Each year, the editorial team at MIT Technology Review puts together a list of 35 innovators under 35—a group of researchers, inventors, and other young minds worth following.
The team worked on the newest edition of the list for months, and the final slate includes nine individuals from all over the world in the climate and energy category. Each one has a fascinating story and is tackling an important challenge.
I think it’s worth zooming out and considering the energy and climate awardees as a group. Taken together, these innovators and their work can tell us something about where climate tech is at this moment—and where it’s heading.
We split the innovators into four main categories this year: biotech, climate and energy, computing and robotics, and AI. It probably won’t surprise you that AI features heavily in the work of many innovators in other categories.
Climate innovator Jae-Won Chung, for example, built software to make AI more energy-efficient. By measuring the energy demands of open-source models, he hopes the industry can better understand and address the impact of AI. (If this work sounds familiar, it’s because we spoke with him last year for our investigation into AI’s energy demands.)
But AI also has the potential to improve many areas of research. Jing Wei is using AI to track pollution more effectively, essentially using machine learning to fill in gaps in data from disparate sources like satellites and weather stations. Zhonghua Zheng developed AI climate models that work better for cities, a well-known blind spot for traditional models.
As we begin to rely on new technologies to power our world, we’ll see a major shift in the materials we need to build them.
Lithium is a prime example: The metal underpins lithium-ion batteries, which are crucial not only for electric vehicles, but also for large-scale energy storage on the grid. We could face lithium shortages as soon as this decade, and the prospect of supply crunches applies to other critical minerals, too—copper is another one to watch closely.
Brine is currently the cheapest source of lithium, but the process to get the metal out can take months and harm the local environment. Mohammad Alkhadra is the cofounder and CEO of Lithios, a startup working to quickly and efficiently extract lithium from brines.
Hardrock ore is the most common source of lithium, but it’s more expensive than brine. Benjamin Mowbray cofounded and serves as CTO for Rock Zero, which is working to extract lithium from hardrock ore.
To reach net-zero greenhouse gas emissions we will obviously need to rethink major sectors, like the electrical grid and transportation, to move away from fossil fuels. But outside these primary sources of climate pollution are seemingly infinite, less obvious problems to figure out, too.
Heavy industry, including steel production, is a major one, making up about 7% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Laureen Meroueh is making cleaner, cheaper steel using a new kind of furnace that simplifies the chemical process required to produce the metal.
Plastics are generally made with fossil fuels, so we’ll need alternatives to this incredibly useful category of materials. Joseph Nguthiru is making a bioplastic replacement for fossil-derived packaging that uses an invasive weed. Also using available materials in a creative way, Diana Orembe is making fish food for aquaculture with food waste.
And refrigerants are often incredibly powerful greenhouse gases. Jinyoung Seo is developing solid refrigerants that could eliminate worries about leakage. A device using these materials could reduce energy consumption by 20% compared to conventional technology.
I’m constantly learning about new challenges we face in the climate and energy world, and I’m often surprised by the ideas people are coming up with to address them. For more on all the under-35 innovators and their work, check out our full 2026 list.
This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here.
CenterPoint Energy disclosed to federal regulators on Sept. 14 that an unauthorized party obtained personal information belonging to some of its customers through an external-facing system, days after a post on a cybercrime forum advertised a data set the seller said covered roughly 7.5 million customer records.
The Houston-based utility, which delivers electricity and natural gas to about 7 million metered customers across Indiana, Minnesota, Ohio and Texas, said in a Form 8-K that it learned of the online post this month and opened an investigation with outside forensic experts. It has reported the matter to law enforcement.
Operations were not affected. The filing states that the company's "delivery of electric and gas services has not been impacted" and remains undisrupted — a distinction that matters for a utility, where regulators and customers draw a sharp line between the theft of billing records and interference with grid operations.
CenterPoint has not confirmed the volume or authenticity of the advertised data set, and has not described how the intruder got in or how long access persisted. The forum poster, using a hexadecimal-styled handle, claimed to have pulled the records from an API endpoint that lacked adequate authentication and rate limiting, and listed fields including customer names, phone numbers, email addresses, service and billing addresses, account and premise identifiers, billing amounts and past-due balances, billing and due dates, service and rate information, autopay and paperless billing status, driver’s license numbers, last four digits of Social Security numbers.
The actor claimed, additional identity information was exposed through a second account-verification function. According to the post, the extraction was split across seven parallel data ranges covering Texas and Minnesota. The actor said that security changes, including CAPTCHA enforcement, were eventually enforced and that prevented further data collection. These claims remain unverified.
Plaintiffs' firms moved faster than the investigation. At least one has already announced an inquiry into potential claims on behalf of affected customers — now a standard sequel to any large consumer breach at a regulated utility.
The incident is not CenterPoint's first brush with data exposure; the company was linked to earlier third-party file-transfer compromises, though analysts at the time judged much of that data to have originated outside its systems.
A San Francisco nonprofit has published a detailed road map of the experiments, studies, and infrastructure that it says would be needed to make informed decisions about the use of solar geoengineering, MIT Technology Review can reveal.
Scientists have now spent half a century exploring the possibility that we could counteract climate change by releasing reflective particles into the stratosphere, mimicking the cooling effects of volcanic eruptions.
But even after at least hundreds of studies on the concept, known as stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI), big gaps remain in the scientific understanding of how well it would work and what else it might do—and there has been no systematic plan for clearing up that uncertainty.
Reflective, a research organization that funds studies on solar geoengineering, has today attempted to fill that gap with the release of its SAI Research Roadmap.
“Our mission is to equip the world with the data and tools required for informed decision-making about sunlight reflection fast enough to matter,” says Dakota Gruener, the organization’s cofounder and chief executive. “Our sense is the world may need to make very consequential decisions on timelines far shorter than our research system is prepared for.”
The hope is the exercise will guide scientific efforts and encourage philanthropies or government agencies to fund high-priority work and “responsibly accelerate research,” says Gruener.
If all the work is done in a coordinated way, it would take about a decade and cost around $370 million—and if it’s not, it would require roughly 20 years and nearly $1.4 billion, the report estimates.
While Gruener stresses that Reflective doesn’t advocate using this form of solar geoengineering, the report does make the case for conducting outdoor experiments, which would release successively larger amounts of sulfur dioxide (or materials that would convert into it) in the stratosphere to observe what happens.
That is a controversial standpoint. Since 2002, hundreds of academics have signed an open letter calling for a ban on outdoor experiments and an “international non-use agreement,” arguing that such a powerful technology could never be governed in a globally equitable way. And some signatories argue that more studies can never address one of the biggest questions about using solar geoengineering: Who gets to do it.
“The first-order questions, from my perspective, are not technical,” Aarti Gupta, co-initiator of the non-use initiative and professor of global environmental governance at Wageningen University in the Netherlands, told me in a recent on-stage interview.
“The core question is: Who would control a planet-altering technology like stratospheric aerosol injection? Who would develop it, and who would deploy it, and to what end? To serve what purposes, and whose purposes? Those questions are very fundamental, because this planet-altering technology will have winners and losers.”
Since Gruener incorporated Reflective in late 2023, the nonprofit has quickly become an important player in solar geoengineering research. It has now raised more than $20 million from a number of prominent charities and individuals, and it’s provided around $4 million to several dozen research groups. Reflective has also undertaken a handful of its own projects to promote research, including the development of an open-source solar geoengineering simulator and an online hub for collaborative research.
Earlier this year, Reflective released its SAI Uncertainties database, which identified a long list of scientific unknowns and engineering obstacles that would need to be addressed before even a small-scale solar geoengineering effort could move ahead. (I wrote about the specific scenario and the unknowns in this earlier piece.)
Some of the biggest uncertainties involve what gas or particles would make the most sense to use and what would happen once they were released in the dry stratosphere. It’s not clear, for example, whether they’d spread out in a way that maximizes the reflectivity—or clump together and quickly fall out into the troposphere, the lowest layer of Earth’s atmosphere.
The road map builds upon the database, highlighting the path to addressing most of those questions.
The initial phase in Reflective’s road map, labeled “foundational knowledge,” includes additional computer simulation studies and lab experiments designed to shed light on the potential impacts on different regions, ecosystems, and phenomena, including ocean circulation patterns, ice sheets, and crop yields.
The report also notes the need to begin developing more observational tools during this phase to improve understanding of the baseline conditions of the stratosphere—and, in turn, our ability to assess any effects from the eventual release of materials.
This first stage would last two to three years and cost $30 million to $75 million, though some of the analysis and observational work would continue into subsequent phases.
The next stage would include using modified aircraft to release 10 metric tons of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere, four times over the course of two seasons. The full research stage could take four to eight years and cost $70 million to $150 million, the report says. The work during it may reduce uncertainty about the “cooling efficacy” of solar geoengineering, or how much the planet would cool per ton of sulfur released, by about 25%.
The experiments during the next phase would step those levels up dramatically, releasing 25,000 tons of sulfur dioxide over the course of one season, at least once but possibly twice. That research stage, which includes other work as well, would last four to 11 years, run $270 million to $1.1 billion, and decrease efficacy uncertainty by around 66%, according to the road map.
The final phase of research would be ongoing monitoring of full-scale solar geoengineering, if the world goes ahead with it. The goal would be to gather real-life data on the technology in action, update estimates of the effects in models, and spot any “unexpected or undesired consequences.”
Gruener says that the road map is intended as a Version 1, meant to be “concrete enough for people to argue with.” But Reflective intends to update the plan as it receives additional reactions from researchers and other observers, and it will invite such feedback through a mechanism on the site.
She also notes that there are firm “stage gates,” set up between the latter stages—in other words, research shouldn’t proceed to the next phase if the experiments suggest that the releases don’t have the hoped-for impact, show worrisome downsides, or fail to resolve crucial uncertainties.
“Our road map has these gates precisely because there may be points where the answer is ‘You should stop,’” she says.
Most observers I spoke to about the report agree that these studies could reduce uncertainty about the effectiveness of solar geoengineering and our technical ability to carry it out.
But highlighting the scientific importance of outdoor experiments won’t necessarily make them any easier to move ahead with. Several earlier proposals to carry out such experiments, including Harvard’s SCoPEx and the UK-based SPICE project, were ultimately halted amid opposition from environmentalists or policymakers.
In addition, not everyone agrees that experiments at those scales will get us to the point where we’re capable of making an “informed decision.”
Wil Burns, a research professor and legal scholar at American University and a signatory to the International Non-Use Agreement, fears that scientists won’t be able to understand the extent of the potential downsides, including impacts on the protective ozone layer and changes to regional precipitation patterns, until we’re carrying out full-fledged solar geoengineering.
“The research would give you some answers,” he says. “I just don’t think it gives you answers that are that relevant. To get to those relevant answers, you have to deploy at scale—and I just don’t think that’s ever tenable.”
That’s because, in his view, using the technology would violate principles of intergenerational equity: If the world continues emitting greenhouse gases, increased levels of solar geoengineering would merely mask the continued warming of the planet. Burns says that means future generations—people who had no say in its use—couldn’t turn it off without triggering a sudden surge of warming, known as termination shock.
“What that would do, in my mind, is put a sword of Damocles over future generations,” he says. “So even if you could, quote-unquote, ‘prove it works,’ I don’t think from an intergenerational perspective it would ever be tenable.”
(Some researchers, however, have argued that the risks of termination shock are less likely than often assumed—and that solar geoengineering could be slowly dialed down over time.)
Ilan Gur, the former CEO of the Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA), the UK research department that funded 21 geoengineering research projects last year, applauds Reflective’s road map.
“Whether you’re a scientist or a policymaker or just a concerned citizen, our goal should be as quickly and efficiently as possible to answer the biggest questions scientifically that would tell us [whether] this is an approach that might work or that would never work,” he says. “We should all want to spend the effort and money to buy down that uncertainty, so my view is 100% the approach that Reflective is taking is the right one.”
Sebastian Eastham, an associate professor in sustainable aviation at Imperial College London who is leading an ARIA-funded research project exploring another approach to engineered cooling, agrees that the outdoor experiments described in the Reflective road map can’t resolve all the unknowns. But he says the map helps begin a conversation about how to make decisions concerning the use of a tool with potential benefits and risks, in the face of escalating climate dangers.
“Every hard decision that has ever been taken has been in the context of unresolved uncertainty,” he says. “That’s just the nature of things.”
Eastham adds that it’s become essential to move beyond computer simulations to address some of the key questions, arguing that appropriately designed and executed outdoor experiments can teach us so much more than millions of hours of computational processing time “that it almost becomes irresponsible to say, ‘Well, there cannot be ever any experiment.’”
The risk is “that we spin our wheels running the same computational simulations over and over and over again,” he says. That could prevent researchers from learning essential things about the effectiveness or the dangers of stratospheric aerosol injection.
Gruener says the risks that solar geoengineering could exacerbate inequality need to be considered, but notes that unchecked warming also threatens to disproportionately harm developing regions.
She also acknowledges that outdoor experiments won’t fully address the scientific unknowns but stresses that they can answer a lot—and carry little environmental risk. She notes that 10 tons of sulfur dioxide is less than 2% of the amount that the global aviation industry releases into the atmosphere each day.
“Some people will be uncomfortable with any discussion of any outdoor experiment, but if we want decisions made on good science … then these are questions that an experiment will be necessary to address,” Gruener says.
She fears that the rising dangers of climate change will put growing pressure on nations and other actors to move forward with solar geoengineering, even if no one has done the necessary research to reduce scientific uncertainty and sort out the technical challenges.
“We don’t think the alternative is decisions not happening at all,” she says. “We think the alternative is decisions being made in a panic or on lack of evidence.”
The US is hitting records for the rapid growth of its energy storage market. That’ll go a long way to shoring up the grid, increasing reliability and also cutting emissions, since batteries can help store energy from intermittent renewables like wind and solar.
Crucially, this is all happening with the help of cheap Chinese batteries, though there’s been a concerted effort to reduce the US’s reliance on them. Most recently, in an executive order in late August, the Trump administration declared a national emergency that essentially bans Chinese batteries from being used in grid-scale energy storage systems.
There’s an argument to be made about reducing reliance on any single source of a crucial energy technology. But all this tension raises a broader question for me: How much should countries take advantage of cheap, available tech, versus cutting off major sources to force development of their own factories even if that comes at a higher cost?
This is hardly America’s first push to move away from Chinese influence in the battery supply chain. One of the major policy tools used in recent years is restricting the tax credits designed to incentivize use of the new technologies. Limiting the types of projects that are eligible can help reduce the cost of local technologies so they’re more competitive with otherwise cheaper imported options.
Back in 2022, the US government designed the tax credits that were part of the Inflation Reduction Act to restrict where a battery’s minerals could be mined, processed, or recycled, as well as where a battery and its components were assembled.
Those tax credits underwent a makeover in 2025, but the Trump administration has taken a similar tack. New legislation requires that starting in 2026, 55% of the cost of materials used for new energy storage projects must come from outside China and other restricted countries or the projects won’t qualify for tax credits.
And we can’t forget about tariffs. Import taxes for batteries increased to 25% in January, up from 7.5%.
But the new executive order is a more drastic move. It bans the installation of “any foreign-produced bulk-power system electric equipment” that poses a national security risk. The order specifically calls out battery energy storage systems, as well as inverters and transformers.
“An outright ban was a bit of a surprise, and it does create a bit of concern for domestic players in the US,” says Shan Tomouk, energy storage and energy lead for Benchmark Mineral Intelligence, an energy industry analyst.
The move is likely to slow deployment of grid-connected energy storage projects in the near term, according to analysis from BloombergNEF, an energy consultancy. Projects could face delays as developers wait for clarity on the rules.
Depending on the detailed guidance from the Department of Energy, which is expected by the end of the year, some projects may need to find alternative sources for their cells, whether they’re domestically produced or imported from other countries. These will likely be more expensive than Chinese imports, says Isshu Kikuma, an energy storage analyst at BloombergNEF. “Worst case, those projects could get canceled,” he says.
Technically, the order applies even to existing energy storage plants, though it’s unlikely that they’ll be taken offline because of their batteries’ origin. Since most of these plants currently use Chinese batteries, enforcing the order to the letter would essentially mean removing most installed battery energy storage from the US grid, Kikuma says.
In the longer term, the US will eventually be able to meet its own demand for batteries. The country could have enough capacity by about 2030, though some factories may not ramp up or run at their full capability, meaning domestic supply won’t actually meet demand until later in the 2030s.
New factories from LG Energy Solutions, Samsung SDI, Ford, and SK On are set to come online or ramp up by next year. In an ironic twist, a slowing EV market is helping, as some factories originally designed for vehicle batteries are retooling to build cells for grid storage instead.
But it will come at a cost. Today, batteries produced in the US are still significantly more expensive than those made in China. Even switching to imports from other countries like South Korea would likely be more expensive.
This is a crucial issue that goes beyond the US and even beyond batteries. China is miles ahead of much of the rest of the world on technologies like solar panels and batteries. Through years of government support and experience with research and manufacturing, the nation is an energy powerhouse.
There’s a delicate political balance to maintain as the world figures out how to navigate this situation. There’s cheap technology on offer, which can help drastically reduce emissions and energy costs. But there can be risks associated with relying too much on any one player for crucial technologies.
This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here.
© Ahmad Mulia Panjaitan/Associated Press
Battery installations hit a new record in the US in the second quarter of 2026. In total, 20.2 gigawatt-hours of new capacity came online, according to a new report. That’s enough to supply the daily electricity needs of about 700,000 homes.
The surge is putting the country on a trajectory to see 71 gigawatt-hours of batteries installed in 2026, a 20% increase over last year. This growth is being driven by a combination of cheaper batteries and an urgent need for more energy storage capacity as renewables such as solar and onshore wind power are added to the grid.
Massive, utility-scale systems are leading the way; they’re responsible for most of the record-setting quarter. Seven new gigascale battery installations (those with a capacity of over one gigawatt-hour) came online during the three-month stretch, according to the report, published by Benchmark Mineral Intelligence and the Solar Energy Industries Association.
“It really came down to a handful of big projects,” says Shan Tomouk, energy storage and energy lead for Benchmark Mineral Intelligence.
But there was also growth in the category of so-called behind-the-meter batteries, which include both residential and industrial battery storage systems. These projects, generally smaller than utility-scale installations, are typically owned and operated by homeowners or businesses rather than utilities or power providers.
In the behind-the-meter category, data centers led the way, making up about three-quarters of new batteries in the commercial sector. But residential batteries saw a sharp slowdown. These systems are often installed in homes to store power from solar panels or serve as a backup source in case of a blackout. Home installations are projected to drop by 16% in 2026 compared with last year, according to the report.
That drop happened largely because a tax credit that helped subsidize home battery systems ended in 2025, Tomouk says. Home installations should recover by the end of the decade, he adds. And tax credits for nonresidential batteries have largely survived.
Overall, batteries are a bright spot in energy right now. “This is one of the strong sectors in the US,” says Isshu Kikuma, an energy storage analyst at BloombergNEF, an energy consultancy.
As the battery market continues to grow, one major trend to keep an eye on is a move toward US-made technology. Today, nearly all the systems coming online use cells made in China, though some are put together into complete energy storage systems in the US.
Tariffs were already pushing the US energy storage industry toward domestic production. And beginning this year, energy storage tax credits required projects to limit their reliance on batteries imported from China. There’s a lot of manufacturing capacity set to come online in the US, though these factories probably won’t be able to meet demand until at least 2030 or so, Tomouk says, so prices could tick up.
© Nick Rohlman/The Gazette, via Associated Press
The steel industry isn’t exactly known for innovation. Very little has changed about purifying iron ore since the process was invented and commercialized in the 1850s.
The majority of steelmakers melt solid iron ore at dizzyingly high temperatures inside blast furnaces, where the material reacts with gases to trigger chemical reactions that remove oxygen. It then undergoes further refining to purify it before it is made into products like rebar and car frames.
The process relies on coal, and it generates roughly 7% of the carbon emissions that drive climate change—about as much as the fashion industry. Decarbonization has proved difficult: Profit margins are tight and furnaces have long service lives, making investment tough to justify.
Now Laureen Meroueh may have found a way to clean up steelmaking without driving up the price. Meroueh, the founder of Hertha Metals, invented a new furnace that simplifies the chemistry behind the process. Her method turns iron ore into refined liquid steel in a single step, and it swaps coal for natural gas. Together, those changes slash emissions by at least half, she says, and cut costs by 25% compared with steelmaking business as usual.
If it catches on, the tech could be transformative. “There’s huge value in reducing the size of this production system,” says Iryna Zenyuk, director of the National Fuel Cell Research Center at the University of California, Irvine. “They’re massive. They’re inefficient and require a lot of energy input, so even if they just save energy efficiency, that’s already a big step.”
Hertha’s approach focuses on what it can fix about the steel industry now, as opposed to waiting around for a zero-carbon system.
Still, it’s a risky endeavor, but pushing limits isn’t new for Meroueh. At 12 she was accepted into a pilot program to take college-level courses through Florida Atlantic University in lieu of a traditional secondary education. She was immediately drawn to engineering and explored topics including calculus and ocean wave energy.
Despite the rigorous coursework, she would spend hours sitting in trees and surfing, which fostered a deep appreciation for nature and a desire to safeguard it. “I don’t know how you can’t be drawn toward trying to help protect that,” she says.
Now 34, Meroueh has let that passion inform her professional goals. After finishing her PhD in mechanical engineering at MIT, she led a green hydrogen startup before founding Hertha in 2022. A first-generation Lebanese-American from an entrepreneurial family, she saw starting her own company as a typical path. “Seeing how common it is to take that jump to start your own business is what made me feel like ‘This is normal,’” she explains on a video call from her office at Hertha’s pilot plant in Conroe, Texas, just north of Houston.
That facility can produce one metric ton of steel per day. “One ton per day is a big metric for steel,” says Rajesh Swaminathan, a partner at Khosla Ventures, one of the company’s investors. (Hertha had raised about $20 million in funding as of July 2026.)
Swaminathan says the company’s scale-up is “impressive,” especially given how little the team has spent. Competitors, he notes, have created far less steel with $50 million or $100 million in funding.
Hertha’s approach focuses on what it can fix about the industry now, as opposed to waiting around for a zero-carbon system. While other approaches to making green steel center on using hydrogen to free oxygen from iron ore—a method that could one day cut or eliminate emissions—Meroueh says Hertha is content for the time being with a continued reliance on fossil fuels, mainly to keep costs down. The current Hertha plant could eventually switch to a fully decarbonized system without drastically changing the hardware, she says, if hydrogen becomes more affordable.
In the meantime, plans are underway to expand into a new plant next to the existing one. The facility is slated to produce 10,000 metric tons of high-purity steel per year and should reach full capacity by the end of 2027. By 2030, Meroueh believes, Hertha can up its output to 500,000 metric tons per year with the addition of a third site. That’s only a fraction of the approximately 80 million metric tons of steel produced annually in the US, but Zenyuk says making even one metric ton is still an achievement.
In Meroueh’s mind, the world isn’t going to outgrow its need for steel, so she’s asking another question: “How can we be smarter about how we make things … so that it’s also not going to harm us in the long term?”
If you’ve had to fill up your vehicle’s gas tank or buy a plane ticket lately, you’ve probably felt the effects of rising fossil-fuel prices. But farmers buying fertilizer for their crops are especially aware of just how far the ripple effects of the conflict in Iran have spread.
Fertilizer prices have been on a roller coaster this year, kicked off in part by trade disruptions and high prices for natural gas, a key ingredient in fertilizer production. Let’s take a closer look at why conventional fertilizer prices are so sky-high, and how a few more climate-friendly alternatives could bring farmers some relief.
As fossil-fuel prices go up, nearly all industries are affected, since most of our economy relies on these fuels to move goods and people around.
But fertilizer is even more intertwined with these fluctuations, because natural gas is used as both an energy source and a chemical input in the production of ammonia, a key fertilizer ingredient. So as natural-gas prices have spiked in recent months because of the war in Iran, fertilizer prices have followed. (It’s worth briefly noting here that fertilizer production is also a major source of greenhouse-gas emissions, accounting for about 2% of the global total.)
Fertilizer trade is being directly affected as well, since about one-third of global seaborne trade in fertilizers passes through the Strait of Hormuz, which has been effectively closed to commercial traffic because of the conflict. Access to fertilizer could get worse for some of the poorest countries around the world because of the strait’s closure, according to a report from the World Bank. While the US largely meets demand for nitrogen fertilizers with domestic production, some imports do come from the Persian Gulf.
At one point in April, the price of urea (the most commonly applied fertilizer) climbed above $850 per metric ton. That’s 80% higher than it was before the conflict and the highest level since 2022, when the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the resulting conflict caused fertilizer costs to hit record highs. Prices have come down significantly, but forecasts remain uncertain.
“There’s just this out-of-control supply chain that’s a lot more volatile than it’s ever been,” says Travis Frey, chief technology officer of Pivot Bio, a company making fertilizer with genetically edited microbes. (For more on these microbes, how they work, and what research is still needed, check out my latest story here.)
Pivot says its products are cost-competitive with chemical fertilizers today. And because they don’t use natural gas as an input, they aren’t subject to the same price spikes. When the war in Iran started, Pivot increased the volume it planned to produce, dropped prices, and allowed farmers to lock in prices for three years, Frey says.
That could be a major help for those farmers, because high prices could be here to stay for a while. Some fertilizer prices could remain high through at least 2028, according to a report from CoBank, one of the largest banks for the agriculture industry in the US.
That’s partly because the war has caused long-lasting damage: 31 ammonia plants in the Middle East have been affected or shut down completely. That’s on top of 20 ammonia plants that have been damaged in Russia in recent years.
Ongoing high prices can be extremely challenging for farmers. “The fertilizer price spikes, and because farmers have paper-thin margins, this is a real problem,” says Tim Schnabel, founder and CEO of Switch Bioworks, another company working on advanced microbe fertilizers.
Higher costs can help push food prices higher, causing all of us to pay more at the grocery store. (It’s not just fertilizer, by the way. Farmers are also getting hit with wild diesel prices this year.) As long as we’re relying on fertilizers made with fossil fuels, food prices will be tied up with energy prices.
Switch and Pivot are among the companies looking to make alternative fertilizers that use microbes to provide nitrogen to plants. There’s a limit to how much synthetic fertilizers these products can actually replace: Depending on the crop and conditions, Pivot says, its products can replace about 25% of synthetic fertilizer today, and the company hopes to reach 40% to 50% of the total. But these alternatives could be a start to untangling fossil fuels and food.
“We can’t keep doing it like this,” Switch’s Schnabel says. “There’s no way we can build a society where the basis of the food chain depends on fossil fuels.”
This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here.
Fertilizer is crucial for the global food supply, but making it uses a lot of energy and produces a lot of emissions. Some companies hope microbes can help.
A growing body of research shows that seeding the soil around a crop’s roots with beneficial microbes can help feed the plant, providing crucial nitrogen to help it grow. This could help reduce the need for chemical fertilizer, production of which accounts for roughly 2% of global greenhouse-gas emissions. It could also cut costs for farmers, a big boon—especially as the Iran war has sent energy and fertilizer prices skyrocketing in recent months.
Humans have used biological fertilizers like manure for thousands of years, and companies have long been developing microbial fertilizers, including some that rely on genetic engineering. But it’s difficult to engineer microbes that can reliably provide nitrogen for crops while also thriving themselves.
A startup called Switch Bioworks is taking a new approach that essentially allows microbes to establish themselves and grow into healthy colonies before shifting into nitrogen-producing mode. “We have to reinvent fertilizer,” says Tim Schnabel, the company’s founder and CEO.
The air is nearly 80% nitrogen, but plants can’t use that “free” nitrogen directly because it doesn’t react readily with other elements. Instead, they rely on so-called fixed nitrogen, which has been converted into more reactive compounds such as ammonia. In nature, microbes can perform this nitrogen fixation. Some plants, like legumes, even have symbiotic relationships with nitrogen-fixing bacteria, housing them in nodules in their roots. Synthetic fertilizer is essentially industrial nitrogen fixation via the Haber-Bosch process, which uses natural gas to make ammonia that’s applied to fields.
Biological fertilizers aim to replace some of the synthetic fertilizer with microbes that can help fix nitrogen for plants. But one challenge microbial fertilizer companies have run into is that it’s energetically expensive for microbes to make and release ammonia. Putting all their energy into nitrogen fixation can hamper their growth.
There’s a certain level of colonization you want to see around the roots, Schnabel explains. It’s too expensive and logistically challenging to put all those microbes on the plant, so you have to rely on a smaller number of microbes to grow and divide, establishing the population.
Switch Bioworks is betting that a genetic switch is the answer. A genetic switch is a section or sections of DNA that controls how genes are turned on and off. In this case it works by activating genes that help trigger ammonia production in and release from the cell. The company is working on several options for setting off this change in its microbes. The leading one is to have the microbes react to the nitrogen level in the soil: Once it drops to a certain level, they begin producing ammonia.
“You have this inherent biological reality, where it’s really expensive for microbes to fix nitrogen,” says Dan Blaustein-Rejto, director of food and agriculture at the Breakthrough Institute. It takes a lot of energy, and if they do fix the nitrogen, they want to use it for themselves, to build proteins and survive, he says. Adding genetic switches could help microbes grow and thrive and then help fertilize crops.
Switch is currently trialing its product in six US states, though it’s two to three years from a commercial product, Schnabel says. It’s initially focused on corn, the most-planted crop in the US, with over 90 million acres in 2026.
“It’s too early to tell exactly how well this works in the field,” Schnabel says. The company plans to harvest the plants in late October or early November, but as of August, some corn plants treated with Switch microbes already looked visibly healthier than those that hadn’t. And it’s still developing the products that will eventually make it to the market, he says.
Switch’s products could significantly help to clean up agriculture. “There’s a lot of potential for these companies and products to help farmers reduce emissions,” Blaustein-Rejto says. “This could be a really important solution for a quite hard-to-abate sector.”
While lab results have been promising, field trials are a crucial step in proving a product, Blaustein-Rejto says: “This is one of the final steps before they can go to market and make strong claims to farmers.” Independent trials are important as well, he adds, since there can be a large gap between a company’s reported data and what independent researchers find.
Pivot Bio is another company working to bring microbes to fields. Since it was founded in 2011, its products have been used on millions of acres of crops. The company now produces a range of products: Some versions can be added when seeds are planted, while others are applied to seeds before they’re even on a farm. The company also recently expanded beyond corn to make microbial fertilizers for cotton, wheat, and small grains including sorghum and barley.
Pivot’s initial challenge was trying to get microbes to produce nitrogen, whether they sensed it in the soil or not. Now the company is working to figure out how to make fitter, more robust colonies no matter the environment, says Travis Frey, the company’s chief technology officer.
“Growers right now are experiencing a double whammy from the farm economics point of view,” he says. Fertilizer costs are going up, and the price of commodity crops like corn has dropped. That’s a big opportunity for Pivot and others in the industry, Frey says: “This next decade is when biologicals on the farm are going to go mainstream.”
Fertilizer and seeds are two of the biggest costs for many growers, so reducing dependence on synthetic fertilizers could be a major help for agriculture, says John Havlin, a professor in the department of crop and soil sciences at North Carolina State University.
“I’m very excited about the future of the use of these products,” Havlin says. “They’ll eventually have a role to play to reduce the load of nitrogen that’s being applied.”
However, there’s a ceiling to the amount of fertilizer we can expect microbes to replace. Switch’s modeling suggests that around 50% is likely the maximum, though the initial product will likely be able to replace about 25% of a farm’s synthetic fertilizer, according to the company. Pivot has said its products can replace about one-quarter of the fertilizer used currently.
That means synthetic fertilizer will be around for a long time. “There is no clear and plausible vision for replacing it entirely in the foreseeable future,” Blaustein-Rejto says. “So other ways to reduce emissions and reduce other types of nitrogen pollution from farms remain really critical.”
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Your thermostat may not look like a power plant. Neither does your electric vehicle, home battery, or HVAC system. But utility and energy companies increasingly want to treat them like one.
A virtual power plant, or VPP, is a collection of household devices (such as smart thermostats, electric-vehicle chargers, home batteries, and solar panels) that a utility can control. Usually that means commanding the devices to draw less electricity during peak hours. For example, the utility might adjust your thermostat or delay or slow EV charging when electricity demand is high.
In exchange, the utility offers VPP participants a discount on their energy bills and, in some cases, a signing bonus. Seth Frader-Thompson, CEO and cofounder of EnergyHub, a software company that helps utility companies run VPP programs, says a smart thermostat program may offer an initial bonus of roughly $50 to $150, plus about $25 to $50 per year, while home battery and EV devices could yield hundreds or thousands of dollars in annual savings.
The amount of power the utility might throttle in any one home is small. But it adds up, Frader-Thompson says. “When you put it together at the scale of hundreds of thousands, or millions, it has a pretty profound impact,” he says, equivalent to “firing up a power plant.”
As of 2023, there were already more than 500 VPP programs operating in the US alone, and the number has only grown since, especially with big players like Google starting to invest in this technology to help power their data centers. An estimated 4 million households with smart thermostats were enrolled in a VPP program as of last year.
But the approach is still new, and some programs may still have some kinks to work out, says Severin Borenstein, faculty director of UC Berkeley’s Energy Institute at Haas and member of the board of governors of the California Independent System Operator, which manages most of the state’s electric grid. If a program is not implemented well, he says, a utility may incorrectly predict when VPP participants plan to use more electricity and pay them for not using energy they weren’t planning to use anyway, potentially increasing energy bills for nonparticipants. Still, Borenstein says, “if we do it well, I think it can really be a benefit,” one that could help utilities avoid an expensive grid upgrade or emergency measures to conserve power.
Most consumer VPPs today are less dramatic than the name suggests and don’t actively send energy from your EV or home battery to the grid. But battery-to-grid programs are on the rise—and potentially offer even larger savings for consumers in the future.
So how do you actually sign up for a VPP? And how do you know if it’s worth it?
1. Check whether your utility company has a program and, if so, whether it actually supports your devices.
The types and brands of home devices supported vary from program to program. Your utility’s website is the obvious place to look to see if yours qualifies, but it’s important to note that you may not actually see the phrase “virtual power plant” anywhere. You may have better luck searching for your utility’s name plus terms like “demand response,” “peak rewards,” “connected solutions,” “battery storage,” “smart thermostat rewards,” “managed charging,” or “bring your own device.”
But don’t stop with the utility, Frader-Thompson says: “The way most people actually learn about this and sign up is through the manufacturer of the device they have.” In other words, the offer may show up through your smart thermostat app, EV app, or battery app, or in an email from the company that made the device.
Once you find a program, the instructions for enrollment may be as simple as clicking through an app, filling out a utility form, or confirming your account and device information through a third-party enrollment page. EV drivers may be able to see the terms and payment in their automaker app and enroll “with a click of a button,” says Joseph Vellone, CEO of the EV-focused VPP company ChargeScape.
Eligibility can get annoyingly specific. A smart thermostat program could require an approved Wi-Fi thermostat; an EV program may depend on your automaker, charger, utility territory, or rate plan; a battery program may depend on the battery brand, inverter, or installer and whether your system can communicate with the utility.
These programs are also not evenly distributed across the country. Most programs are established in places with lots of flexible devices, stressed grids, supportive utilities, or strong state policies—especially California, Texas, New England, and increasingly parts of the mid-Atlantic region.
2. Ask yourself how much flexibility you can afford.
Before you sign up for a VPP, you’ll want to determine whether you’re willing to let a company adjust a device in your home—even if it typically happens only a few times a week.
For some people, this may be an easy decision: If your EV sits plugged in all night but only needs two hours to charge, shifting when that charging happens may be almost invisible. A home battery program could be lucrative if you understand how often the battery will be used, how much backup power you can keep, and whether extra cycling affects your equipment.
Other households, however, “do not have the flexibility to engage in one of these programs,” says Sanya Carley, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and faculty director of the Climate Center for Energy Policy. She says that people who work night shifts, have caregiving responsibilities or health needs, or are already aggressively limiting their energy use to save money may have less room to allow a utility to adjust heating, cooling, or charging rates during peak hours for grid demand.
3. Review the opt-out rules and read the fine print.
VPP programs generally give participants the ability to override temporary changes made by the utility. This right to “opt out” is what makes them workable for many customers. Can you skip a day of the program on your thermostat if you’re planning to have guests over? Can you tell your car to charge immediately before a long road trip? Can you keep a battery reserve for outages? Utilities are typically motivated to make the opt-out process as simple as possible, with few rules and restrictions.
It could also be worth investigating where your data might be going. EV and battery programs may need to collect data about things like charging status and schedule, or how much power a device is drawing, while smart thermostat data may reveal patterns about when people are home, sleeping, or using appliances.The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit focused on digital rights, has warned that this data could be used to infer private routines inside a home; depending on the program, that information may not only move through a utility but get distributed to device manufacturers, software platforms, or third parties involved in running the program.
ChargeScape and Energy Hub say the data used for these programs is limited and functional. EV data is focused on “the physics and the energy of the asset itself,” Vellone says. Frader-Thompson explains, “It doesn’t really matter what any one customer is doing. It matters what the average customer is doing.”
4. Decide whether the offer is worth it for you.
The amount of compensation for signing up for a VPP can vary widely. The payment also may not come as a regular check. It might be a signup bonus, a gift card, a monthly bill credit, a discounted thermostat, free or cheaper EV charging, an annual performance payment, or additional “export credits” for energy sent back to the grid.
The most expensive devices, namely EVs and home batteries, are often what yield the greatest savings, which adds a barrier to entry for those who cannot afford these products in the first place. A smart thermostat program can be a low-stakes way to start.
You might have a variety of reasons for wanting to sign up, including supporting the overall health of the grid or avoiding the construction of a new power plant in your community. “There are not that many things that you can do that directly contribute to decarbonizing the electric supply, or to improving affordability, or to improving reliability, and this is just a clearly effective way to do that,” Frader-Thompson says. “And you get paid for it.”
In short, the best VPP program is not necessarily the one that pays the most. It’s the one that clearly tells you what it can control, how much money you’ll get, how easily you can say no—and how well it supports a community’s energy goals. Your home probably won’t feel like a power plant. But if your thermostat, car, or battery can bend a little when the grid needs it, your home can act like a small piece of one.
© Poppy Lynch for The New York Times
EVs account for under 10% of total new-vehicle sales in the US, and the numbers are declining. From a climate perspective, that’s pretty dismal, especially because the transportation sector is the single biggest source of greenhouse-gas emissions in the country.
One thing that could help turn that around? Slate Auto’s new truck—a vehicle that seems to buck every convention about selling cars in the fully loaded, range-obsessed US market.
The company is going all in on simplicity, to the point of austerity. The Slate is a tiny, two-door pickup that’s shorter than a Honda Civic. Much of the media coverage has obsessed over the fact that the base model’s windows use hand cranks, a feature straight out of the 20th century.
Slate is also breaking away from other EV manufacturers’ efforts to compete with gas-powered vehicles on range. The truck sports a small lithium iron phosphate battery, ringing in at 65 kilowatt-hours, and its quoted top range is just 205 miles. For comparison, the most basic Tesla Model 3 can go over 320 miles on a charge.
By accepting a shorter range and forgoing the frills that Americans have come to expect in vehicles, Slate is able to offer the base model of its truck for less than $25,000. Some customers will choose to upgrade their truck with optional add-ons, like a Bluetooth stereo system, vinyl wraps, or even power windows. But the price will still likely come in well below the roughly $50,000 average for a new vehicle in the US.
It might seem an odd choice to go so small and simple in a market that’s increasingly sizing up—but the status quo hasn’t exactly been working for EV makers. A few years back, the hero for US automotive electrification was supposed to be the Ford F-150 Lightning. Announced in 2021, it was an electric version of the country’s best-selling vehicle.
But Ford discontinued the truck in December 2025, just four years after its introduction. It’s not entirely the Lightning’s fault: The second Trump administration slashed tax credits and other support designed to boost EVs.
The Lightning was also plagued by price increases. The base model cost roughly $40,000 when shipments started in 2022; during its final year, prices topped $54,000. One factor behind the increase was its massive battery; to reach an almost 300-mile range, the truck needed a battery with a capacity roughly twice that of Slate’s truck.
That obsession with range is largely unwarranted. While Americans have historically chased distance, the average driver puts under 35 miles a day on the odometer, and nearly 90% of trips in a personal vehicle are 20 miles or less.
Surveys of EV drivers show a similar trend: One recent study found that people tend to use less than 20% of their EV’s range on a typical day.
The notion that drivers need far less range than they think they do might sound a lot more persuasive these days—even for Americans who tend to buy cars for their longest road trip instead of their everyday errands. Roughly half the country is struggling to pay for basic necessities such as gas and groceries, and 95% of Americans believe we’re in an affordability crisis, according to a recent Harris poll. An inexpensive vehicle that allows you to skip the gas station sounds like an attractive prospect.
Affordable EVs have already found willing buyers in other parts of the world—even with reduced range. China currently has over 40 million EVs and plug-in hybrids on the roads, and roughly half of new vehicles sold are electric. On average, new EVs sold in China in 2025 had a range of just 247 miles. For the US over the same period, the average was 329 miles. (Europe falls between the two, at 281 miles.)
Slate is set to start delivering on preorders in late 2026. Its factory will have a capacity of 100,000 vehicles in the first year and 150,000 soon after. Thousands of customers have already put in preorders, according to the company.
Some people obviously believe in the truck’s prospects: Investors, including Jeff Bezos, have put nearly $1.4 billion into the company over three major funding rounds. Ford is jumping (back) into this space soon too. The automaker is working on its own small electric truck, which is expected to debut in 2027 at a retail price of around $30,000.
The key question that will determine Slate’s success or failure is whether drivers can get on board with a small, short-range vehicle for the sake of its price tag. At this moment, I’d bet the answer is yes.
There’s a hunt for new sources of hydrogen, and the gas (or at least the right conditions to make it) could be hiding beneath our feet.
Hydrogen can be used as a fuel in everything from large trucks to planes to steelmaking. It’s often hailed as a climate solution because when burned, it produces water and oxygen—none of the carbon emissions that contribute to climate change.
In a new story for our latest print issue, freelance reporter James Dineen took a look at the 21st-century gold rush for naturally occurring hydrogen gas. This is an area of research I’ve been fascinated by lately, so let’s take a look at the potential and the questions that still linger.
Today, hydrogen is overwhelmingly made using fossil fuels, generally natural gas. And most of it is used in petroleum refining or goes on to make fertilizer and other chemicals. But in recent years, many in the climate world have imagined a future where its production is clean too.
If you’d asked me a few years ago, I would have said the race for clean hydrogen was between methods that use electrolyzers powered with renewable electricity and operations that use established, fossil-fuel-based approaches cleaned up with carbon capture. But both those methods have struggled to gain ground, largely because of their high cost.
Lately, there’s been momentum in a new field: geologic hydrogen. Companies have found naturally occurring hydrogen resources across Africa, Asia, Europe, Australia, and North America.
The US Geological Survey publishes a map of hydrogen prospectivity in the country (basically, where the gas is most likely to occur naturally). One hot spot is the Midwest—specifically the Midcontinent Rift, winding from Kansas to Michigan. The planet’s crust was stretched and split there about a billion years ago, causing molten rock to push up through the crack. The result today is a lot of iron-rich rock, which can react with water to readily form hydrogen.
HyTerra, an Australian company, is searching for hydrogen across Nebraska and Kansas, and it’s already found samples of gas with hydrogen concentrations up to 96%. Koloma, one of the most capitalized companies in the space with total funding over $400 million, is prospecting in the region as well.
One of the major questions these companies have is just how much hydrogen is produced by natural processes, and whether it can be effectively captured. Hydrogen is an incredibly light gas with a small molecular weight, so it can slip through even tiny cracks in rock.
As James covered in his story, there are some promising signs. Researchers examined a few dozen boreholes at a mine in northern Ontario and found that each one released eight kilograms of hydrogen per year. Given that there are more than 14,000 boreholes at this one site alone, that’s a lot of potential hydrogen to capture.
Rather than hunt for a natural source, some companies are taking matters into their own hands and helping reactions along. The idea behind so-called stimulated geologic hydrogen is to find a spot where there are favorable conditions for hydrogen production but no accumulated resource. By adding water, a catalyst, or some other factor needed for the reaction, it’s possible to kick-start the process.
Vema Hydrogen is a Texas-based company looking to produce hydrogen from subsurface rocks by drilling wells and injecting water and catalysts into them to stimulate reactions. The company is testing its process in wells in Quebec and hopes to start full-scale production in 2028.
Other companies are tackling different aspects of hydrogen production: Eden GeoPower, for example, is using electricity to form fracture networks in rocks, creating more routes for water to get in. (The technology could also be useful in enhanced geothermal projects.)
There are still a ton of unanswered questions here: Hydrogen is notoriously difficult to move around and store, requiring either a lot of space or super-low temperatures to force the gas to become liquid. But if the engineering and logistics work out, this could spell a new beginning for hydrogen.
This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here.
Sometime in the late 2000s, Pim Sullivan-Tailyour was sitting in the back of a car, headed toward her great-grandmother’s tiny town in the south of Thailand. She watched big mountains pass by out the window. She was just six years old but was about to be hit by an adult-size realization. “They were just quarried out,” she says. “Like half the mountain just dug out and disappeared, and so there was just this huge orange face.”
Although she probably didn’t know the word “quarry” back then, she sensed that what she was seeing was unnatural. She also knew, from family stories, that her mother had bathed in a nearby river when she was young, its water so glass-clear she could see fish swimming by. But the extraction had muddied the water. “We’re changing things,” Sullivan-Tailyour thought. “And it doesn’t seem right.”
It was the first time it occurred to her that humans could alter the world—and that they were. For the worse.
She carried that knowledge with her as she got older and her family moved to the UK. There, she joined teenagers from other schools in the Schools Sustainability Network, an umbrella organization for groups that work on environmental initiatives.
But even with those connections, Sullivan-Tailyour didn’t encounter anyone at her own school who was interested in environmental activism. She felt lonely in her desire to push for change—and burnt out on working solo. “I was pretty much the only person who wanted to do these things,” she says.
That was when she heard about another initiative, called Force of Nature. A UK-based organization, in 2021 it had spun up Becoming a Force of Nature, a kind of informal online group therapy program, for kids and young adults worried about climate. The sessions aimed to help young people like Sullivan-Tailyour take their worries and turn them into action, stemming the exact kind of anxiety and burnout she was feeling.
She signed up and soon logged into Zoom for her first session. Dozens of faces from dozens of countries looked back at her. “I realized that I wasn’t alone,” she says.
She began to suspect that kids at her school actually did feel the way she did, even if they weren’t doing anything about it.
Sullivan-Tailyour was right, it turns out: Global surveys have found that most kids are anxious about the state of the world—and not just about whether sea levels and carbon counts will continue to rise. They are growing up in a time of what some historians, policymakers, and economists are calling a “polycrisis”: The planet is warming, yes, but also a pandemic happened and could happen again, conflicts keep erupting, nuclear weapons lurk menacingly in silos, housing is growing impossibly expensive, groceries and gas can feel like luxury purchases, health-care costs are skyrocketing, authoritarianism is on the rise, partisanship splits populations, jobs are hard to get and there’s rampant worry AI will take more and more of them, and pings about all those things (and more!) arrive 24-7 in polarizing digital echo chambers.
That’s a lot. And it’s why online networks like Force of Nature have popped up. Although they’re not taking over the planet, they have gained thousands of participants. And they’re now dealing with climate not as an isolated issue but as one facet of a generally troubled world. The goal is to help young people, who are experiencing symptoms of depression and anxiety at higher rates than earlier generations, deal with their feelings about the multivariately changing future they are maturing into.
But the science on the effectiveness of these sorts of networks is still nascent, and psychological scholars—and some practitioners—say it’s time for the field to measure itself. That way, schools, parents, and kids themselves can know which programs to invest their time and resources in to actually help young people feel better.
The existential dread that comes with the climate crisis is so pervasive that it’s had an official name for many years: eco-anxiety. “The American Psychological Association calls it a ‘chronic fear of environmental doom,’” says Liza Jachens, a psychologist and assistant professor at the University of Nottingham’s school of medicine. “What people describe is closer to grief. A real sense of loss—not just fear of what is coming but mourning for what has already gone.”
Lise Van Susteren, a psychiatrist and coauthor of “The Psychological Effects of Global Warming on the United States,” a 2012 report for the National Wildlife Federation, has called it “pre-traumatic” stress; she sees it as a kind of anticipatory trauma.
In a 2021 study measuring climate anxiety, 56% of 10,000 children and young people in 10 countries agreed with the statement “Humanity is doomed.”
But there isn’t really a word to describe feelings people have about <waves hands> the rest of what’s going on in the world. A 2025 study from Polish researchers attempted to define “polycrisis syndrome” in the young people bubbling into adulthood in this hot soup of ingredients. The researchers assessed their reactions to the many crises using established scales of emotional and mental symptoms—things like the “Flourishing Index” and the “Difficulties in Emotional Regulation Scale.” “Most young individuals in our study face psychological challenges,” the authors write. In fact, more than 60% reported problems —difficulty regulating emotion, symptoms of depression, and lower overall mental and physical well-being—that they attributed to the cumulative stress of world affairs.
That finding meshes with earlier, more climate-specific research suggesting that the kids are (sorry) not all right. In 2021, researchers published a landmark study in The Lancet Planetary Health measuring climate anxiety in 10,000 children and young people in 10 countries. Around 60% reported being very or extremely worried about climate change, with more than 45% saying that eco-anxiety affected their daily ability to function. The word “polycrisis” wasn’t in as wide use then, but 56% of the young respondents nevertheless agreed with the statement “Humanity is doomed.”
But Gen Z isn’t the first to worry about the fate of the species. There isn’t a readily available baseline in the academic literature to compare current youth angst against, but previous studies can give some context. In the early 1980s, during the latter years of the Cold War, around 35% of high school seniors agreed with the statement “Nuclear or biological annihilation will probably be the fate of all mankind within my lifetime,” according to a survey of 130 schools in 48 states. Around the same time, a Gallup poll found that 49% of teens said the possibility of nuclear war influenced how they planned for the future.
Those young Baby Boomers and elder Gen Xers were, though, perhaps more optimistic than kids today as a whole. A majority of students from the high school study agreed with the statement “The human race has come through tough times before and will do so again.”
A 1986 analysis of such research, published by the National Academy of Sciences, described how to help kids feel less alone with their fears: “What is necessary for those providing the education is knowledge of the issue, sensitivity to the inner processes of working through the painful feelings engendered, and a willingness to try to come to grips with what the youngsters are voicing.”
That connection between adults and kids, psychological scholars are currently finding, is still key four decades later. Caroline Hickman, the psychotherapist who led the Lancet Planetary Health study, says the most striking finding was that kids weren’t just anxious about the state of the planet; they were upset that older people had failed to protect their future. “Whatever your politics, we have this expectation that faith leaders, school leaders, community leaders, government officials, will look after us and have our best interests at heart,” Hickman says, “and that social contract was being broken repeatedly.” Grief and anxiety are rational responses, she tells clients, to that bad situation.
Sullivan-Tailyour received that message from the very beginning at Becoming a Force of Nature. At the first session, facilitators (themselves young people) asked how participants felt about the future broadly and the climate crisis specifically.
That question hit Sullivan-Tailyour hard. She was used to thinking of numbers, news—not her internal experience. “It’s one of the things that we just don’t give ourselves the chance to really think about,” she says. The facilitators took the responses in and talked to participants, assuring them that eco-anxiety is only natural. “Our planet is sick, so it’s normal to feel sick alongside it, because we’re just so interconnected,” Sullivan-Tailyour says.
In the second session, participants investigated their personal strengths, skills, and passions. And the final session synthesized the first two. “We create a road map for how they can go out into their communities and take action,” says Hannah Hooper, until recently the group’s head of programs.
Reframing her feelings around action worked for Sullivan-Tailyour, as did the facilitators’ realistic approach to doing so. They emphasized that it’s unreasonable to put pressure on yourself to behave 24-7-365 in ways that will not harm the planet.
Conveying that sentiment is important to Force of Nature’s founder, Clover Hogan, who was a teenager when she started the group in 2019, just before the pandemic made everything virtual. One of her catchphrases is “We don’t need 100 perfect activists but millions of imperfect ones.”
The informal group sessions for Becoming a Force of Nature, free on Zoom, are the initiative’s main offering. The group has also built an interactive site called Hold This Space, which leads individuals through similar mental pathways. And it’s created a podcast that includes digitally solicited #climateconfessions: “I’ve stopped going to protests.” “I drive everywhere.” “I just can’t be arsed to separate or put out the recycling.”
The group has also moved away from its strict eco-focus. “We still think it’s really important, but it’s not our bread and butter at Force of Nature anymore,” Hooper says. Now it’s beginning to use less climate-specific language in its outreach and encouraging people who come to its events to talk about other sources of anxiety or existential despair—cost of living, conflict, whatever.
They made the shift, Hooper says, for two reasons. For one, young people in privileged countries may be anxious, but others are in survival mode—responding to acute crises, not just philosophical ones. For another, talking exclusively about climate grabs only a certain kind of person, and Force of Nature doesn’t want to exist in an echo chamber—especially when its leaders recognize that there’s plenty else to worry about.
Force of Nature had around 900 participants in Becoming a Force of Nature last year and has about 2,000 students from more than 50 countries in its online community. It may be the most prominent receptacle for young people’s planetary feelings, but it has company. Another group, called the Good Grief Network (GGN), recently spun off a program for teens. Its facilitators are trained online, but the youth programs typically take place in person.
GGN, a Michigan-based nonprofit, has a 10-step program for adults, modeled after the Alcoholics Anonymous 12-step model, to help people deal with their worldly anxieties.
Susan Igras, a program designer and evaluator, took part in the adult GGN program and found it helpful. She wanted to adapt it for kids. “So we designed something that was much more experiential—action-, reflection-based,” she says. Igras and a collaborator cut the number of steps down to five, built the program around interactive activities, and called it GGN-Z.
Igras and a collaborator began testing it in 2022 with kids in Northern California. The program is still small, but she’s hopeful it can match the success of the adult version, which has been run more than 85 times with around 2,500 total participants. The group is beginning online training so that club leaders and teachers around the world can use the strategies in their home regions.
It’s early days, but some of GGN-Z’s activities are already resonating. One perpetual favorite is the “bad news graffiti wall,” in which kids scrawl the things causing them angst onto a big sheet of paper. (On one recent wall, kids drew “Meta=cringe,” “hate speech,” a tornado, “LA” with a fire above it, and a dollar sign with an up arrow.) As a group, they then talk about the feelings those bad things bring up.
Kids also tend to like GGN-Z’s storytelling activity. “Like a ‘Once upon a time, I became aware of climate change,’” Igras says. It asks kids to reach back into their memories, to their first awareness that humans had altered the planet. One recent participant wrote, “Scared, 2nd grade learning about non-renewable resources.” Another wrote of seeing a picture of a skinny polar bear on a small chunk of ice.
Participants then switch to the positive, drawing their support web—a map of everyone who cares about them and the places and people that make them feel supported. That positivity leads them into thinking about what they can do and who can help them.
Does it all work? GGN-Z is currently in the process of evaluating itself—something Igras thinks is not done often enough for interventions in this area. “Where’s the program research? Because everyone is talking about feelings, but how do you know what works?” she says. “We’re trying to build the evidence.” She and her colleagues are conducting surveys to see whether participants report improved well-being and have more skills to manage emotions.
Force of Nature is also trying to quantify its impact, and to that end it has joined a 25-organization project called Youth Mental Wellbeing. For five years, they’ll study the collective work of these organizations. “The goal of the project is basically just to spotlight what’s working, to really show proven methods of working with young people and supporting them on their mental-health journeys,” says Hooper.
The idea of taking a scientific look at these kinds of interventions is just beginning to bloom. But if the people running the programs actually want to help kids, it’s important to find out which methods work—and avoid spending a lot of time on things that will leave them feeling the same or worse.
Most existing research on effectiveness, though, simply shows that such research is new. Jachens, for instance, coauthored a 2021 scoping review of eco-anxiety programs for people of any age, to understand the nature and extent of existing research. She found 34 in existence. Of those, only two had done any formal evaluation on themselves. “We need to know what works for who, when, and where,” Jachens says. In fact, she pleads with developers: “Please evaluate what you build.”
Another scoping review from 2024, led by Siqi Xue of the University of Toronto, found that the research gap hadn’t closed. The team included the Good Grief Network in its analysis, noting that while GGN said 90% of participants in its programs felt more empowered and less alone, it didn’t publish any data or methods backing up that finding.
Still, these analyses do have bright spots. They suggest that the group approach provides connection and validation—as well as an active direction for youths’ troubled feelings. “When people feel genuinely heard and held in their distress, they tend to move quite naturally toward wanting to do something,” says Jachens.
Few studies have looked at programs tailored to kids and young adults. But an analysis of one program in Sweden, called the Climate Emotion School, has at least added early dots of color to the map. Its curriculum was shaped by the work of Panu Pihkala, an interdisciplinary scholar in eco-emotions research based at the University of Helsinki. He outlined a “coping model” that emphasizes how important it is for people, including kids, to express emotions, learn how to regulate them, take action based on them, and form meaning from them—all while practicing self-care and taking healthy distance from big feelings when necessary.
“When people feel genuinely heard and held in their distress, they tend to move quite naturally toward wanting to do something.”
Liza Jachens, psychologist and assistant professor, University of Nottingham school of medicine
In the study, Britta Eklöf, a clinical psychologist based in Sweden, found that students in the climate program were relieved to share their bad feelings and see them mirrored by others, something that wasn’t generally happening in their interactions with adults. Grownups didn’t want to dwell on negative emotions with them, and their parents tended to try to soothe them. “The recommendation instead is to validate and share,” Eklöf says. And then, of course, give them something they can do.
Implementing the rest of the coping model—“finding meaning and hope in a hopeless situation,” as Eklöf puts it—can be harder for students and teachers. To do that, she says, kids have to admit that they can’t control the future and consider what they personally want to cultivate—not necessarily to fix the whole planet, but to make their immediate world a better place. For example, they might take out their neighbors’ recycling when it’s raining or join a local beach-cleanup effort.
“These days it feels like the good values of humanity are being shredded,” Eklöf says. “But you can say, ‘I don’t know what’s going to happen, or if this will have a positive influence or not, but this is what I stand for.’”
The world doesn’t appear to be chilling out anytime soon, literally or philosophically. And so it’s good that programs like Force of Nature and GGN-Z are digging into the effectiveness of their techniques: We might need more of them soon, and more ways for young people to find their footing no matter how the polycrisis (d)evolves.
Sullivan-Tailyour, who recently graduated from King’s College London and now leads in-person “climate cafes” with Force of Nature (among other eco-jobs), has been thinking more about how problems in the environment are bound up with those in the social, economic, and political realms. “The intersectionalities that we have in this issue are so much more than just plastic bottles,” she says.
Those other issues are, in fact, tangled up in her climate worry these days. “We’re seeing the deterioration of democracy itself in many places. The shift to the far right that we’re having at the moment across the world is deeply, deeply terrifying,” she says. “I think we’ve reached moments in our history that we never expected to.” She tries, though, to look for the hopeful things—and for that, she also turns to history.
After all, the world has always been bad in myriad ways: Children used to die frequently, everyone died of now-preventable diseases, women didn’t have rights, slavery proliferated, the bubonic plague killed half of Europe, fascism spread, wars went worldwide. And yet people kept on living their lives—and attempting to make them better.
Eklöf thinks looking to the resilience and power of people from the past can actually build and bolster hope for the future. Just as humans can change the planet for the worse, they can change it for the better. And they have. “That’s actually one of my recommendations, to have that in an intervention: Talk about Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, the suffragettes,” Eklöf says.
It can help, she says, to “look at things in the past where things have been made right again.” That’s even happened in the climate space: When humans realized that the ozone layer was withering away from the effects of synthetic chemicals, the vast majority of countries ratified a treaty to ban most of those chemicals. And the ozone started healing.
Sullivan-Tailyour, a few countries away from Eklöf, has come to that idea on her own. And for inspiration, lately, she’s been thinking about her ancestors and the lives they led. “If they [were] able to go through it and get through it,” she says, “we also should be able to get through it too.”
Sarah Scoles is a freelance journalist based in Colorado. Her most recent book is Countdown: The Blinding Future of Nuclear Weapons.
In the 1990s, Barbara Sherwood Lollar descended into the Kidd Creek mine in northern Ontario, which cuts more than three kilometers into the ancient root of North America. There her team of geochemists found water that had been confined underground for more than a billion years. This ancient brine turned out to be a habitat for living microbes that feed on the hydrogen produced in reactions between the water and the rock.
Decades later, Sherwood Lollar, who is a geochemist at the University of Toronto, revisited the team’s hydrogen data to see if there is enough of the gas in the mine to make it a useful source of zero-carbon fuel. “If we can set some smart minds into figuring out how to hook it up and use it, then we’ve got a win for this nascent economy,” she says.
While hydrogen fuel does show promise as a versatile power source, producing it typically generates lots of greenhouse-gas emissions and requires more energy than the gas contains. The ability to tap ready-made underground reservoirs—so-called “geologic hydrogen”—would change the equation.
A flurry of exploration efforts have launched to search for the stuff, which is produced underground when water molecules are split by chemical reactions with iron-rich rock or—as they are at Kidd Creek—by the radioactive decay of other elements. The hunt has spread all over the world and engaged dozens of startups, including the Australian firm HyTerra and the Bill Gates–backed company Koloma, which have both been poking around the US Midwest to reach ancient oceanic rocks associated with hydrogen production.
Researchers at the US Geological Survey have estimated that trillions of tons of H2 are produced within Earth’s crust; if a small fraction of this could be recovered, it could meet global hydrogen demand for centuries. But the search so far has come up short. No one has yet reported finding a commercially viable reservoir of the gas, and public data on what has been found remains in short supply as companies jockey for position and seek to attract investment.
At Kidd Creek mine, Sherwood Lollar and her colleague Oliver Warr leveraged their long-term record of hydrogen to get a fresh read on the potential. By scrutinizing data they’d collected from 35 boreholes at the mine over more than a decade, they found that each one consistently released an average of eight kilograms of hydrogen per year. Extrapolating that finding to the more than 14,000 boreholes at Kidd Creek would mean that around 140 metric tons of the gas is flowing unused out of the mine’s vents each year.
This tally, published earlier this year in the journal PNAS, is not a world-changing amount, but Sherwood Lollar says that if all the hydrogen could be captured, it would offer at least a modest source of energy—perhaps enough to power a substantial portion of the mine’s operations. That would be a valuable local demonstration that geologic hydrogen really can be put to use, she says.
The results from Kidd Creek add to “the growing evidence that natural hydrogen generation and migration are genuine geological processes,” says Laurent Truche, a geochemist at the University of Grenoble Alpes in France. In 2024, his research team reported that at least 200 metric tons of the gas flow out of the Bulqizë chromium mine in Albania every year. “The remaining challenge is not proving that natural hydrogen exists, but proving that it can be produced economically and reliably at commercial scale,” Truche says.
Proof, however, doesn’t necessarily require striking the mother lode. Researchers and startups are also exploring the possibility of stimulating hydrogen production by injecting water, heat, or catalysts into the reactive rocks that naturally produce the gas. More than a dozen of these projects are funded by ARPA-E, which has established a goal of accelerating the hydrogen-producing reaction by a factor of 10,000—the rate at which, researchers estimate, stimulated H2 production would be commercially viable.
An indication that this could work came earlier this year from the mountains of Oman, where a team drilled a one-kilometer borehole and injected 50,000 cubic meters of water into the rock. When they opened the well several months later, gas was spewing out—and it was 90% hydrogen. “It’s bubbling with gas,” Jo Shannon, a geoscientist at the University of Southampton in the UK, told attendees of the European Geosciences Union conference in May. (Shannon declined to comment beyond what was presented.)
While Shannon said this was a promising sign, she was careful to add that a slew of unknowns remain. The most crucial question is a basic one: Is the hydrogen rising up out of the well made through stimulation, or had it been there all along?
James Dinneen is a science and environmental journalist from Colorado, based in New York City. He is working on a book about Earth’s deep interior.
This summer has been a scorcher for much of the Northern Hemisphere. June and July marked the hottest two-month stretch in Europe since record-keeping began. The contiguous US endured its hottest month on record in July. South Korea saw its highest-ever recorded temperature.
The heat isn’t over yet, but some scientists are already looking ahead to 2027. Experts say the latest El Niño event is going to affect next year’s temperatures more than this year’s.
So as the summer (slowly) starts to wane and temperatures (hopefully) start to come down, why has it been so hot this summer? What’s coming next year, and how should we prepare for it?
As we burn fossil fuels and fill up the atmosphere with greenhouse gases, temperatures all over the globe are on the rise—climate change makes heat waves more likely and more intense. But different regions see different warming rates, and Europe takes the prize for the world’s fastest-warming continent. (It’s second only to the Arctic in terms of regional warming.)
So it’s not terribly surprising that Europe has seen a particularly brutal summer, battered with heat wave after heat wave. One study looked at the continent’s May heat wave and found that climate change played a major role: A similar heat wave in 1976 would have been about 3.5 °C (6.3 °F) cooler than it was under today’s conditions.
The US hasn’t been excused from the heat either. July’s record for the contiguous US (which excludes Alaska and Hawaii) officially ends one held by July 1936 for nearly a century. It’s concerning that we’re breaking records set during the Dust Bowl, an environmental disaster across much of the country.
But looking ahead to next year, El Niño could have even more in store.
A quick crash course here: There’s a natural variation in patterns across the oceans and atmosphere called the El Niño–Southern Oscillation, or ENSO. Basically, over the course of several years, feedback systems between the ocean and wind patterns shift one way and then another. (These two states are the El Niño and La Niña events.)
The Pacific Ocean gets a lot of sunlight, warming up the water’s surface. In normal conditions the trade winds, caused by Earth’s rotation, carry that warm water west, forcing colder water deep in the ocean up toward the surface in the east. In turn, warm air rises, flows east, and sinks again.
During an El Niño, the trade winds weaken and heat stored in the central Pacific builds up, warming up the air above it and creating a pocket of air that disrupts movement in the atmosphere and oceans, altering rainfall and weather across the globe.
We’ve already entered an El Niño phase, defined by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration as a period when we see the temperature in a specific part of the Pacific Ocean get 0.5 °C hotter than usual, plus associated changes in the atmosphere.
And this could be a big deal for global temperatures. El Niño doesn’t actually add energy into the climate system or warm up the entire globe on a long-term scale. It’s essentially just taking heat that’s been stored in the oceans and releasing it into the atmosphere.
But climate change has pushed a lot of heat into storage in the atmosphere and oceans—so combining the effects of this year-to-year variation with that long-term trend could have brutal results.
This El Niño is expected to be an especially notable one. Some forecasts predict that the event could peak at over 3.5 °C above the average, potentially making it the strongest on record. It also came on quite quickly, representing “one of the fastest onsets in the observational record,” writes climate scientist Zeke Hausfather in an analysis for Carbon Brief.
And while this El Niño is already starting to have an effect on temperatures, it’s still ramping up. El Niño’s effect on global temperatures tends to lag development of the ocean pattern by several months, and the effects will likely be more significant next year.
In some recent El Niño periods, record-breaking temperatures came during the second calendar year of the event, Hausfather points out in his analysis. The most recent El Niño developed in 2023 and ran into 2024, and 2024 is the reigning hottest year on record. There’s some uncertainty in trying to predict how the rest of this El Niño will play out, but so far, it is set to be a doozy.
Given how brutal these summer heat waves have been, there’s a pretty high likelihood that much of the world could see even higher temperatures next year. “El Niño conditions will pour fuel on the fire of a warming world,” United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres said in a video statement in June.
It’s time to start preparing for it, and individuals can take some actions in the near term: If you’ve been putting it off, I’d buy that air conditioner, install solar and a backup battery, or upgrade the insulation in your home.
In the longer term, though, temperatures will keep climbing because we’re still burning fossil fuels and driving climate change. As Guterres said in his statement, “The only effective response is climate action equal to the crisis: ending the addiction to fossil fuels, accelerating the shift to renewables, protecting the most vulnerable, and delivering early warning systems for all.”
This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here.
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