Scoop: New Nonprofit Backs Unique Approach to Geoengineering the Arctic

Current conditions: In the Atlantic, Tropical Storm Fernand is heading northward toward Bermuda • In the Pacific, Tropic Storm Juliette is active about 520 miles southwest of Baja California, with winds of up to 65 miles per hour • Temperatures are surging past 100 degrees Fahrenheit in South Korea.

THE TOP FIVE

1. U.S. court blocks GE Vernova from exiting Vineyard Wind

Nearly two weeks ago, Vineyard Wind sued one of its suppliers, GE Vernova, to keep the industrial giant from exiting the offshore wind project off the coast of Nantucket in Massachusetts. Now a U.S. court has ordered GE Vernova to finish the job, saying it would be “fanciful” to imagine a new contractor could complete the installation. GE Vernova had argued that Vineyard Wind — a 50/50 joint venture between the European power giant Avangrid and Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners — owed it $300 million for work already performed. But Vineyard Wind countered that the manufacturer remains on the hook for about $545 million to make up for a catastrophic turbine blade collapse in 2024, according to WBUR. “The project is at a critical phase and the loss of [Vineyard Wind]’s principal contractor would set the project back immeasurably,” the Suffolk County Superior Court Judge Peter Krupp wrote in his decision, repeatedly using the name of GE Vernova’s renewables subsidiary. “To pretend that [Vineyard Wind] could go out and hire one or more contractors to finish the installation and troubleshoot and modify [GE Renewables’] proprietary design without [GE Renewables’] specialized knowledge is fanciful.”

2. Exclusive: New nonprofit launches to support a unique approach to geoengineering

Charlotte DeWald fears the world is sleepwalking into tipping points beyond which the Earth’s natural carbon cycles will render climate change uncontrollable. By the time we realize what it means for global weather and agricultural systems that there’s no sea ice in the Arctic sometime in the 2030s, for example, it may be too late to try anything drastic to buy us more time. Much of the discourse around what to do concerns a specific kind of geoengineering called stratospheric aerosol injections, essentially spraying reflective particles into the sky to block the sun’s heat from permeating the increasingly thick layer of greenhouse gases that prevent that energy from naturally radiating back into space. That’s something DeWald, a former Pacific Northwest National Laboratory researcher and climate scientist by training who specialized in modeling aerosol-cloud interactions, knows all about. But her approach is different, using a technology known as mixed-phase cloud thinning, a process similar to cloud seeding. “The idea is that you could dissipate clouds over the Arctic to release heat from the surface to, for example, increase sea ice extent or thickness or integrity,” she told me. “There’s some early modeling that suggests that it could yield significant cooling over the Arctic Ocean.”

With all that context, you can now appreciate the exclusive bit of news I have for you this morning: DeWald is launching a new nonprofit called the Arctic Stabilization Initiative to “evaluate whether targeted interventions can slow dangerous” warming near the Earth’s northern pole. So far, ASI has raised $6.5 million in philanthropic funding toward a five-year budget goal of $55 million to study whether MCT, as mixed-phase cloud thinning is known, could help save the Arctic. The nonprofit has an advisory board stacked with veteran Arctic scientists and put together a “stage-gated” research plan with offramps in case early modeling suggests MCT won’t work or could cause undue environmental damage. The project also has an eye toward engaging with Indigenous peoples and “will ground all future work in respect for Indigenous sovereignty, before any field-based research activity is pursued.” The statement harkens to Harvard University’s SCoPEx trial, a would-be outdoor experiment in spraying reflective aerosols into the atmosphere over Sweden that ran aground after researchers initially failed to consult local stakeholders and a body representing the Indigenous Saami people in the northern reaches of Nordic nations came out against the testing. (By repeatedly invoking ASI’s nonprofit status, DeWald also seemed to draw a contrast with for-profit stratospheric aerosol injection startup Stardust Solutions, which last year Heatmap’s Robinson Meyer reported had raised $60 million.) “We are continuing to move toward critical planetary thresholds without a viable plan for things like tipping points,” DeWald said. “That was the inflection point for me.”

3. China just smashed a world record for the largest test of blending hydrogen into a gas system

Modern lighting on an old building in the Qingzhou section of Weifang, which is getting modern molecules in an old gas system.VCG/VCG via Getty Images

China just took yet another step closer to energy independence, despite its relatively tiny domestic reserves of oil and gas, kicking off the world’s largest project to blend hydrogen into the natural gas system. As part of the experiment, roughly 100,000 households in the center of the Weifang, a prefecture-level city in eastern Shandong province between Beijing and Shanghai, will receive a blend of up to 10% hydrogen through existing gas pipes. The pilot’s size alone “smashes” the world record, according to Hydrogen Insight. Whether that’s meaningful from a climate perspective depends on how you look at things. A fraction of 1% of China’s hydrogen fuel comes from electrolyzer plants powered by clean renewables or nuclear electricity. But the People’s Republic still produces more green hydrogen than any other nation. Last year, the central government made cleaning up heavy industry with green hydrogen a higher priority — a goal that’s been supercharged by the war in Iran. Therein lies the real biggest motivator now. While China relies on imports for natural gas, swapping out more of that fuel for domestically generated hydrogen allows Beijing to claim the moral high ground on emissions and air pollution — all while becoming more energy independent.

Meanwhile, China’s container ships are the latest sector to experiment with going electric and forgoing the need for costly, dirty bunker fuel. A 10,000-ton fully electric cargo vessel capable of carrying 742 shipping containers just started up operations in China this week, according to a video posted on X by China’s Xinhua News service.

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4. Tesla Cybertruck joins California’s vehicle-to-grid program

The ability of electric vehicles to serve as distributed energy resources, charging in times of low demand and discharging back onto the grid when demand peaks, has long been a dream of EV enthusiasts and DER advocates alike. California’s PG&E utility launched a small bi-directional charging program in 2023, allowing owners of Ford F-150 Lightnings to use their trucks as home backup power, and eventually feed energy back onto the grid. The utility added a host of General Motors EVs to the program back in 2025. On Monday, it announced its latest vehicle participant: Tesla’s Cybertruck. The Tesla vehicle will be the first in the program to run on alternating current, which simplifies the equipment necessary and lowers costs for consumers, according to PG&E’s announcement.

5. Trump-backed rare earths company makes a $2.8 billion Brazil deal

In January, I told you about the then-latest company to benefit from President Donald Trump’s dabbling in what you might call state capitalism with American characteristics: USA Rare Earth. The vertically integrated company, which aims to mine rare earths in Texas, took big leaps forward in the past year toward building factories to turn those metals into the magnets needed for modern technologies. For now, however, the company needs ore. On Monday, USA Rare Earth announced plans to buy Brazilian rare earth miner Serra Verde in a deal valued at $2.8 billion in cash and shares. The transaction is expected to be complete by the end of the third quarter of this year. The company pitched the move as a direct challenge to China, which dominates both the processing of rare earths mined at home and abroad. “The world has become too dependent on a single source and it’s high time to break that dependency,” USA Rare Earth CEO Barbara Humpton told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” on Monday.

THE KICKER

As if we needed more evidence that the data center backlash is “swallowing American politics,” here’s Heatmap’s Jael Holzman with yet another data point: According to tracking from the Heatmap Pro database, fights against data centers now outnumber fights against wind farms in the U.S. That includes both onshore and offshore wind developments. “Taken together,” Jael wrote, “these numbers describe the tremendous power involved in the data center wars.”