Below, my video from years ago reviewing a straight-to-vinyl audio episode of General Electric’s “Excursions in Science”, precursor to modern podcasts. That episode reviewed Gilbert Plass’s research on “The Carbon Dioxide Theory of Climatic Change”.
The science moved on. What really lit a fire under me on climate was when James Hansen testified to the US Senate on June 23, 1988 (my birthday), that climate warming had been detected, and was affecting the planet already at that time.
The battery world wasn’t bullish about sodium-ion EV batteries until top Chinese battery companies went all in on the tech. Why bother with a new chemistry when lithium iron phosphate (LFP) and nickel manganese cobalt (NMC) are already powering millions of EVs, are constantly improving, and are widely available?
On Monday, the world’s largest lithium-ion battery maker unveiled a new brand called Naxtra, dedicated to producing both low- and high-voltage sodium-ion batteries. These will power everything from light-duty EVs to commercial trucks in China. And CATL isn’t making modest claims. It says its sodium-ion batteries will charge at near full speeds in temperatures as low as -40 degrees Fahrenheit. That’s cold enough to where Fahrenheit and Celsius are the samenumber.
According to the American Physics Society, sodium is 1,000 times more abundant than lithium and its environmental impact is far lower. Until now, it’s lagged behind in energy density, and lithium still enjoys a head start thanks to a mature extraction and supply chain. Still, different chemistries suit different use cases and sodium-ion may be a good fit for compact EVs, hybrids and extreme cold. Due to its inherent temperature-resistant properties, the ions move freely even in Arctic temperatures.
Two stories in The New York Times today that are related. The details vary, but the main elements are the same wherever you go. Clean energy brings economic stability to rural communities, along with some intangibles.
Mr. Chamberlain, 70, grew up in Atchison, one of Missouri’s most rural counties, and over the years watched as waning opportunities and population decline steadily ate away at the place. Young people didn’t come back after college. School enrollment fell. Farms got bigger, and fewer farmers meant less tax revenue. Businesses on Main Street closed and the area went from having two grocery stores to one.
One thing the county did have was lots of wind, and Mr. Chamberlain thought that having a few commercial turbines might bring an economic boost. He contacted the state’s Department of Natural Resources about putting up a wind monitoring tower on the hilltop of a nearby pasture. The paper, the Atchison County Mail, announced this endeavor under the headline, “Chamberlain to Study Wind,” drawing mirth as well as the attention of a wind power developer from St. Louis.
The developer came to Atchison County, and Mr. Chamberlain drove him and some engineers around to prospective sites, in the van he also used to drive around pallbearers. He also connected the group with local landowners, laying the groundwork for the county’s first wind farm.
Mr. Chamberlain ended up becoming a local consultant on the project, and, as it was being developed, thought it would be a good idea to also set up a small community wind project to help power the county seat, Rock Port. The small city bought power from a municipal power pool, but also had its own power plant that could supply electricity during outages.
American Resources Corporation AREC has announced the development of a cutting-edge leaching solution that is modular, mobile and scalable. This novel solution allows for the extraction of rare earth concentrates from coal waste and other mining waste — materials that are often considered environmental burdens.
The company intends to roll out these units across its 30,000-acre controlled property and license them to landowners and mining operators around the world, generating royalty-based revenues. The leachate produced from this process will be delivered to ReElement Technologies, where it will be refined into high-purity rare earth products for use by domestic and allied-nation magnet manufacturers.
ReElement Technologies has proven its ability to produce high-purity, individually separated rare earth oxides from coal waste. Additionally, the company is working with a U.S.-based partner to obtain rare earth concentrates extracted from mine water liabilities, further expanding a sustainable and domestically sourced supply chain for critical minerals.
As repetitive storms keep hammering the middle of North America, at least some of them, earlier in the month, were associated with a “stalled” system, and a split jet stream, which, while not unique, was rather large and seems implicated in the drawn out nature of the precipitation events at that time.
The video above is a rough version of one of the last pieces I did for Yale Climate Connections. Scientists discuss how climate is affecting jet stream flows, and potentially causing more damaging storms. Weirdly, and all too predictably, Yale has removed all of my videos from “public” listing, I suspect because of finicky bureaucratic concerns about copyrights on news footage etc. Oh well. Below, April’s split jet.
The global battery market is advancing rapidly as demand rises sharply and prices continue to decline. In 2024, as electric car sales rose by 25% to 17 million, annual battery demand surpassed 1 terawatt-hour (TWh) – a historic milestone. At the same time, the average price of a battery pack for a battery electric car dropped below USD 100 per kilowatt-hour, commonly thought of as a key threshold for competing on cost with conventional models.
Cheaper battery minerals have been an important driver. Lithium prices, in particular, have dropped by more than 85% from their peak in 2022. However, rapid advancements in the battery industry itself are also supporting price declines. After years of investments, global battery manufacturing capacity reached 3 TWh in 2024, and the next five years could see another tripling of production capacity if all announced projects are built.
These trends point to a battery industry entering a new phase of its development. While markets used to be regionalised and small, they are now global and very large, and a range of technological approaches is giving way to standardisation. Looking ahead, economies of scale, partnerships along the supply chain, manufacturing efficiency, and the capacity to bring innovations swiftly to market will be crucial to compete. This will likely result in greater consolidation across the sector, which is simultaneously being reshaped by government-drivenefforts to geographically diversify battery supply chains.
According to Wood Mackenzie and the American Clean Power Association, the U.S. deployed more than 3 GW/10.5 GWh of energy storage in Q2 2024 – a dramatic 74% and 86% increase in power and energy capacity compared to Q2 2023. When strategically deployed, these solutions provide sub-second response times for demand management, frequency regulation, and voltage support – capabilities that traditional demand response programs cannot match.
This evolution comes at a crucial time. Grid operators across North America report that conventional demand response programs are struggling to meet reliability requirements as weather patterns become more extreme. During summer 2024, several major utilities experienced record-breaking demand spikes that overwhelmed traditional DR programs, leading to controlled outages in some regions.
However, utilities with integrated storage systems demonstrated significantly better resilience. Rocky Mountain Power expects to bring on 213 megawatts of demand response between 2025 and 2028, designed to maintain service to critical facilities and improve customer satisfaction. This approach helps defer costly infrastructure upgrades and reduce expensive peak power purchases, contributing to more stable rates.
Meteorologist for the Houston Chronicle has been sounding the alarm on cuts to NOAA and climate science data collection. A plus communication work here, leveraging the credibility of local TV meteorologists to inform audiences of what could be lost. Props the the local ABC station, channel 13, for giving air to this issue.
Weather forecasts in Texas and across the United States, which have been critical for public safety during active storm seasons, will be impaired by more cuts to upper-air data collection, a move announced by the National Weather Service on Thursday.
Upper-air data collected by sensors, or radiosondes, are attached to weather balloons are launched twice daily under normal circumstances across more than 100 weather service offices. Hurricane scientists, meteorologists, and forecast modelers then feed upper-air data into weather models.
Radiosonde data is a crucial piece of the forecast puzzle:
Forecast models used by the National Hurricane Center depend on upper-air data to initialize their forecasts every six hours.
Data from the farthest reaches of the troposphere helped forecasters determine where snow would fall during January’s rare snowstorm and who might see sleet or a cold rain.
Atmospheric observations are critical to every aspect of weather forecasting. While some of these observations can be interpreted indirectly through satellite data or remote sensing techniques, radiosondes are the only way to get a direct measure of the upper atmosphere.
It will take some time to build the infrastructure to support a robust circular battery economy, so in the short term we will need to continue mining to meet growing demand for batteries. But by focusing on how to get the most out of these minerals, we can greatly reduce our need for mining. This can be done by implementing the six strategies outlined in our report, The Battery Mineral Loop: The Path From Extraction To Circularity:
Shift to new battery chemistries: Deploy different battery chemistries that require fewer critical minerals.
Increase energy density: Store more energy per kilogram through better battery engineering.
Employ battery recycling: Ensure all batteries are recycled at end of life so their materials can be used in new batteries.
Reuse EVBs and extend their lifetime: Use and reuse batteries longer to avoid the need for frequent replacements and provide a greater flow of service from a smaller stock of batteries and their minerals.
Increase vehicle efficiency: Make cars more efficient — lighter weight, sleeker, and with better tires and accessories — and right size them for purpose to allow for smaller batteries for the same vehicle range.
Change mobility patterns: Reduce the demand for motorized transportation and induce mode-shifts to public transit, electric micromobility, cycling, and walking through better urban planning, smarter transportation infrastructure investments, and logistics efficiency.
These strategies will not only help meet near-term EVB demand but can actually eliminate our need for new minerals by 2050.
