net-zero greenhouse gas emissions we will obviously need to rethink major sectors, like the electrical grid and transportation, to move away from fossil fuels. But outside these primary sources of climate pollution are seemingly infinite, less obvious problems to figure out, too.

Heavy industry, including steel production, is a major one, making up about 7% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Laureen Meroueh is making cleaner, cheaper steel using a new kind of furnace that simplifies the chemical process required to produce the metal.

Plastics are generally made with fossil fuels, so we’ll need alternatives to this incredibly useful category of materials. Joseph Nguthiru is making a bioplastic replacement for fossil-derived packaging that uses an invasive weed. Also using available materials in a creative way, Diana Orembe is making fish food for aquaculture with food waste.

And refrigerants are often incredibly powerful greenhouse gases. Jinyoung Seo is developing solid refrigerants that could eliminate worries about leakage. A device using these materials could reduce energy consumption by 20% compared to conventional technology.

I’m constantly learning about new challenges we face in the climate and energy world, and I’m often surprised by the ideas people are coming up with to address them. For more on all the under-35 innovators and their work, check out our full 2026 list.  

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

The US is hitting records for the rapid growth of its energy storage market. That’ll go a long way to shoring up the grid, increasing reliability and also cutting emissions, since batteries can help store energy from intermittent renewables like wind and solar.

Crucially, this is all happening with the help of cheap Chinese batteries, though there’s been a concerted effort to reduce the US’s reliance on them. Most recently, in an executive order in late August, the Trump administration declared a national emergency that essentially bans Chinese batteries from being used in grid-scale energy storage systems.

There’s an argument to be made about reducing reliance on any single source of a crucial energy technology. But all this tension raises a broader question for me: How much should countries take advantage of cheap, available tech, versus cutting off major sources to force development of their own factories even if that comes at a higher cost?

This is hardly America’s first push to move away from Chinese influence in the battery supply chain. One of the major policy tools used in recent years is restricting the tax credits designed to incentivize use of the new technologies. Limiting the types of projects that are eligible can help reduce the cost of local technologies so they’re more competitive with otherwise cheaper imported options.

Back in 2022, the US government designed the tax credits that were part of the Inflation Reduction Act to restrict where a battery’s minerals could be mined, processed, or recycled, as well as where a battery and its components were assembled.

Those tax credits underwent a makeover in 2025, but the Trump administration has taken a similar tack. New legislation requires that starting in 2026, 55% of the cost of materials used for new energy storage projects must come from outside China and other restricted countries or the projects won’t qualify for tax credits. 

And we can’t forget about tariffs. Import taxes for batteries increased to 25% in January, up from 7.5%.

But the new executive order is a more drastic move. It bans the installation of “any foreign-produced bulk-power system electric equipment” that poses a national security risk. The order specifically calls out battery energy storage systems, as well as inverters and transformers.

“An outright ban was a bit of a surprise, and it does create a bit of concern for domestic players in the US,” says Shan Tomouk, energy storage and energy lead for Benchmark Mineral Intelligence, an energy industry analyst.

The move is likely to slow deployment of grid-connected energy storage projects in the near term, according to analysis from BloombergNEF, an energy consultancy. Projects could face delays as developers wait for clarity on the rules.

Depending on the detailed guidance from the Department of Energy, which is expected by the end of the year, some projects may need to find alternative sources for their cells, whether they’re domestically produced or imported from other countries. These will likely be more expensive than Chinese imports, says Isshu Kikuma, an energy storage analyst at BloombergNEF. “Worst case, those projects could get canceled,” he says.

Technically, the order applies even to existing energy storage plants, though it’s unlikely that they’ll be taken offline because of their batteries’ origin. Since most of these plants currently use Chinese batteries, enforcing the order to the letter would essentially mean removing most installed battery energy storage from the US grid, Kikuma says.

In the longer term, the US will eventually be able to meet its own demand for batteries. The country could have enough capacity by about 2030, though some factories may not ramp up or run at their full capability, meaning domestic supply won’t actually meet demand until later in the 2030s. 

New factories from LG Energy Solutions, Samsung SDI, Ford, and SK On are set to come online or ramp up by next year. In an ironic twist, a slowing EV market is helping, as some factories originally designed for vehicle batteries are retooling to build cells for grid storage instead. 

But it will come at a cost. Today, batteries produced in the US are still significantly more expensive than those made in China. Even switching to imports from other countries like South Korea would likely be more expensive.

This is a crucial issue that goes beyond the US and even beyond batteries. China is miles ahead of much of the rest of the world on technologies like solar panels and batteries. Through years of government support and experience with research and manufacturing, the nation is an energy powerhouse.

There’s a delicate political balance to maintain as the world figures out how to navigate this situation. There’s cheap technology on offer, which can help drastically reduce emissions and energy costs. But there can be risks associated with relying too much on any one player for crucial technologies.

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

If you’ve had to fill up your vehicle’s gas tank or buy a plane ticket lately, you’ve probably felt the effects of rising fossil-fuel prices. But farmers buying fertilizer for their crops are especially aware of just how far the ripple effects of the conflict in Iran have spread.

Fertilizer prices have been on a roller coaster this year, kicked off in part by trade disruptions and high prices for natural gas, a key ingredient in fertilizer production. Let’s take a closer look at why conventional fertilizer prices are so sky-high, and how a few more climate-friendly alternatives could bring farmers some relief.

As fossil-fuel prices go up, nearly all industries are affected, since most of our economy relies on these fuels to move goods and people around.

But fertilizer is even more intertwined with these fluctuations, because natural gas is used as both an energy source and a chemical input in the production of ammonia, a key fertilizer ingredient. So as natural-gas prices have spiked in recent months because of the war in Iran, fertilizer prices have followed. (It’s worth briefly noting here that fertilizer production is also a major source of greenhouse-gas emissions, accounting for about 2% of the global total.)

Fertilizer trade is being directly affected as well, since about one-third of global seaborne trade in fertilizers passes through the Strait of Hormuz, which has been effectively closed to commercial traffic because of the conflict. Access to fertilizer could get worse for some of the poorest countries around the world because of the strait’s closure, according to a report from the World Bank. While the US largely meets demand for nitrogen fertilizers with domestic production, some imports do come from the Persian Gulf.

At one point in April, the price of urea (the most commonly applied fertilizer) climbed above $850 per metric ton. That’s 80% higher than it was before the conflict and the highest level since 2022, when the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the resulting conflict caused fertilizer costs to hit record highs. Prices have come down significantly, but forecasts remain uncertain.

“There’s just this out-of-control supply chain that’s a lot more volatile than it’s ever been,” says Travis Frey, chief technology officer of Pivot Bio, a company making fertilizer with genetically edited microbes. (For more on these microbes, how they work, and what research is still needed, check out my latest story here.) 

Pivot says its products are cost-competitive with chemical fertilizers today. And because they don’t use natural gas as an input, they aren’t subject to the same price spikes. When the war in Iran started, Pivot increased the volume it planned to produce, dropped prices, and allowed farmers to lock in prices for three years, Frey says.

That could be a major help for those farmers, because high prices could be here to stay for a while. Some fertilizer prices could remain high through at least 2028, according to a report from CoBank, one of the largest banks for the agriculture industry in the US.

That’s partly because the war has caused long-lasting damage: 31 ammonia plants in the Middle East have been affected or shut down completely. That’s on top of 20 ammonia plants that have been damaged in Russia in recent years.

Ongoing high prices can be extremely challenging for farmers. “The fertilizer price spikes, and because farmers have paper-thin margins, this is a real problem,” says Tim Schnabel, founder and CEO of Switch Bioworks, another company working on advanced microbe fertilizers.

Higher costs can help push food prices higher, causing all of us to pay more at the grocery store. (It’s not just fertilizer, by the way. Farmers are also getting hit with wild diesel prices this year.) As long as we’re relying on fertilizers made with fossil fuels, food prices will be tied up with energy prices.

Switch and Pivot are among the companies looking to make alternative fertilizers that use microbes to provide nitrogen to plants. There’s a limit to how much synthetic fertilizers these products can actually replace: Depending on the crop and conditions, Pivot says, its products can replace about 25% of synthetic fertilizer today, and the company hopes to reach 40% to 50% of the total. But these alternatives could be a start to untangling fossil fuels and food.

“We can’t keep doing it like this,” Switch’s Schnabel says. “There’s no way we can build a society where the basis of the food chain depends on fossil fuels.”

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

EVs account for under 10% of total new-vehicle sales in the US, and the numbers are declining. From a climate perspective, that’s pretty dismal, especially because the transportation sector is the single biggest source of greenhouse-gas emissions in the country. 

One thing that could help turn that around? Slate Auto’s new truck—a vehicle that seems to buck every convention about selling cars in the fully loaded, range-obsessed US market.  

The company is going all in on simplicity, to the point of austerity. The Slate is a tiny, two-door pickup that’s shorter than a Honda Civic. Much of the media coverage has obsessed over the fact that the base model’s windows use hand cranks, a feature straight out of the 20th century.

Slate is also breaking away from other EV manufacturers’ efforts to compete with gas-powered vehicles on range. The truck sports a small lithium iron phosphate battery, ringing in at 65 kilowatt-hours, and its quoted top range is just 205 miles. For comparison, the most basic Tesla Model 3 can go over 320 miles on a charge.

By accepting a shorter range and forgoing the frills that Americans have come to expect in vehicles, Slate is able to offer the base model of its truck for less than $25,000. Some customers will choose to upgrade their truck with optional add-ons, like a Bluetooth stereo system, vinyl wraps, or even power windows. But the price will still likely come in well below the roughly $50,000 average for a new vehicle in the US.

It might seem an odd choice to go so small and simple in a market that’s increasingly sizing up—but the status quo hasn’t exactly been working for EV makers. A few years back, the hero for US automotive electrification was supposed to be the Ford F-150 Lightning. Announced in 2021, it was an electric version of the country’s best-selling vehicle. 

But Ford discontinued the truck in December 2025, just four years after its introduction. It’s not entirely the Lightning’s fault: The second Trump administration slashed tax credits and other support designed to boost EVs. 

The Lightning was also plagued by price increases. The base model cost roughly $40,000 when shipments started in 2022; during its final year, prices topped $54,000. One factor behind the increase was its massive battery; to reach an almost 300-mile range, the truck needed a battery with a capacity roughly twice that of Slate’s truck. 

That obsession with range is largely unwarranted. While Americans have historically chased distance, the average driver puts under 35 miles a day on the odometer, and nearly 90% of trips in a personal vehicle are 20 miles or less. 

Surveys of EV drivers show a similar trend: One recent study found that people tend to use less than 20% of their EV’s range on a typical day. 

The notion that drivers need far less range than they think they do might sound a lot more persuasive these days—even for Americans who tend to buy cars for their longest road trip instead of their everyday errands. Roughly half the country is struggling to pay for basic necessities such as gas and groceries, and 95% of Americans believe we’re in an affordability crisis, according to a recent Harris poll. An inexpensive vehicle that allows you to skip the gas station sounds like an attractive prospect. 

Affordable EVs have already found willing buyers in other parts of the world—even with reduced range. China currently has over 40 million EVs and plug-in hybrids on the roads, and roughly half of new vehicles sold are electric. On average, new EVs sold in China in 2025 had a range of just 247 miles. For the US over the same period, the average was 329 miles. (Europe falls between the two, at 281 miles.)

Slate is set to start delivering on preorders in late 2026. Its factory will have a capacity of 100,000 vehicles in the first year and 150,000 soon after. Thousands of customers have already put in preorders, according to the company.

Some people obviously believe in the truck’s prospects: Investors, including Jeff Bezos, have put nearly $1.4 billion into the company over three major funding rounds. Ford is jumping (back) into this space soon too. The automaker is working on its own small electric truck, which is expected to debut in 2027 at a retail price of around $30,000.

The key question that will determine Slate’s success or failure is whether drivers can get on board with a small, short-range vehicle for the sake of its price tag. At this moment, I’d bet the answer is yes.