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Last week, the Kearney County Board of Commissioners took an important step for both wildlife conservation and the sustainable tourism industry in Nebraska. On Tuesday, August 18, 2026, the...

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August 25, 2026

Recreation, Conservation Groups Unite Against Forest Service Travel Rule Rollback  – 8.25.26 Proposal would gut protections for fish and wildlife, create chaos for public lands users

Contacts:
Grant Stevens, Communications Director, Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance (SUWA); (319) 427-0260; grant@suwa.org

Washington, D.C. – The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) launched a process to significantly revise its Travel Management Rule, which guides where motorized vehicles are and are not allowed on almost 200 million acres of national forests and grasslands. 

The USDA is proposing to flip the U.S. Forest Service’s longstanding approach to travel management on its head, forcing local forests to allow motorized vehicles everywhere except for places that are specifically closed. The current rule requires motorized vehicles to stay on a designated system of roads, trails and areas in national forests and grasslands and is an essential policy for wildlife conservation, balanced recreation and public safety. 

This comes directly on the heels of the USDA’s proposed repeal of the Roadless Area Conservation Rule, which would make 45 million acres of remote backcountry forests available for clearcut logging, road-building and other development, unleashing back-to-back blows to our national forests. Combined, these actions are part of the administration’s systematic dismantling of the rules and safeguards that keep national forests safe, accessible, and managed for everyone. 

Below are quotes from recreation and conservation organizations and additional information on the rule. 

“The Trump Administration’s proposal to fundamentally alter the Travel Management Rule will change for the worse how Utahns experience national forests throughout the state, from the Wasatch Front to redrock country outside Escalante and Moab,” said Laura Peterson, senior attorney at Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance (SUWA). “The proposal will place a heavy thumb on the scale to prioritize off-road vehicle use at the expense of all other uses of the national forests, including the protection of wildlife, cultural sites, streams and wild places. This move will not improve access to public lands, but it will make the experience of recreating on public lands worse for all users, including hikers, bikers, hunters, anglers and riders.”  

“This is yet another egregious attack in the systematic dismantling of public lands management of our national forests,”  said Dan Hartinger, senior director for agency policy at The Wilderness Society. “Travel management provides the basic guardrails that let hikers, hunters, anglers, and riders share the same forest without chaos; removing those guardrails threatens the freedom of all public lands users to safely enjoy our national forests the way they choose. Paired with the proposed repeal of the Roadless Rule, this destructive agenda sells out future generations’ enjoyment of our forests in order to hand them over for corporate profits.”

“The Travel Management Rule creates a framework that balances uses on national forest lands. It draws on local decision-making processes to support all user groups in enjoying public lands while also protecting these places for future generations,” said Anneka Williams, Policy Director at Winter Wildlands Alliance. “Removing this framework for shared use threatens diverse user experiences on public lands. Coming on the heels of the proposed repeal of the Roadless Rule, it is clear that this announcement is part of the administration’s broader agenda to dismantle our public lands as we know and love them.”

“The Travel Management Rule is why dirtbikers and snowmobilers can share national forests with hikers and backcountry skiers without conflict. It’s built on local decision-making that ensures no user group gets steamrolled and all our national forest values are protected,” said Hilary Eisen, federal policy director at Wild Montana. “Just days after doubling down on repealing the Roadless Rule, this announcement makes the administration’s plan obvious: gut the rules requiring the Forest Service to manage our natural resources carefully and listen to the public, then open the gates to industry and extraction. The Roadless rescission already showed that Forest Service leadership doesn’t value public input, science, or expert management. They’ve lost the public’s trust, and should expect the public to hold them accountable.”

“The USDA’s announcement to gut the Travel Management Rule and the Roadless Rule in the same week is a one-two punch that together deals a tremendous blow to wildlife,” said Vera Smith, director of national forests and public lands at Defenders of Wildlife. “The Travel Management Rule states simply that motorized vehicles must stay on routes and areas designated locally for that use. The Forest Service issued the rule over 20 years ago to curb damage from unmanaged recreation, reduce user conflict and protect public safety. Rescinding it now is irresponsible and reckless.” 

“Just after this administration moved to eliminate protections for Roadless Areas, it is now  proposing to gut the Travel Management Rule that for 20 years has ensured the Forest Service manages motorized recreation in a manner that minimizes damage, protects other visitors, and responds when vehicle use is harming public land resources,” said Adam Rissien rewilding manager at WildEarth Guardians. “Eliminating those protections will not improve access. It would replace locally developed plans with uncertainty, conflict, and unmanaged use.”

“Just days after its proposed rescission of the Roadless Rule, the administration is now attempting to open up our national forests to more off-road vehicle use that will degrade the landscape and disturb wildlife and other land users,” said Thomas Delehanty, senior attorney with Earthjustice’s Rocky Mountain Office. “Some places in our national forests are meant for quiet, undisturbed recreation and protecting sensitive wildlife, including endangered species. This rule would open all roads and trails to ORVs by default, meaning areas set aside for hiking, hunting, or horseback riding could soon be fair game to four-wheelers and dirt bikes.”

“For over two decades the Travel Management Rule has ensured our National Forests are managed to host an array of user groups, while safeguarding the health and future of our public lands,” shared Peggie dePasquale, National Forest Wildlands Director at the Wyoming Wilderness Association (WWA). “We are now witnessing a troublesome undoing of this effective management tool that the American people, especially here in Wyoming, have come to rely on for sustainable and relied upon access. It is critical that we raise our voices to send a clear message that the proposed revision goes against public interest and is bad news for the future of our natural world.”

“The existing travel management planning process allows the public to meaningfully weigh in on where vehicles do and don’t belong in our national forests. Repealing this rule hands that decision to political appointees in Washington, who have decided that every road, trail, and meadow should be open to motorized use, no matter the conflicts with other users or wildlife,” said Center for Western Priorities (CWP) Communications Director Kate Groetzinger. “Repealing this rule is also a recipe for more wildfire in a region that cannot afford it. Putting hot engines deeper into dry forests during longer and hotter fire seasons will increase wildfire risk, and Western communities will pay for it.”

***

Travel management is supported by a diverse group of public lands users
This proposal to revise the Travel Management Rule is out of touch with everyday Americans who use our forested public lands. Motorized groups, recreationalists, sportsmen, conservation organizations, local communities and other public land users nationwide have spoken out in opposition:

• American Hiking Society, Back Country Horsemen of American, American Trails, Letter Opposing Travel Management Repeal, Bureau of Land Management, (7/21/2026).
• Motorcycle Industry Council, Specialty Vehicle Institute of America and Recreational Off-Highway Vehicle Association, Letter Opposing Travel Management Repeal, (10/27/2025)
• American Endurance Ride Conference, American Hiking Society, American Horse Council, American Trails, Appalachian Mountain Club, Back Country Horsemen of America, Equine Land Conservation Resource, Move United, North Carolina Horse Council, Pacific Crest Trail Association, Partnership for the National Trails System, Rails to Trails Conservancy, Washington Trials Association, Letter Opposing Travel Management Repeal, Forest Service (6/5/2026).
• American Motorcyclist Association, Letter Opposing Travel Management Repeal, (12/15/2025).
• Rural & Agriculture Council of America & United States Cattlemen’s Association, Letter Opposing full repeal of Travel Management Rule & Requesting a robust public process, (6/24/26).
• Outdoor Alliance & members Access Fund American Canoe Association, American Whitewater, International Mountain Bicycling Association, Winter Wildlands Alliance, The Mountaineers, American Alpine Club, Colorado Mountain Club, Surfrider Foundation, Runners for Public Lands, Letter Opposing Travel Management Repeal, (6/12/26).
• Off Road Business Association, Inc, United Four Wheel Drive Association, One Voice & United Snowmobile Alliance, Letter Opposing “outright repeal” of Travel Management Rule, (1/26/26). 
• Public Lands Foundation, Position Statement supporting current Travel Management Policy, (4/25).

About the Forest Service Travel Management Rule 

First established in 2005, the Travel Management Rule is a tool that aims to balance use on national forest lands and across different user groups and, when effectively implemented, creates high-quality recreation experiences for all groups while also conserving resources. It provides a consistent framework for forests to follow when writing travel management plans for wheeled or over-snow vehicles. 

During forest-specific travel management planning, local forest officials designate specific trails and areas for motorized use. This is essentially a zoning process where some areas are designated for motorized use, and other trails and areas are set aside for human-powered recreation, or to protect wildlife and other resources. Public participation is an important part of travel planning, and local voices, knowledge, and expertise are considered as part of the travel planning process.

Repealed executive orders helped protect wildlife, waters

On June 2, 2026, President Trump repealed two executive orders (11644 and 11989) that governed off-road vehicle use on public lands. For 54 years, these orders helped protect streams, wildlife and their habitats, and opportunities for safe recreation on Bureau of Land Management, U.S. Forest Service, and National Park Service lands. 

###

The Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance (SUWA) is a nonprofit organization with members and supporters from around the country dedicated to protecting America’s redrock wilderness. From offices in Moab, Salt Lake City, and Washington, DC, our team of professionals defends the redrock, organizes support for America’s Red Rock Wilderness Act, and stewards a world-renowned landscape. Learn more at www.suwa.org.

 

 

The post Recreation, Conservation Groups Unite Against Forest Service Travel Rule Rollback – 8.25.26  appeared first on Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance.

Editor’s note: This article is part of a series exploring the various facets of the Sandhill Crane Migration in Central Nebraska, the $28 Million annual economic impact that the migration brings...

The comparatively modest maximum annual incentive of $200/kW over 10 years reflects the “private resilience value of residential energy storage systems,” state regulators said.

The programs have “historically not provided cost-effectiveness benefits to ratepayers and, indeed, show a decline in performance in recent years,” said the California Public Utilities Commission’s Public Advocates Office.

Each year, visitors from all over the world make plans to visit Central Nebraska for the magnificent Sandhill Crane migration.  Rowe Sanctuary is pleased to once again provide one of the best...

Skeptical Science is partnering with Gigafact to produce fact briefs — bite-sized fact checks of trending claims. You can submit claims you think need checking via the tipline.

Do wind turbines release more emissions than burning fossil fuels?

Wind turbines generate emissions during construction and transportation, but their overall climate impact is far lower than that of fossil fuels.

“Lifecycle emissions” is a measure of all emissions from raw materials, manufacturing, transportation, installation, operation, and disposal. A National Renewable Energy Laboratory review estimates that wind power produces about 13 grams of CO2-equivalent per kilowatt-hour over its full lifecycle. Natural gas averages about 486 grams, while coal is roughly 1,001 grams–or about 77 times wind’s emissions.

Most wind power emissions occur before turbines begin generating electricity, mainly from transporting components and to a lesser degree, manufacturing. Once operating, turbines generate electricity without directly burning fuel, allowing their low-emissions electricity to offset the emissions associated with their production and transportation.

Go to full rebuttal on Skeptical Science or to the fact brief on Gigafact

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Sources

National Renewable Energy Laboratory Life Cycle Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Electricity Generation: Update

Yale Climate Connections What’s the carbon footprint of a wind turbine?

Industrial Ecology Life Cycle Greenhouse Gas Emissions of Utility-Scale Wind Power

Journal of Cleaner Production Life-cycle green-house gas emissions of onshore and offshore wind turbines

Columbia Law School Sabin Center for Climate Change Law Rebutting 33 False Claims About Solar, Wind, and Electric Vehicles

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The loss of more than 3 GW of data center demand in Virginia shows why policy must address operational behavior, not just costs, writes AIxEnergy.io founder Brandon Owens.

The Trump administration has completely changed wildland firefighting on national public lands, an approach that is being put to the test as the Western U.S. is facing the worst fire season in years. A collaborative investigation by six publications across the West details the policy changes pushed through by the Trump administration, and the costly impacts those changes are having on the ground.

One of the most significant shifts is a return to a “full suppression” policy in which any fires, even those that are not human-caused, must be put out by 10:00 am the morning after they are discovered. The U.S. Forest Service originally adopted this policy nearly a century ago, but eventually abandoned it since it artificially suppressed naturally-occurring low-intensity fires that forests need, leaving behind unnatural amounts of vegetation that fuels catastrophic wildfires. The Trump administration also announced the creation of a new U.S. Wildland Fire Service, intended to consolidate firefighting crews and streamline communication.

But across the West, fire experts have expressed concern with the combination of major policy changes and significant staffing and funding cuts, especially as communities develop further into high fire-risk areas amid an ongoing drought. Seven people have already died fighting wildfires this year, with several weeks still remaining in the fire season.

Nevada sues Trump admin over Colorado River cuts

Nevada Governor Joe Lombardo announced that his state is challenging the Trump administration’s Colorado River two-year operating plan in court. Nevada’s lawsuit argues that the plan unfairly demands drastic cuts by Lower Basin states without imposing similar cuts on Upper Basin states, and asks the district court to block the plan.

Quick hits Trump admin plans to relax travel rules on national forests

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Trump’s border wall construction threatens rock art as old as the pyramids

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Planned copper mine in southern Arizona draws lawsuit over rare owls

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Quote of the day

The Travel Management Rule is why dirt-bikers and snowmobilers can share national forest lands with hikers and backcountry skiers without conflict. It’s why our national forests provide habitat to support thriving wildlife populations. It is built on local decision-making, with a designation process that ensures that no user group gets steamrolled and all our national forest values are protected.”

—Hilary Eisen, Wild Montana, Outdoor Life

 

Picture This

@devilstowernps
We get a lot of questions asking about what it’s like up top. No, there’s not a massive hole in the middle, it’s actually pretty flat! It is said to be as big as a football field. You can even find small animals and snakes up there. Snakes are great climbers and are often found scaling the Tower, crawling through the cracks. Hawks, Falcons and other birds sometimes drop off their prey on top of the Tower too!
NPS Text/Lohma G. NPS Archives Photo. Featured image: A fuels reduction project on the Tahoe National Forest, U.S. Forest Service

The post How the Trump admin has upended wildland firefighting appeared first on Center for Western Priorities.

Germany is among the top three countries in Europe with the highest private jet flights per year1. The NGO ROBIN WOOD e.V. in Germany decided to do something about it. They’ve been working on a campaign for a ban of private jets at the airport in Hamburg. Private jets are one of the most climate-wrecking forms of transport2 and the number of flights increases every year. What exactly are the…

Source

Imagine the “perfect” bird nest.What comes to mind? Maybe leaves and fluff stuffed into a cozy little birdhouse or a tightly woven basket made of twigs and dried grass? Chances are that image in...

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Strategically placed greenbelts in the suburbs could cool some of the world’s biggest cities by almost half a degree across at least half their area, according to a new analysis.

The findings suggest an old but often overlooked strategy to manage the urban heat island effect, the tendency for cities to be a few degrees hotter than surrounding landscapes due to their extensive pavement, concrete and steel buildings, and lots of people packed together.

In recent years, many cities have tried planting trees to help mitigate heat. But some are still sweltering through increasingly warm summers. The new study suggests a solution might be found outside the cities themselves.

“For urban cooling, where we place vegetation can be just as important as how much vegetation we have,” says study team member Shi-Jie Cao, director of the Center for Sustainable Built Environment at Southeast University in Nanjing, China.

Cao and his collaborators were inspired by an urban planning pattern characteristic of traditional Chinese villages known as the mountain-water-forest (MWF) framework, in which “settlements are backed by mountains, facing water bodies, and are embedded within surrounding forests,” the researchers write in Nature Cities.

The team set out to explore whether this approach could also apply to today’s large, heterogeneous metropolises. They used a computer model to gauge how temperatures in the urban core on a hot summer day would be affected if suburban areas upwind of a city were converted to either woodlands or built-up areas.

The strategy could help cool both Beijing, a city built on a plain at the base of mountains, and Shanghai, located on the coast, the researchers found. Analysis based on these two cities revealed the mechanisms involved: first, the suburban vegetation creates a cool mass of air, and then prevailing winds sweep the cooler air from the suburbs into the city.

 

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The researchers then analyzed six additional mega cities—Cairo, Kinshasa, São Paulo, Houston, Sydney, and London—to see how widely applicable the approach might be. “One of the most striking results was how robust the basic cooling mechanism was across cities with very different climates, topographies, and urban forms,” Cao says.

Across the eight cities, the upwind greening approach could reduce temperatures on a hot summer day by an average of 0.4 °C across at least half the city area. The exact magnitude, timing, and spatial extent of the cooling varied from city to city, “but the underlying pathway—creating cooler air upwind and transporting it into the city—remained remarkably consistent,” says Cao.

The analysis shows not just the potential but the limits of the strategy. The cooling effect is more modest and localized in Shanghai than in Beijing because Shanghai’s cooling sea breezes don’t align perfectly with the locations where suburban trees could be planted.

“This is not simply a call to plant more trees everywhere,” Cao says. “The strategy works best where cities have relatively persistent wind pathways and sufficient space for greening on the upwind side.”

Of course, that space for suburban greening might already be taken up by houses, roads, and industry, so creative approaches to creating multi-functional landscapes—and getting local governments and others stakeholders on board—will be necessary.

But the real lesson from traditional village design is a more general one, Cao says: “We hope the study encourages cities to think beyond isolated green spaces and consider vegetation, wind, topography, water, and the surrounding landscape as an interconnected climate-regulation system.”

Source: Yang M. et al. “Overlooked upwind greening for urban cooling.” Nature Cities 2026.

Image: ©Anthropocene Magazine.

If Canada opts to reduce or eliminate electricity exports to New England, the impact would be largely financial — at least under typical weather conditions, according to the region's grid operator. A previous 25% tariff in 2025 lasted only a day.

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Photo: Julien Helaine | Activists break onto the tarmac at Roissy Charles-de-Gaulle Airport to protest against the Terminal 4 project, October 3, 2020. This overview of the opposition to the expansion plans for Roissy Charles-de-Gaulle Airport was co-authored by Charlène Fleury, Audrey Boehly and Eric Lombard. It forms part of the ‘Emergency Landing’ feature in the October issue of the…

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By mid-2026, Honduras was under a far-right government that had intensified agrarian conflict, deepening criminalization, persecution, and violence in rural areas. On May 21, 20 peasants were killed in the village of Rigores, in Trujillo, Colón, in the Bajo Aguán region. “This tragedy brings mourning not only to Honduras, but to the entire Mesoamerican and Latin American peasant movement,”

The post Honduras: “This Law Legalizes the Dispossession of Communities From Their Territories” appeared first on La Via Campesina - EN.

Fishers operating off the coast of Sulawesi, Indonesia, are detonating more than 8,000 underwater explosives each year, researchers estimate. The practice is turning picturesque coral reefs to “rubble.”

Read more on E360 →

Headline News:

• “World’s Oceans Hit Hottest Temperature Ever Recorded In August As El Niño Takes Hold” • The world’s oceans reached their highest daily temperature on record, with global sea surface temperatures hitting 21.1°C. The record was set on August 22, when temperatures would normally be declining, according to the EU’s climate change data. [Euronews]

Ocean (Sebastien Gabriel, Unsplash)

• “Elia Completes Belgium Energy Island Foundations” • Elia Transmission Belgium completed foundation installation for the 3.5-GW Princess Elisabeth Island. Comprised of DEME and Jan De Nul, the TM Edison Consortium put the last of 23 caissons in place to form an outer perimeter at the site 45 km off the Belgian coast. Work was started in 2024. [reNews]
• “Making This Fossil Fuel Crisis Europe’s Last One” • Fossil fuel dependence has repeatedly undermined Europe’s prosperity and constrained its ability to act in the world. As long as Europe relies on fossil fuels, its citizens remain exposed to price shocks and geopolitical decisions made elsewhere. That exposure is a choice, and Europe can choose differently. [CleanTechnica]
• “Tens Of Thousands Evacuated As Hawk Wildfire Nears The City Of Reno” • Authorities in Nevada urged tens of thousands of people to evacuate and ordered schools to stay closed as a fast-moving, wind-driven wildfire bore down on Reno. About 42,000 people have been forced to evacuate and an additional 45,000 have been told to get ready to leave. [Euronews]
• “Broad Coalition Of 95 Organizations Urges Congress To Reject Attacks On Long-Standing Clean Air Protections” • A broad coalition urged Congress to reject four Congressional Review Act resolutions that would overturn long-standing Clean Air Act preemption waivers relied on by states to protect public health and air quality. [CleanTechnica]

For more news, please visit geoharvey – Daily News about Energy and Climate Change.

The United States has never been one of the most ambitious countries when it comes to tackling climate change, but it has long maintained a program that funds innovative clean energy technology. This program is known as the Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy, or ARPA-E, and over the past 15 years it has doled out more than $4 billion to universities and startups that are trying to change the way we produce energy.

It’s very hard to raise money for this kind of moon shot technology, which can take years or even decades to scale up large enough to generate a profit. A huge number of emergent technologies never attract the funding to cross this “valley of death” between experiment and big business. The purpose of the Department of Energy’s ARPA-E, which was modeled on a similar program run by the U.S. military, was to help energy inventors span this gap and develop the climate technologies of the future.

A landmark report from the National Academies of Science, requested by Congress and released last week, has found that this high-risk, high-reward program is working: ARPA-E’s $4 billion investment has led to more than $20 billion in additional funding and more than 1,400 patents. Projects that received ARPA-E money were much more likely to get patents and additional investment than projects that were denied. The report also found that around 40 percent of ARPA-E grants led to a “crowding in” effect: After a startup proves that a new technology is feasible, other companies jump in and try to replicate it. 

“We’re trying to enable very talented people who could be doing other things to spend their lives trying to do incredibly risky things that, probabilistically speaking, will not deliver a profit in time to benefit them,” said Chris Bataille, a fellow at the Columbia University Center on Global Energy Policy and an expert on the development of clean energy technology who was not involved in the report.

The report committee, which consisted of more than a dozen scientists and energy experts, recommended that Congress significantly expand ARPA-E’s funding. It also found that the program should shift its focus from renewables and electric vehicles toward a harder set of energy problems — a shift for which the Trump administration has signaled its partial support.

ARPA-E began in 2009, and many of its early grants focused on improving solar panels and lithium-ion batteries, which weren’t yet ready to compete with traditional energy sources on a large scale. (A different Department of Energy program offered early support to Tesla.) The technologies have since gotten hundreds of times cheaper thanks to China’s massive investment in manufacturing overcapacity. Among the report’s most notable findings is that ARPA-E doesn’t need to focus on this renewable tech anymore. This finding echoes some climate experts’ claim that solar no longer needs tax subsidies like those in the Inflation Reduction Act passed during Joe Biden’s presidency. 

But solar and wind only work when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing, and most of the country’s grid still relies on coal and gas plants that can run at all hours of the day. This is especially true for factories and data centers, which need large and constant infusions of electricity in order to stay online. It’s here that ARPA-E’s investments are really starting to bear fruit.

Many of the program’s more recent grantees have been companies trying to solve the problem of “clean firm” power available around the clock. The most notable is Fervo, a company that uses super-deep wells to convert the ambient geothermal heat of the Earth into electricity. The company received ARPA-E support as early as 2019 and went public this year on the heels of a few successful demonstration projects. It’s now inking deals with Google to power data centers in Nevada. Other success stories include Form Energy, which develops iron-air batteries that can store large amounts of clean energy for multiple days at a time, and X-energy, which builds small-scale nuclear reactors.

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Given this success, the report authors argue that ARPA-E should now shift its investment to the hardest climate problems, the ones where solutions could still be decades away. Potential opportunity areas include nuclear fusion, which in theory would provide almost limitless clean energy if it ever panned out. There’s also “seasonal energy storage,” or batteries that could store solar and wind energy for long winter months when those resources aren’t as available in a given location. Perhaps most significant for the climate would be carbon-free methods for producing steel and cement, which each account for around 8 percent of global emissions.

“You need this sort of constant innovation to move us off the fossil fuel pathway, right? Because we’re very firmly entrenched on it,” said Bataille. “We’re talking about projects that will likely be profitable, but they’re just not valued unless the government values them. There’s probably one-one-hundredth of the necessary money going into those.”  

President Donald Trump tried to defund ARPA-E in his first term by withholding funds appropriated by Congress. So far, during his second term, the administration has attempted to wipe billions of dollars in Biden-era climate grants. Trump’s budget request to Congress this year called for shrinking ARPA-E by almost 50 percent, but the Department of Energy is still handing out new grants for experimental tech like long-duration energy storage, fusion reactors, and mining for critical minerals like lithium.

In a statement to Grist, the department said that ARPA-E is “advancing President Trump’s agenda to restore American energy dominance” by “backing breakthrough, high-risk technologies.” The proposed funding cut, on the other hand, “demonstrates fiscal discipline and a commitment to an efficient and effective federal government.”

Even though Trump hasn’t destroyed the program itself, his policies have hindered the growth of the clean tech field that ARPA-E helped to advance. A case in point is Natron Energy, a company that received ARPA-E grant funding to develop experimental sodium-ion batteries. The company announced in 2024 that it would build a $1.4 billion plant in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, but Trump’s reelection dampened private sector interest in electric vehicles, and the company failed to secure investors for its factory. The company shut down last year.

toolTips('.classtoolTips1','A type of rechargeable battery that functions by shifting lithium ions between two charged metal components, the anode and cathode, and is commonly used to power EVs and consumer electronics.'); toolTips('.classtoolTips8','A lightweight, silvery-white alkali metal with properties that allow it to store large amounts of energy. Lithium is a key component of many batteries, including those that store renewable energy and power electric vehicles.');

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline US companies are on the cusp of big climate solutions. Thank the government. on Aug 25, 2026.