$8 Billion Of Climate Tech Projects Were Canceled In 3 Months

FLORA LICHTMAN: This is Science Friday. I’m Flora Lichtman. Later in the hour, we’ll look at the connections between chronic pain and mental health, and we’ll talk to the author of a new book about the horrifying and creative world of zombified bugs. But first, late yesterday, the head of the National Science Foundation, Sethuraman Panchanathan, announced that he’s resigning. His decision comes as the Trump administration slashes the agency’s budget, cuts hundreds of jobs, and terminates active research grants.

We’ll continue to follow what this means for NSF, but those aren’t the only cuts to science we’re watching. The administration has also canceled climate-change efforts, from layoffs at large science agencies to leaving the Paris Climate Agreement and rescinding federal funding for green research and infrastructure.

So what do those federal policy changes mean for cleantech development and adoption? Here to break it down is Casey Crownhart, senior climate reporter at MIT Technology Review. Welcome back to Science Friday, Casey.

CASEY CROWNHART: Thanks so much for having me. Great to be here.

FLORA LICHTMAN: OK, so how is cleantech being affected by these priority shifts that we’re seeing in Washington?

CASEY CROWNHART: Yeah, you really kind of laid it out there at the top, but we have seen, since the first days of the Trump administration, that they would be kind of taking, let’s call it, a different approach to climate than what we’ve seen in the past few years– pulling out of that Paris Climate Agreement, the global treaty that aims to limit global warming to less than 2 degrees C; cancelling a lot of climate research; firing scientists at agencies like NOAA. And I think we’re starting to see very early effects from it. A new report that came out last week from group E2 found that about $8 billion worth of cleantech projects have been cancelled, downsized, or shut down just in the first three months of this year.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Give me a sense of the trajectory of greentech, like solar panels and wind turbines, before the new Trump administration.

CASEY CROWNHART: I would say that the kind of atmosphere was very positive. We saw hundreds of billions of dollars from the federal government investing into projects like factories for batteries and huge solar installations. The biggest change that I’ve seen is this injection of uncertainty. There’s been fights over the Trump administration trying to pull back some of that funding. We talked about a lot of firings and a lot of changes within the government. Whereas a few months ago, the kind of outlook for the next 10 years was a lot of tax credits, a lot of support. And now there’s questions about, will that money be there? How will things like tariffs affect efforts to build projects? So I would say we’ve gone, very quickly, into a very uncertain time.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Yeah, you reported this week that $8 billion of cleantech projects in the US have been cancelled so far this year. Can you put that number in context? It sounds really big, but is it a big percentage of all cleantech projects?

CASEY CROWNHART: Yeah, so that’s a really good point. So we’ve seen much more than that be announced over the past few years. Since August 2022 is when a lot of groups kind of started tracking this. That’s when the Inflation Reduction Act was passed with all of that money for tax credits and the like.

I will say from August 2022 to the end of 2024, there were about $2 billion worth of projects that got cancelled. Just in the first few months of this year, we’ve seen almost $8 billion get cancelled, so just a much larger number. I’ll note that, again, there are more projects going forward, so there are more to get cancelled, but experts that I spoke with said that this uncertain policy landscape is definitely leading to kind of this higher number of cancelled and scaled-back and shut-down projects.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Is that the main driver, the uncertainty?

CASEY CROWNHART: I think uncertainty in kind of all of its forms is one of them. I’ll note that all of these cancellations come before things like the tariffs, which were announced earlier this month, but I think that that is really a big part of it. You’ll see companies, in these announcements, they’ll mention changing market conditions. They’re shifting production to other countries. So I think there’s definitely a range. And some of this is just like the normal case of business. Companies go bankrupt all the time. Not everybody makes it. But I think that uncertainty is certainly contributing to this really high number that we’re seeing.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Yeah, I’ve heard solar and wind are some of the cheapest ways to make energy now. Despite what the administration is doing, do you think capitalism will continue to drive these projects forward?

CASEY CROWNHART: Yeah, I don’t think that we’ll see these technologies absolutely crash and burn or anything like that. I think that we’ll still continue to see some projects succeed. We’ll still see some solar installation. We’ll still see some factories being built, but I think it might be shifted. I think one of the big questions that I have is how much all of this will cause the US to fall behind. I think we’ll see a lot of folks moving to Europe or to China for a lot of this. So I don’t think the energy transition is stopping, but I think that maybe what role the US and US companies play in it is kind of the big question.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Speaking of cleantech, tell me about this new startup that’s recycling solar panels.

CASEY CROWNHART: Yes, I’m fascinated by trash caused by cleantech. I think it’s a really interesting kind of problem that, as we’re seeing energy sources shift, there are challenges that come with this.

So this company called OnePlanet is based in Jacksonville, Florida, and they recently raised some money to build a solar-recycling plant in the state. They say that this will be one of the largest plants to recycle solar panels in the US. It’s expected to be a $90-million facility, and they can recover things like the glass, the silicon, the plastic, and metals like aluminum and copper from solar panels.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Is there a reason why it’s based in Florida?

CASEY CROWNHART: Absolutely. So Florida has emerged as kind of a big place for solar power in the US. Florida built more large-scale solar than California in 2024. It’s also, as you might know, a place that sees a lot of hurricanes. So I think we’ll see a lot of solar panels just kind of coming off ready to be retired in the coming years but then also a lot of damaged panels that need to be dealt with. So I think it’s a really kind of smart fit for that state right now.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Let’s switch gears and check in on the measles outbreak. It is breaking records, unfortunately. Tell us about it.

CASEY CROWNHART: Yeah, so this is the largest single outbreak of measles in the US since 2000, which is when measles was declared to be eliminated in the US. We’re seeing cases mostly across Texas, Oklahoma, and New Mexico, and there have been over 600 cases of measles in Texas alone since late January, with two people having died.

FLORA LICHTMAN: So there have been cuts to public health agencies. Has that affected the outbreak?

CASEY CROWNHART: Yeah, it’s really expensive and very difficult to deal with outbreaks like this. The state has to do things like contact tracing to try to get a handle on this outbreak because you can be infectious or contagious with measles before you show symptoms. The state is doing that. They’re running vaccine clinics. They’re getting extra CDC support. And so there’s a lot of concern that those cuts to public health can really impede the ability of the state agencies to deal with outbreaks like this.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Do we know if the scale of this outbreak is prompting new people to get vaccinated?

CASEY CROWNHART: The state has been running vaccine clinics, and they have been vaccinating people. Getting a vaccine even after exposure can help lessen the severity of the disease. But this is largely happening in a county called Gaines County where there’s a really large Mennonite community there that has very historically low vaccination rates. And so that’s absolutely kind of one of the major things here is we know these vaccines are safe, we know that they’re effective, and it’s really important to preventing outbreaks like this.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Moving on, a new analysis in Nature suggests that we’re starting to see the beginning of a scientific brain drain in the US. Can you tell us about it?

CASEY CROWNHART: Yeah, so we talked about some of this at the top with things like research grants getting cancelled. And so Nature did an analysis of job-boards data, and they found that US scientists are really looking to get out of the US and look for jobs abroad. US scientists submitted 32% more applications for jobs outside the US in the first three months of this year compared to the same period a year ago, and things really started to heat up in March when we saw more news about the administration targeting science. Views of job postings abroad rose by almost 70% compared to March in 2024.

FLORA LICHTMAN: So it’s like the warning sign of a brain drain, and we’ll see what happens.

CASEY CROWNHART: Absolutely. Yeah, it’s early. We don’t know if people will actually get jobs, move abroad, but other countries are really looking to capitalize. There’s one university in France that started something called the Safe Place for Science Initiative, and they had about $17 million to sponsor a handful of researchers working in climate, health, environment. They had to shut the applications down because they got so many applications, and 70% of them were from US scientists.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Let’s head to China. In lighter news, there was a half marathon in Beijing last Saturday, and 21 of the participants weren’t human at all. What was going on there?

CASEY CROWNHART: I love this story. I know. There were 12,000 humans that ran this half marathon, and the robots are getting all of the attention.

So yeah, a handful of companies developed humanoid robots that attempted to start the half marathon. 21 started. Only six of them finished the course, largely much slower than the humans did.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Solidarity with the ones who didn’t finish and the slow robots. But yeah, keep going.

CASEY CROWNHART: I know. I know. The fastest one finished in 2 hours and 40 minutes. It got its batteries changed three times, and it fell down once, which– I don’t know. I think that’s very relatable.

FLORA LICHTMAN: That’s very relatable. Did you watch the video, Casey, of these robots?

CASEY CROWNHART: I didn’t, but I bet they’re amazing.

FLORA LICHTMAN: They’re amazing. First of all, some of them seem to be wearing shoes, like running shoes. And they look a lot like me trying to run a half marathon. It’s like C-3PO mall walking after hip surgery. It’s just highly recommend.

CASEY CROWNHART: Amazing. It’s good signs that just a few years ago, robots couldn’t really reliably walk, so it does show progress. But I do feel a little better about my abilities.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Athletic abilities, yeah. Speaking of athletic abilities, a study about bats was amazing this week. Tell us about it.

CASEY CROWNHART: Yeah, so scientists have observed that bats tend to drink on the fly. Water holes can be very dangerous. That’s kind of a gathering place for animals. And so most species of bats have developed this ability to kind of just swoop down over sources of water to take a drink.

And so researchers really wanted to understand how they’re doing this without crashing, and so they focused on a few bat species that tend to fly over water sources and lap up water with their tongues. And they set up all of these cameras around and use stereoscopic imaging to track the bats bodies to better understand how they were able to do this multitasking.

FLORA LICHTMAN: What did they find?

CASEY CROWNHART: Yeah, they found a few common techniques. They tend to reduce their flight speed as they approach the water, reduce how far they’re flapping their wings or their wing stroke, and then also use a higher angle with their wings to counterbalance them moving their head down.

What I found really fascinating about this is that they had to be really precise with this because bats, a lot of the times they do echolocation kind of in their nose area. So if they were to get water up their nose, it would kind of interfere with their ability to, quote, unquote, see. So this is really important that the bats are able to do this really precisely.

FLORA LICHTMAN: There’s also something about these videos of these bats drinking on the go that really reminds me of my personal ideal happy hour.

CASEY CROWNHART: It’s just like swooping through. You’re kind of a quick one. Swoop through, grab a drink, and go.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Just like in and out, you know? Thanks, Casey, for coming on.

CASEY CROWNHART: Thanks so much for having me. Great to be here.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Casey Crownhart is a senior climate reporter at MIT Technology Review.

Copyright © 2025 Science Friday Initiative. All rights reserved. Science Friday transcripts are produced on a tight deadline by 3Play Media. Fidelity to the original aired/published audio or video file might vary, and text might be updated or amended in the future. For the authoritative record of Science Friday’s programming, please visit the original aired/published recording. For terms of use and more information, visit our policies pages at http://www.sciencefriday.com/about/policies/