As Congress revisits permitting reform, proponents are clearing the path of obstacles. Lessons from the demise of the Energy Permitting and Reform Act (EPRA) of 2024 are in the spotlight. A March 2026 piece by the Breakthrough Institute (BTI) argues that EPRA failed in part because some utilities read its transmission provision as a vehicle for “stealth deregulation” of power generation, and warns that the next permitting package will fail the same way unless transmission reform is decoupled from deregulatory efforts. The piece makes two further claims: that deregulation has not delivered on its promises and that mandatory interregional transmission expansion is bad policy.

BTI is right that permitting reform is overdue, that side agendas can derail otherwise valuable proposals, and that the political coalition needed to pass anything is fragile. We share these premises and the urgency behind them. Diverse agendas ranging from reshoring manufacturing to fostering artificial intelligence (AI) development to reducing power sector emissions and enhancing grid reliability all require an ability to get things built.

We disagree, however, that transmission reform is a stealth deregulatory effort and disagree with their characterizations of industry restructuring and interregional transmission. Further, transmission and permitting reform are substantively compatible and politically complementary, as coalitions pairing the two have gained steam over the last three Congresses.

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Stealth Deregulation: A Category Error

BTI’s description of the “stealth deregulation” effect is perplexing. It correctly identifies that greater physical ties between regulated utility regions and deregulated regions would expose “utilities to the argument that lower cost imports should displace new local investment” and that “this would not definitively lead to deregulation.” BTI claims that this would allow ratepayer advocates to make the case for utility trading with external generators and to integrate with competitive markets. This is true and desirable—it results in gains from trade—but this does not equate to generation deregulation. In fact, the wholesale markets in the Midwest, Plains, and those emerging in the West primarily consist of vertically integrated, cost-of-service utilities. Indeed, nearly half of the states in the US’s largest electricity market, PJM, are composed of vertically integrated, cost-of-service utilities. Transmission expansion and better generation coordination in these regions enable rate-regulated monopoly utilities to serve their customers at lower cost.

BTI’s “stealth deregulation” argument frequently treats wholesale market integration and supply deregulation as a single phenomenon. They are not. Supply deregulation, better known as restructuring, refers to reforms that make power generation and retail supply subject to competitive markets. Organized wholesale electricity markets are necessary to facilitate competitive supply, but they can also exist to improve trading between monopoly utilities. Further, even in states where retail supply has not been deregulated, wholesale competition exists with or without organized wholesale markets. Wholesale customers, such as coops and municipalities, are not subject to retail market designs determined by state policymakers, and they and their customers additionally benefit from cost-effective transmission integration.

Such confusion is common. It prompted the R Street Institute’s paper on electric paradigms, which identifies three basic models: traditional monopoly, fully restructured, and the hybrid that most states use—competitive wholesale markets with predominately monopoly generation and retail. For example, the majority of the Southwest Power Pool and Midcontinent Independent System Operator wholesale market footprints are regulated monopoly states totaling half of U.S. states. Western wholesale market expansion, and prospective expansion in the Southeast, are projected to have the same composition. Better transmission ties have value across all three paradigms.

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Eat real food. It’s the closest thing American alternative food politics has to a creed, and for the better part of two decades it belonged to the left. To eat real food was to opt out of industrial agriculture, to refuse the long ingredient list and the seed oils and the corn-fed beef, and in doing so, to register a quiet protest against the system that produced them. It was, we were told, a progressive politics—an alliance of small farmers, conscientious eaters, and environmentalists against the depredations of Big Ag.

That coalition is gone, but the phrase is not. Today “real food” is the rallying cry of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement, repeated by Calley and Casey Means, endorsed by RFK Jr., and dispensed on Instagram by suburban moms warning each other about Froot Loops and Doritos. The vocabulary has barely changed—wholesome, clean, natural, traditional, ingredients your grandmother would recognize—but the political reality is far from the same.

Into this altered reality, Jan Dutkiewicz and Gabriel Rosenberg released Feed The People: Why Industrial Food Is Good and How to Make it Better, a book-length appeal to the alternative food movement to reconsider their long-running critiques of industrial agriculture. But, while Dutkiewicz and Rosenberg provide a useful new lens to understand the values of industrial food production, they stop short of defending the food system as a whole. Industrial food is good, they proffer, except for the meat and dairy products that remain fundamental to the American farm economy and diets.

While it is abundantly clear that animal agriculture has problems—high emissions compared to other foods, staggering land and water use, and, of course, animal welfare concerns—a defense of industrial food production that does not include industrial meat and dairy production raises a question. If technologically advanced, large-scale, highly capitalized modes of production provide the solutions to the problems caused by agriculture in general, why would these systems not also provide the solutions to the problems caused by animal agriculture in particular?

Dutkiewicz and Rosenberg likely wrote most of Feed the People before the sudden rise of MAHA, which is distinct from foodie environmentalism mostly in its zeal for animal-based protein. That makes their book’s inconsistencies when it comes to meat production all the more glaring. Offering a tractable alternative to anti-industrial foodie politics requires now, more than ever, an embrace of the efficiencies, innovation, and regulatory leverage available only through factory farms.

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Who’s Opposed to Industrial Food?

Make no mistake, Feed the People is an important book. In it, Dutkiewicz and Rosenberg lay out a strong argument for a different approach to the food debate. Their “democratic hedonism” thesis, defined as “an approach to politics that sees moral value in the simple pleasures that people experience in their daily lives” (18), represents a humanist opposition to the ascetic and judgmental moralizing of alternative foodies who preach organic, farm-to-table, and wholesome.

There are, as Feed the People demonstrates, pleasures inherent to the industrial food system. According to Dutkiewicz and Rosenberg, those pleasures—whether from a late-night Waffle House run or a bodega egg sandwich—ought to be defended, and made accessible to all in a fashion that reduces their harm. But the accessibility of those pleasures depends on the large-scale, hyper-efficient food production systems that critics label as “industrial.”

Through this framework, Dutkiewicz and Rosenberg lay out the absurdities of the various arguments against industrial food production. The “family farm” of foodie nostalgia accounts for a vanishingly small share of American agriculture, and the farmers markets that have proliferated in its name feed a narrow, largely affluent slice of the country. A system built on small, local producers simply cannot move enough calories at low enough prices to deliver the pleasures the authors defend. The point is not that we should reluctantly accept fast food and processed snacks as inferior substitutes for “real” or “slow” food; it is that virtually all of our food—fresh broccoli no less than Hostess Cup Cakes —is a product of the industrial food system in the first place.

In this effort, Dutkiewicz and Rosenberg are doing real, important work. The myths proffered by the likes of Wendell Berry, Michael Pollan and Alice Waters, still hold sway over a large swath of the ostensibly progressive population. Debunking the progressive foodie narrative from a progressive, justice-oriented perspective is crucial to reframing the question of the future of food and agriculture for the American left.

But, while anti-industrial faux-progressivism did indeed dominate foodie politics for decades, the movement that Dutkiewicz and Rosenberg have targeted has already lost its influence. Berry, Pollan, and Waters are still wrong, but the energetic core of the anti-industrial food movement has completely migrated right-ward. And so too has the underlying debate.

Progressives can read this migration two ways. The flattering reading is that the food movement has been hijacked. The more correct reading is that food politics was never really progressive in the first place. It was a politics of purity and disgust dressed in progressive clothes, and the clothes have finally come off. MAHA, the manosphere foodies, and the suburban mom alternative eaters did not pervert the once liberal and righteous food movement—they unmasked its immanent conservatism. But, more than anything, the MAHA movement completely changed the food discourse.

As recently as 2024, the debate over industrial food was an intra-progressive argument with broadly shared premises. Everyone at the table—vegans, effective altruists, environmentalists, alternative foodies, food justice folks—agreed that factory farms were bad, that the modern American diet contained too much meat, and that the future, whatever it looked like, would involve eating further down the food chain. The disagreements were about scale, technology, and means: lentils versus cell-cultured beef, smaller dairies or ranches versus veganism. How to solve the “meat problem” was hotly debated, but almost everyone in the alternative food movement agreed it was a problem.

MAHA has rearranged that table. While MAHA glorifies the small, regenerative farmers, few MAHA voices go so far as to directly criticize or target large-scale animal agriculture in their screeds. And, there is little to no acceptance of the idea that eating meat is somehow bad for people, or the environment, let alone, the animals themselves. Instead, MAHA has reshaped American food politics around something a bit harder to quantify: health and nutrition.

No longer made up of coastal-progressives, the anti-industrial food coalition is now a more politically potent alliance of wellness influencers, anti-vaccine activists, libertarian homesteaders, and suburban parents who believe the food system is poisoning their children. Far from agreeing that meat is a fundamental problem that must be solved, many of the MAHA-inflected anti-industrial foodies laud meat—especially beef—and dairy products as the key to American health.

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The Meat Problem

The meat question remains the sub-text underlying most debates around food. This is true for Dutkiewicz and Rosenberg. While Feed the People aims to defend industrial food production, it is assuredly not defending all industrial food production.

As longtime advocates for alternative proteins, Dutkiewicz and Rosenberg made their position on meat eating and production abundantly clear long before they published Feed the People. In venues like The New Republic, Wired, and Vox, the two published many pieces criticizing the meat industry and promoting its alternatives. It’s not surprising, then, that Feed the People, even after defending the varied pleasures of industrial food, provides a critique of both industrial meat production and the bogus claims of regenerative ranching, and other smaller-scale, more “farm-to-table” approaches to animal rearing.

In Feed the People, Dutkiewicz and Rosenberg are explicit that everyone should eat far less meat. They advocate for increasing taxes on meat that would help internalize the external costs of its production, and they promote improved alternative meat sources that would serve as a replacement for industrially produced meats. While they suggest that a “eat less meat, stupid” policy proposal amounts to “meat austerity,” they equate eating meat to “other bad pleasures you may also be loath to lose—booze, risky sex, dangerous sports, gambling” (93). For example, their vision for a healthy, industrial food future would include Waffle House branches with “mycelium-based steak and Impossible burgers for the patty melts,” and no red meat thanks to “improvements to animal-welfare laws and the implementation of carbon taxes on agriculture” (229).

But, meat is simply too popular, and too ubiquitous to actually replace anytime soon with alternatives. While alternative proteins like plant-based and cell-cultured meat may eat into some meat consumption, there is little evidence that it can displace even a small portion of the animal agriculture industry. Unfortunately for its critics, industrial meat production is the only way to produce enough meat and dairy products without accelerating the deforestation of wild lands or driving up food prices. Intensive and confined operations have lower emissions, use less land, and have the potential to improve welfare at a better rate than their organic, regenerative, and extensive alternatives.

Replacing industrially-produced meat and dairy with non-industrially produced meat and dairy would significantly increase land use for agriculture, raise emissions, force the conversion of wild lands into pasture, and increase the price of food. This is not the reality that Dutkiewicz and Rosenberg want—they are especially critical of the regenerative gurus who promise to replace bad factory farms with pastures and grass-fed livestock operations.

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Meating the Moment

And, perhaps more importantly, by criticizing meat production in total, Feed the People cedes the debate to the newly coalesced anti-industrial MAHA foodies. Dutkiewicz and Rosenberg essentially defend industrial food, except for the part of industrial food that is most central to the modern American plate.

For the vast majority of MAHA, meat and dairy products are central to nutrition and health. They advocate for beef tallow instead of seed oils, organ meats instead of vegetables, and ground beef and eggs instead of grains. With few exceptions, much of the cultural and political energy of the new anti-industrial food movement relies on the idea that animal products are vastly healthier than the fibers, sugars, and carbohydrates that purportedly drive inflammation, weight gain, mental disrepair, and all manner of physiological and psychological maladies.

Defending industrial agriculture means defending it against this movement, and convincing at least some of its constituents that industrial agriculture is not the problem. In 2026, that means acknowledging the carnivorous shift in American foodie identity, and attempting to channel that energy towards the most efficient forms of meat and dairy production. MAHA leaders like RFK Jr., Joel Salatin, and the like, may rage against health threats from factory farms, CAFOs, and large-scale dairies, but, for most, industrial animal agriculture is the only source of affordable meat and dairy. Centering a defense of industrial food around an overarching anti-meat politics simply is a non-starter for the vast majority of Americans, and lets the most radical anti-industrial fringe of MAHA control the debate over the future of American food and farming.

Some anti-meat activists and researchers seem to have tacitly understood this dilemma. For example, Coefficient Giving’s Lewis Bollard has, for years, advocated for marginal improvements to animal welfare standards in industrial agriculture. This approach may not save the millions of animals being born and bred to slaughter, but feasible steps to make their lives even just slightly better trump infeasible pathways to end factory farming. This was the central philosophy behind California’s 2018 passage of Proposition 12 to limit extreme confinement of hogs and chicken in gestation crates.

Since passing by referendum, Proposition 12 has been the target of failed lawsuits and campaigns, mainly from the meat industry. Most recently, this opposition took the form of the Save Our Bacon Act, which sought to ban states from imposing animal welfare laws onto meat producers. That bill died in Congress, but was given new life—to the consternation of many—when Republican legislators added the bill text to the pending Farm Bill.

Whether or not Proposition 12 survives the upcoming Senate Farm Bill vote, the effort to ban gestation crates and marginally improve the welfare of the horde of animals going through factory farms demonstrates both opportunities for and limitations to anti-meat politics. While many Americans—and, apparently, the majority of California’s voters in 2018—are appalled by aspects of industrial meat production, few Americans—around 4%, according to Pew—are actually morally opposed to the act of eating meat. If industrial meat is here to stay—whether through incremental steps like banning gestation, or more radical pathways—the only way to improve these modes of production is to embrace them. This would be drawing “democratic hedonism” to its logical conclusion. This is especially the case since both the contemporary supporters and detractors of the industrial food system seem to only agree on one thing: the importance and centrality of meat.

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The Future of Industrial Food Will Include Meat

To be fair to Dutkiewicz and Rosenberg, the rise of MAHA in American food politics happened fast. And the process of writing a book is slow. But while much of Feed the People could not have been written with MAHA in mind, there was little doubt in 2023 or early 2024 that the lodestar of food politics would always be meat.

Feed the People was a project born out of the Pollan-era of anti-industrial food discourse. It speaks to progressive values and finds common ground over things like climate, corporate power, and labor. That posture made sense when the opposition to industrial agriculture was a coalition of progressives who could potentially be persuaded by appeals to “democratizing” pleasures and the reality of environmental impacts. But, it does not make sense today, when that opposition has mutated into a populist movement that has successfully captured state power, rejects basic premises of agricultural science, and wants to dismantle the food system to try to, among other reasons, increase testosterone production in teens.

Dutkiewicz and Rosenberg set out in Feed the People to defend the industrial food system from its progressive critics, and they do so with creativity and empiricism. But, they can not bring themselves to defend the part of the system—meat and dairy—upon which most Americans’ food preferences actually hinge. In doing so, they fall victim to the same kind of moralizing that is central to the critique of industrial agriculture. While the moral center of food politics has shifted from Chez Panisse to the Joe Rogan Experience, the underlying feeling has not changed: disgust at how most people eat.

A defense of industrial food requires a defense of industrial meat and dairy—not as a guilty pleasure to be taxed and surreptitiously abolished, but as one of the greatest achievements of modernity. Industrial animal agriculture feeds hundreds of millions of people affordably and can, with reforms and improvements, be made better still. That is a hard book to write, especially when the authors firmly believe the opposite.

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The long-overdue abandonment of RCP 8.5, the IPCC’s much criticized and implausible emissions scenario has, rightly, shined a light on how climate modeling and emissions scenarios are constructed and used by scientists, policymakers, journalists and advocates. The making of scenario sausage turns out to be a dodgy business, rife with all sorts of unexamined assumptions both within and across scenarios. These, in turn, produce a wide range of highly speculative outcomes that actors across the political spectrum can select from to support their priors.

It should be entirely unsurprising, then, that the abandonment of RCP 8.5 has had little apparent impact on the well rehearsed debates that have raged in the years leading up to the change. Was RCP 8.5 always implausible or was it made implausible by climate policy and falling renewable energy costs? Did scientists really think of and describe it as business as usual or was it always understood to be a worst case thought experiment? If the former, was it an honest misunderstanding or were there strong perverse incentives to represent RCP 8.5 in that way? Does the abandonment of RCP 8.5 suggest that climate change might not be so bad or does 2 or 3C of warming herald catastrophe anyway? Is 5C of warming off the table or are there other plausible ways that the world might hit the extreme warming levels implied by RCP 8.5 even if the RCP 8.5 pathway to those warming levels is not plausible?

The answers to these questions are, in my view, pretty obvious if you don’t have an ax to grind. Yes, RCP 8.5 was always implausible. Yes, many scientists and other experts represented it as business as usual. Yes, there was a lot of confusion and genuine misunderstanding among many scientists who were using RCP 8.5 but also, yes, there were perverse incentives not to ask too many questions about it. No, catastrophe is not assured at 3C of warming but yes, you can still conceivably end up with higher warming by the end of the century if you assume high end climate sensitivity, deep reductions in sulfur dioxide emissions, and climate feedbacks that all impact warming in the same direction.

What almost all of that misses, though, is just how speculative and ungrounded the entire climate scenario enterprise is.

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Can’t Get There From Here

The problem with IPCC scenarios and modeling isn’t just with RCP 8.5. Across the full range of outcomes, many scenarios simply don’t make sense. The low emissions scenarios, for instance, frequently assume low population growth, slow economic growth, and fast technological change. This combination of factors is every bit as implausible as the combination of high population growth, high economic growth, and slow technological change necessary to produce RCP 8.5. That is not simply because the world does not appear to be on either trajectory. Rather, in both cases, the component factors necessary to produce these futures are not compatible with one another.

Consider that the relationship between economic growth and declining fertility is among the most robust in the modernization literature. As societies urbanize, shifting from agrarian economic relations to manufacturing and services, women and families have very strong incentives to have fewer children and direct more household resources towards educating them.

The relationship between the rate of technological change and economic growth, similarly, is not only robust but foundational in the neoclassical economic literature. Technological change accounts for the vast majority of long-term economic growth. High and sustained economic growth rates bring faster rates of technological change along for the ride and vice versa.

Taken together, these two relationships have very significant implications for plausible climate futures. A rich world at the end of this century will almost certainly be a less populous one than a poor world and, of necessity, more technologically advanced. This is not a future where the world digs up every bit of coal that it can find and burns it. The converse is true as well. A poor world will almost certainly be a more populous and less technologically advanced one. This is not a world in which a small and shrinking population lives lightly upon the Earth while making a quick transition to clean energy.

For all the talk of feedbacks in the climate system, we’re not very good at thinking about, much less modeling, feedbacks in our socio-economic systems. That problem becomes even more pronounced once we use emissions scenarios—which estimate emissions and radiative forcing over the course of this century based upon speculative (and sometimes fantastical) socioeconomic trajectories—to model climate impacts on society. Doing so requires making dozens of socioeconomic assumptions to estimate both how evolving socio-economic conditions will translate into global emissions and hence warming, and then how those same evolving conditions will shape vulnerability, resilience, and adaptation to the climate change that results.

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PATPAT Not IPAT

IPAT (Impact = Population X Affluence X Technology) has been the long-standing framework through which environmental scientists have understood how human activity impacted the environment. It provides a useful conceptual framework for decomposing the factors that contribute to environmental impacts. But it has two deep and related flaws.

The first is that population, affluence, and technology operate on both sides of the equation, affecting the consequences of environmental impacts every bit as much as causing them. So IPAT can just as easily be expressed as PATPAT (Population X Affluence X Technology = Population X Affluence X Technology).

The second is that the decomposition breaks down when we try to use the equation, conceptually or practically, to understand change over time. You can decompose an environmental impact into the factors that contribute to it at any given point in time. But over time, the factors don’t move in the same direction and feedback into one another in ways that blur the lines between them. So, in the case of global emissions, population growth and economic growth increase emissions while technological change blunts those factors, decoupling them from emissions. Economic growth and population growth each independently increase emissions. But faster economic growth rates result in slower population growth rates. Technological change accelerates economic growth which in turn slows population growth.

Similar interactions come into play when considering the human and economic impacts of climate change. Economic growth both results in higher economic damages associated with climate extremes and makes human populations more resilient to those extremes. It slows overall population growth and draws larger populations toward economic opportunity in coastal regions and floodplains where they are more exposed to climate risk. Technological change accelerates economic growth, putting more wealth in harm’s way, increases societies’ adaptive capacities, and results in richer societies, which are also more resilient to climate extremes.

The feedbacks fold back upon each other across the emissions and impacts sides of the equation. This is, of course, exactly what you would expect in a complex, emergent system encompassing the physical climate, the global economy, and the intersection of the two in millions of actual places. Emissions scenarios and impacts modeling can only, at best, give us a very high level and rough approximation of what might happen. At the very least, we ought to demand that these efforts make a reasonable effort to check whether the scenarios they are producing are coherent. A rich world in 2100 is very unlikely to be one with 12 or 13 billion people. It will almost certainly not be one that is heavily dependent on coal.

Or consider global agriculture. Any projection of the impact that climate change will have on agricultural production and food security requires dozens of assumptions about both the emissions levels that the global economy will produce decades from now and how population, economic development, food preferences, agricultural technology, and much else will evolve over many decades. Even if that future does bring 5C of warming, that world is also almost certainly one in which the scale, intensification, and productivity of global agriculture is far greater, even if climate change has resulted in some non-trivial reduction in future yield growth. Technological change (e.g. agricultural productivity improvement) operates on both sides of the IPAT equation, both reducing emissions from the agricultural sector and improving the resilience of the sector to climate change.

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Science Fiction Versus Science

Past, of course, is only prologue. Perhaps in the face of a baby bust, nations will increasingly incentivize (or coerce) women to have more children. Or technology will bring us artificial wombs. Or artificial intelligence will bring about an economic singularity without any significant energy technology breakthrough, leading our robot overlords to dig up and burn all the coal. Perhaps a global government managed by a priestly caste of scientists will perfectly redistribute wealth and resource consumption while engineering a planned transition to a low carbon economy. But these developments are, at this point, science fiction, not something that policy-makers or anyone else should take very seriously. Where, one wonders, are the scenarios reflecting the muddle of our present and future—a baby bust, secular stagnation, mixed economies, slow but steady long term decarbonization, and a rising tide that floats all boats but some far more than others?

The problem with the IPCC scenarios can’t be reduced to one bad apple scenario. The construction of scenarios has been ad hoc. Historically, the climate scenario community has sought to produce a range of anthropogenic forcing and temperature outcomes suitable for modeling impacts and then layered on top of that the mental models of the scenario builders (e.g. a rapacious capitalism making babies and burning coal in roughly equal measure vs various post-growth and egalitarian imaginaries).

The resulting scenarios have largely failed to produce plausible futures, meaning futures that can reasonably be extrapolated from the ongoing evolution of social and economic relations as we actually observe them. Worse, it has enabled a cottage climate impacts industry to manufacture sensational climate impact claims that don’t consider those impacts in the social and economic contexts that could conceivably produce them.

I have increasingly come to the view that human societies will be more resilient to climate extremes in a rich world with 5C of warming than a poor world with 2C of warming. But neither of these futures is particularly likely. Because of the way that population, economic growth, and technological change feedback into each other, the range of possible outcomes, and hence the design space for climate policy efforts is far narrower than that. It’s hard to get much beyond 3C of warming or below 2C of warming without the science fiction described above. The greatest failure of the IPCC’s scenario making enterprise has been to obscure this basic dynamic rather than illuminating it.

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As of June 4, 2026, Antares Nuclear’s Mark-0 reactor became the first reactor in the Department of Energy’s Reactor Pilot Program to reach criticality at the Idaho National Laboratory. Antares is one of 11 companies taking part in the Pilot Program.

These reactors are not gigawatt-scale commercial plants, but they are essential first-of-a-kind demonstrations. Done well, the program can generate the data, operating experience, and regulatory lessons that help clear the path for commercial advanced reactor deployment. It fills the gap in the prototyping stage of the innovation cycle—a stage that is crucial for the U.S. to succeed. That Antares has been able to reach criticality a full month before the July 4, 2026 deadline established for the program is a welcome indicator of the program’s potential success.

Why Prototypes Matter

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I’m just back from Japan, where thanks to my hosts at the Canon Institute for Global Studies, I’ve had a chance to talk with former government officials, academics, industry leaders, and energy experts about Japan’s present energy crisis. Caught between Washington and Beijing, Japan’s struggles to reconcile economic imperatives, energy security, and climate commitments over the last fifteen years have prefigured the difficult choices that much of the world faces today in the wake of the Iran war. Japan’s domestic energy endowments are extremely limited. It has no domestic fossil reserves to speak of. Its main islands are mountainous and forested, densely populated, and not particularly sunny. Its coastal waters support a huge fishing industry and are deep and stormy, not well suited to conventional offshore wind. After the Fukushima nuclear accident, it shut down its entire nuclear fleet, which once produced more than a quarter of the nation’s electricity.

As a result, the vast majority of Japan’s energy consumption, almost 80%, is fossil-based and imported, half of that from oil, most of which must transit the Strait of Hormuz. Like a lot of places with the means to do so, Japan is drawing down its strategic petroleum reserves to mitigate the immediate impact of the price shock. But the clock is ticking on Japan’s petroleum reserves. Japan is less dependent on the Gulf for its LNG imports but the general run up in LNG prices is adding to the economic pain.

Most of the alternatives are less than appealing. Japan has substantial headroom to increase coal imports and generation with its existing coal fleet. But doing so would effectively eviscerate Japan’s net-zero Paris commitments. Wind, solar, and batteries offer some fuel-saving opportunities for the electricity system. But Japan’s wind and solar resources are not great, its eastern and western grids operate at different frequency, making a national grid that might help balance variability unfeasible, and, functionally, a rapid shift to renewables simply shifts Japan’s energy sector from one geopolitical risk, namely imported oil and gas, to another, imported Chinese green energy technology.

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Green energy proponents correctly point out that while the energy technology is imported, the wind and the sun are domestic, and free. Once you build a wind or solar farm, it will produce electricity (albeit variably) for several decades no matter what China does. But China is, increasingly, the sole source of most of these technologies and represents Japan’s greatest geopolitical rival and national security threat. Increasing dependence on Chinese green technology undermines Japan’s independent industrial capabilities, its competitiveness across a growing suite of clean technologies, and its ability to act independently of China in other critical geopolitical domains.

And it’s not like the rest of Japan’s energy system at present features domestic energy sources to balance that dependence. Rather, Japan presently takes an all-of-the-above approach to geopolitical risk, importing oil from the Gulf, coal from Australia, gas from Australia, Southeast Asia, and the United States, and green technology from China.

Unsurprisingly given these realities, Japan has finally gotten serious about restarting its nuclear fleet. After a decade plus of haltingly slow approvals, nuclear generation is now back up to over 9% of Japan’s electricity. That’s still a far cry from close to 30% prior to Fukushima. But it seems likely now, given the energy and geopolitical situation, that Japan will restart most of its legacy nuclear fleet in the coming years, as well as complete two long-stalled new builds.

Japan already runs its LNG-fueled gas plants at relatively low capacity. In response to the current crisis, Japan has issued an emergency waiver allowing dirtier sub-critical coal plants to operate at higher capacity factors in order to conserve costly LNG for load following and firming. Should Japan extend that waiver, it will, in deed if not in word, effectively abandon its net-zero aspirations. Doubling down on green energy won’t change that.

Those net-zero commitments, of course, were never plausible in the first place. I’ve traveled to Japan to engage on energy and climate issues for almost 20 years now. At some point during every trip, I am presented with an elaborate slide deck, sometimes from METI, Japan’s famous industrial planning agency, sometimes from an affiliated think tank, showing how Japan will deeply decarbonize and meet its climate commitments. The plans are impressively detailed and technical, with Sankey graphs and flow charts showing technology by technology how Japan will get there, a triumph, on paper at least, of Japan’s legendary industrial planning bureaucracy.

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Over the years, the plans have involved supercritical coal plants with carbon capture, hydrogen-powered vehicles, and now, lots of solar, wind, electric arc furnaces and similar. Ever the uncouth gaijin, I asked my hosts at METI during a visit a few years ago how it was going. They giggled uncomfortably and then, politely, admitted not so well.

And yet, excepting the extraordinary jump in emissions and emissions intensity after the closure of Japan’s nuclear reactors in 2011, Japan’s emissions intensity trajectory looks like pretty much every other advanced industrialized economy. Its total energy consumption is in structural decline and its emissions (again excepting the rebound following the post-Fukushima closures) has been falling consistently for decades. Running its sub-critical coal plants a lot more in the coming years may slow that trend line a bit. Restarting its reactors will accelerate it. If past is prologue, all of these peregrinations over the long term may look like little more than squiggles in a long, linear evolution of Japan’s energy system from oil, coal, and gas toward ever cleaner energy.

How Japan sustains that trajectory remains an open question. It is already the most energy efficient and electrified economy in the world. If the great global dividing line of the post-post-cold war era is petrostates versus electrostates, as a lot of the left-of-center punditry has recently come to believe, then the archetypal electrostate is Japan, not China. Solar now accounts for 10% of Japan’s electricity, quietly exceeding China’s share of solar electricity—a significant (if costly) achievement given Japan’s less than favorable climate and topography. Yet despite early and quite significant efforts to develop a solar manufacturing industry, Japan has virtually entirely ceded the sector to China. Panasonic, a Japanese company, is a major player in global battery production, but less than 20% of its battery manufacturing is domestic.

It will surprise almost no one that the most obvious path for Japan, to my mind, is more nuclear. Japan has deep technical expertise. Other than the unprocessed uranium itself, the nuclear fuel cycle and supply chain have been fully indigenized. Toshiba, Hitachi, and Mitsubishi all have experience designing and building large nuclear reactors. Japan is one of the few nations in the world with facilities capable of fabricating steel pressure vessels for large reactors.

On the flip side, even before the Fukushima accident, Japan had already largely put its formidable nuclear energy capabilities on ice. Its bubble economy burst in the early 1990s, substantially slowing both economic and electricity demand growth. The post-bubble economy also coincided with a sustained period of cheap fossil fuels globally. Japan then shut down its entire nuclear fleet after Fukushima and, until recently, has only slowly restarted those reactors. It also implemented sweeping electricity market liberalization in the years that followed Fukushima, making the institutional conditions even more challenging for new nuclear.

Nonetheless, much of the technical and institutional capacity that would be necessary for a renewed nuclear push remains intact. Japan’s large regional utilities still control roughly 80% of the nation’s generation assets. Public opinion has rebounded since Fukushima. A majority of the Japanese public now supports nuclear energy.

In the face of increasingly dominant competition from China’s industrially planned manufacturing behemoth, Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s administration has taken steps to relax rules designed to discourage the old keiretsu system of interlocking shareholders and investments between large industrial firms. This makes it much more plausible that large utilities, national champion industrial firms like Mitsubishi and Toshiba, component suppliers like Japan Steel, and METI might work together to start building new reactors again.

I have been a very vocal advocate of small next-generation reactors and skeptic of large reactors in the context of the US institutional environment and political economy. The utility sector is too decentralized and liberalized. The capacity to cost effectively build large reactors, and large public works projects more generally, has atrophied. The nation is blessed with an abundance of energy resource endowments, from coal, oil, and gas to wind and solar to geothermal resources. Given these realities, the prospects for dedicating sufficient public resources to building large reactors in multiples significant enough to get good at doing it are not good.

Japan, by contrast, is entirely different. Its domestic energy resource options are practically non-existent. In contrast to its financialized US counterparts such as Westinghouse and GE, its legacy industrial consortiums still make stuff and build things. Its utilities are large and well capitalized. Large reactors make a lot of sense for Japan.

For these reasons, nuclear energy is Japan’s way out of the Hobson’s choice between continuing its heavy dependence on imported fossil fuels and mortgaging its energy future to China. It won’t get Japan to net zero emissions over the next several decades but it will assure that the nation is able to continue to decarbonize far into the future without bankrupting its economy or compromising its national security.

The choices faced by Japan are arguably more extreme than most. But as goes Japan, so goes the world. It is among the most modernized and electrified places on the planet. You would be hard pressed to find any nation that has stronger economic and geopolitical incentives to kick the fossil fuel habit. It has no powerful domestic fossil fuel industry determined to foil efforts to decarbonize in the national and public interest. And yet, it has had limited success doing so.

Nuclear energy is not a silver bullet for Japan or anywhere else. But it is a very critical energy technology for the future of the global energy system. In a decarbonized and energy abundant future, nuclear and solar will have to do the heavy lifting. Other primary energy sources and carriers, including storage, wind, and geothermal can play important roles. What Japan shows, though, is that without nuclear, that future will likely be extremely difficult to realize.

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In the first thing I ever wrote about effective altruism, in 2022, I took issue with the philosophy’s ecocentrism. This is a premise, I argued, that EA shares with conventional environmentalism: the notion that humans are just one of many morally comparable species in the known universe.

I think there’s much to admire about EA’s emphasis on animal welfare, but it’s often dependent on positing this “ecocentric utilitarianism” that I find neither morally nor politically convincing. By contrast, I argued that ecomodernism’s anthropocentric deontology is just as capable of generating ethical duties over the lives of animals, and it does so by recognizing, not denying, humans’ unique characteristics as a species. We’re indisputably much more sentient, smarter, and more physically capable than any other known species. We make the rules. We can choose to treat animals better, or worse, or indeed to go full Jain—but even if we treat animals like they’re humans, it’s a human choice whether or not to do so.

So it was a bit surprising to see these questions about EA and anthropocentrism surface again, not most prominently in debates about animal welfare, but about robots.

Since I wrote that essay, the discursive gestalt about EA has shifted distinctively from bed nets and factory farms to artificial intelligence. There are all sorts of contingent reasons for this, but it mainly comes down to the EA community taking a special interest in existential risks, and then deciding that the only way to confront the x-risk of AI specifically would be to create the AI-governing institutions that became the hyperscaling megacorporations OpenAI, Anthropic, and so on. In just the few years since EA became a widely understood ideology, artificial intelligence has simply become a bigger deal than public health interventions in poor countries or animal welfare regulations.

And in that sense, it’s not actually surprising that the more prominent debate is not whether humans are special compared to other forms of animal life, but whether we’re special compared to forms of machine life.

Which brings me to the Pope.

This month, the Vatican published Magnifica humanitas, Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical on artificial intelligence. The 40,000-word document does many things, but its principal argument is over the enduring specialness of the human species.

And whatever one thinks about AI regulation or the nature of the Divine, this strikes me as an important shift in the broader conversations about effective altruism, environmentalism, and beyond. Though they feel all sorts of ways about it, EA seems to grapple very seriously with the human condition. Environmentalism, on the other hand, is dismissive, taking for granted that humans are merely upright apes. And it’s in EA’s and environmentalism’s respective reactions to Catholic doctrine, of all things, that this contrast becomes particularly stark.

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The Era of the Climate Pope Is Over

When the prior Pontiff, Pope Francis, published his famous climate encyclical Laudato si’ in 2015, my colleagues were quick to criticize it.

Francis, after all, had explicitly argued that “the Bible has no place for a tyrannical anthropocentrism unconcerned for other creatures.” This amounted to an outright rejection of humanity’s special use of technology to steward the natural world that both Christians and ecomodernists should be able to get on board with. “While the Pope bemoans the burning of coal, oil and gas,” wrote Ted Nordhaus, Mark Lynas, and Michael Shellenberger, “he does so without recognizing that increasing energy consumption in developing countries is a precondition for poverty reduction.”

Ecomodernism was a young idea at the time—the Manifesto was less than a year old—and I was a young Breakthrough analyst. So as luck would have it, it fell to my mom to offer a moderate correction to my fellow ecomodernists.

My mother, Sally Vance-Trembath, is an academic theologian at Santa Clara University, with an expertise in the modernization of the Roman Catholic Church. So she read Laudato si’ a bit differently. In an essay that Ted edited and published in the Breakthrough Journal, Mom argued that, far from representing the same anti-modern ecological politics embraced by environmental thinkers from Murray Bookchin to Bill McKibben, Francis was actually a distinctly modern pope.

As she wrote, the climate encyclical “can only be understood in the context of Francis’s broader effort to drag the Church, once and for all, out of its feudal traditions, authoritarian hierarchy, and hostility toward the modern world.” Nevertheless, she agreed that Laudato si’ sometimes went too far in its negative characterizations of both technology and human consumption. The encyclical, Mom argued, “associates human technology and modernization with our overly-physicalized, selfish human ‘animal’ nature rather than placing modernity and technological activities on the same spectrum as all human acts.”

In retrospect, this dispute was somewhat orthogonal to the way the encyclical was received by climate hawks.

As was the case on other social issues, progressives saw the Pope’s views on climate change mainly as a vector through which to transmit modern, secular values to the Church’s billion-plus members around the world. The expectation was that the encyclical would create more moral urgency to address the climate crisis and mobilize Catholics to join the climate movement. As Naomi Klein put it in her dispatches from the Vatican at the time, if Francis’s efforts to change the Church were successful, “we might just stand a chance of tackling climate change.”

“There is no voice more important in the world than Pope Francis in the struggle for justice and the fight against climate change,” said the economist Jeffrey Sachs. “We really need to give Pope Francis all of the support because he is unique in the world in his capacity to reach the entire world.”

In these tellings, Francis’s efforts were intended not so much to reconcile the Church with modernity, but to override religious belief with a modern secular ecocentrism, all in the name of mobilizing global climate action. As Klein lamented, “Replacing a maternal Earth with a Father God, and draining the natural world of its sacred power, were what stamping out paganism and animism were all about.” Francis seemed to offer secular progressives a chance to reverse this, to restore the natural order, literally and figuratively.

The rest is history. Laudato si’ preceded the Paris Climate Agreement, Western elites spent the better part of a decade celebrating the unstoppable force of the climate movement, and then the era of the climate hawk—and the Climate Pope—came to an abrupt end.

In more recent years, concern about climate change has waned, concern about AI has skyrocketed, and, perhaps not coincidentally, religiosity and spirituality have rebounded. Secular progressives’ attempts to displace ancient anthropocentric theology with ecocentric climate scientism failed. Something new is happening now.

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Magnifica Anthropocene

In the final years of his life, Pope Francis offered his own reflections on the dawn of the AI era. “Technology,” he said in 2024, “is a sign of our orientation towards the future.” He likened the double-edged nature of AI to knives that can carve or cut, and to fusion energy, “which could be used to produce clean, renewable energy or to reduce our planet to a pile of ashes.” (It turns out Pope Francis was a nuclear bro.) Above all, Francis urged, AI must remain in human hands.

This was, for what it’s worth, something of an evolution in the way Francis talked about technology compared to Laudato si’, one that Pope Leo XIV would build upon in Magnifica humanitas.

To Leo, humanity’s use of technology is elemental to our existence. “Technology should not in itself be regarded as a force opposed to the human person,” he writes. “On the contrary, it is rooted in our history from the beginning, as ‘a profoundly human reality linked to the autonomy and freedom of the human being.’”

The salient issue, then, is not the Church’s understanding of technology, but its understanding of the human person. The special risk Leo sees in AI technology is in its tendencies towards “dehumanization,” “transhumanism,” and “posthumanism.”

And here Leo gets explicit. “Posthumanism, especially in its more radical forms, goes further: it challenges anthropocentrism.” Instead, Leo urges the Church’s followers to “cultivate what Pope Francis called a ‘situated anthropocentrism’...which recognizes the human being as a creature embedded in a network of relationships with other living beings and with all of creation.”

Despite the seeming contradictions across various encyclicals and addresses, the Church’s anthropocentrism really should not surprise anyone. “The human being,” Pope Leo reminds his erstwhile secular fans, is “created in the image of the Triune God.”

And this brings me back to my original argument about effective altruism. Because as best as I can tell, the EAs are grappling with their ecocentrism in a way that environmentalists are not.

Environmentalists, after all, have been clear that, to them, the “Good Anthropocene” is a contradiction in terms. In the environmentalist ethos, humans are not special, and certainly not personal incarnations of the Divine. We are, at best, simply one among many species, no more worthy of moral weight than an ant or a cow. At worst, we’re a plague, unique only inasmuch as the unique physical threats we pose to the rest of the natural world. This is the thinking behind all major environmentalist frameworks, like the preference for naturally harvested ecological flows of energy instead of artificially harvested synthetic stocks, and the “Planetary Boundaries” within which humanity must remain. Despite some progress made among environmentalists over population control and nuclear energy, this remains their overarching moral understanding of creation, even as artificial intelligence threatens to disrupt whatever “natural order” environmentalists perceive in the first place.

EAs, though, seem to be going through a surprising reckoning with their own humanity and, indeed, with the whole of creation.

As Avital Balwit, a longtime intellectual influence in EA spaces and now a chief of staff at Anthropic, described it in a recent essay for The Free Press, “We of the atom and the pixel, whose world is of physical laws and ancient natural origin, do seem to sense that missing element.” By this Balwit is referring to the trend of AI researchers who are continually bewildered by the machines and software they are building day in and day out. She writes about her own urge to pray at Grace Cathedral, the particularly gothic Episcopal Church in San Francisco, where many of her fellow AI professionals are working through similar surprising inclinations. “They are not building God because they miss Him,” she writes. “They are building something that has brought them, unexpectedly, to the edge of where He would be.”

That a machine intelligence would prompt its engineers to confront their own humanity is not, upon reflection, that surprising. What this ecomodernist still does find surprising, though, is that the effective altruists come to this reckoning much more readily than environmentalists have, despite the arguably much starker distinctions between, on the one hand, a human and a horse, and on the other hand, a human mind and a large language model.

Humanity’s special place in the known universe has been obvious in a first-order kind of way as long as we’ve been human. We engineer fire, invent advanced tools and systems of social organization, we have speech and abstract thought, we have recorded history and cultural transmission, and we can even, it seems, create new forms of intelligence. And yet environmentalism as a philosophy denies that we are distinct.

AI engineers and EA researchers, I would argue, are contending with a much more bedeviling set of questions, over what human intelligence even is, and how readily machine intelligence might replace us. These are much newer and harder questions than those about humanity’s place in the animal kingdom. But even so, the EAs seem much more interested in grappling with our place in the universe.

“We find structures that mirror results from human neuroscience,” Anthropic’s Chris Olah said in a response to Magnifica humanitas. “We find evidence of introspection. We find internal states that functionally mirror joy, satisfaction, fear, grief and unease. I don’t know what that means, but I think it warrants ongoing discernment.”

So while the AI communities’ warm reception to Leo’s AI encyclical might seem reminiscent of climate hawks’ enthusiasm for Francis’s climate encyclical, I find the former much more sincere and the latter much more cynical. Though EAs and AI thinkers like Balwit and Olah don’t necessarily endorse the entirety of Pope Leo’s particularly Catholic version of it, they take his anthropocentrism seriously. It’s a stark contrast to how many environmentalists perceived Laudato si’: as an opportunity to revive “paganism and animism,” in Naomi Klein’s words.

Which makes me wonder: Who, at the end of the day, is really trying to replace humanity?

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p.s. Yes, I’m aware Magnifica Anthropocene combines Latin with Greek.

Bulldozers are already pushing dirt, welders are connecting steel reinforcing bars, concrete mixers are spinning, electricity customers are signing mega-deals for power from reactors for decades into the future, and billions of dollars of construction is already underway for a nuclear resurgence. It looks a bit like a replay of the 1970s.

But it isn’t. People understand that a nuclear resurgence means new reactors, but that doesn’t describe how radically different this round will be.

In the construction campaign that built the fleet we have now, there were essentially two choices: buy a reactor that boils water, or one that heats it without boiling. Make it as big as you can. And the choices were made by traditional utilities.

Now a new cast of players is poised to be builders and owners, almost any size is possible, and the medium being heated may not be water.

The who, what, where, when, how and even the why of nuclear have changed. Here is a rundown of the key elements of a nuclear resurgence.

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Who

Anybody who wants to.

There is a large pool of reactor developers, utilities, hyperscalers, end users, and more all looking to build new nuclear. Some well known players include Westinghouse, NuScale, GE Vernova, Holtec International, and many, many more; all with different business models, customers, and deployment strategies.

The current fleet was all built by utilities, mostly investor-owned but some public power agencies. They contracted with reactor suppliers and with architect-engineers who actually put the pieces together. But with the possible exception of the Tennessee Valley Authority, the utilities have been slow to embrace a new round of reactors, advanced or otherwise. There will be a broader set of customers, developers, and owners than in the last nuclear buildout. Four likely alternative business models are emerging:

Build a Reactor for a Particular User

Dow is working with a start-up, X-energy, on a high temperature gas reactor that will replace a steam production plant that serves a Dow chemical factory in Seadrift, Texas. Dow has financial resources and extensive construction experience, complementing X-energy, which has the engineering and design smarts. The plan is for a quartet of small reactors, each producing about 80 megawatts of electricity, or 200 megawatts of thermal energy.

Amazon also wants electricity. It has financial resources but isn’t known for its expertise in industrial construction. So Amazon is investing in X-energy, allowing X-energy to build a cluster of reactors that will be run by a nuclear utility, Energy Northwest. Google also wants clean energy and is following a slightly more hands-off strategy: it has committed to buying electricity from a fleet of reactors to be built by Kairos Power. Google will not be the builder, but will be essential to the project.

Something like that business model might work for the biggest reactors too. Fermi America, another start-up, wants to build a gigantic data farm in Amarillo, Texas, with four Westinghouse AP1000 reactors. That would make it a kind of energy park, of a sort not seen since the early 1800s, when companies in the New England hills built dams that provided mechanical power, and later electricity, to clusters of factories.

Build, Own, Operate

Oklo, a Silicon Valley start-up, plans to build, own and operate its small reactors around the country, serving specific customers: a data center or an industrial user, not the grid as a whole. The Aurora Powerhouse reactor would provide electricity and, if the market wants it, industrial heat. The departure from the current business model is substantial. Rather than a utility ordering the parts, hiring a contractor and building its plant, this would represent a customer hiring a contractor to provide a service. It’s as if Frigidaire not only built your refrigerator/freezer, but installed it in your kitchen, owned it, and billed you for keeping your beer cold.

NuScale Power has a design, already licensed by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, that uses fuel and ordinary water much the way that present-day pressurized water reactors like those built by Westinghouse do. But they are only one-fifteenth the size of a full-scale pressurized water reactor, which allows vastly simplified safety systems. NuScale is following yet another new business model: it has a partner, ENTRA1 Energy, that is supposed to build, own and operate the NuScale reactors.

Build A Reactor and Sell It to a Utility.

TerraPower, a start-up backed by Bill Gates and other tech moguls, is building the Natrium reactor in Kemmerer, Wyoming, using another new business model. Nearly all utility-owned power plants were made from parts ordered from a supplier, and built on a utility-owned site by contractors working for the utility. But utilities are nervous about building a first-of-a-kind reactor because they are not sure what it will cost or when it will be done. TerraPower plans to sell Natrium to PacifiCorp when the plant is finished, although the price has not been publicly disclosed.

Build A Reactor and Sell It to a Non-Traditional user

Several companies are working on micro-reactors, some of which produce only a megawatt or two, for small towns that are off the grid, remote mining operations, or enterprises with a strong need for reliable, in-house generation. These are replacements for diesel generators, which are generally reliable if you can be assured of a supply of diesel.

President Trump’s executive orders of May 23, 2025 called for such a reactor at a domestic military base by Sept. 30, 2028. The military wants a reactor that can be brought in by truck or cargo plane, set up in a day or two, and moved again after it’s been shut down for a few days. Civilian users may not need the “transportable” model.

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What

The reactors will split atoms to make heat. But they will be configured differently than the ones running now. And the variations among the new reactors will be larger than those in the current fleet.

With the promise of investment money from Japan, and interest from some utilities and non-utilities, it seems likely that some Westinghouse AP1000 reactors will be built. In gross outline, these resemble the large light-water reactors operating today, but they have various refinements intended to make them passively safe, relying on gravity and natural heat dissipation in place of many of the pumps, valves and pipes needed in current designs.

Westinghouse has also designed an SMR, the AP300, but it has not attracted much commercial interest so far. That, too, could be built.

In addition to the Natrium and X-energy reactors, described above, Kairos Power is building a series of test reactors that will use a fuel that is highly resistant to heat, pebble-type fuel, in a coolant that is also highly resistant to heat, a mix of two salts, lithium fluoride and beryllium fluoride. The reactors will run at very high temperatures but low pressures.

There are other possible entrants; for example, Holtec International, which has extensive experience building dry casks for fuel storage, and some nuclear power plant components, has a design for a small modular reactor, and has at least two sites where it might build. These will be about one quarter the size of the biggest reactors today.

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Where

There are four particular sites where reactors are likely to be built soon, and some clues as to what regions will follow.

Kemmerer, Wyoming, Seadrift, Texas, Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and the Idaho National Laboratory are the four sites with significant movement. The respective developers are Terrapower, X-energy, Kairos Power, and Oklo.

TerraPower’s Natrium plant in Kemmerer, Wyoming has received its construction permit from the NRC and begun work. X-energy recently received its Environmental Assessment from the NRC, with only a final safety review left before issuing a construction permit. Kairos Power is constructing both its test reactors in East Tennessee at a former nuclear weapons site, and Oklo has broken ground at the Idaho National Laboratory.

Market structures provide many clues as to where more reactors may find a home. Generically speaking, no company is likely to risk building a reactor as a “merchant plant,” one that makes its money by selling its output and its capacity in a competitive market, until the cost and schedule of reactors is established. So the early reactors are likely to be in traditionally-regulated regions where decisions are made by public service commissions, not “deregulated” regions where short-term market considerations hold sway. That means the southeastern United States, and the West. Reactors built to be connected to particular customers, and not the grid as a whole, could be built in other places.

Across our northern border, Ontario Power Generation is building a GE-Hitachi BWRX, a 300 megawatt SMR, on the shore of Lake Ontario. The TVA says it will build one at the Clinch River site, in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.

Governor Kathy Hochul of New York has ordered her state’s Power Authority to develop plans for 1,000 megawatts of new generation, leaving the technology and business model to be decided later.

And there are scores of places where coal plants are retiring. These have grid connections, cooling water, rail and road access for delivering components, and, in many cases, powerplant work forces that need new jobs. There are also scores of places that are highly dependent on reliable electricity, and would pay a premium for micro-reactors to replace diesel generators.

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When

When Congress approved the Advanced Reactor Demonstration Program, in 2020, the reactors were supposed to be built in five to seven years, but among the difficulties was getting the Energy Department to pick which projects to back.

President Trump’s executive orders demand that the Department of Energy get at least three advanced reactors running by July 4, 2026. That schedule was very ambitious when it was announced in May, 2025. But the goal is “initial criticality,” or first chain reaction, not full operation, and not commercial reactors.

Of those with significant movement, the Dow/X-energy plant is supposed to start construction in 2027 and be finished by 2030. TerraPower has said that it, too, would be finished in 2030. Oklo says that its first small reactor will be running by late 2027 or early 2028, but it is at an earlier stage of licensing. But all are first-of-a-kind projects, and thus at risk of delays.

Most cite the early to mid 2030’s as a good target for when the first new nuclear projects will be up and running.

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Why

The reactors running today were built by companies that thought they would be more economical than coal or oil, or at least a good way to hedge the bet.

For the last few years, the motivation for new nuclear reactors has been reducing greenhouse gases. That is still the case for some projects, but there is a new political and industrial-policy dimension: advanced nuclear now appeals to policymakers focused on energy security, domestic manufacturing, technological leadership, and rising electricity demand. .

There is also a growing realization that intermittent renewables can make limited contributions, because they have high associated costs and are difficult to integrate.

Two other factors are prominent. One is that although overall electricity demand has not changed radically in recent years, there are predictions, widely believed, that data farms will require enormous amounts of electricity in the years to come. This is true, although the extent is uncertain. And the other is a traditional goal of energy planners: diversity in the generation mix, so that price spikes or supply problems for fossil fuels, droughts in water or wind, or other unusual but anticipated events, will not cripple their systems.

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How

Successful buildout of the next wave of nuclear reactors will rely on a greater emphasis on available parts, an accelerated regulatory structure including cooperation with regulators in other countries, a global supply chain (Korea, Japan), and reduced need for heavy forgings.

GE-Hitachi, for example, is offering a 300 megawatt small modular reactor in which it boasts that 90 percent of the parts are already in use in the industry. NuScale stresses that the fuel it uses is nearly identical to what Westinghouse already makes for pressurized water reactors. And NuScale has attracted a group of suppliers that have also invested in the company, giving them a greater stake in its success.

NuScale and other SMR makers stress that much of the work on their models can be done in a factory. The NuScale module, for example, comprises three factory-built parts.

Factory fabrication offers promise in theory but it takes skill to make it work. Georgia Power discovered when it built Vogtle 3 and 4, which are AP1000 units, that the company subcontracted to pre-fabricate major modules wasn’t familiar with nuclear quality control requirements. The parts came late and without the required paperwork.

And some advanced reactors may be easier to build than the water-based models now in service. Kairos Power is developing a commercial version of a molten salt reactor, which operates at near atmospheric pressure. For a test reactor, it built its own reactor vessel, something that legacy reactor manufacturers could not do because the vessel has to withstand more than 1,000 pounds of pressure per square inch, and in some models more than 2,000 pounds.

Buildout in the U.S. will also require a NRC that has been successfully reformed to match its updated mission statement. In January 2025, the NRC approved the updated mission statement provided by the ADVANCE Act, which pressed the Commission to include the societal benefits of nuclear technology as part of its licensing process. While this is a significant step forward, far more reform is needed for the NRC to live up to its improved mission statement. Currently there is bipartisan pressure on the Commission to modernize and license new nuclear reactors much more promptly.

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Will The Nuclear Resurgence Be Successful?

Success will be measured along a spectrum. Some new reactors will be built, and if all goes well, they will be a model for scores of others to follow. But that is far from certain.

There are several ways for the nuclear buildout to go wrong. Construction of first-of-a-kind models could take so long and be so far over budget that nobody wants to go next. Few companies could survive the kind of cost overruns that Southern Company saw on its Vogtle project near Augusta, Georgia.

In the past, some reactor concepts have reached the prototype stage but simply not worked very well, and commercial pressures have led to the ideas being junked in lieu of tried-and-true technology. That kind of failure is an option.

A reactor somewhere could suffer a mishap that scares the public. The Three Mile Island unit 2 accident of March 1979, which is beyond the memory of most people, did just that. In round numbers, it turned a billion-dollar reactor into a billion-dollar liability, but it did not hurt any member of the public or reactor staff. But it contributed to a lull in reactor orders, because of public fear and because it triggered new NRC requirements. That particular accident won’t happen again. It is not likely that some other kind of accident will occur, but it is not impossible.

What may matter more is public perception. Three Mile Island did not hurt human health, although opponents have struggled for years to assert that it did. When it comes to nuclear energy, every event is prone to becoming a Rorschach test, with an interpretation that depends more on the observer than the observed.

Another factor, perhaps more likely, is that the demand for electricity might not expand as expected. Artificial Intelligence and data centers might not turn out to be quite as huge as some people expected. Shocks in the fossil fuel market or other causes could lead to a recession that depresses electric demand. Another pandemic could do the same.

And almost certainly, there are more reactor models in development than the market will sustain.

And there is a risk from competition. A nuclear resurgence was brewing around 2010, because natural gas was at $16 a million BTU, and suddenly nuclear looked cheap. But along came fracking and the cost of gas collapsed, along with the price of energy on the wholesale grid. The effect was so severe that it killed several reactors.

There are other technologies that could derail a buildout. Lithium-ion batteries could be made obsolete by something better, just as lithium replaced nickel metal hydride, which replaced nickel cadmium. Or someone could invent an effective way to capture carbon from fossil fuel burning.

None of these developments is likely enough to delay a full-court press towards advanced nuclear energy. But when Yogi Berra said that it was tough to make predictions, especially about the future, he might well have been referring to energy technology.

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Note from the editors: We’re making a few changes at The Ecomodernist. To date, we’ve kept each and every piece free to all readers. Starting soon, we’ve decided to put some of our content behind a paywall while lowering our monthly and annual subscription fees by half.

Most of the paywalled content will be what we are calling “Breakthrough Deep Dives.” These pieces will take on more technical topics, and provide readers with background context, and clear arguments written by Breakthrough Institute analysts. We will also be publishing more monthly paid-only content such as reading lists, staff profiles, and more.

The Ecomodernist remains committed to publishing novel analyses that help to construct a better environmental politics for the 21st Century. Paywalling some of our content can help support our work and take advantage of Substack’s promotional algorithm.

***

On May 1, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) released a proposed new licensing framework—Part 57—for microreactors and other designs with very low potential offsite consequences.

The proposed rule closely follows the release of the final Part 53 rule that establishes a technology-inclusive licensing framework aligned with advanced reactor technology and modern risk analysis. Part 53 represents a transition away from purely deterministic regulation—such as earlier licensing frameworks like Part 50 and 52 that regulated the construction of large reactors—but is not a risk-informed, performance-based approach.

Part 57 differs from existing NRC rules because it works as a pathway for reactors that first satisfy restrictive entry criteria. The rule is built around the idea that some reactors are small enough, simple enough, and low-consequence enough that applying the licensing structure developed for large commercial power reactors may add cost and delay without adding commensurate safety value.

But Part 57 would not be a universal shortcut for new reactors. Proposed reactors must clear two gates before accessing streamlined licensing. First, applicants must show, with reasonable assurance, that an individual in the unrestricted area following an accident would not receive more than 1 rem total effective dose equivalent for the duration of the accident. Second, the reactor must have a total inventory of thorium, uranium, and plutonium—i.e. nuclear fuel—less than 10 metric tons.

The proposed rule could represent the first attempt by the NRC to create a licensing framework proportional to the safety risk of a proposed reactor. Proportional regulation is the right goal for the NRC, but Part 57 can only achieve that if the Commission can justify its entry criteria, explain its operational assumptions, and make its framework internally coherent.

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Read more

Note from the editors: We’re making a few changes at The Ecomodernist. To date, we’ve kept each and every piece free to all readers. Starting soon, we’ve decided to put some of our content behind a paywall while lowering our monthly and annual subscription fees by half.

Most of the paywalled content will be what we are calling “Breakthrough Deep Dives.” These pieces will take on more technical topics, and provide readers with background context, and clear arguments written by Breakthrough Institute analysts. We will also be publishing more monthly paid-only content such as reading lists, staff profiles, and more.

The Ecomodernist remains committed to publishing novel analyses that help to construct a better environmental politics for the 21st Century. Paywalling some of our content can help support our work and take advantage of Substack’s promotional algorithm.

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Heavy industry—with CAPEX averaging in the hundreds of millions of dollars and decades-long iteration cycles—carries a kind of technological inertia, making it highly resistant to the disruptive innovation often seen in consumer goods and software. For many chemical and metallurgical commodities, the displacement of an incumbent production process is unprecedented in modern history. Every aluminum smelter in the world runs on the Hall-Héroult process, and we depend on the Haber-Bosch process to create our global supply of ammonia despite the two processes being invented in 1886 and 1913, respectively.

Instead, the majority of industrial innovations improve efficiency at the margins. Installing a new tray type in a distillation column or controlling a molten salt electrolysis cell differently might make a system 0.1% more efficient but still save hundreds of thousands of dollars annually. Relatively marginal innovations, accumulated over time, are what let today’s aluminum smelters use around 60% less energy per kg than in the early 1900s and modern Haber–Bosch plants boast about 4 times higher energy efficiency than plants in 1930.

But incremental innovation can only take us so far. Constrained by the laws of thermodynamics, efficiency gains in the coming decades could begin to decrease asymptotically as industrial processes approach their theoretical maximum efficiencies.

Apparent logarithmic behavior of aluminum smelting electricity intensity over time. Data from The Metallurgical Society and the International Aluminum Institute.

Countries seeking to support disruptive innovation to meet goals of decarbonization, reindustrialization, and economic growth will have to overcome the high barriers to industrial innovation. Success may require a new policy playbook that addresses the unique economic and technical risks for large industrial projects. Such policy thinking will benefit from a closer look at the few rare instances wherein a new industrial process has undergone mass adoption. Two such cases recently occurred in the nickel industry, turning Indonesia into the nickel capital of the world. The histories of these processes suggest that risk-tolerant capital, regulatory clarity, and hands-on technical experience may be three foundational pillars of industrial innovation that underpin invention, scaling, and commercialization.

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How Did Indonesia Come to Lead the World in Nickel Processing?

In the last 20 years, Indonesia has undergone a meteoric rise up the nickel value chain. After trailing the Philippines as the largest exporter of nickel ores and concentrates in 2006, Indonesia increased its exports from 4.4 million tons to 58 million tons in 2013—a thirteenfold increase. By 2020, Indonesia’s exports of nickel ore had dropped to zero, but it had surpassed China in production of nickel intermediates, firmly becoming the global leader of midstream nickel products.

Exports of nickel ores and concentrates (HS2604) by the top 3 historical exporters, expressed as a percentage of global exports by mass.

Production of ferronickel and nickel pig iron in Indonesia and China—data from USGS Minerals Yearbooks, Table 12.

At the heart of Indonesia’s explosive growth are two commodities, nickel pig iron (NPI) and mixed nickel-cobalt hydroxide precipitate (MHP), both made from lower-grade nickel laterite ores that were seen as uneconomic under older processing routes. The NPI route undercut ferronickel as the dominant feedstock for stainless steel by offering a cheaper alternative that contains less nickel but, chemically, is still “good enough” for steelmakers (NPI is 4-15% Ni, while ferronickel is 20-40% Ni). Similarly, the high-pressure acid leaching (HPAL) process allows battery makers to purchase MHP and upgrade it into battery-grade chemicals on-site, a cheaper and more streamlined supply chain than separately buying battery-grade nickel and cobalt from third-party vendors.

NPI smelting and HPAL matured into disruptive innovations in modern-day Indonesia, but their journeys to commercialization happened elsewhere over the course of many decades. Indonesia’s experience therefore speaks most directly to the conditions needed for scaling and deployment, not to the separate challenge of inventing new industrial processes. To inform a truly holistic industrial strategy, one must instead zoom out and extract takeaways across a much broader temporal and geographic domain.

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When Nickel Pigs Fly: The Origins of Nickel Pig Iron

Meet Liu Guanghuo: a middle school dropout who quit his job at a Chinese state electricity bureau in 1984 to pursue his passion for metallurgy. Self-taught by metallurgy textbooks read in his spare time, Liu’s choice to abruptly change careers was inspired by a shiny pile of decades-old nickel ore; he told Bloomberg in 2014 he had always believed shiny things to be valuable. After over a decade of trial-and-error experimentation in a decades-old blast furnace (BF) left over from China’s Great Leap Forward, Liu succeeded in 1997 in upgrading low-grade laterites into NPI. He would hone and expand the BF NPI route over the coming years.

The timing was serendipitous. Liu took his technique to market by 2005-06, just in time to capitalize on skyrocketing stainless steel demand driven by China’s construction boom. His company, Huaguang Smelt Group, quickly broke into China’s top 100 most profitable companies.

Nickel prices skyrocketed in 2005-06, driven largely by China’s construction boom.

Liu took textbooks and a pile of ore that Albania traded to China in the 1950s and turned himself into a multi-millionaire. For a brief moment, it seemed that he would live out a quintessential Cinderella story. But Huaguang’s early success also teed it up for displacement.

Not only did Huaguang derisk the technical viability of laterite processing, but it also revealed a clear market for NPI and demonstrated to other potential entrants that production could earn a profit. Its dependence on the nickel bubble exposed it to depressed prices and weaker demand following the bubble’s pop in 2007 and during the 2008 financial crisis that followed. And the use of conventional blast furnaces constrained Huaguang’s ability to move down the cost curve and made its emissions-intensive facilities targets of growing environmental regulations. Liu had pioneered NPI, but his company wasn’t positioned well to produce it cheaply and at scale. Tsingshan, a Chinese metallurgy giant, was.

Tsingshan began exploring its own approach to laterite processing in 2006, having sensed that NPI had “become the mainstream process for producing nickel raw materials.” By 2008, Tsingshan had built an NPI production line that used rotary kiln electric furnaces (RKEFs) instead of blast furnaces and was fully integrated with downstream stainless steel production.

Unlike Huaguang, which produced NPI as a standalone intermediate to sell into the open market, Tsingshan approached NPI as an established stainless steel producer interested in expanding upstream. Most other firms, Huaguang included, would struggle to justify the high upfront costs and technological risks of constructing a new RKEF production line to pursue a potentially infeasible process. But Tsingshan had secure internal NPI demand, deep experience with RKEF technology, and a clear incentive to reduce its market exposure following the recent bubble pop and financial crisis. In this unique position, the cost-benefit analysis favored action.

The vertically integrated RKEF process would become more valuable as Indonesia began pushing to move up the nickel value chain. But Tsingshan didn’t initially plan to build a full mine-to-metal pipeline in Indonesia. When Indonesia’s 2009 Mining Law pressured foreign companies to process minerals locally, Tsingshan only announced plans for a laterite mine and nickel processing facility—no RKEF or steelmaking—in Morowali Province. Tsingshan continued operating its RKEF in China on imported Indonesian laterites. But this arrangement quickly proved inefficient. The low nickel content of laterites meant most of what Tsingshan paid to freight overseas was waste. This, in addition to the looming shadow of Indonesian export controls, the mine-to-metal nature of the RKEF stainless steel process, and Xi Jinping’s signing of a high-profile Memorandum of Understanding in 2013 to turn the Morowali site into a much larger industrial park, convinced Tsingshan to commit fully to building a future in Indonesia. $6 billion and 5 years of intense construction later, Tsingshan turned, in their words, a “barren island” that lacked “electricity, mobile communication signals, and even paved roads” into an industrial ecosystem complete with a port, airstrip, captive coal-fired power plants, coke plant, lime plant, acid plant, and even hotels, hospitals, and schools.

The story behind NPI is not a single, decisive moment of disruptive innovation. Rather, it was a series of deployment hurdles overcome by whoever was positioned best to tackle the challenge at hand. NPI’s first hurdle touches on a general principle: developing an industrial process requires working with industrial equipment large enough to reproduce the physics and operating problems of real, full-size production. Luckily, Liu had zero-cost access to a blast furnace, which he would use as a critical piece of research infrastructure to pioneer NPI smelting. Tsingshan would later run into the same hurdle for its integrated RKEF approach. Its success owes not to pre-existing research infrastructure but rather the confidence that building its own research infrastructure would pay for itself in the long-term.

After R&D, the primary challenge became scaling. Here, Huaguang’s and Tsingshan’s stories split. Tsingshan moved forward because it owned high-volume industrial assets and process experience; Huaguang lagged because it didn’t. Lastly, Indonesia provided a safe investment environment wherein scaling risk and cost were lowered.

Taken together, the NPI case points to a less romantic model of industrial innovation. New processes need ideas, but they also need large and expensive research infrastructure, accumulated process knowledge, a financial backer willing to absorb scale-up risk, and access to power, ports, transport, and labor. Liu created a technical and market opening, Tsingshan scaled it, and Indonesia gave it somewhere to commercialize.

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The Origins of High-Pressure Acid Leaching

High-pressure acid leaching (HPAL) for MHP production developed in fits and starts over 80 years.

The first experiments with HPAL were carried out during World War II by Freeport, a U.S. mining company interested in processing Cuban nickel ores. Industry documentation from 1960 describes HPAL as one of many techniques tested during the late 1930s and 1940s, but enough magnesium—which acts like a sponge for sulfuric acid—was in the ore that researchers abandoned HPAL for an ammonia-based approach.

Revived U.S. concern over nickel supply, sparked by the Korean War, gave HPAL new life. In 1950, Congress passed the Defense Production Act (DPA), which would be activated two years later to encourage exploration of new nickel mines. Freeport found that the laterites in Cuba’s Moa Bay had low enough magnesium content to potentially work with HPAL. Further benchtop trials confirmed this hypothesis, leading to the construction of an integrated pilot plant in Louisiana. In 1957, the DPA was activated once again for a first-of-a-kind HPAL plant in Moa Bay based on the pilot’s design. The deal included $100 million in upfront government funding and a five-year, $248 million offtake agreement—worth in total around $4.2 billion in 2026 dollars. But just one year after Moa Bay came online in 1959, Fidel Castro nationalized it along with every other foreign-owned industrial facility in Cuba.

Moa Bay continued operating after nationalization and still processes Cuban laterites today. But for decades, the Cuban embargo kept HPAL process knowledge largely outside Western industrial networks, confined to Cuban operators and occasional teams of Soviet technicians.

That changed after the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991. Cuba lost its main trade partner, and Moa Bay survived by entering a joint venture with a Canadian mining company and shipping mixed sulfide precipitate (MSP) to a refinery in Alberta. Over the following years, the arrangement showed global mining firms that HPAL could be commercially viable outside a Soviet-bloc trade system. It derisked HPAL’s market potential in much the same way that Huaguang later derisked NPI.

Other mining companies noticed, and in the late 1990s, three Australian projects—Murrin Murrin, Bulong, and Cawse—decided to try their hands at HPAL. All three failed badly across multiple dimensions. Amongst many other engineering oversights, developers failed to account for the high magnesium content of Australia’s laterites and fell victim to a limitation that HPAL’s original researchers identified up front. Magnesium consumes so much sulfuric acid that Bulong famously exhausted the entire available supply in Western Australia. Non-technical issues also added to the list of hardships. For example, the projects planned to sell nickel into open markets, which placed pressure on senior management to cut CAPEX by taking engineering shortcuts and rushing construction to get to market quickly. Of the three original HPAL projects in Australia, only Murrin Murrin remains active today. A fourth project, Ravensthorpe, was built years later with the benefit of hindsight, but still repeated many of the same mistakes.

Sumitomo Metal Mining, a large Japanese metallurgical company, took a different approach. It began feasibility work in 2000 on its Coral Bay plant in the Philippines with an arrangement for Sumitomo’s Niihama refinery in Japan to purchase all output. Freed from long-term market uncertainty, Sumitomo’s engineers could prioritize diligence and accuracy over meeting an arbitrary schedule. Sumitomo also took deliberate action to facilitate knowledge transfer, flying Filipino workers to Niihama before construction began, then using Coral Bay veterans as mentors for a second Philippine plant in Taganito. These actions contributed to outstanding results. Coral Bay and Taganito both operated at over 85% nameplate capacity after just one year; ramp-up for every other HPAL project built around the same time took twice as long or more, and most never even neared the same production levels. The sole exception is the Ramu HPAL plant in Papua New Guinea.

The Ramu plant was launched by an Australian mining company that realized around five years into development that it lacked the necessary capital to see the project through to completion. It chose to sell the majority of Ramu’s ownership to the Metallurgical Corporation of China (MCC), which partnered with three of China’s largest nickel and steel enterprises to finance the $2.1 billion plant and supervise its execution. Backing from this coalition introduced the patient capital and strong technical roots that Ramu needed to succeed.

The Chinese engineers who worked on Ramu learned the intricacies of HPAL and would carry that experience over to Indonesia in the exact way that Sumitomo’s engineers carried experience from Niihama to Coral Bay and then to Taganito. MCC led the technical work on two of the three Indonesian HPAL projects, Obi and QMB. The third project, HNC, was led by GEM, a global leader in battery recycling, and included partnerships with Tsingshan and CATL—the world’s largest manufacturer of EV batteries. All three Indonesian projects began with firm offtake agreements with downstream Chinese businesses. They also had the added advantage of tapping into pre-built infrastructure available in Indonesia’s burgeoning industrial parks, cutting out major line items like mine development and power. Under these favorable conditions, it took Obi, QMB, and HNC just three years to move from feasibility to commercial production. As of mid-2026, several HPAL facilities are projected to begin production by the end of the year, potentially doubling Indonesia’s MHP capacity.

HPAL’s checkered history validates that durable financing, revenue certainty, and real-world technical expertise are absolute essentials for a successful industrial project, innovative or not. Australian HPAL struggled because it lacked one or more of these variables, all of which were clearly identified for HPAL in Sumitomo and MCC/Indonesia. Even Moa Bay was thoroughly derisked via aggressive DPA support and built by Freeport, which leveraged its deep background in sulfur production. After decades of false starts and billions of dollars in cost overruns, Indonesia’s industrial parks worked exactly as planned, providing the substrate upon which HPAL commercialized.

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Can Other Countries Replicate Indonesia’s Success?

In some ways, Liu’s explosive entrepreneurial success story appears to contrast with HPAL’s long, winding path to mass deployment. One follows a self-taught metallurgist experimenting in an abandoned blast furnace; the other with international tech transfer and multi-billion-dollar firms. But the apparent contrast is only superficial. In both cases, disruptive innovation emerged only after alignment of the same key capabilities and many years of prior work.

Both NPI and HPAL were shaped by many forces not discussed here in detail: Chinese industrialization, geopolitics, regulatory compliance, and—of course—luck. But the central pattern is still clear. Long-term stability—whether through sustained market pulls or direct contracts with downstream processors—gave investors the confidence to make billion-dollar bets and gave engineers the time to overcome technical hurdles.

Indonesia’s contribution was narrow but invaluable—it did not fund Liu’s early experiments or Freeport’s pilot plant, nor did it create the technical workforces that Tsingshan and MCC brought into their projects. Rather, Indonesia created the conditions necessary for commercialization. Proactive announcement of export controls gave the clear signal that nickel processing would increasingly have to occur onshore, while industrial parks—made credible by a cooperative international initiative—reduced the cost and complexity of CAPEX-intensive projects. These conditions made Indonesia a natural destination for technologies developed elsewhere to grow, and fueled Indonesia’s successful capture of NPI and HPAL markets despite the country’s choice not to pursue a domestic R&D program of its own.

The NPI and HPAL case studies don’t imply that any country can replicate Indonesia’s industrial strategy, especially without comparable resource endowment, dependence on captive coal power, and favorable market timing. Still, Indonesia’s crucial role in the overall stories of these two nickel intermediates demonstrates how difficult disruptive industrial innovation will be if supportive industrial and investment ecosystems remain in short supply. Without empirical process knowledge, risk-tolerant capital, secure demand, abundant infrastructure, and credible political signals, even early-stage technologies with tremendous promise may continue to fall short of their commercial ambitions.

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In April, the White House proposed eliminating funding for one of the country’s oldest agricultural research programs. The Hatch program provides over $250 million annually to agricultural research centers at land-grant universities and colleges in every state, allocating it through block grants based on each state’s rural and farming population. The President’s budget proposal for 2027 says that universities use the so-called “formula funds” to conduct too many “pet projects” like research related to the needs of transgender people and environmental justice.

The White House is right that federally-funded research is misallocated. But the problem is not that agricultural research has been captured by “woke” ideology. It is that the federal government spends too little on research that helps farmers produce more food with less land, lower costs, and less environmental impact. The Trump administration’s proposed budget would only make that failure worse.

In real dollars, U.S. public spending on agricultural research has declined by a third since peaking in the early 2000s. What’s often overlooked is that the share of R&D spending that is focused on farm production is also declining. The state agricultural experiment stations (SAES) that use Hatch funds devoted about two-thirds to production-oriented research in the 1970s and 80s, but only about one-half today. Instead they’ve diversified the research that they support to include more work on nutrition, environmental protection, economics, and other topics.

Production-oriented research is arguably more important than ever. Farmers are under pressure from intensifying global competition, extreme weather and disease risks, and high and volatile input costs. Consider, for instance, that fertilizer and diesel prices have risen about 50% since January with the onset of the Iran War.

One of the few reliable ways to improve the economics of farming is to raise productivity: getting more output from each acre, animal, ton of fertilizer, or unit of feed. That kind of progress comes from better seeds, animal breeding, pesticides, equipment, and farm management, much of it rooted in agricultural research. Decades of studies have found that public agricultural R&D, much of it funded by the federal Department of Agriculture (USDA), has made large contributions to U.S. productivity growth, generating about $20 in social value for every $1 invested. With declining R&D funding, however, productivity growth in U.S. agriculture has slowed.

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Proposed White House Cuts Would Worsen Problem

The President’s budget calls not just for cutting Hatch funding, but for reducing overall funding for agricultural R&D grants. That will only make it more difficult to develop the innovations to revive productivity growth.

In theory, USDA could do more with less by reallocating funds to programs that best support farm production. USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins has signaled that this is her intention, announcing new R&D priorities explicitly focused on farmers—including “Increasing Profitability of Farmers and Ranchers.” Ironically, though, the programs the White House is pushing to cut are among those most focused on farm production.

USDA’s Hatch program provides funds that universities and agricultural experiment stations primarily use to support productivity-oriented research, with about 60% of funding going towards this area. For example, researchers at Utah State University have shown that grazing cattle on a mix of grasses and legumes can reduce the need to apply nitrogen fertilizer while maintaining animal performance, reducing costs for ranchers as well as environmental impacts. And Hatch-funded plant breeders in South Dakota have developed new oat varieties with higher yields and greater disease-resistance.

It may be easy to critique the program for awarding funds based on a rudimentary formula. There’s little reason to think that allocating funds to universities based on the rural and farmer population in their state would result in the best research. And surely this allocation could be improved. However, one of the only comparative assessments finds that this formula-based Hatch funding boosts farm productivity more than competitive funding. For one, it provides universities with the long-term certainty they need to make major investments, such as in field sites, new facilities, and long-term experiments. For another, university research leaders generally know better what research is relevant for farmers in their region, with its unique soil, climate, and pests, than the distant administrators of USDA’s competitive programs out in Washington, D.C. and Kansas City.

Competitive grant-making programs serve a critical role too and can be highly productivity-oriented.The Crop Protection and Pest Management Program (CPPM) allocates a larger share towards productivity-oriented research, nearly 70% in 2025 and even more in other years. The small competitive grant program, with about $20 million in funding in 2025, supports research and farmer education projects that address high-priority pest issues using integrated pest management—approaches that combine biological, targeted chemical, and other strategies. However this program too is on the chopping block for the White House. Their budget proposal for 2027 recommends zeroing out funding for this program.

In contrast, USDA’s Agriculture and Food Research Initiative (AFRI) awards a smaller share of its funds, about half, to productivity-oriented projects. To be clear, AFRI supports a wide range of valuable projects. Grants are awarded based on a selective review process: the program provided only 19% of funds that applicants requested in fiscal years 2022 and 2023. In fact, over 70% of applications recommended for funding by peer reviewers weren’t funded because of the program’s limited budget. And the program supports thousands of projects with potentially national significance including over $150 million in basic science.

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A Better Path

Cutting agricultural block grants for universities makes little sense if the goal is to align federally funded research with broader national goals like improving farmers’ productivity and international competitiveness. Eliminating Hatch funding may prevent universities from directing federal funds to a handful of politically charged projects. But it would come at a great cost to farmers and agricultural science.

Congress, for its part, has taken a more grounded view. It has largely maintained funding for the program for years, though it has not kept pace with inflation. Looking forward, House Republicans recently advanced a funding bill for 2027 that would largely maintain funding for both Hatch and AFRI, as well as most other research programs. Many in Congress recognize that Hatch’s formula funding, by directing funds toward projects informed by stakeholder needs, is complementary to the competitive merit-based grants that focus on nationally-determined priorities.

Washington should protect and, where appropriate, expand the parts of the federal agricultural research portfolio that are most clearly tied to farm productivity. This can and should be done while letting university-based researchers, in consultation with local agricultural stakeholders, determine what types of projects matter most for their region. Instead of trying to wrest control of research funds and centralize it under competitive programs, federal policymakers should incentivize more research that is productivity-oriented or otherwise aligned with national goals. For example, they could provide additional funding for Hatch funding recipients that commit more of their funds to crop protection, animal health, or other national priorities.

The administration is right to expect more from federally funded research. If Washington wants a more productive and more competitive farm sector, it should rebuild agricultural research around the problems farmers actually face. That means funding more of the work that helps farmers cut losses, control inputs, and raise output. It also means resisting the temptation to confuse ideological screening with serious reform. The decline in productivity-oriented research has largely gone unnoticed and unaddressed. The administration’s proposed cuts would make this reality worse.

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In the fall of 2023, John Halpin, a founder and the executive editor of The Liberal Patriot (TLP), got a heads up that one of his funders was unhappy with an essay they had published about climate change. “I was given an ultimatum by a donor not to write about climate policy and politics anymore, and not to publish anyone else on the subject as well, b/c they didn’t like our criticisms of Democratic orthodoxy and strategic failures on the issue.”

TLP’s writing on climate change was far from the most contentious issue about which the website challenged Democratic orthodoxy. Over nearly six years TLP published multiple columns per week arguing, for instance, that Democrats needed to embrace much stricter enforcement of the US border and deportation of immigrants living illegally in the United States; impose limits on medical interventions for trans-identified youth and prevent natal males from competing in girls’ and women’s organized sports; and push back on activist rhetoric describing Israel as an “apartheid state” committing “genocide” in Gaza.

Each of these issues is controversial within the Democratic Party and its political coalition. That was explicitly the point of TLP, to challenge the whole suite of progressive Democratic orthodoxies that have, in TLP’s telling, hobbled the ability of the party to reliably win electoral majorities and build a durable governing coalition. One need not endorse every position the authors at TLP took to understand that their project was a fundamentally tent-enlarging one, meant to expand the boundaries of politically and culturally permissible rhetoric and views within the party and across the center-left more broadly. No donor to TLP could conceivably have failed to understand the nature of the project.

But that dissent, in the eyes of at least some of TLPs funders, needed to end at the climate’s edge. Ruy Teixeira, Halpin’s cofounder and TLP’s most prolific and influential author, told us that across 6 years, 1500 posts, and a range of controversial subjects, TLP’s funding and editorial independence had been threatened exactly four times. Every one of those instances was in response to an article about climate change.

Teixeira and Halpin, to their credit, stood their ground. But it cost TLP and the effort to revitalize the Democratic Party. “I refused the ultimatum,” Halpin wrote. As a result, “we lost future funding and subsequently had to stop the growth of the organization.” TLP is no more because Teixeira and Halpin refused to bend the knee to Democratic climate catastrophism.

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Scientism, Not Wokeness

We, unfortunately, bear some responsibility for TLPs demise. Teixeira had published fairly regularly on the foibles of Democratic climate and clean energy politics and occasionally on the shaky underpinnings of a lot of what Democrats often said about the climate problem. And TLP published a policy memo we wrote in 2023 on energy politics in an age of war and inflation. But the proximate reason for the ultimatum from TLPs largest funder at the time was an essay by our then-colleague Patrick Brown about the arbitrary nature of the 1.5 Celsius atmospheric temperature target.

Kyle Saunders, in his post about what happened, notes that the objection was not that Patrick’s essay was factually wrong. The objection, rather, was that the analysis “may be technically correct, but it’s harmful.” Saunders uses this as a launch point for a broader exposition about the epistemic problems that have resulted over the last 50 years as various academic post-modernisms have leaked into the broader discourse and politics of the Left.

And this is surely true. But that also can’t really explain why the climate issue, uniquely, has become such a third rail for so many liberal reformers. Teixeira and colleagues could go after many other progressive and Democratic sacred cows with little consequence. Climate change was different.

Why? Because the climate enterprise on the Left is not so much about, as Saunders would have it, the transformation of once “reasonable intellectual cautions (be careful about objectivity, power shapes knowledge, perspectives matter) into philosophical dogma (objectivity is a myth, all knowledge is social construction).” Rather, the central claims of the climate movement (as opposed to climate science) are produced in the opposite fashion, by transforming dogma (nature bats last, the earth has exceeded its carrying capacity, harmonizing human societies with nature is necessary to assure human survival) into capital-S scientific truths (natural disasters are caused by global warming, the 1.5 degree target is a biophysical threshold, harmonizing the global energy system with natural energy flows is both feasible and imminent).

What distinguishes climate politics on the Left from most of the other issues that TLP took on, in other words, is not so much its post-modernism as its scientism. The immigration and trans debates are rife with conflicting scientific and empirical claims and counterclaims about the impact of immigration on wages or the causes and resolutions of gender dysphoria, for instance. But there is no analogue for the totalizing claims to scientific consensus and authority made by the climate movement.

Modern environmentalism has always been different from other issue-based movements in this way. While other advocates claimed to speak for given constituencies—workers, women, illegal immigrants, etc—environmentalists claim to, as the Lorax put it, speak for the trees. The conceit of the movement, from its origins in the scientists’ movement of the 1960s and Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, was that it spoke for the interests of the Earth as revealed by science.

Sometimes that science has been clear. The overuse of DDT harmed wild bird and insect populations. Combustion of fossil fuels is warming the planet. But more often, it is not. In fact more often, the scientific claims made by the environmental and climate movements are not well supported at all. The evidence that glyphosate causes cancer or gas stoves are responsible for an epidemic of childhood asthma or neonicotinoids are causing bee populations to collapse is, at best, dubious. Claims of planetary boundaries and planetary overshoot are little more than numerated ecotheological claims, not established biophysical thresholds. What holds these various claims together is not a consistent body of evidence, it is what the late Steve Rayner called a “myth of nature.” Nature is fragile, ergo, “a wide range of environmental threats—though apparently unrelated—are understood as manifestations of the same underlying vulnerability. The myth of nature thus provides a unifying rationale that renders diverse risks coherent and compelling.”

Saunders isn’t wrong about the post-modernism. It’s there too. The contemporary climate movement constantly toggles between the two, wrapping itself in the mantle of science in one moment, a priori rejecting all evidence that might challenge its claims as “climate denial” or “fossil fuel talking points” in the next. When environmental leaders and donors say that a particular set of facts is unhelpful—say that the 1.5 degree threshold is arbitrary or that humans are safer than they have ever been from the climate—what they mean is not just that it is unhelpful to their advocacy objectives but also that it is immaterial to their broader truth. Everybody knows that we are screwed absent sweeping changes, even if the particular scientific claims made by the movement are not accurate.

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Climatism’s March Through the Institutions and the Democratic Party

Beyond its deep scientism, the other thing that distinguishes the environmental community from other issue based constituencies on the Left is that it is far wealthier. The institutional environmental movement is a multi-billion dollar enterprise, perhaps the wealthiest social movement in the history of humankind. And the same people who write six and seven figure checks to name-brand environmental groups also frequently write similar checks to Democratic super PACs. They account for an outsized share of Democratic Party fundraising.

They also underwrite much of the scientific research that produces so much of the catastrophic science that supports the movement. Billions of philanthropic dollars have flowed into academic institutions to produce this knowledge. You will be hard pressed to find an elite university that doesn’t feature a well financed program, often created explicitly to produce catastrophic warming and impact studies and pollyanna estimates of a costless energy transition.

As Jessica Weinkle has documented for years, there is an internecine web of conflicted interests among climate philanthropies and NGOs, university departments, financial regulators, law firms, and even the National Academies of Science and other public science institutions. Environmental philanthropy has successfully captured much of the relevant infrastructure of scientific discovery and communication, in the belief that doing so would lead to public demand for climate action.

For these reasons, the climate issue is epistemically broken in a somewhat different way than what Saunders describes elsewhere on the Left. Environmentalism never explicitly challenges the notion that there is fixed knowledge that can be empirically established in the way that various other political post-modernisms do. It is up to something different. When TLP published work that was critical of claims that looming climate catastrophe required a swift transition to renewable energy technologies, it ran headlong into this self-reinforcing web of interests and institutions.

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Educated Class Warfare

TLP launched in 2020, at the height of the Great Awokening. Halpin and Teixeira were early to the effort to combat the illiberal overreach being advanced by the new heralds of progressive politics,from anti-colonialism to gender self-identification to corporate DEI to the slavish beatification of Greta Thunberg.

In the years since, many of the worst excesses of the Great Awokening have receded. We don’t hear much these days about white fragility or Ibram Kendi. Major exposes, such as Ryan Grim’s piece on the paralysing impact that these ideas had upon the ACLU and the Sierra Club (among others), demonstrated how destructive anti-racism had been within center-left institutions.

This liberal backlash extended, to varying degrees, to other classically woke concerns. The idea that, maybe, defunding the police was both bad politics and bad policy; that some safeguards needed to be placed on pharmaceutical gender affirmation for children; that unionizing workforces in nonprofit media and advocacy shouldn’t override the mission or issue focus of their organizations; and that multiple perspectives could obtain as to whether or not Israel’s actions after October 7 should be characterized as a “genocide,” became acceptable, if not fashionable.

The backlash to the climate catastrophism of that era, by contrast, has been far more muted. Liberal and progressive elites were far more insulated from post-pandemic inflation and energy and fuel price spikes that Biden era climate and energy spending seemingly corresponded with. Instead, the gentrified soul of the Democratic Party mostly experienced benefits, not discomfort and inconvenience, from climate policy—a cool, nicely subsidized electric vehicle, a home powered by solar panels and cooled with a heat pump, and delicious farm-to-table cuisine. For the Democratic Party’s educated and affluent base, the party’s climate agenda and priorities have been, at worst, benign and frequently exalting.

Teixeira, most especially, wrote volumes about why Democrats’ preoccupation with concerns of the educated classes had alienated working class and non-college educated voters and inveighed against the idea that Democrats could overcome cultural differences with those voters by focusing exclusively on economic populism. The economic issues, he argued, were easily washed away from one election cycle to the next by short term macroeconomic shifts. The cultural issues, by contrast, were evergreen and everpresent.

Climate change is, of course, the archetypal concern of the educated class, operating across both key political frequencies and, uniquely, alienating non-college educated and working class voters culturally and economically. So with the benefit of hindsight, it was in equal parts ironic and entirely predictable that liberal climate catastrophism would kill the Liberal Patriot. The Democratic Party is broken precisely because its educated base and powerful donor class have demanded that it move the climate issue to the center of its core political value proposition whether or not the average voter much cares about the problem.

This is why we have long argued that environmentalism is antithetical to both the Abundance movement and any left-of-center politics that aspires to inspire the loyalty of working class voters. As long as the environmental and climate movements hold outsized power and influence within those coalitions, neither movement is likely to realize its promise. The death of the Liberal Patriot is just the latest confirmation of that.

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The Western United States is facing another severe fire season. More than 12 million acres have burned so far in 2026, already surpassing the total cumulative area burnt by wildfires in all of 2024. According to the National Interagency Fire Center’s incident reports, the number of acres burned is up 231% compared to the previous 10-year average for the first three months of the year, with activity largely concentrated in the Southeast and Great Plains. In addition to area burned, the number of distinct wildfires is also above average, indicating increased ignition frequency.

Climatic conditions and a build up of hazardous fuels—combustible vegetation such as dry grass, dense brush, and fallen branches—are primary drivers of this year’s worrying start. But, Trump may be fanning the flames. The administration’s sweeping reorganization of U.S. land management agencies is making it harder to proactively prevent wildfires and jeopardizing better forest policy currently before Congress, together worsening future fire seasons.

Warmer winter temperatures and low snowpack across many Western basins are expected to intensify fire behavior later this spring and summer. This will exacerbate the consequences of decades of overly aggressive fire suppression that has contributed to fuel accumulation across U.S. forests, increasing the likelihood of severe fires under enabling weather conditions.

A growing body of evidence shows that proactive hazardous fuel reduction—including practices like mechanical thinning and prescribed fire (i.e. controlled burns)—can meaningfully reduce fire intensity, restore ecosystem resilience, and generate large net economic benefits. A 2024 meta-analysis of Western U.S. forests found that fuel treatment reduces wildfire severity by roughly 62–72% compared to untreated areas, with mechanical thinning combined with prescribed fire as the most effective strategy for preventing wildfires that destroy the majority of overstory trees. A 2025 study found that prescribed fire reduced the burn severity of wildfires by an average of 16% and lowered net smoke emissions by 14% during California’s 2020 fire season.

As the case for scaling fuel treatment becomes increasingly well established, the policy landscape is shifting. The Fix Our Forests Act (FOFA) is a sweeping legislative response to the nation’s escalating wildfire crisis. The bill aims to expedite active forest management by streamlining environmental review, limiting litigation delays, and accelerating hazardous fuel treatments on federal lands. FOFA passed the House with bipartisan support and advanced through the Senate Agriculture Committee in 2025. Trump’s reshuffling of the US Forest Service (USFS) and Department of Interior (DOI) threatens the passage of FOFA and would make implementation significantly harder.

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A Diminished and Declining Workforce

The USFS manages 193 million acres of national forests and grasslands. DOI manages wildfire response and fuel treatments across more than 500 million acres of public and tribal lands. In the first year of Trump’s second term, the USFS lost almost 6,000 employees through deferred resignations, early retirements, and buyouts amounting to a 16% reduction.

These workforce losses are already affecting the agencies’ ability to plan, permit, and execute fuel treatments at scale. In 2025, USFS saw a 38% reduction in wildfire risk reduction, including hazardous fuel treatments, compared to the four previous year average.

Even before the staffing changes in 2025, federal agencies have struggled to scale fuel treatments. In recent years, total treatment has averaged 5-7 million acres per year, far short of the 117 million acres identified as having high or very high wildfire risk potential. A 2024 Breakthrough Institute analysis found that California alone may require 3.9 million acres of treatment per year to most effectively reduce risk.

Additional workforce reductions are expected in 2026 that could further constrain capacity. Despite echoing some of the key goals articulated in FOFA around scaling up risk reduction, the White House’s recent budget proposal for FY2027 emphasizes organizational restructuring over permitting reform or workforce expansion. The central proposal is the transfer of fire-related employees from USFS to a new U.S. Wildland Fire Service within DOI. This is the biggest structural change proposed in the budget that could impact fuels management work on National Forest System lands.

Trump’s executive order on wildfire prevention and response in 2025 directed the consolidation of wildland fire programs across USDA and DOI. While the USFS move to DOI has not yet been initiated, DOI established a new U.S. Wildland Fire Service (USWFS) in January 2026. The new entity consolidates fire management operations of six preexisting DOI agencies including the National Park Service, Bureau of Indian Affairs, and the Bureau of Land Management. But it is unclear how the USWFS will balance suppression with mitigation work. The newly appointed Director of the U.S. Wildland Fire Service, Brian Fennessy emphasized that fire suppression is the service’s “primary mission,” igniting concerns that fuel reduction will not receive sufficient attention.

Critically, the administration has not spelled out how consolidating the nation’s wildfire efforts under one agency will increase the scale and pace of fuel treatments nationwide. The FY2027 USWFS budget proposes an increase in funding and staffing levels over FY2026 levels to support conducting fuels management activities but estimates the funding would support fuels management on 4.7 million acres. This is far less than the combined 6.6 million acres treated by USFS and DOI in FY2024, the most recent year for which complete data is available.

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Reorganization Risks Compounding Capacity Loss

Alongside internal changes at DOI, USDA initiated a sweeping reorganization of its own earlier this year. In March, the Forest Service announced it would be relocating its headquarters to Salt Lake City, Utah, closing regional offices, and restructuring to a state based leadership model. These changes risk further exacerbating operational challenges that Trump’s Forest Chief Tom Schultz himself said impacted the agency’s ability to meet annual goals for prescribed fire.

It’s too soon to know how relocation assignments for Forest Service employees will impact overall staffing levels. But, historical precedent suggests such relocations can significantly reduce staffing capacity. The Bureau of Land Management’s 2019 move to Colorado led to substantial attrition and was reversed in 2021. Similarly, relocation of USDA research agencies to Kansas City resulted in approximately 75% staff attrition and a sharp decline in productivity.

These risks extend beyond operations to politics. After passing with bipartisan votes in the House and moving out of committee in the Senate in 2025, FOFA now awaits a Senate vote before going to the President’s desk. FOFA’s bipartisan coalition may weaken as concerns grow—particularly among Senate Democrats—about staffing shortages and inadequate transparency surrounding the DOI reorganization.

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FOFA Implementation Challenges Loom

If Congress does manage to pass FOFA this year, a diminishing federal workforce also jeopardizes its implementation.

Expanding hazardous fuel treatments requires more than regulatory reform. Skilled staff are needed to execute environmental reviews, manage contractor relationships, conduct environmental consultations, and oversee treatment projects. The reorganizations at USDA and DOI will reshape implementation capacity precisely when states facing a severe wildfire season need it most.

FOFA could accelerate project approvals through a range of proposals, including expanded categorical exclusions and limits on injunctions. A Breakthrough Institute analysis found that litigation delays can add over two years to project timelines, and that forest management projects face more litigation than other federal project types.

Relief is needed on this front, but litigation is only one component of delay. By some estimates, NEPA compliance accounts for roughly one-fifth of the time required to implement forest management projects, with the remaining delays arising from contracting, funding, and project execution constraints.

Agency capacity remains crucial for meeting the Forest Service’s current regional targets, much less treatment levels supporters hope FOFA will usher in and, eventually, the goals set by the Forest Service’s 10-year Wildfire Crisis Strategy to treat an additional 50 million acres. These goals will be increasingly difficult to achieve with workforce and budget constraints.

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A Perfect Storm

A convergence of political and institutional challenges now threatens to limit our ability to mitigate the scale, intensity, and economic burden of future wildfires.

The sweeping reorganizations at USFS and DOI threaten to further diminish forest management capacity, complicate Democratic support for FOFA in the Senate, and jeopardize FOFA’s successful implementation if passed.

At the same time, other budget pressures are looming. Forest restoration and fire mitigation funding from the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (also known as the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law) is appropriated only through 2026. Further, the Wildfire Suppression Operations Reserve Fund, which has served as a backstop since 2020 ensuring surging emergency fire suppression costs don’t crowd out mitigation spending, is set to expire in 2027.

Carryover balances and IRA funding available through 2031 will moderate near-term impact but, absent new appropriations, federal wildfire mitigation funding could face a meaningful decline later this decade. These dynamics create a perfect storm where rising wildfire risk coincides with declining institutional capacity and uncertain policy support.

Lawmakers should not allow these converging risks to delay action. Passing FOFA remains an important step toward scaling proactive forest management. Congress must ensure FOFA is duly followed by sustained investments in workforce capacity, contracting systems, and project delivery infrastructure. Without these commensurate investments, FOFA’s expanded authorities will be underutilized, leaving communities, ecosystems, and public budgets increasingly exposed to catastrophic wildfire.

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A few years ago, I wrote about a particular class of clean energy advocates who I described as “not anti-nuclear but.” The true face of the anti-nuclear movement, I argued, is not “hair-shirt wearing opponents of progress” but rather “a highly credentialed progressive policy wonk, a lawyer, or, academic, or journalist, who often claims not to be opposed to nuclear energy at all.”

Five years later, that cohort of barely disguised opponents has largely been defeated. Even NRDC now supports reopening shuttered nuclear reactors.

Instead, the biggest challenge the nuclear sector faces today, in my view, comes from within. The “pro-nuclear but” camp is genuinely pro-nuclear but typically argues for policy and technology that represent little change from the status quo that has been responsible for a generation of decline and stagnation—reactors that no one has been willing to build and regulations that have stifled innovation.

In the sections that follow, I run through five common “pro-nuclear but” claims: that advanced reactors are too exotic and unproven; that economies of scale mean that small modular reactors will never be cheaper than large reactors; that serious regulatory reform isn’t important and undermines safety and public confidence; that enriched fuels significantly increase proliferation risk; and, that doubling down on public engagement proceduralism is the key to assuring social license to build new reactors.

I’ve written about some of these claims in the past. They often overlap and there is a grain of truth in each of them. But each claim in one way or another mistakes highly contingent technological, economic, and political developments from the last century as intrinsic to nuclear energy and its future. Taken together, they reflect not a hard headed pragmatism about the technology but a self-fulfilling prophecy, one that risks dooming the sector to stagnation and obsolescence at a moment of unprecedented opportunity.

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Myth #1: The Paper Reactor Problem

If you’ve followed nuclear energy over the last 15 years or so, you have almost certainly come across Admiral Rickover’s famous observation about paper reactors:

An academic reactor or reactor plant almost always has the following basic characteristics:1) It is simple. 2) It is small. 3) It is cheap. 4) It is light. 5) It can be built very quickly. 6) It is very flexible in purpose (“omnibus reactor”) 7) Very little development is required. 8) It will use mostly “off-the-shelf” components. 9) The reactor is in the study phase. It is not being built now.

On the other hand, a practical reactor plant can be distinguished by the following characteristics: 1) It is being built now. 2) It is behind schedule. 3) It is requiring an immense amount of development on apparently trivial items. 4) Corrosion, in particular, is a problem. 5) It is very expensive. 6) It takes a long time to build because of the engineering development problems. 7) It is large. 8) It is heavy. 9) It is complicated.

These days, the quotation is almost always used to raise skepticism about small, advanced reactors in contrast to proven technology, namely large light water reactors. But the characteristics that Rickover described don’t cleave nearly as neatly as people who invoke the quote imagine. The only reactors currently being built now in the United States are, in fact, small advanced reactors, two Kairos Hermes reactors in Tennessee and the TerraPower Natrium reactor in Wyoming, along with a half dozen or so demonstration reactors as part of the Department of Energy’s Reactor Pilot Program at Idaho National Laboratory. Several are behind schedule. All, as first-of-a-kind reactors, will be expensive.

First-of-a-kind small advanced reactors will surely face many of the problems that Rickover described above. Non-light water reactors had exactly these sorts of issues in the 60’s and 70’s when they were demonstrated by government laboratories and very occasionally commercialized. Sodium coolants leaked and caught fire. Steel alloys and other materials became embrittled by high neutron flux fast reactors. Corrosion, in particular, was a problem. First-of-a-kind commercial reactors were expensive to build and operate and were frequently down for repairs and maintenance. This history has been the foundation for much contemporary skepticism toward advanced reactors.

But these problems are, ironically, the characteristics in Rickover’s telling of practical reactors, not academic reactors. Back in the 60s and 70s, the US was building lots of conventional nuclear plants at competitive cost that featured proven technology and well developed supply chains, so there was little reason to push through the first of kind and supply chain challenges necessary to get non-light water reactors to market. But that is not the case today. A range of institutional and economic changes have made it far more difficult to build large light-water reactors at competitive costs in advanced developed economies. And there is ample reason to believe that fifty years of progress in materials science, computation, and design will help advanced reactor developers solve many of the problems that plagued early advanced reactor designs in the post-war era.

For at least the last five years, meanwhile, breathless reports that the next AP1000 build was imminent have come to naught, despite a Trump executive order calling for 10 new reactors under construction by 2030. Unable to convince domestic parties to take on the risk, the administration appears to be considering switching horses, dropping the AP1000 and acquiescing to using Korean or Japanese technologies and firms to get large reactor projects underway in the US.

So while it is true that the AP1000, thanks to the completion of two reactors in Georgia in 2024, are proven technology, there is very little reason to think, despite many proponents’ claims, that the next one will be built quickly or cheaply. Rather, it appears unlikely that any site, other than the unfinished AP1000 build that was abandoned in South Carolina in 2017, will begin construction before 2030.

Many boosters have also claimed that the next build might be as much as 30% cheaper than the Georgia plants. But recent estimates by both Duke Energy and TVA project that the next AP1000 build will cost more than the first two plants in Georgia. TVA projects that an AP1000 will cost the same as the first of four planned GE BWRX300 units, with subsequent builds seeing substantial further cost declines. Cheapest of all, in TVA’s analysis, is the Terrapower Natrium reactor which it projects will cost about two-thirds as much as an AP1000.

Besides the two plants at Vogtle, the only AP1000s ever completed are in China, which did so at costs that the West is unlikely to replicate and has since significantly changed the design for future builds. The much hyped Fermi project, which planned to build four AP1000s to power its President Donald J. Trump Advanced Energy and Intelligence Campus, is, as Robert Bryce wrote last week, imploding. With every day that passes since the completion of the Vogtle reactors in 2024, the AP1000 looks more like a paper reactor and less like a practical one.

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Myth #2: Economies of Scale Are the Coin of the Nuclear Realm

Back in the 60s and 70s, the size of light-water reactors increased from demonstration reactors that clocked in around 600MW, to 800MW commercial reactors, and then upwards of 1GW. Size, it turned out, really mattered for light-water reactors. As reactors got larger, the cost per MW to build and operate them declined, at least until the mid-70s, when rising commodity and labor costs, high interest rates, and overregulation saw nuclear costs escalate significantly. That’s because a 600MW reactor requires much the same infrastructure, security, and operating staff as a 1200MW reactor.

This basic dynamic should mostly apply to small light-water designs as well. For somewhat different reasons, both NuScale’s VOYGR reactor and GE’s BWRX300 reactor require substantially more concrete and steel per MW of capacity than an AP1000. Small light-water reactors also still require a significant exclusion zone, a well-staffed control room, and much the same infrastructure as a large light-water reactor.

But that assumption does not necessarily apply to many other reactor types. Given the larger safety margins and lower likelihood and consequences of worst case accidents, many small advanced designs can be much more lightly staffed or remotely operated. The exclusion zone is often the plant wall or the fence line. Security needs are less extensive and fewer moving parts and redundant safety systems mean much reduced maintenance, infrastructure, and staffing.

We won’t really know what these reactors will cost until some of these first-of-a-kind non-light water reactors are built. In contrast to light water reactor costs, which have a well established cost structure and significant data to base estimates of future costs upon, non-light water reactor costs, in both structure and particulars, are far less certain. A comprehensive literature review and engineering analysis led by Idaho National Laboratory concluded recently that while cost estimates for non-light water reactors were highly uncertain, the best estimates provide little basis for the claim that non-light water SMRs will cost more than conventional large light-water reactors.

And while it is true that all else equal, a larger reactor will generally cost less per MW to build and operate than a small reactor, all else is almost never equal. Whether light water or something else, large reactors have proven virtually impossible to build in liberalized electricity markets, which dominate in the US and most other developed economies. As Adam Stein and I noted in the fall of 2024, site availability, in the short and medium term, significantly limits opportunities to build large reactors in large enough numbers that we might get good at doing it again. Meanwhile, smaller reactors, simpler builds, and much reduced unit costs mean that economies of multiples, process innovation, manufacturing, and simplified supply chains have much greater potential to drive costs down for small, non-light water technologies.

I don’t write any of this to suggest that we should give up on the AP1000 or that economies of scale never matter. The AP1000 is a wondrous technology. It would be great if we could figure out how to get some more of them built in the US. But the logic of the small, advanced reactor appears, at the moment at least, to be winning the day in the real world. Billions of dollars in private investment have flowed into dozens of next generation startups, orders from hyperscalers, big tech, and industrial users are growing, and real “practical” reactors are actually under construction, suggesting that legacy light-water technology and large reactors may not, in fact, turn out to be the future of nuclear.

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Myth #3: Far Reaching Regulatory Reform Is Unnecessary, Compromises Safety, and Risks Public Confidence in Nuclear Energy.

If you’d been a fly on the wall as Congress was debating passage of the ADVANCE Act back in 2024, you would have heard a lot of erstwhile nuclear advocates insisting that a key provision directing the NRC to modernize its mission statement to account for the benefits of nuclear energy was at best a distraction and at worst would compromise nuclear safety.

Some said it publicly. Others privately. Yet, today, you will be hard pressed to find any nuclear advocate still skeptical of that change. Some have publicly reversed course. Others simply took credit for it after the fact.

That’s because barely a year after the NRC revised its mission statement, the impact of the reset is already clear. Congressionally mandated action to modernize NRC licensing for a new generation of reactors had dragged along without resolution for over five years prior to the agency’s mission statement revision. In the year since, the NRC has both finalized the Part 53 licensing framework mandated by Congress in 2019 and revised its entire regulatory code pursuant to Executive Order 14300. The NRC approved TerraPower’s construction permit, NuScale’s uprated license amendment, and Kairos Hermes 2 license ahead of schedule.

The new mission statement, alone, can’t take credit for this. President Trump replaced and then removed the former chair of the commission, issued Executive Order 14300, and used DOGE and other sources of executive power to force the NRC to move much faster on reform. The mission statement was part of a much broader culture shift that has ramified throughout the agency and far beyond.

But the dramatic change in the pace of rulemaking and license approvals is good evidence of just how conservative, arbitrary, and lacking in urgency much of the agency’s regulatory practices actually were. The memory-holing of all the arguments made against the mission statement requirements in the ADVANCE Act prior to its passage, meanwhile, suggest that there was never much basis to them in the first place.

And yet, many of the same parties are now making almost exactly the same arguments in opposition to current proposals to eliminate ALARA, abolish or significantly limit the use and misuse of LNT, raise maximum public radiation dose limits, and license demonstration reactors through DOE. As with mission modernization, these “pro-nuclear but” advocates claim that they are unnecessary because both conventional and advanced reactors are already able to meet the old standards. They say that raising regulatory thresholds increases the risk of accidents and that even if new rules and standards don’t materially increase public health risk, they will undermine public confidence in nuclear regulation.

I have written recently about these claims and won’t go into too much detail here. Suffice to say that as with the claims that were made about mission modernization, there is little by way of an actual mechanism that critics will stipulate for how these changes would lead to negative consequences. Raising the public radiological dose limit, for instance, from 100 millirem to 500 millirem, might seem to portend significant public health consequences until you realize that both doses are well over an order of magnitude below exposures at which an increase in cancer incidence could conceivably be observed.

The argument that changing these standards won’t matter because current and proposed reactors already meet more stringent standards, meanwhile, asserts, with little basis, that design decisions that have been informed by the current standards and regulatory norms would be the same under a different regulatory regime. As with claims about the technical issues and economics of scale that challenge small, advanced reactors, this argument is strongly anchored in the current regulatory and technological status quo, which tells us nothing about what future developers might do under different policies.

Finally, the chestnut that these changes risk undermining public confidence both misunderstands the nature of public opinion and is fundamentally incompatible with any sort of risk informed regulation. If public fear of radiation exposure is both highly irrational and irrationally high, after all, then all risk informing of regulation definitionally undermines public confidence. To the contrary, what has become clear over the last year, as regulatory reform has shifted from talking point to reality, is that it is possible to license and regulate nuclear energy far more flexibly and expeditiously without compromising safety or provoking a public outcry.

Myth #4: Advanced Reactors and Enriched Fuels Increase Proliferation Risk

If you are not deeply enmeshed in nuclear policy and technology, you might think that the distinction between low enriched uranium (LEU) and high assay low enriched uranium (HALEU) is arcane. With regard to the importance of these different fuel types to different sorts of reactors, the distinction is anything but. Most advanced reactor technologies require the latter, which is typically enriched to just below 20% U235 content, versus LEU which is typically enriched to 4-6% and is sufficient to power conventional reactors.

But when it comes to proliferation risk, the distinction is indeed arcane and largely irrelevant. Neither 4% enriched uranium nor 20% enriched uranium is remotely sufficient to make a fissionable weapon. The case against HALEU is that it takes a lot less additional enrichment to turn 20% enriched uranium into weapons grade uranium with over 90% U235 content than it does to turn LEU into weapons grade material. But the key thing that determines whether you can make weapons grade material is not whether you start with LEU or HALEU but whether you have the enrichment capacity to make LEU in the first place. The process and technology for enriching a decent grade of uranium ore from 0.6% U235 to 4 or 6% is exactly the same as what is required to enrich LEU from 6% to 18 or 20% which is the same that is necessary to enrich HALEU from 20% to weapons grade at 90%. It’s just centrifuges, lots of them, spinning up the U235 concentration in the fuel.

Once you have sufficient enrichment capacity to increase the concentration of U235 from .06% in uranium ore to 6% in LEU, you already have all the enrichment capacity and technical capability you need to make weapons grade fuel. HALEU is just a step along that path, and not a particularly significant one. Time to breakout is somewhat shorter if you start with HALEU rather than LEU. But any actor that has stockpiled significant LEU has ample enrichment capacity to get from there to weapons grade material in short order.

What makes producing weapons grade uranium difficult is not procuring uranium ore or centrifuges but hiding the effort from prying international eyes. Sanctions, technology restrictions, and other disincentives to weapons proliferation make nuclear weapons development an unattractive enterprise for all but the most determined state actors. States that are determined to do so will generally, sooner or later, succeed. But the existence of civilian nuclear energy and enrichment capabilities is not correlated significantly with weapons development.

Nonetheless, it has been an article of faith within the non-proliferation community for decades that HALEU production ought to be discouraged, a posture that continues to this day. And while few proliferation experts today outright oppose HALEU reactors and fuel, the basic heuristic is that more enrichment capacity and more enriched fuels are bad even though, in many contexts, lower enriched fuels and technology can be faster and easier pathways to weapons grade material. LEU used in light water reactors, for instance, produces spent fuel with higher plutonium levels than HALEU in most advanced reactors. A CANDU reactor produces similar levels of plutonium from natural uranium with no enrichment at all.

Nonetheless, general preference within the non-proliferation community has been for large light-water reactors using LEU with a once-through fuel cycle that forgoes reprocessing. Once all the caveats and safeguards for HALEU fuel production and reactors that many non-proliferation experts insist upon are accounted for, there is little likelihood that HALEU-based technologies will prove scalable.

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Myth #5: Consent-Based Siting Holds the Key to Community Acceptance of Nuclear Facilities

For much of the last generation, the shadow of the failed Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository has loomed over nuclear politics and policy. Nevada Senator Harry Reid’s long tenure as leader of Senate Democrats resulted in the issue dominating Democratic policy priorities at both the NRC and DOE. Opposition to Yucca, along with sustained fights to prevent the completion of the Shoreham plants in New York and Seabrook in New Hampshire, were taken as evidence that local NIMBY resistance was at the core of failed efforts to site and build nuclear facilities around the country.

In response to this diagnosis, the notion of consent-based siting has gained support among many nuclear advocates. If the problem is that nuclear plants and waste facilities are being forced upon communities that don’t want them, then the answer is to find communities that want them. Better yet, do even more community and public engagement before choosing sites, and offer lots of special, legally binding, community benefits, so more communities will want those facilities.

But while there is nothing wrong with consent based siting in theory, most proposed nuclear facilities actually have significant community consent. As Breakthrough’s Adam Stein recently wrote, in the case of proposed waste facilities, the communities where they have been proposed have strongly supported these facilities. Even Yucca Mountain had significant local support.

The opposition to these facilities, rather, typically comes from further afield. State officials, the city of Las Vegas (150 miles away), and national environmental groups were the main opponents of Yucca Mountain. Opposition to temporary waste storage facilities in Texas and New Mexico has been similarly composed.

The problem has not been local NIMBYs who don’t want these facilities in their communities but state officials whose incentives are more often to pander to larger constituencies in population centers that see no direct benefit from these facilities finding common cause with ideological opponents who often have little connection to the communities in question whatsoever. Recent proposals in this vein, such as the proposed Office of Public Engagement at the NRC, would almost assuredly make the situation worse, basically paying environmental justice and similar activist groups with little actual presence in local communities to show up and obstruct nuclear projects and demand community benefits that no one locally is asking for.

In reality, many communities are competing for new nuclear facilities. Four towns in Wyoming all campaigned to be the site of the first TerraPower reactor. As Stein notes, the Department of Energy’s proposed Innovation Hub approach, which packages long-term waste storage with reprocessing, advanced reactor demonstration, and other opportunities that position these hubs as centers for innovation around cutting edge energy technologies has potentially flipped the script. Twenty-eight states have indicated interest in hosting hubs. Combining local and state incentives, and supporting local communities that want them, has far greater potential to build broad stakeholder support for nuclear facilities than pouring more public engagement resources into communities that have not been the source of resistance to those facilities and typically have wanted them.

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Nuclear for the 21st Century

As I noted at the beginning of this post, none of these claims are necessarily wrong. It is possible that non-light water reactor technology will prove as difficult to tame as it was fifty years ago. If that proves to be the case, large reactors may well continue to be the nuclear technology of choice, regulatory reform to allow for different technological pathways and innovation will be less essential, there will be little need for HALEU fuels, and the number and diversity of siting contexts and use cases for new nuclear infrastructure will be greatly simplified. But the applicability of each of these erstwhile conditions and constraints to the future of nuclear energy is every bit as contingent as the histories from which they are drawn.

And while I don’t doubt the sincerity of many who make these claims, there are other reasons why so much of the nuclear advocacy community continues to fight the last century’s wars. For a lot of nuclear insiders, the nuclear they know is the basis of their expertise and status within the community. For many generalists without deep knowledge of either the technology or its history, the “pro-nuclear but” posture is a way to signal that they are serious people, not wild-eyed “nuclear bros”. And for a lot of left-of-center nuclear advocates, “pro-nuclear but” helps resolve the cognitive dissonance between their (not unreasonable) conviction that “the Orange Man is bad” and the reality that the Trump administration has proven far more effective at accelerating nuclear innovation, regulatory reform, and commercialization than Biden-era Democrats.

At a moment when power demand, AI economics, global energy supply shocks, climate concerns, and a huge shift in public opinion about nuclear have created possibilities for the technology that have not existed since the dawn of the nuclear era, the effort to downselect nuclear’s future to a post-industrial simulacrum of its 20th century past has real policy consequences.

In order to convince utilities and state regulators to sign up for new large reactors, for instance, legislation is now proposed to establish federal cost-overrun insurance, which seems as likely to incentivize cost overruns as spark a renaissance in large light water reactors. The NRC’s regulatory reform efforts, to take another example, have stopped short of establishing a clear and consistent numerical standard for reactor safety in the face of criticism from various “pro-nuclear but” quarters.

Much of the nuclear advocacy community, meanwhile, has failed to substantively engage the NRC as it has embarked upon a soup to nuts revision of its entire regulatory code. Licensing barriers and ambivalence at the Department of Energy has delayed congressionally mandated establishment of a HALEU fuel bank. And while climate and clean tech philanthropy has underwritten much of the academic discussion around consent-based siting, there has been little support for state based nuclear advocates, the kind of people who might actually show up at a local meeting to support a proposed nuclear project.

To be clear, there is much to be said for leaning into strategies that have worked in the past. But that heuristic doesn’t offer much guidance for nuclear energy. The assumptions, norms, institutions, practices, and technologies that characterized the sector over the last fifty years bear significant responsibility for its decline. That’s why the civil society pro-nuclear movement that has so transformed the political and policy landscape around nuclear energy over the last fifteen years had to be launched by outsiders who were willing to question those assumptions and norms. As that effort gained momentum, it was too often captured by the old nuclear priesthood and its many conventional wisdoms. A better future for nuclear energy will almost certainly require something different.

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This was originally published by The Dispatch on April 16, 2026.

Since the start of my career in energy more than 15 years ago, I’ve been hearing about—and, indeed, actively championing—the declining cost of renewable energy technologies. Between 2010 and 2023, the price of wind turbines fell by about 70 percent and the price of solar panels fell by 90 percent. Lithium-ion batteries, which can store electricity for short durations when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing, have also shown impressive gains in both performance and price, dropping about 90 percent in cost through 2023.

Given these advancements, renewables are now competitive on a per-kilowatt-hour basis with incumbents like coal, nuclear, and natural gas. So why are electricity prices rising?

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A Renewables Referendum

The explanation is threefold. First, the intermittency of wind and solar means that even very affordable renewable energy relies on enabling technology and infrastructure, like natural gas plants and extensive networks of power lines, with the consumer price set by the overall system. Second, though wind turbines and solar panels are cheap, they are increasingly running up against geographic limitations. The sunniest and windiest places are not always close to cities and industrial sites, or to transmission infrastructure that can connect generation to demand.

These two factors are exacerbated by a third, which is perhaps the defining energy phenomenon of our era: U.S. electricity demand is rising for the first time in a generation. The electrification of vehicles and HVAC systems, artificial intelligence and other emerging industries, and growing use of air conditioning are combining to increase electricity demand faster than new sources of power generation are coming online. That lag time pushes prices up, and it’s just the beginning.

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Intermittency.

While many renewables advocates have come to believe it’s a form of trolling to point out that the sun doesn’t always shine and the wind doesn’t always blow, it is, in fact, true. And because they’re both intermittent and have no fuel costs, wind farms and solar plants largely act as fuel-savers for the nation’s natural gas and coal plants (which are “dispatchable,” meaning they can be turned on and off by their operators instead of relying on the weather like renewables do). This capability has real economic advantages, especially given renewables’ current level of penetration in the U.S. grid system. But over the long term, grids that include more and more wind and solar will inherently require substantial overbuilding of redundant capacity to smooth out lulls in sunlight or wind.

Battery storage also helps fill the gaps caused by fluctuating supply and demand, but today’s battery systems store electricity for only a few hours at a time. They cannot cover unexpected days- or weeks-long droughts in wind generation, nor store excess summertime energy for use when the solar panels are covered in snow in the winter.

Meeting current, let alone growing, year-round demand with increasing shares of wind and solar will simply require far more electric power capacity than is installed today. That helps explain why the capital costs of the U.S. electric power system are expected to grow faster if more renewables are added to the grid.

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Geography.

One reason my fellow Dispatch Energy columnist Lynne Kiesling has written frequently about long-distance transmission is because large power lines make it easier to connect sunny and windy deserts and plains to demand centers. Provided they have access to the right infrastructure, renewables have some of the shortest lead times of any electricity sources available today, so utilities and independent power producers are trying to connect them to the grid as quickly as possible. But as with the nation’s bridges, tunnels, and rail lines, the U.S. has struggled to build significant high-voltage transmission for decades.

This wait time imposes something of a hard constraint on many renewable projects, hundreds of which are languishing in the “interconnection queue.” Transmission lines have become one of the most difficult types of infrastructure to build in the United States, often taking a decade or more to clear overlapping local, state, and federal siting and permitting regulations. As one prominent analysis of the Biden administration’s energy policy found, the growth of wind and solar through 2030 could be cut by as much as half if new electric power lines are not built in a timely manner.

But it’s not just transmission. Communities across America have increasingly turned against renewable energy projects. In a prelude to the ongoing local opposition to data centers, hundreds of counties around the country have enacted siting limits on wind and solar projects. Building more clean energy may be a national priority, but it runs up against local preferences against new construction and infrastructure in people’s backyards.

And even in areas that allow renewable energy development, other geographic features may get in the way. For example, the Northeastern United States has both high population density and dark, snowy winters—not exactly a welcoming combination for land-intensive and weather-dependent renewable energy projects. Many Eastern states had hoped offshore wind projects would overcome these limitations, but due to both economic and political factors, the U.S. offshore wind industry has failed to scale.

There is still plenty of untapped solar and wind potential in the United States. But these geographic constraints are real, and we can already see evidence of them in the data on annual wind deployment, which, despite falling costs, has fluctuated substantially over the last decade. Solar, which is a much more modular technology that can be deployed at either the rooftop or megaproject scale, has grown more consistently.

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When demand outpaces supply.

The dynamics that defined the expansion of U.S. wind and solar power over the past two decades have been completely upended by more recent technological developments. A steady migration toward air conditioning-reliant states like Arizona, Florida, and Texas, together with the growing adoption of electric heat pumps and vehicles, is helping drive electricity consumption up for the first time in a generation. But the big story, of course, is AI data centers, whose power consumption could triple (or more) within a decade.

So it’s telling that, while wind and especially solar continue to grow steadily in the United States, data centers are relying overwhelmingly on natural gas to meet their immediate power needs—at least for now.

AI is also infamously driving renewed interest in nuclear power, especially smaller advanced reactors that can be installed on-site and generate reliable power. The so-called tech hyperscalers like Google and Microsoft have also invested in next-generation geothermal and natural gas with carbon capture to meet the skyrocketing electricity needs of their data centers.

In other words, while wind turbines and solar panels have become cheap, mature electric power commodities, they alone do not appear capable of meeting rising electricity demand. In renewables’ defense, no other single technology is better-positioned either. Advanced nuclear, geothermal, and carbon capture technologies remain somewhat speculative, and there’s even a shortage of natural gas turbines.

But as many energy analysts have been warning for years, even impressively declining solar and wind costs will not enable renewables to meet all or even most of the electricity demand facing modern power grids.

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By Adam Stein (& ChatGPT, Gemini, NotebookLM)

An office worker pastes a contract clause into an AI assistant and asks whether it is enforceable. The system produces a confident explanation, complete with citations to legal precedent. A small notice warns that the tool can make mistakes and should be verified with a professional. The worker skims the answer and sends an email based on it anyway.

Interactions like this are becoming routine.

Artificial intelligence is often criticized for producing errors: fabricated citations, broken code, or confidently wrong explanations. But the more important risk may be what it does to the people using it. The growing catalog of what people now call “AI slop” has become a familiar complaint in classrooms, workplaces, and online forums. The usual conclusion follows naturally: large language models are unreliable. That conclusion is understandable, but it does not reflect the actual problem.

The real risk is not that AI systems sometimes generate incorrect answers, it is that the humans using those systems are not checking their work. For decades, researchers studying safety‑critical industries have documented a behavioral pattern known as automation bias. When people work with automated systems that perform reliably most of the time, they gradually reduce their own vigilance. They verify less. They question less. And when the system eventually fails, they become less likely to detect the mistake.

Until recently, automation bias was most visible in expert environments using specialized tools. In some clinical studies, physicians have even changed correct diagnoses to incorrect ones after consulting automated decision-support systems—a well-documented example of automation bias in clinical decision-making. Pilots have followed incorrect cockpit alerts despite contradictory instrument readings, a pattern documented in studies of automation bias in aviation decision support systems. Military operators have accepted automated threat classifications even when other evidence suggested the system was wrong. In each case the system usually worked until the moment it didn’t, and the human operator had already stopped questioning it. Automation improved performance on average, but introduced a predictable category of error: humans trusting the machine too much.

Versions of this behavior have appeared in everyday technology before. Early consumer GPS systems occasionally sent drivers down the wrong road, or in a few well-publicized cases into lakes or dead-end roads, because digital maps were incomplete. The problem was not that the navigation system occasionally made mistakes; no map is perfect. The problem was that some drivers assumed the system must be right, even when the route clearly did not make sense to a human paying attention. Artificial intelligence changes the scale of that dynamic, bringing this pattern into everyday decision‑making.

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In effect, AI has democratized automation bias, extending what was once a problem in expert systems into domains where users cannot tell when the system is wrong. Artificial intelligence has effectively placed a cognitive assistant into millions of hands. Ordinary people are asking for investment advice, writing essays, or building software they can’t understand—what developers have taken to calling “vibe coding”. In each case, people are operating in domains where they may have little underlying expertise, or where the volume of work has outpaced their capacity for careful review.

Consider a hiring manager reviewing hundreds of job applications. Instead of reading each one carefully, they ask an AI system to summarize the candidates and rank them. The summaries are plausible, and the rankings feel systematic. But over time, the manager reads fewer applications themselves and becomes less certain what a strong candidate actually looks like. If the system misinterprets a resume, overlooks an unusual career path, or invents a detail that was never there, the manager may not recognize the mistake. The automation has not simply accelerated the task; it has quietly replaced the manager’s independent judgment.

When automation is used under conditions where the user lacks verification capacity, two distinct failure modes appear. The first is that the user does not know what a good output should look like. If an AI system produces legal language, technical analysis, or complex code, the user may not have the background knowledge required to judge whether the result makes sense. The second is more subtle: even when something goes wrong, the user may not know how to recognize that a failure has occurred, or how to diagnose it.

The first failure is straightforward but easy to underestimate. If a person lacks a mental model of what a sound answer looks like, they cannot meaningfully judge whether the output is strong, weak, or subtly flawed. A polished response can therefore create the illusion of competence. The user sees fluency, structure and confidence, but has no independent basis for deciding whether those qualities reflect genuine correctness.

The second failure is different and in some ways more consequential. Here the user is not merely unable to rank the quality of the output; they may not even know that a mistake has been made. The error leaves no obvious trace. Nothing feels wrong, so nothing triggers review. In that situation, automation does not just influence judgment. It suppresses the very signal that would tell a person their judgment should be activated.

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In expert settings, automation bias is dangerous but somewhat bounded because experts retain the underlying skills needed to detect errors. A physician can usually recognize when a recommendation is clinically implausible. A pilot can cross-check instruments and procedures. Experts also have internal standards against which they judge automated outputs. For many everyday AI users, that safeguard does not exist.

When people operate in domains where they lack expertise, they often substitute surface signals for real evaluation. A fluent summary feels reliable because it reads well. A ranking generated by software feels objective because it was produced by an algorithm. These cues resemble evidence of quality, but they are only proxies. Without an independent standard for judging correctness, those proxies quietly replace genuine verification. The same mechanism that causes a hiring manager to trust a flawed ranking causes a writer to accept a first AI draft as though revision were unnecessary. Anyone who has written a paper understands that a rough draft is followed by editing and iteration. That feedback loop is often missing when people use AI tools, sometimes because users do not realize it should exist at all.

A student using AI to summarize research papers may not recognize fabricated citations. A small business owner automating spreadsheets may not fully understand the logic embedded in formulas the model produced. Someone relying on AI-generated code or analysis may not know how to verify whether the results are correct. When verification capacity disappears, automation bias changes form: instead of experts trusting machines too much, non‑experts begin outsourcing cognition entirely. The workflow becomes simple: ask the model, receive an answer that appears plausible, move on.

Systems that are correct most of the time can still degrade decision quality by training users to trust them too much. Research on automation bias shows that systems performing correctly most of the time can still degrade decision quality. Reliable automation gradually trains users to treat outputs as authoritative rather than provisional. The remaining errors slip through precisely because people have stopped checking. What AI adds is scale. It lowers the barrier to attempting complex tasks while producing outputs that are fluent enough to anchor judgement even when they are wrong.

Paradoxically, improvements in system reliability can make the effect worse. Consistent success encourages what researchers sometimes call learned carelessness: users reduce scrutiny because past experience suggests scrutiny is unnecessary. Artificial intelligence amplifies this dynamic in two ways at once—it dramatically lowers the barrier to attempting complex tasks, and it produces outputs fluent and plausible enough to anchor human judgment even when they are wrong. The result is a category of failure that looks like a technology problem but is fundamentally a human one.

Public debate about AI risks tends to focus on the models themselves: hallucinations, training data limitations, or alignment failures. Those concerns are real. But focusing exclusively on model errors overlooks the human side of the equation. The more consequential question is what happens to human cognition when automated reasoning tools become ubiquitous. History suggests a clear answer: people adapt. They adapt by delegating parts of their reasoning process to machines, or by trusting outputs that appear credible. And over time, they adapt by investing less effort in verifying results that are usually correct.

Return to the example of early GPS navigation. Over time, both the technology and its users improved. Maps became more accurate, and people learned when to trust directions and when to question them. But the underlying tendency did not disappear. It adapted. This behavior is not irrational—in many contexts, it is an efficient response to cognitive cost, since verifying every AI output can easily take longer than generating it in the first place. But efficiency and reliability are not the same thing.

As AI systems move deeper into education, workplaces, and professional practice, and increasingly into research, engineering, and policy analysis, the central challenge will not simply be improving model accuracy. It will be preserving the human capacity, and the institutional expectation, of independent verification. Safety‑critical industries learned this lesson long ago. Automation not only changes what machines can do; it changes how humans think and how carefully they check their own decisions.

What AI has done is extend that familiar human tendency into domains where many users lack the expertise to verify the results. The real risk of AI is not that machines will make mistakes. It is that, as we grow accustomed to relying on them, we may become less likely to notice when they do.

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Thanks to supply chain disruptions stemming from the war with Iran, California drivers, long accustomed to the nation’s highest pump prices, are now paying even more exorbitant sums for gas than usual—up to $8 a gallon in some locations. Part of this eye-watering price tag is due to the state’s strained refining capacity and other market quirks unique to California. But part of it is due to a program called the Low Carbon Fuel Standard (LCFS). As of January 2026, the program adds 17 cents to every gallon of gas.

The LCFS requires fuel suppliers in California to reduce emissions from transportation by either using low-carbon fuels in their supply chain—and thus receiving a LCFS credit—or by purchasing low-carbon fuel credits from producers elsewhere. The system works, in theory, by incentivizing the substitution of fossil fuels with supposedly less emissions-intensive products like biofuels and electricity.

The program could reduce emissions, in theory, but, in reality, California’s LCFS sends billions of dollars to biofuels linked to deforestation that, by some estimates, release more carbon over their lifecycle than the fossil fuels they replace. In short, California is charging drivers a premium to make emissions worse.

But there is a further irony to the LCFS program. The California credits are, in large part, for biofuels that would have been produced and sold anyway thanks to the Renewable Fuel Standard, a federal mandate. So, not only does LCFS fail to actually reduce emissions, it is overcharging Californians for a biofuel incentive program that does not incentivize new biofuels.

This is, paradoxically, better, emissions-wise, than the alternative. When the program fails to drive new production, it merely forces drivers to pay extra for biofuels that have already done their damage. When it succeeds, it forces drivers to pay to make emissions worse.

With more states looking to follow in California’s footsteps and launch their own versions of LCFS, it is critical for California legislators to reform the program. A good first step will be to make sure that drivers are not forced to pay extra for fuels that are already receiving federal credits through an additionality requirement. Still, actually reducing emissions from California’s transportation sector will require far larger policy changes.

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The Renewable Fuel Standard already drives most U.S. biofuel use

The federal Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) is the main policy shaping the U.S. market for ethanol and bio-based diesel (including biodiesel and renewable diesel). The program requires oil refiners and fuel importers to blend specific amounts of renewable fuel into the nation’s gasoline and diesel supply each year.

Instead of requiring each refinery to physically produce or blend those fuels itself, the RFS works through a credit system. When a company produces a gallon of renewable fuel, it generates a tradable credit called a Renewable Identification Number, or RIN. Refiners and fuel importers must acquire enough RINs each year to meet the federal mandate, either by blending in renewable fuel themselves or by buying RINS from others.

The EPA sets several renewable fuel mandates for each year. These include an overarching mandate covering all renewable fuels as well as mandates for specific categories of fuels: advanced biofuel, bio-based diesel, and cellulosic biofuel.

The RFS explicitly required about 3.4 billion gallons of bio-based diesel in 2025. But because the program’s mandates are nested, it actually incentivized more. Biodiesel and renewable diesel generate RINs that can count not only toward the bio-based diesel requirement but also the advanced and total renewable fuel mandates. In fact, these fuels are often the lowest-cost way for refiners to meet the larger advanced biofuel requirement and to fill any remaining gap in the overall renewable fuel mandate.

The programs’ influence on biofuel use can hardly be overstated. It sets a very high floor for biofuel use. Nearly all corn ethanol and 80% of all bio-based diesel use nationally was tied to RFS compliance in recent years, from 2022–2024. Put another way, the program effectively requires about 15 billion gallons of ethanol and 4 billion gallons of bio-based diesel. EPA’s new renewable fuel targets for 2026 and 2027 will require even more, nearly 5.5 billion gallons of bio-based diesel.

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Why the LCFS credits are often redundant

The LCFS works by requiring fuel suppliers to reduce the average carbon intensity of the fuels they sell. Fuels below the benchmark generate credits; fuels above the benchmark generate deficits. Those credits are tradable, creating a market that rewards low-carbon alternatives. California fuel sellers have historically passed on about 100% of the costs of compliance to consumers; right now the LCFS adds about 17 cents to a gallon a gas, and is expected to rise to 25 to 40 cents a gallon by 2030 as the benchmarks become more stringent.

Because the RFS already requires vast quantities of bio-based diesel and ethanol to be sold, the majority of LCFS compliance dollars paid by California drivers—nearly two billion dollars just in the last year—is likely going to biofuels that would have been produced anyway. As of 2024, 75% of LCFS credits were going to either bio-based diesel, ethanol, or biomethane—all fuels covered by the RFS.

By just comparing nationwide fuel sales to the volumes credited under the RFS, we can see that at most 60% of bio-based diesel credited under California’s LCFS in 2024 was produced because of the program or, in other words, was additional. As the figure below shows, the vast majority of national bio-based diesel use was required by the RFS: only the remainder, about 1.6 billion gallons, could have plausibly been spurred by the LCFS. Yet the program still allowed companies to earn credit revenue for over 2.5 billion gallons. It’s possible that even more of the diesel would have been produced anyway since the RFS also increases its market price, making it more profitable to produce even without any government incentives.

Ethanol is even worse—virtually none of it is additional. This is because there is an effective ceiling on how much ethanol can be blended into the gasoline supply—only flex-fuel vehicles can use blends above E15, and they make up a small fraction of the fleet. Therefore, there is no reason that the quantity of ethanol consumed in the US should be above the quantity mandated by the RFS, even if there were very lavish additional subsidies. This is borne out by the data, as shown below.

In other words, California drivers are not buying cleaner fuel—they are buying the same fuel, at a higher price, that would have been sold in another state. The LCFS subsidy does not reduce emissions so much as it moves them.

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Policymakers should add an additionality requirement

As California goes, so do many other states. Legislatures and agencies in Oregon, Washington, and New Mexico have modeled their clean fuel programs after California’s. Other states, from Minnesota to Massachusetts, are considering their own programs too. California’s LCFS, however, has set a poor precedent by subsidizing biofuels that would already have been produced.

The state agency in charge of the program, CARB, is unlikely to consider any changes having just passed a series of controversial reforms in 2025. Likewise, Governor Newsom is unlikely to roll back a major environmental program while preparing a campaign for president as well as throwing his support behind ethanol, practically a prerequisite for any presidential contender. The legislature and the next governor, then, must push for reforms.

The most straightforward reform is to add an additionality requirement. California should not award LCFS credits to biofuels already needed to satisfy the federal RFS. The state could take a range of different approaches. It could credit only biofuel producers who couldn’t sell the RINs generated from their fuel. Or it could require financial data indicating that a fuel would not be profitable to produce without an LCFS credit. Or it could simply cap the amount of LCFS credits for fuels eligible for RFS compliance, especially corn ethanol and conventional biomass-based diesel.

This need not be revolutionary. Some of the projects that the LCFS supports are already highly additional and would not be pursued without the program’s support. Nearly 30% of credits are now awarded to a wide range of electrification activities. Hundreds of millions of dollars in LCFS revenue have been used to offer electric vehicle rebates. While many high-earners receiving the rebates would have bought an EV regardless, thousands of low-income households received larger rebates that likely enabled them to buy an EV. LCFS credits also help cover the high capital costs of installing fast chargers, including for trucks. While these costs have constrained widespread deployment, the LCFS now supports over 5,000 fast chargers.

Making the LCFS more additional would provide more support for electrification. Governor Newsom has already proposed a $200 million EV rebate program, but California is estimated to need far more: roughly $16.5 billion in EV charging and related electrification investment by 2030. Reforming the LCFS would not close that gap on its own, but it could further shift support toward fast chargers, charging at multi-unit dwellings, and other infrastructure needed to make EV ownership practical.

California should still pursue lower-carbon transportation. But it should stop making California drivers pay more for performative decarbonization, cutting emissions on paper while real-world fuel use hardly changes. In fact, reforming the LCFS would accelerate the state’s climate goals and pave the road for others to follow.

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The recent film adaptation of Andy Weir’s novel Project Hail Mary opens with an astronaut coming to consciousness, alone on a spaceship, almost 12 light-years from Earth. What follows is a saga where that man, Dr. Ryland Grace (played by Ryan Gosling), seeks to engineer a solution to a crisis on his planet, inspired by the exploration of a distant solar system with the help of an alien friend.

But despite the plot’s distance from our own planetary reality, its statement on humanity and nature is profound. Mankind has dominion over Creation. And exercising technological power to bring out the potential of nature, with humility and love, is foundational to human and natural flourishing.

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A mission for stewardship

The movie’s story is premised on a global cooling crisis in the near future. Scientists observe extraterrestrial microbes that metabolize solar radiation—called “Astrophage”—forming a film around the Sun. If the trend persists, a catastrophic ice age will arrive in a few decades, leading to famine and ecological collapse. Astronomers also find that this phenomenon is occurring on other stars too, with the lone exception of Tau Ceti.

Dr. Ryland Grace, a disgraced scientist turned schoolteacher whose heterodox astrobiology proves useful for the Astrophage crisis, is sent on a mission—the titular “Project Hail Mary”—with two other astronauts to investigate what makes Tau Ceti immune. Due to the distance and fuel constraints, the spacecraft can’t return. The astronauts are expected to send their findings back with remote probes and sacrifice themselves to save Earth and humanity.

After waking up from an induced coma, Dr. Grace finds that he’s the only surviving astronaut on the spacecraft. The pilot and engineer died mysteriously sometime before his coma lifted. But, Grace is not alone. Soon arriving to the Tau Ceti system, he finds that another spacecraft, manned by a benevolent alien we come to know as “Rocky,” is on a similar mission for his planet, Eridia.

Working together, Grace and Rocky investigate the Tau Ceti system, finding that a microbial predator—“Taumoeba”—is keeping Astrophage in check. With this knowledge, they develop Taumoeba for deployment on their own homes, and after feats of science, Grace and Rocky successfully send the engineered Taumoeba back home to save their planets.

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Technology, humility, and love

Project Hail Mary not only suggests that technology is key to addressing our problems—it also shows how to approach active, technological management. The dominion ecology of the movie is centered on three elements of stewardship: the use of technology for cultivation, the humility of the good scientist and nature manager, and the love of home.

Clearly, the power of technology is a central theme of Project Hail Mary. The characters see the real threat that Astrophage pose—limiting Earth’s human carrying capacity in the near future—not as an immovable biophysical reality but as a technological challenge. Grace’s mission develops a technological solution that uses a natural predator-prey control mechanism, breaking the prior limit.

This story has overlap with the real world. As ecomodernists have long shown, the Malthusians and neo-Malthusians who model and discuss hard biophysical limits of human prosperity have been proven wrong again and again by technological progress.

Thomas Malthus’s insistence that England’s population growth would outpace food production was rebutted by early agricultural advancements in Britain. President Jimmy Carter’s concerns about peak oil were reprimanded by the technological advancement of fracking led by the likes of George Mitchell and Harold Hamm. And the infamous, late Paul Ehrlich’s disastrously wrong predictions about human population growth were roundly disproven by leaders of the Green Revolution like Norman Borlaug, who developed high-yield wheat through experiments in Mexico that likely saved hundreds of millions of lives. Project Hail Mary tells a similar story. Through the discovery and engineering of Taumoeba, Grace seeks to understand and work with nature to then shape it for the common good.

Grace’s particularly humble approach to technology and nature is notable. His dominion over nature isn’t one of a rationalist, top-down tyrant inflicting his will. Rather, Grace’s approach is one of respect—he recognizes that Tau Ceti can teach him something. Through careful investigation and trial and error, he and Rocky find an ecology in the solar system that they then use to engineer and iterate planet-saving technology. Grace is confident and takes risks, but his approach is bound by a respect for the limits of his knowledge. The Jurassic Park story and the disastrous real-world release of cane toads in Australia are the negative corollaries to Grace’s technological humility. The introduction of moose to Colorado and the construction of Dutch sea walls are positive corollaries—bold acts of natural dominion that elevate nature with a respect and love for it.

And it is love of home, for people and nature, that animates Grace and Rocky in the final analysis. Both characters have a love for the natural world manifested in their joy at knowing it through science. But their mission to save their planets with engineering is guided by a deeper love for their particular homes and communities.

In flashbacks, the audience learns that Grace was extremely resistant to the “Project Hail Mary” mission. Indeed, the duty was forced on him by a technocratic autocrat tasked with saving the world. As Kody W. Cooper observed, an abstract love of humanity didn’t initially compel Grace for the mission. But by loving his neighbor, Rocky, Grace awakens his love and duty toward his planet and his people.

Over the course of their developing friendship, Grace and Rocky discuss their relationships with their people and their homes. Rocky clearly has deep bonds with his romantic interest on Eridia, but absent an old girlfriend, Grace doesn’t have a corollary. We do see early glimpses of Grace’s longing for home in flashbacks to scenes with his students and as he often returns to a simulator that shows landscapes on Earth. But Grace’s innate love of people and home is developed by the sacrificial love Rocky shows him. When Rocky falls into a temporary unconsciousness after he saves Grace from spacecraft troubles, Grace works alone to engineer Taumoeba to save Earth and Eridia. After developing a particular relationship with Rocky over the course of their mission, Grace is prepared to take radical action to save the planet he’s always loved.

In doing so, Grace distinguishes his first duty to save Earth from his friendship with Rocky, while taking heroic actions to save him. As Grace embarks back to Earth after Rocky generously gives him extra fuel, he comes to a technological problem in his ship that he realizes would doom Rocky’s spacecraft too. But before backtracking to save his friend and abandoning hope of returning home, Grace is sure to send his Taumoeba samples back to Earth, ready to be used. The Taumoeba are deployed on Earth, and Grace ends up on Rocky’s planet of Eridia, with a terraformed landscape built for him, and the Eridians working to build a ship so he can return. In the end, it’s love and duty toward his people and his home, awakened by Rocky, that motivates and guides Grace.

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Applied dominion

Despite the catastrophism of the climate alarmists, Earth doesn’t face the same degree of ecological challenge as represented in Project Hail Mary. We won’t see temperature averages change 10-15°C within thirty years that would require interplanetary alien microbe deployment, thank goodness.

What we do have are serious natural challenges and opportunities that require the daring of ambitious technologists exercising a humble and loving dominion. Recent history is replete with successes against these challenges, from the aforementioned Green Revolution and fracking boom to the rapid COVID vaccine development in Operation Warp Speed. But these projects aren’t inevitable—they require resolve and, often, public policy. With deliberate attempts to aim high and reject the hard biophysical limits of degrowthers, innovators can call out the potential of nature for the good of itself and everyday people. We need more of our own “Hail Mary” projects.

Facing the challenge of climate change will require ambitious ventures of natural stewardship. It’s true that a lot of the adaptation and mitigation work climate change requires can be accomplished with existing technology and approaches—active forest management, building energy infrastructure, and agricultural modernization. But now that global temperature averages are higher than any period in the last 100,000 years, climate change will require the humble, confident, and careful innovation of novel mitigation and adaptation technologies to be deployed where localities want. Marine cloud brightening can cool ecosystems and save coral reefs, as Australia is experimenting with right now. Glacial stabilization technology could slow the sea level rise that would drive mass migration and immense human suffering. Carbon dioxide removal through ocean enrichment could improve fisheries while mitigating climate change.

A similar opportunity exists for energy and industry. Massive public investment in research and commercialization made natural gas and solar the cheapest energy available. These projects have advanced both emission reductions and energy abundance. National projects to replicate this success to drive down the cost of even denser and cleaner energy resources like nuclear and geothermal could lead to three simultaneous outcomes. American industry would expand with new sources of cheap industrial heat and electricity. American families and families throughout the world would have lower energy costs. And by displacing higher-emission and higher-land-use resources, emissions and ecosystem loss would be mitigated. As the Breakthrough Institute’s Ted Nordhaus has pointed out, Secretary of Energy Chris Wright’s DOE has taken admirable steps to do just this, especially in nuclear development.

Directly addressing climate and energy challenges is only the beginning. There are many more projects of natural dominion, including active projects to support Great Salt Lake restoration with precipitation enhancement, to functionally de-extinct woolly mammoths for reintroduction to the Arctic, and to use gene drives to control mosquitoes and invasive species.

On each of these fronts, nature managers have chances to both reactively address challenges and proactively take opportunities to actively steward the Earth. But amassing the political will behind these projects will require a new consensus on the human person, technology, and our relationship to nature. As popular culture like Project Hail Mary shows, that consensus is already emerging.

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A pro-human ecology

As other reviewers have identified, there are strong Christian themes throughout Project Hail Mary. A man named Grace embarks on a sacrificial, likely fatal mission to save the world. He’s even delivered by a spaceship called “Mary.” The story’s ecological message is built on the same ground.

The Christian story says that the same characteristic that gives every human being inherent and equal dignity—the image of God—gives humanity the right and responsibility to tend the Garden. Grace exercises this office in the story by investigating Tau Ceti, engineering Taumoeba, and sending it back home to renew nature and support people. As leaders on the Right and the Left are embracing public Christianity, this conception of the human person offers a pro-human, techno-optimist ecology that transcends partisan affiliations. I’ve called it “an environmentalism of dominion.”

Dominion ecology offers a positive alternative to the misanthropic environmentalism of Paul Ehrlich. As the Breakthrough Institute’s Alex Trembath recently wrote, Ehrlich’s anti-humanism manifested in deep cruelty directed toward the poor, families, and mothers. His legacy is one of forced sterilization and abortions, and an anti-humanism that unfortunately still pervades parts of the environmental movement. All of this arose from Ehrlich’s deeply warped view of the human person. As we rethink ecology for this century, leaders on the Right and the Left should embrace the human person’s dignity and responsibility to tend the Garden. In doing so, each must overcome elements in their coalitions inclined toward dehumanization, lest we repeat the evils of misanthropic environmentalism.

Our environmental politics should reject Ehrlich’s lies. The human person is good. Our home is good. And technological ingenuity, inspired by nature, can elevate people and ecosystems by realizing the good of each.

Because of technological ambition, the present already has mRNA vaccines, abundant food, and cheap natural gas and solar. With a common good techno-ecology, the future could have woolly mammoths, dense clean energy in abundance, and a more stable climate, governed and enjoyed by thick human communities. Let’s advance more projects of dominion in the pattern of Dr. Ryland Grace and Norman Borlaug. The future of people, and nature, depend on them.

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Isaiah Menning is the External Affairs Director at the American Conservation Coalition, a nonprofit organization building the conservative environmental movement. Follow him on X @IsaiahMenning.

As suicide drones wing through the skies of the Middle East, bringing a sizable share of global oil and gas shipments to a grinding halt, the strategic significance of electrified technologies looms indisputably large. The proof is now in the pudding that solar panels are helping countries reduce exposure to natural gas scarcity and resultant price spikes, that electric vehicles are valuable for de-risking oil import dependence, and that mass-produced fleets of armed drones are disruptively changing how militaries fight wars.

Tremors in energy prices, suspension of industrial facilities such as aluminum smelters and fertilizer plants, and munitions shortages facing the combatant countries raise larger questions around resilient and competitive industrial production in an era of uncertain geopolitics and rapid technological change. The crisis has revealed the energy vulnerability of North American to European to Middle Eastern economies, compounding preexisting insecurities over the changing global landscape of industrial mass production.

In contrast, China’s position today inspires envy. Early large-scale bets in solar and EV deployment but also in drone production and managed, diversified gas sourcing have made China the manufacturer of record across a wide spectrum of highly-coveted to markedly mundane supply chains. China now generally defines how global political elites think of industrial might.

A growing number of technological and clean energy futurists now see China’s successful pursuit of batteries, solar power, computer chips, and electric motors as synonymous with its manufacturing mastery. Such arguments seek to shift the framing of this “electro-industrial stack” from a mere set of climate-friendly gadgets to the very essence of 21st century geopolitical and military power. Expertise and innovation sparked by iterative improvements and networking of electric vehicles, drones, and robots, they argue, catalyze vertical integration and competence across a whole ecosystem of other manufacturing industries.

But the purveyors of this thesis mistakenly assume that upstream inputs—critical minerals, key metal inputs, and chemicals—fall obediently into place in response to demand pull from value-added, feature-rich consumer products. In reality, metals and chemicals production require muscular industrial policy of their own to succeed, yet carry the potential to either constrain or catalyze downstream innovation. Whereas batteries, solar cells, semiconductor chips, and rare earth magnets are modular and democratized commodities with rapidly-improving performance, their supply chains are a series of bespoke, energy-intensive, large-scale metallurgical and chemical industries often heavily concentrated in China and viewed as uneconomic or uninvestible almost everywhere else.

If solar panels, batteries, and rare earth motors are the future key to national power, why is it only possible to manufacture them competitively in a single country? Part of the answer is that key tests of industrial mastery lie upstream in the ability to commercialize hard tech—including difficult chemical and metallurgical industrial processes—at vast economies of scale. Other countries seeking to rebuild such process knowledge must explicitly define their alternative to China’s model in these sectors. If governments and political elites hope vague prioritization of the “electrotech” technologies themselves can deliver industrial competitiveness, their misdiagnosis may well lead to profound disappointment.

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Metals all the way down

For all the teeth-gnashing that visionary Chinese industrial strategy has lapped the West in electric vehicles and drones, relatively few analysts have sought to dissect how China’s market share of unglamorous bulk raw material inputs and intermediates across its minerals, metallurgy, and chemicals sectors actually directly enables their market share in these finished, shiny consumer products.

Critical minerals get their nod, to be sure. In his widely-read essay “The Electro-Industrial Stack Will Move the World,” venture capital manager Ryan McEntush acknowledges “mineral sourcing and refining” as among the core areas of expertise that companies like BYD have built and calls for “software-native mineral and metal companies that operate at machine speed” to compete accordingly. Similarly, in an essay from September 2025, blogger Noah Smith devotes a line to the importance of these upstream supply chains: “If you want to be able to defend your country, you simply have no choice but to secure the Electric Tech Stack. And this includes securing the minerals that are necessary to create the Stack.” But such inputs are too important to address with a terse handwave—all the more so because these key commodities do not benefit from the kinds of software and consumer technology playbooks that commentators like McEntush and Smith laud the electrotech stack products for.

A hundred kilos of bagged 99.9999999% (9N) pure polysilicon chunks or a pallet of 99.7% aluminum foundry ingots are not “tested in simulation, updated over the air, and improved continuously as telemetry feeds back into design.” Nor does a kilogram of gallium or neodymium-iron-boron alloy powder benefit from the same cost learning curves as the semiconductor chips or wind turbine rotor drives that they go into. It is hard to imagine how AI will be particularly useful for mastering rare earth separation from mined ores in the face of arcane process knowledge, protected IP, and Chinese restrictions on technical secrets.

These ingredients of “electrotech” technologies are not themselves small-format, modular, robot-assembled, feature-rich, and digitally-connected but rather products of scaled industrial processing and refining. Strong demand pulls and industrial policies supporting manufacturing of the final technologies are not sufficient to establish dominance in their upstream supply chains and secure their end-to-end manufacture from mined ore to the microchip—a lesson that the U.S. is now learning in the wake of the CHIPS Act and one that Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan have grappled with in solar and battery manufacturing.

In fact, the critical industrial capability allowing China to eventually scale its solar, battery, rare earth permanent magnet, and computer chip industries was, arguably, a co-benefit of China’s achievement of producing 15 million metric tons per year of domestic primary aluminum (Figure 1). China passed this threshold in 2010, notching quadruple the aluminum output of global production runner-up Russia and more than quintuple that of Canada, in third place.

Considering aluminum as the foundation of the electrotech stack is more likely than not a little absurd, but it helps illustrate that pinpointing the electrotech stack as the essence of national industrial strength is overly narrow.

Today, the automobile manufacturing sector—a competitive industry where automakers have traditionally used hedging instruments to guard against swings in steel and aluminum prices—accounts for around one quarter of Chinese domestic aluminum consumption.

Meanwhile, China’s ability to produce 15 million tons of primary aluminum a year requires around 6 to 7 million tons of carbon anodes for the aluminum smelting process. The production route for these carbon anodes shares many commonalities with the industrial processes for synthetic battery graphite anode material—which makes up around 80% of the global battery anode market. China’s vast aluminum industry indeed catalyzed a network of standalone carbon anode plants whose capabilities and technical experience translated to battery applications. Every lithium-ion EV battery pack also directly uses around 30 to 50 kg of aluminum in cathode current collectors (and 50 to 80 kg of graphite), depending on battery size.

Provincial grid planners and engineering firms accustomed to cumulatively building one to two million tons of new aluminum smelter capacity yearly from 2007-2011 likewise gained experience in power plant construction and large industrial grid interconnections that supported a wave of comparably electricity-intensive solar and semiconductor-grade polysilicon refineries. Every kilometer of high-voltage power lines in turn requires around 12.9 tons of aluminum conductor cables.

For high-performance semiconductor chips and power electronics, China recovers the critical element gallium as a byproduct from its immense fleet of alumina (aluminum oxide) processing plants, which perform 62% of the world’s refining of aluminum-bearing bauxite ores into alumina. By regulation, Chinese alumina plants are required to extract gallium during the alumina refining process. Circa 2012 the world’s largest producer of gallium was the Aluminum Corporation of China (Chalco).

Finally, the electrolysis of rare earth oxides into rare earth metals borrows significantly from aluminum process knowledge, with Chinese researchers having regularly tested and adapted approaches from the latter for the former. An experienced chemical engineer transferring from Chalco to China Northern Rare Earth Group would adapt to rare earth metal refining relatively quickly. Indeed, Chalco’s Rare Earth and Metals division was one of three state-owned rare earth producers merged into the new China Rare Earth Group in 2021.

Rare earth refining, along with metallurgical-grade silicon (MGS) smelting and electric arc furnaces for steelmaking, again makes substantial use of graphite electrodes. Because metallurgical silicon is widely used in aluminum-silicon alloys, some MGS smelters in China are even co-located with aluminum smelters. With all this laid out, aluminum’s place in the electrotech industrial network appears increasingly coherent.

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The shared ingredients behind electrotech

The advantages of heavy industrial process knowledge for competitiveness in electrotech stack and other technologies extend well beyond aluminum, of course.

While many observers have focused on chronicling the Chinese success in manufacturing iPhones and electric vehicles, the upstream supply chains feeding into batteries, solar cells, chips, and magnets are themselves crucial. The raw materials at the center of these technologies importantly determine the performance or form factor of the final product—the size or thinness of the silicon wafer, the capacity and longevity of the battery, and the strength of a permanent magnet motor.

Across graphite, battery active material synthesis, aluminum, metallurgical silicon, solar-grade polysilicon, solar wafers, gallium, rare earth oxides, and rare earth magnets, China manufactures around nine to ten times the volume as the next-largest global producer. This amounts to an extraordinarily powerful industrial ecosystem, built upon technical expertise but also vast old-school industrial plants and an abundance of baseload electricity generation.

For instance, in the solar, chip, and rare earth magnet supply chains, certain steps are almost obligatorily co-located. Neodymium-iron-boron alloy powders can react with both air and water and spontaneously combust, restricting transportation to short distances and forcing magnet production facilities to be located near rare earth metal refineries. Competitiveness in rare earth permanent magnet production thus depends heavily upon competitiveness in rare earth metal refining, a technically-challenging metallurgical step with miniscule to nonexistent profit margins.

Similarly, China’s share of solar manufacturing is most formidable precisely at the “ingot/wafer” step—the growth of monocrystalline high-purity silicon ingots, followed by the slicing of those ingots into solar wafers. Ingots are so sensitive to damage and contamination that solar and semiconductor wafer manufacturers typically perform wafering at the same facility, such that most industry publications refer to “ingot/wafer” capacity as a single step. Co-location of wafer production and solar cell manufacturing also possesses additional synergies, incentivizing vertically-integrated solar manufacturing.

Many of these relevant upstream commodities that Chinese firms have mastered are also highly electricity-intensive—enough to be classified as “congealed electricity,” a term traditionally used to describe the energy-intensity of aluminum production (Figure 2). Synthetic graphite battery anode material requires a little more electricity per ton to produce than aluminum, with electricity accounting for one-third of the cost of the graphitization step. Metallurgical silicon and rare earth metals are likewise “congealed electricity” due to the electricity requirements of their smelting and refining, respectively. Nickel metal for stainless steel production, a global market that Chinese-Indonesian mining and refining joint ventures have turned on its head in the last ten years, is more than three times as electricity-intensive as aluminum. Meanwhile, the Siemens process for polysilicon refining, which Chinese producers first adopted when taking the solar-grade polysilicon market by storm, is more than five times as electricity-intensive as aluminum smelting, with electricity accounting for 40% of the process cost.

Figure 2: Electricity consumption of major current and proposed industrial processes, in kilowatt-hours per ton of metal or material produced. Emergent proposed processes include hydrogen electrolysis and green steel production via the green hydrogen direct reduced iron electric arc furnace (DRI-EAF) and molten oxide electrolysis routes.

China sourced the energy to feed these growing industries mainly from coal and hydropower. In many cases, China had already achieved dominance in these electricity-intensive commodities by 2015 if not 2010, well before the country began adding noticeable margins of wind and solar electricity onto its grid. While reporters and analysts are now uncritically lavishing attention on recent and future announced shifts of new marginal industrial capacity towards hydropower, wind, and solar, few seem interested in considering how Chinese industry climbed to its current level of production in the first place. After all, it is far easier for Chinese policymakers to experiment and tighten clean energy standards when already sitting atop the commanding heights of the supply mountain.

The unvarnished truth is that Chinese industrialists used the country’s last great wave of coal-fired and environmentally-unabated heavy industry buildout to master process knowledge across a whole host of strategically valuable capabilities. As Ember energy strategist Kingsmill Bond and energy systems professor Jesse Jenkins put it during one recent conversation, China invested its coal power wisely as an “endowment” to take the lead in important emerging industries.

Runaway Chinese success in charismatic and futuristic sectors like electric vehicles and drones must be understood as part of a larger story spanning flat glass, PVC materials, magnesium, and silicones, where survival on thin profit margins hinges upon fairly traditional pillars of scaled heavy industry: vertical integration, cheap energy, and cheap feedstocks.

Amusingly, batteries, solar and semiconductor polysilicon, rare earth permanent magnets, and aluminum all use petroleum coke as an input—for battery graphite, metallurgical silicon, and carbon anodes, respectively. While some might scoff at petroleum coke’s significance relative to the more important industrial factors listed above, all of the electrotech stack products would be much more expensive if their production had to make use of non-fossil alternatives.

What all of this conveys is that competitiveness in these industries is built upon sprawling process plants of furnace halls and distillation columns just as much if not more so than they are upon manicured, automated “dark factories” and clean rooms. The ability to build a new greenfield metallurgical plant or chemical plant is as critical as the ability to build a shiny, vast, robot-equipped auto manufacturing complex. It should be worrying, then, for the European and North American commentators ruminating over industrial power, that their countries struggle much more with the former than the latter.

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The hard industrial choices ahead

The important if obvious realization from a closer look at earlier supply chain steps is that batteries, solar cells, chips, and magnets are not in fact very useful for reproducing themselves. “If you want to be able to defend your country,” as Smith puts it, it is clear that it must be able to mass-manufacture drones. However, mastery of electrotech, industrial dominance, and the capacity to produce a million drones monthly fundamentally depend on regaining some ability to scale upstream components and materials that global investors now casually speak of as oversupplied and uninvestible outside of China. The temptation with electrotech thinking is to focus overly on deployment, software, AI, product iteration, and final assembly and continue letting someone else figure out the difficult unglamorous steps of polysilicon or lithium refining.

It is not yet clear that the mass-manufacturing of drone swarms needs to be particularly solar-powered or even clean. In fact, the expectation that the electrotech discourse sets up is the same old wine in new bottles as the climate movement presuming that any new heavy industrial capacity developed upstream should be maximally electrified and decarbonized. The similar consensus among many climate-minded policymakers in Europe or North America ten to fifteen years ago that fully low-carbon industries were the optimal and preferred way forward may bear some partial responsibility for the current industrial disparity that political elites are now worrying about today.

Cheap industrial electricity is indeed critical, making solar and batteries useful but far from sufficient. Hurdles like super greenhouse gas emissions from aluminum and rare earth metal smelting, the use of coal as a reducing agent for metallurgical silicon and nickel production, and the basic difficulty of accommodating large flat heavy industrial electricity consumption with entirely variable renewable sources remain imposing. The challenges of competing with low-cost Chinese industrial market power in these commodities only entrench such decarbonization obstacles further.

If everyone were to follow the actual Chinese industrial dominance recipe of investing their own fossil endowments into rebuilding process knowledge—as observably practiced through the 2010s—the world can likely kiss carbon budgets goodbye (perhaps building a lot of hydropower as some silver lining). Indeed, if elite thinkers remain insistent that the only path to competitive national industry is a pure green path, they must understand this remains a yet untraveled path that China itself is only just starting to experiment with.

In one interview, Kingsmill Bond dismissed harder-to-decarbonize industrial sectors while emphasizing the enormous progress on emissions and electrification that governments could capitalize on immediately: “People often focus on hard to solve sectors and that’s great and I salute [those folks] but actually we shouldn’t forget that we can already get solar and wind to around 70 or 80% of electricity demand and we can already electrify around 75% of our economy.”

What planners and commentators must keep in mind is that many of the electrotech stack’s supply chains happen to reside heavily in the hardest 30%. Even assuming fully green electricity is indeed cheap, green metals, by all accounts, will not be. If policymakers remain determined to simultaneously pursue environmental performance alongside strategic security and competitiveness, then fostering such alternative ex-China production will neither be cheap, nor emerge naturally from free market outcomes.

Selectively framing the future of industrial mastery around the most photogenic technologies risks ending up with an incomplete recipe—one can’t just pick a few favorites, trace their supply chains back to their roots, prioritize those inputs too, and call it a day. Recall that technologies like Siemens process polysilicon refining, lithium-iron-phosphate batteries, and even early techniques for rare earth metal refining were originally innovated in countries like Germany and the United States with considerable public sector support. A failure to scale manufacturing outside China owes a great deal to broader industrial conditions—higher-cost energy, higher-cost feedstocks, higher plant capital costs, atrophied engineering and technical expertise, halfhearted investor interest in hard tech, and a policy and regulatory environment non-conducive to dynamism or economies of scale.

As goods like aluminum and graphite electrodes illustrate, strategic industries are interconnected and linked to “non-strategic” industries in surprising and unpredictable ways. The broader aim of industrial policy is to cultivate an energy-industrial ecosystem that can effectively procure upstream capabilities on its own to adapt to the evolving technological cutting edge. The operative test of such an ecosystem may well be whether it can build and commission a new metallurgical or chemical plant as necessary. The challenge for Japan, India, the United States, or the European Union will be developing a non-Chinese formula for bringing that plant into operation.

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In 1968, a little-known ecologist named Paul Ehrlich published The Population Bomb, which aimed to bring attention to the perceived dangers of rapid population expansion. Almost three million copies were sold worldwide, marking a turning point in the global discourse on population control. Much of the book’s popularity was driven by Ehrlich’s portrayal of India as an example of the catastrophic consequences of unchecked population growth.

Ehrlich’s views were formed during a family trip to India in the 1960s. He famously described the experience of arriving in New Delhi as overwhelming and alarming. In The Population Bomb, he wrote:“People eating, people washing, people sleeping… people, people, people, people.”

India symbolized the limits of human carrying capacity. According to Ehrlich, India would be among the first to suffer catastrophic food shortages because agricultural production could not keep pace with population growth. Its rapid population increase was unsustainable and would result in famine and societal collapse. Ehrlich predicted imminent mass starvation:“The battle to feed all of humanity is over.” He added “hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death” and “nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate.”

Ehrlich’s book, reprinted twenty times by the early 1970s, succeeded in creating a climate of fear around the size of India’s population. Appearing several times on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, he gained a huge following with his predictions of a world with too many people, running out of food. Policymakers and philanthropists jumped on board with sterilization programs and incentives for smaller families. Doug Ensminger, the Ford Foundation’s representative in India, designed and financed large-scale family planning programs, including experimental programs that tested new methods of contraception on Indians. Ensminger’s goal was to embed population control within the machinery of the Indian state.

It worked.

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On June 25, 1975, Indira Gandhi, who served as prime minister from 1966 to 1977 and, again, from1980 to 1984, declared a state of Emergency. The decision followed mounting political unrest, economic challenges, and a court ruling that invalidated her 1971 election victory on grounds of electoral malpractice. Invoking Article 352 of the Indian Constitution, her government cited threats to national security and stability, but the move was primarily aimed at preserving political power. During this period, the Indian state curtailed democratic processes, arrested opposition leaders, and imposed strict censorship on the press.

The suspension of democracy during the Emergency enabled a coercive campaign that led to the sterilization of millions of men. Indira Gandhi’s son Sanjay, the driving force behind the campaign, believed that reducing birth rates quickly would ease pressure on land, jobs, housing, and public services, and help India move faster toward industrialization. Local officials were given quotas, and in many areas coercive tactics were used. Men were rounded up, detained, denied access to food rations and housing permits, and threatened with job loss, all unless they agreed to be sterilized. Local authorities and police conducted mass sterilization camps, often under unsafe and unhygienic conditions. Millions of men suffered health complications. Some men were forced to undergo serious procedures, and the many who did “consent” did so under duress.

The program expanded rapidly, disproportionately targeting poorer and marginalized communities. Over 6 million sterilizations (mostly male vasectomies) were carried out in 1976 alone. Precise figures on deaths are harder to establish, but contemporary reports and later analyses indicate that hundreds, and possibly thousands, of men died due to botched procedures, infections, or poor conditions in overcrowded camps. The lack of medical oversight and the pressure to meet quotas contributed to outcomes that left a lasting stigma around family planning programs.

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Despite these brutal efforts, India’s population growth did not slow down. Between 1971 and 1981, India’s population grew by roughly 24% from 548 million to 683 million people. And, yet, India never ran out of food.

Instead, India benefited from the Green Revolution, which introduced high-yielding varieties of rice and wheat to poor countries. Advances in high-yielding varieties of rice and wheat, along with the use of irrigation and fertilizer, allowed India to become self-sufficient in food. Even as Ehrlich was making the rounds on American TV, Indian farmers had figured out how to grow three times the amount of wheat and twice the amount of rice on the same amount of land.

The Green Revolution freed up rural labor that moved into more productive sectors, contributing to the structural transformation of India’s economy. Lower food prices helped urban workers reduce their cost of living, which in turn supported industrial growth. At the same time, public investments in education, healthcare, and infrastructure bore fruit. As child mortality declined and economic opportunities expanded, people chose to have fewer children. A 2021 study of the Green Revolution estimated that a 10 percent increase in the adoption of high-yielding varieties of rice and wheat increased GDP per capita by 15 percent.

But, Ehrlich simply refused to acknowledge this demographic transition, preferring to see India’s population as an endless driver of poverty and instability.

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Ehrlich’s vivid description of crowds vastly oversimplified the complex reality of India. India was not a nation overwhelmed by its circumstances, unable to take effective action. Rather, it pursued a deliberate strategy to build food security through state-led investment and institutional innovation. Beginning in the 1950s and accelerating in the 1960s, the government expanded agricultural research through bodies such as the Indian Council of Agricultural Research and agricultural universities, which helped develop and disseminate high-yielding varieties of wheat and rice. At the same time, policymakers provided incentives to increase production: minimum support prices, input subsidies for fertilizers and irrigation, and credit programs aimed at farmers. These measures were complemented by the establishment of procurement and distribution institutions like the Food Corporation of India and the Public Distribution System, which enabled the state to purchase grain, maintain buffer stocks, and deliver subsidized food to vulnerable populations. Together, these policies formed the backbone of the Green Revolution, particularly in regions such as Punjab and Haryana.

The results were transformative. India moved from a position of chronic food shortages and dependence on imports in the early 1960s to near self-sufficiency in staple grains within a decade. Large-scale famines—once a recurring feature—were effectively eliminated. The gains were uneven: regions with better access to water and infrastructure benefited most, while rain-fed and poorer areas lagged behind. The intensive use of fertilizers and groundwater introduced long-term environmental stresses. Even so, the overall trajectory was clear—India emerged as one of the world’s leading agricultural producers, with the capacity to feed its population and maintain significant public grain reserves, reshaping its rural economy and reducing the risk of mass starvation. Today, it uses advanced digital techniques to predict the onset of monsoons. India’s development story could not be more different from Ehrlich’s rigid and pessimistic views.

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Paul Ehrlich turned a vacation to India into a thinly-researched book that brought him fame and fortune. His stereotype of a densely-populated land, unable to sustain itself, remains influential to this day, as doomsayers (now with a climate twist) compete to take his place. The historian Naomi Oreskes asserts that eight billion people represent a crisis, not an achievement. People living in poor countries, she says, lack opportunity. Despite a mountain of evidence on technological advances and smart policies that have resulted in fewer poor people, rapid economic growth, and more food being grown on less land, there is no dearth of people regurgitating Ehrlich’s failed arguments. An obituary in the New York Times states that his findings were “premature” and brands his critics as “conservatives and academic rivals.”

The apocalyptic scenario Paul Ehrlich predicted for India never came to pass. New seeds, fertilizer, irrigation, and human ingenuity provide more than enough food for the 1.4 billion people who live there. In the end, Ehrlich will be remembered not for rigorous scholarship but for preying on the anxieties of people in wealthy nations for his own gain.

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As the last major effort for bipartisan permitting reform fizzled out at the end of the last Congress, both protagonists and observers settled upon two dueling explanations for the political failure of the Energy Permitting and Reform Act (EPRA). The first was that the green groups did the deed, opposing judicial reform and other key changes to the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) that spiked a deal with Republicans. The second was that the utility industry was responsible, opposing reforms that would have made it easier for the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) to override state opposition to new interstate transmission lines because they feared that new transmission would increase competition from out of state generators.

The first of these explanations is undoubtedly true. Green groups made no bones about their opposition to the package pushed by then West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin and Wyoming’s John Barrasso. Despite a lot of handwaving in some green quarters about the need to build, not a single major green group came out publicly in support of EPRA.

But the role that utilities played is more complicated. Not every major utility opposed EPRA and some publicly supported it. Rural electricity co-ops and publicly owned utilities opposed the transmission reform provisions in EPRA as did a subset of investor-owned, vertically integrated monopoly utilities in states that have not liberalized their electricity markets.

The dispute, ostensibly, was about whether states should be forced to pay for transmission capacity that they don’t want or need. But it was also about an attempt to use transmission reform as a trojan horse to force states where utilities continue to be traditionally structured and regulated to allow competition from merchant power generators.

As Democrats and Republicans gear up for one more go at a permitting reform deal, there are lessons from the failed effort to pass EPRA in the dying days of the last Congress that might help avert a similar fate in this Congress. Transmission reform needs to work not only for utilities and states that have liberalized their electricity markets but also for those that have not. For decades, advocates for electricity market liberalization have argued that competition would lower rates and accelerate decarbonization. But the real world evidence for these benefits is mixed at best. Simultaneously, the ability of traditionally regulated utilities and regulators to plan for new generation, transmission, and distribution has real strengths that advocates for market competition have underestimated. Using transmission reform to force competition on states that have not signed up for liberalization is bad politics and bad policy.

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Electricity Market Liberalization Has Been a Mixed Bag

Both renewable energy advocates and proponents of electricity market competition have long directed fire at traditional cost-of-service utilities, both believing that supply-side competition will drive down electricity prices by opening up the grid to alternative energy sources. Vertically integrated utilities, in this view, restrict the free market’s ability to lower prices and bring new energy technology to market. There is some truth to this argument. Data collected since restructuring in the 1990s shows that competition in deregulated markets does indeed improve dispatch and decrease production costs.

But the relationship between wholesale electricity market competition and lower observed electricity rates is tenuous. Lower production costs don’t necessarily lower consumer prices because electricity markets remain deeply imperfect. Generators can exert market power, markets are influenced by state policies, and public goods like reliability and grid inertia aren’t properly valued, even by capacity and ancillary markets. Multiple analyses of deregulated regions suggest that dispatch of cheaper generation doesn’t even translate into lower wholesale price, much less retail prices.

Production costs, moreover, are just a fraction of the prices seen by end users. In an analysis of utility spending reports to FERC, EIA found that, while production costs nationwide decreased 24% from 2003 to 2023, spending on transmission tripled and spending on distribution grew 160%. EIA goes so far as to explicitly state that “capital spending on the distribution system, responsible for delivering electricity to end users, was the main driver of electricity spending increases over the last two decades.”

In practice, the choice between competitive markets and cost-of-service regulation has real tradeoffs. For instance, deregulated markets tend to beget volatility. Prices subject to real-time swings in supply and demand expose consumers to the volatility of fuel prices and supply-demand imbalances. The cost-of-service model doesn’t eliminate these impacts entirely, but helps smooth them out over a longer time horizon, protecting ratepayers from feeling price spikes as acutely.

If one regulatory model were objectively better than the other, it would demonstrate so on the grounds of a utility’s core mandate: to provide reliable electricity at the least cost possible to consumers. Yet deregulation has not emerged as a clear winner.

Consider resource adequacy. Deregulated regions internalize resource adequacy with market structures like ancillary and capacity markets that offer profits to private developers willing to build generation needed for long-term resource adequacy. But resource adequacy, and reliability more broadly, are public goods that can’t be bought and sold in any organic market. Because of this, electricity markets struggle with proper valuation. Markets are also influenced by inconsistent risk tolerances between regions and states, distortionary political interventions (e.g., renewable portfolio standards and state tax credits), and regulations that cap energy prices during periods of extreme scarcity (e.g., Texas electricity prices hitting the state’s $9/kWh cap during Winter Storm Uri). On net, merchant developers in competitive markets typically wait to start new construction until they see strong enough price signals. This often leaves deregulated regions with thinner margins of excess capacity to act as a buffer against, say, an unanticipated explosion of demand from data centers.

Regulated utilities can tackle resource adequacy with the advantages of centralized decision making, stable financing, and predictable revenue. As both the system planner and the system builder, they don’t experience a coordination gap between the identification of a need and that need getting fulfilled. This lets regulated utilities construct larger projects that serve long-term resource adequacy forecasts rather than limiting new construction to what near-term market signals justify.

As a result, vertically integrated utilities are structurally better equipped to accommodate large loads like data centers and industrial facilities and to build energy megaprojects like nuclear, hydropower, and even offshore wind. Market liberalization has proven deadly for both firm, low carbon generation and large loads. Since restructuring began, liberalized markets have contributed to the closure of 6.5 GW of nuclear generation. The replacement of long-term industrial price agreements has contributed to the closure of 85% of U.S. aluminum smelting capacity since 1980. No liberalized market in the US or abroad has succeeded in deploying a new reactor or smelter. Ever.

Critics will point out that guaranteed rates of return on billion dollar megaprojects incentivizes utilities to overrun costs. Again, this argument is not wrong, but it is incomplete. Yes, the cost-of-service model puts the risk of overbuild onto ratepayers. But liberalized markets burden ratepayers with risk too; they only shift it to the opposite scenario by imposing steep scarcity prices if past market signals caused underbuilding.

Is it better to bill ratepayers for larger safety margins, knowing that utility gold-plating makes up at least some of those costs, or to use markets to ensure, on average, leaner spending on generation but increase household electricity prices at the times when that conservatism falls short? The case for the latter is by no means clear enough to justify fixating on competition and deregulation, a stance that only works to the country’s collective detriment at a time when bulk system reliability demands collaboration and coordination over homogeneity.

Figure 1: Conceptual table of societal risk burdens under cost-of-service versus competitive electricity market structures

At any rate, using transmission reform to increase competition in regulated markets in the name of affordability, reliability, and decarbonization fails to reckon with how deregulated markets have yet to deliver on their promises.

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Decoupling Transmission Reform from Stealth Deregulation

Unfortunately, proposed federal transmission reforms of the past few years have indeed erred towards the deregulatory thesis—directly and circumspectly proposing increases in federal authorities to promulgate competition.

The Energy Bills Relief Act introduced by Reps. Levin and Casten in March 2026, for example, would mandate minimum electrical transfer capacity between regions, give FERC ultimate authority to allocate the costs for a broad and vague classification of transmission lines of “national significance,” and require that demand response be “eligible to participate in all wholesale energy markets regardless of the State in which they are located.” Physical ties to neighboring deregulated regions exposes regulated utilities to the argument that lower cost imports should displace new local investment. While this would not definitively lead to deregulation, it allows ratepayer advocates to make the case to state commissions that utilities should trade with external generators and integrate with competitive markets in lieu of investing in local generation and infrastructure. Integration and interconnection may make sense in some cases, but those determinations need to be made in the context of comprehensive, long-term planning. Moreover, statutes like these in the Energy Bills Relief Act make no attempt to integrate with regional processes or the limits placed on FERC jurisdiction by the Federal Power Act, nor do they ensure ratepayers on one side of a line won’t pay for benefits received only on the other.

The press release announcing the Energy Bills Relief Act—and the bill title itself—frame these policies around lowering electricity prices. But it wasn’t too long ago that policymakers openly pushed for similar reforms to advance the interests of competitive electricity markets and renewables into cost-of-service regions. The CHARGE Act of 2022 mandated competitive procurement and eliminated right of first refusal laws for new generation built outside of an RTO or ISO, with sections titled “Promoting Competition for Generation” and “Due Regard for Fair Competition.” The 2023 SITE Act proposed allowing FERC to pre-empt state legislatures for interstate transmission lines that “enable the use of renewable energy,” while the 2025 Reinforcing the Grid Against Extreme Weather Act called on FERC to consider “improved access to electricity generating facilities with no direct emissions of greenhouse gases” and “increased competition and market liquidity in electricity markets” as transmission benefits to determine minimum mandatory interregional transfer capacities.

EPRA, to its credit, steers clear of many of these excesses, shedding the unambiguous use of deregulatory and renewables-biased language seen in its predecessor bills. But traces of that approach still exist. EPRA, for instance, would allow FERC to issue siting permits for interstate transmission at or above 100 kV. This change makes much needed improvements to the existing federal siting pathway that bureaucratic redundancies and legal challenges have made nearly impossible to use. And while the 100 kV provision does constrain FERC’s siting authority compared to the status quo (the existing authority has no such voltage floor), the very act of making the siting pathway usable nets an increase in federal powers well above the floor at which they would likely be particularly efficient or practical. Half of the country’s transmission lines are at or over 100 kV [Figure 1]. 100 kV transmission is significantly more expensive per unit capacity than higher voltage lines [Figure 2]. Raising the voltage floor to, say, 230 kV, would reserve federal authority for projects that clearly exploit transmission’s high economies of scale and promote more efficient utility spending. Democrats genuinely interested in interregional transmission should be prepared to concede points like a 100 kV limiter for the greater good of the permitting package, which almost certainly provides more benefit for transmission than extending federal siting authority to thousands of lines at the lowest possible voltages to be considered part of the bulk power system.

Figure 2: Number of transmission lines in the United States by voltage class. Approximately 52% (44,665) of lines with documented voltage levels are rated between 100 and 161 kV.

Figure 3: Cost per MW-mile (rated capacity) for a new AC, single-circuit transmission line at different voltage levels. Assumes a 100 mile line, addition of two breaker-and-a-half positions (one each terminal), power factor of 0.95, and conductor specs provided in MISO’s 2024 transmission cost estimation guide. Calculated data may not be accurate outside of the MISO footprint.

Bottom line, rather than assuming that interregional lines maximize social welfare, federal policies should instead facilitate interregional planning processes that use local cost-benefit analyses to evaluate projects on their merits. States, utilities, and other stakeholders are far more likely to support federal transmission policies that let them participate in planning from the outset and that align with existing FERC rules. Even if interregional planning is federally required, it retains local autonomy, making it significantly more palatable than top-down, prescriptive transmission mandates.

It is also crucial that interregional transmission planning operate in parallel with both region’s internal transmission plans, and that these joint transmission plans use objective criteria that regions agree upon a priori to calculate a project’s benefits. This builds upon interregional planning provisions in EPRA that require consideration of existing regional transmission plans but don’t ensure that interregional lines are directly evaluated as alternatives to multiple regional projects. Such criteria should consider both the least and most cost-efficient solutions across the shared geographic area that improve bulk system performance defined using quantifiable metrics already employed by the power sector. Importantly, such criteria should exclude more politically-laden criteria like promotion of clean energy, regional carbon emissions, and other vague benefits. After all, one state should not have to pay higher rates to help another state meet its clean energy policy targets. If climate advocates believe so firmly in the growing economic power of clean energy sources, they should take appropriate confidence that such characteristics will manifest empirically in cost-optimized reliability planning.

If interregional planning selects an interregional line as a worthy project, it stands to reason that the affected states and entities should cooperate to build and pay for them. To prevent intractable disagreements over the exact share of costs that each involved state’s ratepayers should bear, federal policy should also require in advance that states formalize agreements on a default cost allocation formula to pay for a project in the event that it meets cost-benefit criteria. Here again, the early involvement of key decisionmakers improves this transmission reform framework’s political viability by letting them craft the agreements that will hold them accountable moving forward.

FERC siting authority should only apply in cases where states refuse to issue siting permits as a veto to block transmission projects that regional planning or rigorous independent analysis has already singled out as desirable for the areas they would connect. In such instances, FERC is only intervening to enforce agreements that the relevant stakeholders have already consented to—to advance a public interest that project-specific modeling has already empirically identified. Notably absent from this framework is any ideological attempt to impose competition upon vertically-integrated utility territories for its own sake.

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Market Neutral National Transmission Policy Is Good

In the end energy system evolution and decarbonization will have to move forward in numerous vertically-integrated, regulated jurisdictions as well as in deregulated electricity markets, federal organizations like the Tennessee Valley Authority or Bonneville Power Administration, and not-for-profit, community-owned utilities. Of these options, many states will choose to retain regulated monopolies in the electricity sector and have every right to do so.

Regions with competitive electricity markets are not going anywhere either. It is difficult to imagine putting Humpty-Dumpty back together, nationalizing all generation and transmission assets, and re-bundling everything under one roof again in places like New England, California, and Texas.

The United States, being a large and diverse country with strong regional and state-based identities, contains a myriad of regulatory flavors and will likely continue to do so. In a federal system, Congress should be expected to craft transmission policy reforms that let a thousand flowers bloom, rather than implicitly dictating one electricity market structure over another. If Congress and energy policy commentators want to build lines connecting wind and solar in the Great Plains to coastal population hubs or to restructure utility regulation in states that currently operate under the traditional cost of service monopoly utility model, they should debate such ideas explicitly rather than using transmission to fight a proxy war over competition and renewable energy despite the lack of clear evidence that these objectives efficiently improve affordability and reliability or accelerate decarbonization.

Meaningful and politically-durable transmission reform, rather, need only ensure that transmission planning regions coordinate to identify—and build—projects that genuinely benefit both regions, and to codify agreements between states for sharing project costs. Such a framework rightly leaves decisions over preferred utility or market structures up to regions and states, retaining federal siting authorities but only for transmission lines that participatory interregional planning has already identified as beneficial to all parties involved.

Even if critics of traditional monopoly utilities are correct that such territories would continue to block interconnections that might introduce competing sources of electricity generation, a compromise would still facilitate interregional transmission between other areas of the country—a vast improvement from the currently intractable status quo. At the same time, the empirically-grounded regional planning processes mandated by this policy framework would focus greater political pressure upon bad-faith stakeholders if they were indeed seeking to prevent worthy projects from moving forward.

By the same token, if utilities operating under cost-of-service regulation are correct that their regional systems are cost-efficient, resilient, and in conformity with reliability requirements, then the regional planning process will vindicate their claims and deem additional interconnections unnecessary. If they are mistaken, then they possess an obligation to their regulators and their ratepayers to support new high-voltage lines identified as beneficial.

Just as grid operators and researchers rely on centrally-designed power system models to test scenarios and hypotheses, the solution to regionally contested transmission expansion is to evaluate results scientifically: 30 years of observations from the American Experiment with reconstruction fail to corroborate the hypothesis that competitive markets are more effective than cost-of-service regulation. Policymakers should adopt this narrow and more technically-informed mindset to decouple the transmission debate from fraught ideological goals around preferred market models and favored generation technologies, increasing the odds that Congress will enact politically durable and materially successful permitting and transmission reforms.

This article has been revised in order to clarify language and discussion points regarding several policies and regulations.

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