I genuinely hope that @fervoenergy is correct here and the short seller is wrong. But @heatmap_news publishing what is basically an extended debunking of what the short seller is claiming here is a marked contrast to how Heatmap and other clean tech media treat similar stories about next generation nuclear, where every short position and dip in share prices is treated as proof that its all a gigantic bubble built on hype while the founders, unlike Latimer, are framed not as climate heroes but tech bros and con men. Maybe Fervo will succeed and advanced nuclear will fail. But the double standard is noticeable and reflects I think, the latent anti-nuclearism that has been baked into environmental and energy discourse for a several generations and that is so normalized that many well-meaning and "not anti-nuclear" people are completely unaware of it. I see this across many related domains. I can't tell you how many times over the last decade I've heard philanthropists and program officers proudly proclaiming that they are making big investments under the banner of clean energy abundance, underresourced climate strategies and technologies, or effective altruism who then proceed to explain that while they are making big philanthropic commitments to geothermal, carbon capture, carbon removal, geoengineering, and similar, they aren't investing in nuclear because nuclear is already covered. This notion is laughable. Even today, a decade and a half after we launched the pro-nuclear movement, there is a pittance of philanthropic money going into nuclear compared with any of the above technologies. But making big philanthropic bets on nuclear is considered to be gauche, a fool's errand, or just not something that environmentally or climate concerned philanthropists do. At this point I don't think any of this is going to change. Environmentalism is the secular religion of the western, post-industrial, knowledge class and it comes with a particular imaginary about the future. As I wrote a few years ago: "At the heart of modern environmental identity and consciousness is an imaginary and utopian future, easily recognizable in contemporary iconography, of bucolic landscapes with low density housing in the foreground, agricultural lands teeming with wildlife and dotted with windmills and solar panels in the middle ground, and magnificent mountains, wilderness, and wild rivers in the background. Somewhere in this world there are cities and lithium mines, factories and sewage treatment plants. But they are literally not in the picture." It is remarkable that even today, carbon capture and removal, enhanced geothermal sprawling across vast landscapes to frack hot water from deep below the earth's surface, and spraying sulfur particles into the upper atmosphere are all more welcome amendments to that imaginary than dense, land and material efficient, always on nuclear energy. If nuclear succeeds it will do so in spite of climate-industrial complex, and its many pragmatic and abundance-ish offshoots, not because of it. heatmap.news/energy/fervo-sh…

Climate change is real and is having impacts. But "the determination by the climate movement and its allies to reduce the issue to a manichean struggle to save lives by reducing fossil fuel use" has undermined straightforward measures to improve public health outcomes associated with climate change and pollution.