Less than two weeks ahead of the United Nations climate conference, Bill Gates posted a memo on his personal blog encouraging folks to just calm down about climate change.

“Although climate change will have serious consequences — particularly for people in the poorest countries — it will not lead to humanity’s demise. People will be able to live and thrive in most places on Earth for the foreseeable future,” Gates wrote.

The missive seems to run counter to earlier climate actions taken by the Microsoft co-founder and billionaire, but also echoes Gates’ long-held priorities and perspectives. In some regards, it’s the framing, timing and broader political context that heighten the memo’s impact.

What the world needs to do, he said, is to shift the goals away from reducing carbon emissions and keeping warming below agreed-upon temperature targets.

“This is a chance to refocus on the metric that should count even more than emissions and temperature change: improving lives,” he wrote. “Our chief goal should be to prevent suffering, particularly for those in the toughest conditions who live in the world’s poorest countries.“

More than four years ago, Gates published “How to Avoid a Climate Disaster,” a book highlighting the urgency and necessity of cutting carbon emissions and promoting the need to reduce “green premiums” in order to make climate friendly technologies as cheap as unsustainable alternatives.

“It’ll be tougher than anything humanity’s ever done, and only by staying constant in working on this over the next 30 years do we have a chance to do it,” Gates told GeekWire in 2021. “Having some people who think it’s easy will be an impediment. Having people who think that it’s not important will be an impediment.”

Gates’ clean energy efforts go back even earlier. In 2006 he helped launch the next-gen nuclear company TerraPower, which is currently building its first reactor in Wyoming. In 2015 he founded Breakthrough Energy Ventures, a $1 billion fund to support carbon-cutting startups, which evolved into Breakthrough Energy, an umbrella organization tackling clean tech policies, funding for researchers and data generation.

Earlier this year, however, Gates began taking steps that suggested a cooling commitment to the challenge.

Roughly two months after President Trump took office in January, and as clean energy policies and funding began getting axed, Breakthrough Energy laid off staff. In May Gates announced he would direct nearly all of his wealth to his eponymous global health foundation, deploying $200 billion through the organization over two decades.

At the same time, many of the key points in the memo published today reflect statements that Gates has made in the past.

In both his new post and at a 2022 global climate summit organized in Seattle by Breakthrough Energy, Gates urged people to focus on reducing green premiums more than on cutting emissions as a key benchmark.

“If you keep the primary measures, which is the emissions reductions in the near term, you’re going to be very depressed,” Gates said. At his summit talk, he shared optimism that new innovations were arriving quickly and would address climate challenges.

A curious paradox in Gates’ stance is the reality that people living in lower-income nations and in regions important to the Gates Foundation are often hardest hit by the rising temperatures and natural disasters that are stoked by increased carbon emissions.

Gates acknowledged that truth in his post this week, and said that solutions such as engineering drought tolerant crops and making air conditioning more widespread can address some of those harms. At the Seattle summit three years ago, one of the Breakthrough Energy executives likewise said the organization was going to increase its investment into technologies for adapting to climate change.

On Nov. 10, global climate leaders will meet in Brazil for COP30 to discuss climate progress and issues. Gates has often attended the event, but the New York Times reported that won’t be the case this year.

UN efforts meanwhile continue to emphasize the importance of reducing emissions. A statement today from the organization notes that while carbon emissions are curving downward, it’s not happening fast enough.

The world needs to raise its climate ambitions, the statement continues, “to avoid the worst climate impacts by limiting warming to 1.5°C this century, as science demands.”

EVERETT, Wash. — In an industrial stretch of Everett is a boxy, windowless building called Ursa. Inside that building is a vault built from concrete blocks up to 5 feet thick with an additional layer of radiation-absorbing plastic. Within that vault is Polaris, a machine that could change the world.

Helion Energy is trying to replicate the physics that fuel the sun and the stars — hence the celestial naming theme — to provide nearly limitless power on earth through fusion reactions.

The company recently invited a small group of journalists to visit its headquarters and see Polaris, which is the seventh iteration of its fusion generator and the prototype for a commercial facility called Orion that broke ground this summer in Malaga in Central Washington.

Few people outside of Helion have been provided such access; photographs were not allowed.

“We run these systems right now at 100 million degrees, about 10 times the temperature of the sun, and compress them to high pressure… the same pressure as the bottom of the Marianas Trench,” said Helion CEO and co-founder David Kirtley, referencing the deepest part of the ocean.

Polaris and its vault occupy a relative small footprint inside of Ursa. The majority of the space is filled with 2,500 power units. They’re configured into 4-foot-by-4-foot pallets, lined up in rows and stacked seven high. The units are packed with capacitors that are charged from the grid to provide super high intensity pulses of electricity — 100 gigawatts of peak power — that create the temperatures and pressure needed for fusion reactions.

All of that energy is carried through miles and miles of coaxial cables filled with copper, aluminum and custom-metal alloys. End-to-end, the cables would stretch across Washington state and back again — roughly 720 miles. They flow in thick, black bundles from the pallets into the vault. They curl on the floor in giant heaps before connecting to the tubular-shaped, 60-foot-long Polaris generator.

The ultimate goal is for the generator to force lightweight ions to fuse, creating a super hot plasma that expands, pushing on a magnetic field that surrounds it. The energy created by that expansion is directly captured and carried back the capacitors to recharge them so the process can be repeated over and over again.

And the small amount of extra power that’s produced by fusion goes into the electrical grid for others to use — or at least that’s the plan for the future.

‘Worth being aggressive’

Helion is a contender in a global race to generate fusion power for a rapidly escalating demand for electricity, driven in part by data centers and AI. No one so far has been able to make and capture enough energy from fusion to commercialize the process, but dozens of companies — including three other competitors in the Pacific Northwest — are trying.

The company aims by 2028 to begin producing energy at the Malaga site, which Microsoft has agreed to purchase. If it hits this extremely ambitious target — and many are highly skeptical — it could be the world’s first company to do so.

“There is a level of risk, of being aggressive with program development, new technology and timelines,” Kirtley said. “But I think it’s worth it. Fusion is the same process that happens in the stars. It has the promise of very low cost electricity that’s clean and safe and base load and always on. And so it’s worth being aggressive.”

Some in the sector worry that Helion will miss the mark and cast doubt on a sector that is working hard to prove itself. At a June event, the head of R&D for fusion competitor Zap Energy questioned Helion’s deadline.

“I don’t see a commercial application in the next few years happening,” said Ben Levitt. “There is a lot of complicated science and engineering still to be discovered and to be applied.”

Others are willing to take the bet. Helion has raised more than $1 billion from investors that include SoftBank, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Sam Altman, who is OpenAI’s CEO and co-founder, as well as Helion’s longtime chair of its board of directors. The company is able to unlock an additional $1.8 billion if it hits Polaris milestones.

The generator has been operating since December, running all day, five days a week, creating fusion, Kirtley said.

Energy without ignition

Helion is highly cautious — some would say too cautious — in sharing details on its progress. Helion officials say they must hold their tech close to the vest as Chinese competitors have stolen pieces of their intellectual property; critics say the secrecy makes it difficult for the scientific community to verify their likelihood of success in a very risky, highly technical field.

In August, Kirtley shared an online post about Helion’s power-producing strategy, which upends the conventional approach.

Most efforts are trying to achieve ignition in their fusion generators, which is a condition where the reactions produce more power than is required for fusion to occur. This feat was first accomplished at a national lab in California in 2022 — but it still wasn’t enough energy that one could put electricity on the grid.

Helion is not aiming for ignition but rather for a system that is so efficient it can capture enough energy from fusion without reaching that state.

Kirtley compares the strategy for producing power to regenerative braking in electric vehicles. Simply put, an EV’s battery gets the car moving, and regenerative braking by the driver puts energy back into the battery to help it run longer. In the fusion generator, the capacitors provide that initial power, and the fusion reaction resupplies the energy and a little bit more.

“We can recover electricity at high efficiency,” Kirtley said. Compared to other commercial fusion approaches, “we require a lot less fusion. Fusion is the hard part. My goal, ironically, is to do the minimum amount of fusion that we can deliver a product to the customer and generate electricity.”

Today, we announced a collaboration with NextEra Energy to accelerate nuclear deployment across the U.S., including the restart of the Duane Arnold Energy Center in Iowa…

Tokenized mining rigs turn extra local energy into shared Bitcoin rewards, giving communities a fair way to profit and power new opportunities.

The post Tokenized mining rigs fueling growth of grassroots hubs appeared first on CoinGeek.

Hundreds of global leaders gathered in the Pacific Northwest this week for the inaugural One Ocean Week Seattle, a maritime conference with dozens of events that brought together company executives, government officials and advocates charting paths toward cleaner shipping, sustainable fishing and ocean conservation.

The conference, organized by Washington Maritime Blue, was anchored by Wednesday’s One Ocean Summit, where leaders from global companies with Seattle ties discussed their climate progress and the challenges of deploying sustainable technologies.

Seattle-based SSA Marine, a global marine terminal operator, has 200 locations worldwide, moving cargo from ships to terminals and onto trains and trucks. The company has carbon emissions targets and is working to shift from gas and diesel to electrical power for the machines moving moving the cargo, but the move requires juggling sometimes competing factors.

“If you have a piece of electrical equipment, you have to think about charging time that’s required in between shifts, and when can you actually fit it in there?” said Meghan Weinman, SSA Marine’s vice president of sustainability. “One of those big pieces of innovation that we really have to think about is the overlay of technology, labor planning, and can it do the job that we need it to do.”

Corvus Energy is a Norwegian clean shipping company with Seattle offices and a manufacturing facility in Bellingham, Wash. The business is helping vessels go electric with its maritime battery technologies, serving ferries, cruise ships, tugs, cranes and fishing boats.

It’s an evolving sector and the company spends up to 15% of its annual revenue on research and development to fine-tune its technology to meet demanding oceanic conditions.

“It is totally different to operate a battery in an EV versus a maritime setting,” said Corvus CEO Fredrik Witte. “For an EV, you’re traveling three, four hours a day, maybe. But in a maritime setting, you’re potentially operating 24/7.”

Seattle’s Trident Seafoods operates fishing boats and onshore production facilities, including the largest seafood processing plant in North America in Akutan, Alaska. While seafood typically has a much lower carbon footprint than beef, pork or dairy, the company wants to reduce the climate impacts associated with its operations.

But Paul Doremus, Trident Seafoods’ vice president of policy and sustainability, pointed to a hard reality: the company competes directly with Russian and Chinese seafood companies that are doing business under less stringent environmental regulations.

He said the seafood sector — “which has been kind of famously fragmented, small, fairly scrappy” — needs to come together to collectively make improvements.

Doremus applauded events like One Ocean Week Seattle for gathering maritime interests to draw attention and capital toward “sustainable use of the ocean for the benefit of local communities, regional and national.”

“I think that’s the next wave,” he said.

Collaboration and innovation

The call for collaboration echoed throughout the One Ocean Summit, which also featured former NOAA Administrator Jane Lubchenco, United Nations officials, and Norway’s ambassador to the U.S.

Washington Lt. Gov. Denny Heck gave a welcome address, highlighting the state’s maritime economy while calling out threats from plastic pollution, undersea noise, and environmental degradation.

“To face these challenges, we will need to develop new technologies and strengthen our institutions,” Heck said. “It will require sustainable fuel storage, habitat restoration, quiet propulsion and so many other inventions and innovations. But more importantly, it will require the dedication and teamwork of thousands of people.”

The message was reinforced by Haakon Vatle, leader of the One Ocean Expedition, which is sailing a 111-year-old Norwegian tall ship across the globe. The ship, named the Statsraad Lehmkuhl, was moored just outside Bell Harbor International Conference Center during the event.

“The role of our ship is to create attention and share knowledge of the crucial role of the ocean for a sustainable future,” Vatle said. “We’re going to use a ship to reduce the gap between science and the public — get the people we need for the ocean we want. We cannot save the ocean alone.”

Editor’s note: GeekWire reporter Lisa Stiffler was the volunteer emcee of the One Ocean Summit.

An overview of our support for a first-of-its-kind gas power plant with carbon capture and storage.

Seattle agriculture-tech startup Carbon Robotics raised $20 million in new funding to support the creation of another piece of AI-powered machinery for farms.

With its signature LaserWeeder and relatively new Autonomous Tractor Kit (ATK) already being used by hundreds of customers, Carbon founder and CEO Paul Mikesell told GeekWire that “a brand new AI robot” is coming.

Mikesell said the machine, which is at least nine months away from being revealed, will leverage the same AI system used in Carbon’s other equipment but perform tasks beyond weeding.

“It’s very flexible, capable of doing a lot with the world around it, understanding what it’s seeing, what’s happening,” Mikesell said of Carbon’s system that uses an array of AI, computer vision and machine learning technology. “We see our ability to reinvest in that platform and double down on what it can do in some new activities.

“It’ll blow your mind,” he added.

Founded in 2018, Carbon Robotics made its name across ag-tech with the LaserWeeder, a machine which can be pulled behind a tractor and uses its tech to detect plants in fields and then target and eliminate weeds with lasers. The latest iteration, the LaserWeeder G2, was released in February.

In March, the company unveiled the Carbon ATK, previously called the AutoTractor. That autonomous platform is designed to fit on and control existing farm equipment and serve as an answer to labor shortages and increased productivity in farming.

Both platforms are continuing to grow and scale, and “things are moving really fast,” according to Mikesell, a longtime technologist and entrepreneur who previously co-founded data storage company Isilon Systems.

LaserWeeders are active on farms across the U.S. and in 14 countries around the world. Mikesell said revenue continues to grow every year, but Carbon is not yet profitable.

Ranked No. 9 on the GeekWire 200 list of top privately held startups based across the Pacific Northwest, Carbon has previously been backed by NVIDIA and Seattle-based Voyager Capital.

The Series D-2 extension round attracted Giant Ventures as lead investor. The UK-based VC invests across a variety of “purpose-driven” startups, and Mikesell said, “They got what we were trying to do.”

Giant previously invested in a $140 million round for Tidal Vision, a Bellingham, Wash.-based company turning discarded crab shells into a valuable industrial chemical called chitosan.

Beyond the secretive new machine, Carbon is revealing more about the “large plant model” at the heart of how it does computer vision through its AI systems.

Mikesell said the company is at the point where it has enough training data and labeled images that it can teach its AI to learn about the basic structure of the plants it’s seeing. This allows Carbon to run one model on every machine in the world.

“If new weeds pop up in an onion field in France, and those are eventually going to show up in a carrot field in the U.S., the first time we see that weed anywhere it can be part of the model and be ready to go,” Mikesell said. “It also means that if we want to go into a new crop that we’ve never seen before, we can do it immediately.”

A LaserWeeder is designed to target the meristem of a weed to kill it as quickly as possible and the large plant model helps it understand where to precisely target its zap.

Carbon Robotics, which has raised $177 million to date, now employs about 260 people. The company runs a manufacturing facility in Richland, Wash., and added another in the Netherlands to offset some trade and tariff issues as well as speed deployment of machines in Europe.

Mikesell said as far as competition, there are some companies in Europe who claim to be building some version of a LaserWeeder, but he’s never seen one in a field or competed against one.

“It’s very hard to create a LaserWeeder,” he said. “The targeting system is so special, and the AI is so special. It’s not just about detecting where the weeds are. The trick to making it work is you need a targeting camera to be able to keep the lasers on target [while moving], and everybody I’ve seen that says they’re gonna build a LaserWeeder doesn’t understand that concept.”

Today with the City of The Dalles, Oregon, we’re celebrating the completion of a new aquifer storage and recovery (ASR) system — a new water infrastructure project set t…