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Three tactics from Erin Burns, executive director of Carbon180, on how the industry can use this time wisely.
Erin Burns has been here before. The executive director of Carbon180, a carbon removal research and policy nonprofit, joined the organization as its first policy director in 2018, partway through Donald Trump’s first term as president. It was under that administration that she helped win the first ever dedicated federal research and development funding for carbon removal, a modest $60 million in 2019.
It’s a very different world today than it was then, so she wasn’t exactly here. There’s now billions of dollars in federal funding appropriated to pull carbon from the atmosphere — not just for research and development, but also for building commercial-scale projects and purchasing carbon removal services. At the same time, this new Trump administration is moving more quickly and aggressively than the last one to undo anything resembling climate policy, and future attempts to re-allocate some of that money are not out of the question.
I recently spoke to Burns about how she’s looking to make progress on carbon removal under these circumstances. Here are my big takeaways from the conversation.
It’s not yet clear how the Trump administration or new Congress is going to act on existing carbon removal programs. Although the industry has a history of receiving bipartisan support and federally-funded carbon removal projects are happening in Republican states and districts, that doesn’t mean these programs are safe. “The rollback of certain policies are not ultimately going to be about how people feel about direct air capture or carbon removal,” Burns told me. “It’s going to be a broader ideology around the role of a place like the Department of Energy, and what kinds of supports the federal government should provide.”
With that in mind, Burns’ motto is “the best defense is a good offense.” That means working with the congresspeople who supported the direct air capture hubs to highlight why the government should continue investing in them. It also involves working with labor unions with members in heavy industry who see the jobs potential. It’s time to double down on a more expansive argument for the benefits of these projects, she said. “There are additional benefits to every carbon removal pathway. We should always be talking about them. Climate’s not going to be the argument that gets you those really durable political coalitions.”
Playing offense also means planning for the next opening. The reason the Biden administration made so much progress on carbon removal, Burns said, is that advocates like her spent two years under the Trump administration meeting weekly, developing policy and “socializing” it, so that it was “ready to go.” As policy enactment in Washington slows down, advocates will have more capacity to sit down and develop the next wave of ideas. To Burns, that means thinking about a more tailored, ground-up approach.
“To be honest, we don’t really have carbon removal policy in the United States,” Burns told me. “We have direct air capture policy, and even that is, like, point-source carbon capture policy that’s been tweaked to fit direct air capture.” An example is the 45Q tax credit, which was originally created to support projects that capture carbon from the smokestacks of coal plants, but was expanded to support direct air capture projects as well.
But carbon removal is not just direct air capture — it’s also planting trees and grinding rocks, activities that likely require different policies and supports than big air-sucking machines to scale up. Leveraging all that to its fullest extent will require a more expansive policy regime.
“Let’s start from scratch,” Burns said. “Start to grapple with the fundamental nature of carbon removal as a unique thing that isn’t going to be deployed only with the policies that we’ve used to deploy technologies like solar. Because carbon removal is not going to create electricity, for example. It’s not just about making it cheap enough that there’s going to be this market force. Making it cheaper is great, but you also have to think about the other barriers.”
Before coming to Carbon180, Burns worked at the center-left think tank Third Way on carbon capture and nuclear energy policy. While she was there, Trump proposed dramatically slashing the Department of Energy’s budget for energy efficiency and renewable energy research and eliminating the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy, which supports the early development of technologies that are too risky for private investment.
“You can get some unusual bedfellows together when you have an administration that’s trying to cut, say, all of the Department of Energy,” Burns said. Instead of renewable developers and nuclear power companies and carbon removal startups all fighting for a piece of the pie, there’s incentive to come together and “make sure the pie still exists.”
It’s not just about preserving funding. The carbon removal industry also needs to be making inroads with adjacent industries because they have common interests. Direct air capture facilities need renewable energy to operate. and right now the future of renewable energy is under major threat. Similarly, direct air capture projects need the Environmental Protection Agency to be well-staffed enough to continue permitting carbon sequestration wells — a process that was slow to start but starting to pick up at the end of Biden’s term. “I think there’s value in us thinking about what it means to not just defend carbon removal, but defend all of this climate infrastructure that is going to be necessary for us to be successful.”
In her past work on carbon capture, Burns grew familiar with a divide between players who were genuinely trying to fight climate change and those for whom carbon capture was just a line in their advertising budget. In her view, the carbon removal industry has been different, with most companies genuinely trying to do the right thing for the climate. It’s an open question as to whether that might change in this new political environment, she said.
Under the Biden administration, the Department of Energy was staffed with some of the leading carbon removal experts in the country. Now there may be less pressure on companies to have high standards for measuring, reporting, and verifying carbon removal outcomes — meaning more of an opening to fudge the truth of how much benefit their projects are providing.
The Trump administration is also scaling back the size of agencies’ staff and removing requirements for companies that receive financial assistance to do things like ensure that the communities hosting their projects also benefit from them. Burns said the onus is on organizations like Carbon180 and on corporate carbon removal buyers to maintain high standards not just for measurement, but also for community engagement. “If you care about deploying CDR, you need to care about local support for those projects,” she said.
For one, community opposition can shut down a project. But also, bringing benefits to host communities helps build political support for carbon removal that can lead to more federal aid down the line. “Those are keys for long-term success.”
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Jesse and Rob go back to basics on the steam engine.
Just two types of machines have produced the overwhelming majority of electricity generated since 1890. This week, we look at the history of those devices, how they work — and how they have contributed to global warming.
This is our second episode of Shift Key Summer School, a series of “lecture conversations” about the basics of energy, electricity, and the power grid for listeners of all backgrounds. This week, we dive into the invention and engineering of the world’s most common types of fossil- and nuclear-fueled power plants. What’s a Rankine cycle power station, and how does it use steam to produce electricity? How did the invention of the jet engine enable the rise of natural gas-generated electricity? And why can natural gas power plants achieve much higher efficiency gains than coal plants?
Shift Key is hosted by Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University, and Robinson Meyer, Heatmap’s executive editor.
Subscribe to “Shift Key” and find this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.
You can also add the show’s RSS feed to your podcast app to follow us directly.
Here is an excerpt from our conversation:
Robinson Meyer: It’s interesting thinking about the deployment of steam and these Rankine cycle generators in the late 19th century for us as people who care about the power grid. These are interesting techniques as they’re deploying electricity for the first time. But the use of coal to convert water into steam and the use of steam power actually comes way earlier than any of this, right? Like, it’s steam. That is actually the 19th century — the core 19th century and late 19th century, especially — energy medium. And actually, the history of the 19th century energy is switching from wood and hydropower to coal-powered steam.
And already by the time that the Pearl Street station is built in New York, the United States is crisscrossed with steam engines. Our economy already runs on steam. It’s actually the application of steam and coal — which at that point are kind of old and fundamental technologies to economic function — to power generation. They didn’t have to make any huge discoveries around steam and coal. They were already using steam and coal in factories, they just weren’t intermediating it through the electricity grid.
Jesse Jenkins: That’s right. And in all these cases, you’re just trying to convert that steam, the expansion of that steam, into motion, whether that’s the pistons of a steam engine or the pistons of a reciprocating generator attached to a dynamo in Pearl Street, or, in a lot of factories, just a bunch of belts, right? That would then move equipment throughout the facility. It’s just a lot easier to move energy around, and more precise to do that as electricity. And so over time, the devices in industrial facilities all converted over to using electricity directly, and then you could generate your energy somewhere far away.
And this is the other, second advantage of steam turbines. What made Westinghouse so successful is that they have large economies of scale, so it’s a lot cheaper to generate power from a big steam turbine than the equivalent amount of power from a lot of little steam engines. And that wasn’t … I mean, that’s true for reciprocating engines, but they kind of top out, given their complexity.
The Pearl Strait station generators were in the 100-kilowatt scale. I think there were six of them, originally, so 600 kilowatts, and they only powered a few hundred lights, which is remarkable. These lights, the original lights, were incredibly inefficient, so it took something like 1,000 watts or more per light bulb. Whereas again, now we’re down to like, 10 to 15 watts in an efficient LED bulb. But anyway, they were in that kind of hundreds of watts scale, and that kind of maxed out the scale of the reciprocating engines. Steam turbines you could increase and increase and increase into the megawatt scale, and by doing that utilities or generators were able to lower the cost of energy while expanding customer bases.
Mentioned:
Powering the Dream: The History and Promise of Green Technology, by Alexis Madrigal
This episode of Shift Key is sponsored by …
The Yale Center for Business and the Environment’s online clean energy programs equip you with tangible skills and powerful networks—and you can continue working while learning. In just five hours a week, propel your career and make a difference.
Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.
The Senate told renewables developers they’d have a year to start construction and still claim a tax break. Then came an executive order.
Renewable energy advocates breathed a sigh of relief after a last-minute change to the One Big Beautiful Bill Act stipulated that wind and solar projects would be eligible for tax credits as long as they began construction within the next 12 months.
But the new law left an opening for the Trump administration to cut that window short, and now Trump is moving to do just that. The president signed an executive order on Monday directing the Treasury Department to issue new guidance for the clean electricity tax credits “restricting the use of broad safe harbors unless a substantial portion of a subject facility has been built.”
The broad safe harbors in question have to do with the way the government defines the “beginning of construction,” which, in the realm of federal tax credits, is a term of art. Under the current Treasury guidance, developers must either complete “physical work of a significant nature” on a given project or spend at least 5% of its total cost to prove they have started construction during a given year, and are therefore protected from any subsequent tax law changes.
As my colleague Matthew Zeitlin previously reported, oftentimes something as simple as placing an order for certain pieces of equipment, like transformers or solar trackers, will check the box. Still, companies can’t just buy a bunch of equipment to qualify for the tax credits and then sit on it indefinitely. Their projects must be up and operating within four years, or else they must demonstrate “continuous progress” each year to continue to qualify.
As such, under existing rules and Trump’s new law, wind and solar developers would have 12 months to claim eligibility for the investment or production tax credit, and then at least four years to build the project and connect it to the grid. While a year is a much shorter runway than the open-ended extension to the tax credits granted by the Inflation Reduction Act, it’s a much better deal than the House’s original version of the OBBBA, which would have required projects to start construction within two months and be operating by the end of 2028 to qualify.
Or so it seemed.
The tax credits became a key bargaining chip during the final negotiations on the bill. Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska fought to retain the 12-month runway for wind and solar, while members of the House Freedom Caucus sought to kill it. Ultimately, the latter group agreed to vote yes after winning assurances from the president that he would “deal” with the subsidies later.
Last week, as all of this was unfolding, I started to hear rumors that the Treasury guidance regarding “beginning of construction” could be a key tool at the president’s disposal to make good on his promise. Industry groups had urged Congress to codify the existing guidance in the bill, but it was ultimately left out.
When I reached out to David Burton, a partner at Norton Rose Fulbright who specializes in energy tax credits, on Thursday, he was already contemplating Trump’s options to exploit that omission.
Burton told me that Trump’s Treasury department could redefine “beginning of construction” in a number of ways, such as by removing the 5% spending safe harbor or requiring companies to get certain permits in order to demonstrate “significant” physical work. It could also shorten the four-year grace period to bring a project to completion.
But Burton was skeptical that the Treasury Department had the staff or expertise to do the work of rewriting the guidance, let alone that Trump would make this a priority. “Does Treasury really want to spend the next couple of months dealing with this?” he said. “Or would it rather deal with implementing bonus depreciation and other taxpayer-favorable rules in the One Big Beautiful Bill instead of being stuck on this tangent, which will be quite a heavy lift and take some time?”
Just days after signing the bill into law, Trump chose the tangent, directing the Treasury to produce new guidance within 45 days. “It’s going to need every one of those days to come out with thoughtful guidance that can actually be applied by taxpayers,” Burton told me when I called him back on Monday night.
The executive order cites “energy dominance, national security, economic growth, and the fiscal health of the Nation” as reasons to end subsidies for wind and solar. The climate advocacy group Evergreen Action said it would help none of these objectives. “Trump is once again abusing his power in a blatant end-run around Congress — and even his own party,” Lena Moffit, the group’s executive director said in a statement. “He’s directing the government to sabotage the very industries that are lowering utility bills, creating jobs, and securing our energy independence.”
Industry groups were still assessing the implications of the executive order, and the ones I reached out to declined to comment for this story. “Now we’re circling the wagons back up to dig into the details,” one industry representative told me, adding that it was “shocking” that Trump would “seemingly double cross Senate leadership and Thune in particular.”
As everyone waits to see what Treasury officials come up with, developers will be racing to “start construction” as defined by the current rules, Burton said. It would be “quite unusual” if the new guidance were retroactive, he added. Although given Trump’s history, he said, “I guess anything is possible.”
“I believe the tariff on copper — we’re going to make it 50%.”
President Trump announced Tuesday during a cabinet meeting that he plans to impose a hefty tax on U.S. copper imports.
“I believe the tariff on copper — we’re going to make it 50%,” he told reporters.
Copper traders and producers have anticipated tariffs on copper since Trump announced in February that his administration would investigate the national security implications of copper imports, calling the metal an “essential material for national security, economic strength, and industrial resilience.”
Trump has already imposed tariffs for similarly strategically and economically important metals such as steel and aluminum. The process for imposing these tariffs under section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962 involves a finding by the Secretary of Commerce that the product being tariffed is essential to national security, and thus that the United States should be able to supply it on its own.
Copper has been referred to as the “metal of electrification” because of its centrality to a broad array of electrical technologies, including transmission lines, batteries, and electric motors. Electric vehicles contain around 180 pounds of copper on average. “Copper, scrap copper, and copper’s derivative products play a vital role in defense applications, infrastructure, and emerging technologies, including clean energy, electric vehicles, and advanced electronics,” the White House said in February.
Copper prices had risen around 25% this year through Monday. Prices for copper futures jumped by as much as 17% after the tariff announcement and are currently trading at around $5.50 a pound.
The tariffs, when implemented, could provide renewed impetus to expand copper mining in the United States. But tariffs can happen in a matter of months. A copper mine takes years to open — and that’s if investors decide to put the money toward the project in the first place. Congress took a swipe at the electric vehicle market in the U.S. last week, extinguishing subsidies for both consumers and manufacturers as part of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. That will undoubtedly shrink domestic demand for EV inputs like copper, which could make investors nervous about sinking years and dollars into new or expanded copper mines.
Even if the Trump administration succeeds in its efforts to accelerate permitting for and construction of new copper mines, the copper will need to be smelted and refined before it can be used, and China dominates the copper smelting and refining industry.
The U.S. produced just over 1.1 million tons of copper in 2023, with 850,000 tons being mined from ore and the balance recycled from scrap, according to United States Geological Survey data. It imported almost 900,000 tons.
With the prospect of tariffs driving up prices for domestically mined ore, the immediate beneficiaries are those who already have mines. Shares in Freeport-McMoRan, which operates seven copper mines in Arizona and New Mexico, were up over 4.5% in afternoon trading Tuesday.