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On Mission 2025, Heirloom’s new facility, and geoengineering’s unintended consequences
Excessive rainfall in the Swiss Alps triggered a landslide • Power was restored in the Balkans following a massive outage that left people sweltering • Flood waters are receding in Rock Valley, Iowa, after 1,500 people were forced to evacuate.
A group of influential leaders across business and politics have formed a new coalition, called Mission 2025, aimed at pressuring governments to “align their upcoming national climate plans with the Paris Agreement target of limiting global warming to 1.5°C.” These plans, known as nationally determined contributions (NDCs), outline how countries will cut their emissions. There is a February 2025 deadline for new, updated NDCs to be submitted to the United Nations, so Mission 2025 is pushing governments to set ambitious goals. The coalition points to recent data showing that more than two-thirds of annual revenues across the world’s largest companies are now aligned with net zero, which is an increase of 45% over the last two years. Backers of Mission 2025 include IKEA, Unilever, Mastercard, and the heads of C40 Cities, among others. The coalition is spearheaded by Christiana Figueres, who helped shepherd leaders toward the Paris Agreement in 2015 and is now the co-founder of nonprofit Global Optimism. “The launch of Mission 2025 today is a clear rebuttal to everyone claiming that moving faster on tackling the climate crisis is too difficult, too unpopular or too expensive,” Figueres said.
Bay Area-based carbon removal company Heirloom announced today that it’s moving its half of the Department of Energy-funded Project Cypress DAC hub from coastal Calcasieu Parish inland to Shreveport — and that it will be building a second facility, capable of removing 17,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide annually, on the same site. As Heatmap’s Kate Brigham reported, once the two facilities reach full scale, they will have the capacity to suck up a combined 317,000 metric tons of CO2 per year. Project Cypress is a partnership between Heirloom, the Swiss DAC company Climeworks, and project developer Battelle. As per the initial plan, Climeworks will still build out its portion of Project Cypress in southwest Louisiana, and together with Heirloom’s Shreveport plant, the two facilities will pull a combined megaton of CO2 out of the atmosphere every year. Heirloom expects its new 17,000 ton facility to be operational by 2026, while its larger Project Cypress plant is planned to come online in 2027. Initially, this larger facility will remove 100,000 metric tons of CO2 annually, eventually ramping up to 300,000 metric tons. For both projects, Heirloom is partnering with the carbon management company CapturePoint to permanently sequester CO2 in underground wells.
The death toll from this year’s Hajj keeps climbing. Saudi Arabia now says at least 1,300 people died during the pilgrimage, which took place during an extreme heat wave. Temperatures in the holy city of Mecca reached 125 degrees Fahrenheit at one point. “May Allah forgive and have mercy on the deceased,” Health Minister Fahd Al-Jalajel said. Meanwhile, at least 1,400 heat records were set last week as temperatures soared across five continents. In the U.S., more than 100 million people were under heat warnings as of Sunday. The East Coast is getting some relief, but a heat dome is now situated over states in the Plains and the South and the heat index could reach 110.
A new study published in the journal Nature Climate Change found that geoengineering projects off the West Coast of the U.S. could inadvertently lead to more intense heat waves over Europe. The paper examines “marine cloud brightening,” which would involve spraying aerosol particles into the atmosphere to reflect solar radiation. The researchers concluded that this process would indeed lower temperatures in Western states, but only temporarily. By 2050, if temperatures increase by 2 degrees Celsius, the researchers’ models suggest cloud brightening would be ineffective and would actually lead to temperature increases in Europe.
China and the European Union agreed during a call on Saturday to negotiate over the EU’s planned tariffs on Chinese EVs. EU Trade Commissioner Valdis Dombrovskis and his Chinese counterpart Wang Wentao had a “candid and constructive” discussion that ended with an agreement to “engage at all levels.” The EU has threatened levies as high as 48% and accused China of unfairly subsidizing its EV production. Bloombergreported that China hinted that Germany’s luxury carmakers could benefit from relaxed tariffs in China if Berlin “convinces” the EU to drop its tariffs. The discussions come weeks after President Biden announced that U.S. tariffs on electric vehicles made in China will quadruple from 25% to 100%.
Researchers have created a new kind of fabric that they claim can keep wearers up to 16 degrees Fahrenheit cooler than traditional silk.
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On the first night of climate week, I headed over to a happy hour hosted by a bunch of progressive climate advocacy nonprofits, including Climate Cabinet, Data for Progress, and Evergreen Collaborative. The event was called “Progress No Matter What,” and the theme was states’ ability to advance climate action regardless of national politics.
On the packed back patio of a beer garden on the Lower East Side, a handful of speakers took turns climbing atop a picnic bench to address the boisterous crowd. State and federal officials celebrated the billions of dollars flowing to states to decarbonize and pressed attendees not to ignore the down-ballot climate champions running for office in November. Then, to close things out, White House Climate Advisor Ali Zaidi got up. Over the past year, I’ve heard Zaidi deliver the same impassioned but rehearsed preamble on press call after press call reminding us of President Biden’s climate accomplishments during his term. But here, Zaidi let loose. He said the Wall Street Journal had published a story that morning that started with the line “Climate optimism is fading.” He didn’t think so. “This is popular shit!” he declared, of efforts to fight climate change while reducing pollution, and the audience erupted in cheers. — Emily Pontecorvo
Last weekend, I attended the U.S. premiere of The Here Now Project at the inaugural Climate Film Festival — and was totally wowed. The 75-minute documentary is unnarrated and composed entirely of archival cell phone videos, vlogs, and news clips that were shot during climate disasters in 2021, ranging from the Texas power crisis that left almost 250 people dead after a February cold snap to the “sea snot” that covered Turkey’s Sea of Marmara over that summer.
While it’s harrowing to see all the footage back-to-back — and to learn about disasters I hadn’t paid close attention to at the time, like the subway flooding in Zhengzhou or the dust storms in Brazil — I was even more struck by the seemingly universal urge people have to document the way extreme weather upends their lives, even when those lives are quite immediately at risk.
The movie’s power lies in echoes and patterns of human nature, from our curiosity to our horror to our powerful compassion and self-sacrifice. I spoke to the filmmakers, Greg Jacobs and Jon Siskel, for my article about the Climate Film Festival last week, and Jacobs told me they hope to make The Here Now Project an ongoing chronicle of climate change in the style of Michael Apted’s famous Up series; I very much hope they will succeed. — Jeva Lange
At several events this week related to carbon dioxide removal, the conversation turned again and again to the challenge of finance and the scarcity of buyers. During a marine carbon removal panel on Monday, for instance, James Lindsay, the director of investments at the philanthropic Builders Initiative described the tension between simultaneously trying to raise capital for a given carbon removal approach while also trying to prove that it’s safe and actually works. While there are a few buyers, like the Frontier Climate initiative, that accept these conditions and are willing to support nascent approaches that may or may not work out, making one big deal with Frontier doesn’t provide the consistent cash flow that a startup needs to progress, he said.
Later that day, at a mini-conference hosted by the direct air capture company Climeworks, CEO Christoph Gebald declared that the industry simply cannot rely on voluntary purchases if it is going to scale. “We need to transition to regulated markets,” he said. Josh Becker, a California State Senator gave a brief presentation on a bill he introduced this year, SB 308, to do just that. It was a “government-enabled, market led” policy that would have required corporate polluters to begin paying for carbon removal. The bill “died a mysterious death,” he said, but he plans to try again in 2025.
The event closed out with a panel on “the economic opportunity of carbon removal in the U.S.,” and yet the talk once again turned to the economic obstacles. “Demand is an existential challenge,” Giana Amadour, executive director of the Carbon Removal Alliance, said. “If we want deployment beyond these 1,000- to 10,000-ton facilities, we need a demand signal that is robust, steady, resilient, growing, in order to make sure these companies can raise the private and public sector funding they need.” — Emily
While most of the energy developers, technologists, and investors I spoke to and/or heard speak this week were excited about artificial intelligence as a way to bring forward demand for clean electrons, there was one interesting note of caution from Katie Rae, chief executive of Engine Ventures, the investment firm that has backed Commonwealth Fusion Systems and the long-duration battery company Form Energy. “The government has to think about it: Are the people going to get energy? Or are the hyperscalers going to get energy? The pitchforks can come.” — Matthew Zeitlin
On Tuesday morning, I stopped by “Geothermal House,” a day-long event and installation at the Hall des Lumières near City Hall. It’s a former bank building that now hosts “immersive experiences,” which essentially amount to wandering around a room decorated with floor to ceiling projections of art, like the paintings of Chagall. This time, however, the room was made up to bring you miles deep within the Earth’s crust.
The VR lounge at Geothermal House.Emily Pontecorvo
The event was put on by Project InnerSpace, a nonprofit dedicated to transferring skills and knowledge from the oil and gas industry to scale geothermal energy. “This is the first time geothermal has shown up at NY Climate Week,” the group’s executive director, Jamie Beard, declared at the start of a series of panels held in the central hall. Unfortunately, the talks were nearly impossible to hear in the cavernous marble room, but I spent some time wandering around, watching the animated projections of geothermal power plants and hit up the “VR lounge,” which offered a much more convincing immersive experience and taught me about the difference between “enhanced” and “advanced” geothermal.
The event also had some of the best swag I saw at Climate Week, including a station where you could 3D print your face onto “the core of the Earth.” Jeva was accurate when she compared the resulting object to a Ferrero Rocher. — Emily
Two members of the Jean Charles Choctaw Nation — which is considered to be one of the first communities in the U.S. to be displaced by climate change — spoke at an event on Wednesday hosted by EarthRights International. They emphasized the way the state of Louisiana failed to keep the tribe intact during the relocation effort, with Chief Deme Naquin and Tribal Secretary Chantel Comardelle explaining that while their own story is one marked by failure, they hope other communities will be able to learn from it. After all, it’s not just a house or neighborhood that you lose to something like coastal erosion; it’s also the stories and memories of the place you’d called home. “We probably weren’t the first” community to be displaced by climate change, Chief Deme told the room, “but we’re definitely not the last.” — Jeva
And over in D.C., during “National Clean Energy Week,” a more industry-focused panel-ganza, the cofounder and chief executive of the most important company in energy was sharing his thoughts on the sector. That would be Nvidia's Jensen Huang, the head of the company that designs the chips that power many artificial intelligence models and applications.
During his one-hour chat with former Education Secretary Margaret Spellings at the Bipartisan Policy Center on Friday, Huang focused mostly on what good AI could do for energy and grid efficiency, including weather simulation and designing smart grids. While it's true, Huang said, “that AI does take energy,” AI-trained models can predict weather and climate “tens of thousands of times more energy efficiently” than supercomputers. But he was also straightforward about the intense energy demands of training artificial intelligence models.
“These data centers could consume, today, maybe 100 megawatts. In the future it will be 10, 20 times more than that.” To reduce strain on the grid, these data centers could be located “where the energy” is located, Huang suggested. “The AI doesn't care where it goes to school.” And like a student, “it’s okay” if it sometimes has to “take a nap” when the sun’s not out. — Matthew
Ocean-based storms are increasingly affecting areas hundreds of miles from the coasts.
After a hurricane makes landfall comes the eerie wait for bad news. For Hurricane Helene — now a tropical storm as it barrels toward Nashville — that news came swiftly on Friday morning: at least 4 million are without power after the storm’s Thursday night arrival near Florida’s Big Bend region; more than 20 are dead in three states; and damage estimates are already in the billions of dollars.
But that’s just the news from the coasts.
As Helene is set to illustrate yet again, hurricanes are not just coastal events — especially in the era of our warming climate. The National Weather Service warned towns in the Blue Ridge Mountains of South Carolina and Georgia that Helene will be “one of the most significant weather events” in the region in “the modern era,” while the Appalachians are in store for a “catastrophic, historic flooding disaster” according to AccuWeather’s Chief Meteorologist Jonathan Porter during a briefing with reporters Friday morning. He added for good measure: “This is not the kind of language we use very often.”
Helene’s dangerous inland impacts are precisely what the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration sounded the alarm over earlier this year. Ninety percent of hurricane fatalities result from water, and almost 60% of those are freshwater deaths caused by heavy rainfall. Such fatalities often occur hundreds of miles from the shore in flash floods fueled by the warmer atmosphere, which can hold and dispense far more moisture in a short period than would have been possible in the pre-industrial era.
With Helene specifically, “there are going to be communities that are cut off” as bridges are compromised and roadways wash out, Porter said. Especially in mountain communities that might have only one or two ways in and out of town, that kind of rain raises the level of difficulty for any sort of emergency response and can make evacuation impossible. There have already been reports of 12 to 15 inches of rain in some parts of North Carolina.
“This is steep terrain,” Porter said. “When you get rain rates of 2 to 4 inches per hour, that is going to result in very significant flash flooding that can go from a dangerous situation to a life-threatening emergency over the matter of just a few minutes.” Rivers could exceed record levels by tonight, with more than 2 million under flash flood warnings around Raleigh and Fayetteville. Landslides are also a possibility in the mountains, where just 5 inches of rain from a single storm can be enough to trigger a disaster, the National Hurricane Center warned; two interstates near Asheville, North Carolina, are already closed due to slides.
It’s certainly not unheard of for the remnants of tropical storms to pass over the Carolinas and Appalachian Mountains — hurricanes such as Katrina in 2005 and Lee in 2011 were deadly billion-dollar disasters even as far inland as Tennessee. But as storms get bigger and wetter like Helene, “even people who have lived in a community for decades may see water flowing fast and rising rapidly in areas that they’ve never seen flood before,” Porter said.
It’s time to adjust expectations — and preparedness plans — accordingly. Louisiana, Texas, and Florida still stand for “Hurricane Country” in the popular imagination, but the mountain states of the southeast are rapidly joining that list. The National Hurricane Center is already monitoring a new low-pressure area in the Gulf of Mexico — in nearly the exact same spot that birthed Helene.
Helene’s winds stretch close to 500 miles across. That’s half the width of the entire Gulf of Mexico.
When Hurricane Helene began to take shape in the Gulf of Mexico, there was one factor that quickly made the storm stand out to meteorologists: its size. Helene is “unusually large,” the National Hurricane Center said; “exceptionally large,” per the Washington Post. Upon landfall, it was one of largest hurricanes in modern history, according to hurricane expert Michael Lowry — bigger than Harvey, bigger than Katrina, surpassed only by 2017’s Hurricane Irma, which was one of the costliest tropical storms on record and resulted in dozens of deaths.
Bigger does not always correlate to stronger. Discussions around the strength of a hurricane typically center on its wind speeds (which is what the categories connote) and the volume of rain it is expected to unleash. But in Helene’s case, there was both size and power — when the storm made landfall in Florida’s Big Bend region late Thursday night, it was classified as a Category 4 storm, with sustained winds of 140 miles per hour.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis declared a state of emergency in 61 of the state’s 67 counties ahead of the storm, speaking to the breadth of damage he expects to see and the long recovery process to come. Already, images of flooded streets are circulating on social media, multiple deaths have been reported, and millions are without electricity. As Helene continues its course, it’s bringing tropical storm conditions to Alabama, Georgia, the Carolinas, and Tennessee.
In the hours and days to come, we’ll get a better understanding of how well forecasters did predicting the path and strength of this storm, a task that has become increasingly difficult. Because at the same time technology has improved oversight of these storms, with artificial intelligence models that have raised the bar for prediction accuracy and the ability to deploy radar systems as they pass overhead, climate change is altering the ingredients that feed their formation. For example, record-high temperatures in oceans have changed the behavior of storms as they form, Matt Lanza, who monitors Atlantic storm activity for The Eyewall, explained to me, resulting in more storms intensifying rapidly ahead of landfall. This has made storms like 2023’s Hurricane Idalia tougher to predict, despite being closely tracked.
Helene, too, rapidly intensified on its way to reaching land. The area of Florida where it hit, a little over 50 miles from the state capital in Tallahassee, is no stranger to storms— in just the past 13 months, Florida’s Big Bend has had to absorb the impacts of both Idalia and Hurricane Debby, each of which caused billions of dollars in damages. Still, Truchelut said Hurricane Helene could be a “truly unprecedented scenario for North Florida.” Part of the unusual force behind this storm can be attributed to another unprecedented scenario — the warmth of the water in the Gulf of Mexico. CBS News said the water surface temperature below the storm’s formation was up to 89 degrees Fahrenheit, which is as much as 4 degrees above average. This follows the overall Gulf warming trend observed by NOAA, which the agency says “increases the intensity of hurricanes.”
Another factor that allowed Helene to grow so huge so fast was the lack of wind shear, a term meteorologists use to refer to the way wind changes speed or direction or both across different elevations. Strong upper-level winds can inhibit storms from forming or growing. In Helene’s case, however, warm water was accompanied by low wind shear and plenty of moisture— conditions that aligned to provide tremendous energy for the storm’s formation. The only thing really standing in Helene’s way was its own size, Lanza noted, which would have made it more difficult for the storm to get organized and strengthen further.
The most obvious reason size matters is the footprint the storm will have on land. To give you an idea of just how large Helene is, Lowry said in his newsletter Friday that the full breadth of its winds upon landfall stretched over 450 miles across, nearly half the entire width of the Gulf of Mexico. This means the effects of the storm began long before it officially made landfall and will continue long after the eye of the storm has moved on.
Hours before Helene officially reached Florida, rain was already drenching communities in the storm’s projected path. Meanwhile, “Severe and life-threatening impacts from Helene will occur hundreds of miles from the cone confines, especially on the eastern half of the storm,” Florida meteorologist Ryan Truchelut wrote in the Tallahassee Democrat, summing up just how far-reaching Helene’s effects could be. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration issued a self-described “rare news release” on Wednesday to warn of the potential for major flooding as far inland as Appalachia, some 300 miles from the Gulf Coast.
Another serious size-related consideration relates to the potential storm surge, or how far above average tides the water will rise. “When you have a storm this big, you’re just inherently moving a lot of water over a broader area,” Lanza said. As Hurricane Helene’s eye approached Florida, water levels easily surpassed multiple storm surge records. But what stood out to Lanza was not just that the surge was powerful, it was also that the threat of surge was so widespread. “A much smaller storm, you can still have a very large storm surge, but it’s going to be very isolated near to where it comes ashore,” he told me. “With a storm like Helene, because of its size, near and east of where it comes ashore, you’re going to have a massive storm surge — and you’re going to have a pretty big storm surge even down the coast from that.” The NHC warned that much of Florida’s Western coastline would see multiple feet of water.
Messaging the risks of these storms to an extreme weather-weary public is another challenge stemming from climate change. “Record breaking” has now become a familiar phrase for most of us, describing everything from extreme temperatures to rainfall rates. But as tropical storms become more intense, fueled by warming-influenced weather conditions, finding ways to accurately convey threats to the public is increasingly essential.
Ahead of Helene’s landfall, the NHC stressed that the storm surge would be “unsurvivable,” encouraging residents to heed evacuation orders. According to The New York Times, the warnings — paired with memories of those other recent storms — seemed to have worked, leaving Big Bend-area towns “eerily empty.” Even the local Waffle House, a business widely recognized for making its own assessments of hurricane risk, was shuttered on Thursday.
The NHC is experimenting with new graphics in hopes of better conveying risks outside of the classic “cone of uncertainty,” which illustrates the predicted path of a tropical storm’s eye. The center shared an image on social media showing inland risks from storms, not just those along the coast.
So if you noticed the NHC’s risk map for Hurricane Helene colored the entire state in a palette of watches and warnings, the reason why is twofold: Yes, the risks really are that widespread with this storm, but the agency is also trying to get better at telling you about them. And in the case of major hurricane like Helene, the more warning, the better.