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♫ It’s getting hot in here, so close up all your domes ♫
Home runs ain’t the half of it.
Last week, the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society issued a widely cited report that found global warming is “juicing” baseballs. The result is an extra 50 or so home runs per year in the major leagues. “It’s basic physics,” The Associated Press explained. “When air heats up, molecules move faster and away from each other, making the air less dense. Baseballs launched off a bat go farther through thinner air because there’s less resistance to slow the ball.”
Baseball fans have long been aware that hot weather makes for more home runs, so it follows that increasing temperatures will have an impact on the game in the years ahead. But MLB has more to worry about than the game becoming boring again because of too many dingers. Here are a few more ways climate change could irrevocably alter the future of America’s favorite past time:
We’ve already covered how the ball will behave differently off the bat. But what about out of the hand?
Heat and high humidity mean less air density, which in turn causes “fastballs to be faster, curveballs to curve less, and spin rates of pitches to be higher,” wrote Lawrence Rocks for SABR’s “Future of Baseball” issue in 2021. Of course, “these factors will cause pitchers to change their usage percentages on their pitch selection.”
As lowland parks grow hotter, we can expect them to behave more like the famously thin-aired Coors Field in Denver — particularly Atlanta, Kansas City, and Houston, which have among the lowest air densities of the Major League stadiums. Heat and humidity will cause baseballs to move more quickly out of the hand while the reduction in the Magnus force will cause them to break more poorly. And if fastballs get faster and curveballs break less, you can naturally expect to see more heaters in the game — and potentially more strikeouts as a result.
At the time of first pitch in Seattle, the Air Quality Index was 220. During the nine innings that followed, it would peak at 240 — more than twice the satisfactory level and “unhealthy for all groups.”
The year was 2020, and wildfires up and down the West Coast were making the empty stadiums even more apocalyptic. Shortly after smoke turned the Bay Area a dystopian orange, MLB decided to move home games from Seattle to San Francisco’s Oracle Park — because the air quality in the Pacific Northwest at that point was too unsafe for athletes.
\u201cA look outside the San Francisco Giants' stadium today.\u201d— SportsCenter (@SportsCenter) 1599694410
It won’t be the last time baseball games are moved or even postponed due to air quality from fires. In 2022, perhaps against better judgment, the Mariners played the ALDS against the Astros when the AQI was 158. Though the unwritten rule is to postpone games when the AQI tops 200, players are beginning to push back, saying — rightfully — that prolonged exposure to inhaling smoke is dangerous. “It’s not like if you’re below 200, everything is fine, and if you’re above 200, everybody is severely affected,” a public health official pointed out to The Athletic. “There’s a whole continuum.”
If the Oakland Athletics move to Las Vegas, they’re all but certain to become the ninth Major League baseball team with at least the ability — if not the necessity — to play indoors.
In addition to the fully enclosed Tropicana Dome in Tampa Bay, seven stadiums currently have retractable roofs. And it is in the warmest, sunniest markets where those roofs most often remain closed: “Miami … played under an open roof just five times in the past two seasons — combined,” Fox Weather reports. The Rangers, meanwhile, replaced their only-26-year-old ballpark in 2019 because it had gotten literally too hot to play in Texas without air conditioning.
It’s not uncommon for the remaining open-air ballparks to top 95 degrees in the summer — a miserable experience for players and fans alike. Without covering more ballparks, injuries could climb and attendance could drop. “People might just say forget about it. I’m not going to a baseball game. It’s 105 degrees,” Brad Humphreys, professor of economics at West Virginia University, told Capital News Service.
Triple-A baseball introduced electronic strike zones this season, fueling speculation that the controversial robo-ump system could be coming to the Major Leagues next. But there is one big reason in favor of electronic strike zones that doesn’t often get mentioned in the debate: climate change.
A recent study found that “umpires call pitches less accurately in uncomfortable temperatures, with performance at its worst in extreme heat conditions,” Monmouth University writes. Incorrect calls were made at a rate of about 1% worse when temperatures topped 95 degrees. And while that might seem insignificant, “it is non-trivial for this high-revenue, high-stakes industry,” the study’s author, Monmouth associate professor of economics Eric Fesselmeyer, said. “Moreover, high temperatures cause an even greater decrease in accuracy on close-call pitches along the edges of the strike zone.”
Aggression and violence rise with the temperatures. In one study, violent crimes went up by as much as 5.7% on days with a maximum daily temperature above 85 degrees, and as much as 10% on days above about 88.
As dugouts and diamonds get hotter, tempers will too. But there is another reason to believe there will be more bench-clearing brawls beyond heat-induced short-fuses. According to a study published in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin in 1991, “a positive and significant relationship was found between temperature and the number of hit batters per game, even when potentially confounding variables having nothing to do with aggression were partialed out.”
Similarly, Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business found in 2011 that “pitchers whose teammates get hit by a pitch are more likely to retaliate and plunk an opposing batter when the temperature reaches 90 degrees than when it is cooler.” Curiously, if no one has been hit in a game, the study found “high temperatures have little effect on a pitcher’s behavior.” As one of the researchers put it, “heat affects a specific form of aggression. It increases retribution.”
Hurricane Ian — the category 4 hurricane that slammed southwest Florida last September — was the state’s costliest storm, inflicting $109 billion in damage including “totally” destroying 900 structures in Fort Meyers Beach alone. Among the damages: CenturyLink Sports Complex, the spring training facility of the Minnesota Twins; Fenway South, the Boston Red Sox’s facility; and Charlotte Sports Park, the Tampa Bay Rays’ spring training home, which sustained damage so extensive that the team had to find another stadium to practice in during the 2023 spring training season.
The lasting damage of the storm extends beyond the physical: “Hurricane Ian’s impact on Lee County likely played a role in depressing the crowds at Red Sox and Twins games this year,” Fort Myers News-Press reports.
There are no murmurs of moving the Grapefruit League’s spring training facilities — yet. But already the rising sea levels and storms of Florida are ruling out new stadium locations, including at least one potential regular-season home for the Rays. “Sites that once appeared to be great places to build a ballpark are now expected to be underwater,” the team president said. With climate already costing teams money and fans, as well as being a deciding factor in new builds, the Grapefruit League could prudently decide to uproot for higher grounds.
Homebuyers are taking into account the future climate conditions of potential properties, and if MLB is wise, it will do the same when considering team expansion.
From a climate standpoint, it already seems egregious to move a team to a desert city that is running out of drinkable water in the summer, though the Oakland A’s potential relocation to Las Vegas is still very much on the table. But when MLB looks at locations to expand to — Portland, Mexico City, North Carolina, Nashville, Montreal, and Vancouver have also been floated — the climate calculus becomes ever more important.
In 60 years, Portland will have a climate similar to Sacramento, complete with the threat of wildfire smoke. Mexico City is getting hotter, drier, and sinking. Charlotte and Raleigh will eventually “resemble the Florida panhandle, specifically Tallahassee, which is 12.6 °F warmer and 10.6% to 14.4% wetter than winter in Charlotte and Raleigh. Nashville is not too far, with Mobile, Alabama serving as its closest projection,” Fangraphs writes in an assessment of the future of ballparks in the climate crisis.
Unsurprisingly, with an eye for the future, it is the northernmost cities that look like the best options to withstand climate change impacts: “Vancouver and Montreal could look toward current day T-Mobile Park and Citizens Bank Park as examples of how to keep fans comfortable during games.”
Over the course of 12 months between 2019 and 2020, 10% of MLB teams switched from real grass to turf. “The three stadiums that replaced their grass share a lot in common,” wrote The Wall Street Journal at the time: “They play in cities with extreme weather and have retractable roofs.”
In Arizona, for example, real grass required sunlight — and thus an open roof — until between 4 p.m. and 7 p.m., which meant that players often worked out before games in temperatures of 110 degrees or more. By the time fans arrived, the building would still be sweltering, air conditioning not having yet kicked in. But by switching to turf, “the roof can remain closed all summer.”
Switching to turf also eliminates the demands of watering: Conservatively, about 62,500 gallons of water a week are required to maintain an average field, an amount 89 homes would use in the same amount of time. Though that water is likely negligible in the grand scheme of things, it’s important for teams to take “social responsibility” by “walking the walk,” Diamondbacks president and CEO Derrick Hall told The Associated Press.
Turf remains controversial — it can affect the bounce of balls and result in higher rates of injuries. Recent advances in turf technology, though, are making it more appealing for teams and the planet.
Anyone who’s ever watched nine innings of live baseball knows the kind of mess fans leave behind: peanut shell piles; beer cups; burger trays; plastic ice cream bowls shaped like hats; abandoned bobbleheads. Overall, baseball audiences create more than 1,000 tons of waste every season, according to the Green Sports Alliance.
A growing number of stadiums are now aspiring to contribute less to landfills, including by using compostable serving items and reducing food waste. But one place waste is still frequently overlooked is in promotional giveaways.
Every year, MLB gives away around four million bobbleheads in addition to other tchotchkes like branded visors, T-shirts, sunglasses, and bags. While some of these end up as treasured pieces of home collections, the vast majority are junk destined for landfills.
Though teams show no sign of forgoing giveaways anytime soon, the more environmentally conscious parks may begin to consider new ways of reducing their waste — including by curbing handouts of cheaply made petroleum products and environmentally taxing garments that no one actually needs.
Every year, athletes end up on the Injured List for reasons ranging from benign to ridiculous. Now there is a new reason to be pulled from a game: heat illness. During one 2018 game at Wrigley Field with a heat index of 107, four players ultimately left the field for temperature-related causes, including three who had to be treated with IV fluids. During another game in 2021, a 28-year-old pitcher vomited on the mound in New York City. Diagnosis? Heat exhaustion.
Normal sports injuries also spike as it gets warmer. “We always had what seemed to be a lot more soft-tissue leg injuries than some of the other clubs. Hamstrings, calf injuries, from guys running the bases,” a former Rangers trainer told The Atlantic in 2016, prior to the construction of the team’s new air-conditioned stadium. “Our staff attributed that to the excessive heat and the fatigue.”
The prevalence of naturally occurring injuries could go up too because as players get dehydrated, their brain, thought capacity, and reflexes “are affected and the player is not able to react immediately on the field,” a 2021 study by the International Journal of Physical Education found. “The player will be injured due to a fall or collision with another player or being hit by a ball.”
Tragically, rising temperatures also are known to contribute to an increased number of deaths, a pattern already observable in high school football. Baseball fans and minor league athletes have already died due to heat-related causes — an awful pattern that isn’t likely to abate.
In 2017, the mercury during the first game of the World Series in Los Angeles hit 103 degrees after 5 p.m.; the same year, the Oakland A’s Triple-A affiliate played in 111-degree heat in Las Vegas. On average, the temperature across the 27 Major League Baseball cities has risen over two degrees since 1970. And “the difference in home run rates between a 90-degree day and a 40-degree day is roughly equivalent to the difference between hitting in Citizens Bank Park” — which is small — “versus Citi Field,” which is comparatively huge, ESPN reports.
In our hotter, damper future, baseball will be a markedly different game than it was 50 years ago — or even now. Heat will affect players’ reflexes and focus. Balls will move differently through thinner, warmer air. Fielding could change ever so slightly as turf becomes more common, and pitchers might switch up their pitches as electronic strike zones come into use and curveballs become less effective.
All good statistical comparisons need context, and that is especially true in the ever-changing sport of baseball. But in the next century of the sport, it is all but certain that the literal environment of the games — from the weather to the air density to the AQI — will be a necessary asterisk beside unusual home runs and IL designations. One day, announcers may even reminisce about “open air” stadiums from their climate-controlled booths during downtime on broadcasts. Perhaps we’ll even have a name for the days of comparatively thicker air: the “cool-ball era.”
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Any household savings will barely make a dent in the added costs from Trump’s many tariffs.
Donald Trump’s tariffs — the “fentanyl” levies on Canada, China, and Mexico, the “reciprocal” tariffs on nearly every country (and some uninhabited islands), and the global 10% tariff — will almost certainly cause consumer goods on average to get more expensive. The Yale Budget Lab estimates that in combination, the tariffs Trump has announced so far in his second term will cause prices to rise 2.3%, reducing purchasing power by $3,800 per year per household.
But there’s one very important consumer good that seems due to decline in price.
Trump administration officials — including the president himself — have touted cheaper oil to suggest that the economic response to the tariffs hasn’t been all bad. On Sunday, Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent told NBC, “Oil prices went down almost 15% in two days, which impacts working Americans much more than the stock market does.”
Trump picked up this line on Truth Social Monday morning. “Oil prices are down, interest rates are down (the slow moving Fed should cut rates!), food prices are down, there is NO INFLATION,” he wrote. He then spent the day posting quotes from Fox Business commentators echoing that idea, first Maria Bartiromo (“Rates are plummeting, oil prices are plummeting, deregulation is happening. President Trump is not going to bend”) then Charles Payne (“What we’re not talking about is, oil was $76, now it’s $65. Gasoline prices are going to plummet”).
But according to Neil Dutta, head of economic research at Renaissance Macro Research, pointing to falling oil prices as a stimulus is just another example of the “4D chess” theory, under which some market participants attribute motives to Trump’s trade policy beyond his stated goal of reducing trade deficits to as near zero (or surplus!) as possible.
Instead, oil markets are primarily “responding to the recession risk that comes from the tariff and the trade war,” Dutta told me. “That is the main story.” In short, oil markets see less global trade and less global production, and therefore falling demand for oil. The effect on household consumption, he said, was a “second order effect.”
It is true that falling oil prices will help “stabilize consumption,” Dutta told me (although they could also devastate America’s own oil industry). “It helps. It’ll provide some lift to real income growth for consumers, because they’re not spending as much on gasoline.” But “to fully offset the trade war effects, you basically need to get oil down to zero.”
That’s confirmed by some simple and extremely back of the envelope math. In 2023, households on average consumed about 700 gallons of gasoline per year, based on Energy Information Administration calculations that the average gasoline price in 2023 was $3.52, while the Bureau of Labor Statistics put average household gasoline expenditures at about $2,450.
Let’s generously assume that due to the tariffs and Trump’s regulatory and diplomatic efforts, gas prices drop from the $3.26 they were at on Monday, according to AAA, to $2.60, the average price in 2019. (GasBuddy petroleum analyst Patrick De Haanwrote Monday that the tariffs combined with OPEC+ production hikes could lead gas prices “to fall below $3 per gallon.”)
Let’s also assume that this drop in gas prices does not cause people to drive more or buy less fuel-efficient vehicles. In that case, those same 700 gallons cost the average American $1,820, which would generate annual savings of $630 on average per household. If we went to the lowest price since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, about $3 per gallon, total consumption of 700 gallons would cost a household about $2,100, saving $350 per household per year.
That being said, $1,820 is a pretty low level for annual gasoline consumption. In 2021, as the economy was recovering from the Covid recession and before gas prices popped, annual gasoline expenditures only got as low as $1,948; in 2020 — when oil prices dropped to literally negative dollars per barrel and gas prices got down to $1.85 a gallon — annual expenditures were just over $1,500.
In any case, if you remember the opening paragraphs of this story, even the most generous estimated savings would go nowhere near surmounting the overall rise in prices forecast by the Yale Budget Lab. $630 is less than $3,800! (JPMorgan has forecast a more mild increase in prices of 1% to 1.5%, but agrees that prices will likely rise and purchasing power will decline.)
But maybe look at it this way: You might be able to drive a little more than you expected to, even as your costs elsewhere are going up. Just please be careful! You don’t want to get into a bad accident and have to replace your car: New car prices are expected to rise by several thousand dollars due to Trump’s tariffs.
With cars about to get more expensive, it might be time to start tinkering.
More than a decade ago, when I was a young editor at Popular Mechanics, we got a Nissan Leaf. It was a big deal. The magazine had always kept long-term test cars to give readers a full report of how they drove over weeks and months. A true test of the first true production electric vehicle from a major car company felt like a watershed moment: The future was finally beginning. They even installed a destination charger in the basement of the Hearst Corporation’s Manhattan skyscraper.
That Leaf was a bit of a lump, aesthetically and mechanically. It looked like a potato, got about 100 miles of range, and delivered only 110 horsepower or so via its electric motors. This made the O.G. Leaf a scapegoat for Top Gear-style car enthusiasts eager to slander EVs as low-testosterone automobiles of the meek, forced upon an unwilling population of drivers. Once the rise of Tesla in the 2010s had smashed that paradigm and led lots of people to see electric vehicles as sexy and powerful, the original Leaf faded from the public imagination, a relic of the earliest days of the new EV revolution.
Yet lots of those cars are still around. I see a few prowling my workplace parking garage or roaming the streets of Los Angeles. With the faded performance of their old batteries, these long-running EVs aren’t good for much but short-distance city driving. Ignore the outdated battery pack for a second, though, and what surrounds that unit is a perfectly serviceable EV.
That’s exactly what a new brand of EV restorers see. Last week, car site The Autopiancovered DIYers who are scooping up cheap old Leafs, some costing as little as $3,000, and swapping in affordable Chinese-made 62 kilowatt-hour battery units in place of the original 24 kilowatt-hour units to instantly boost the car’s range to about 250 miles. One restorer bought a new battery on the Chinese site Alibaba for $6,000 ($4,500, plus $1,500 to ship that beast across the sea).
The possibility of the (relatively) simple battery swap is a longtime EV owner’s daydream. In the earlier days of the electrification race, many manufacturers and drivers saw simple and quick battery exchange as the solution for EV road-tripping. Instead of waiting half an hour for a battery to recharge, you’d swap your depleted unit for a fully charged one and be on your way. Even Tesla tested this approach last decade before settling for good on the Supercharger network of fast-charging stations.
There are still companies experimenting with battery swaps, but this technology lost. Other EV startups and legacy car companies that followed Nissan and Tesla into making production EVs embraced the rechargeable lithium-ion battery that is meant to be refilled at a fast-charging station and is not designed to be easily removed from the vehicle. Buy an electric vehicle and you’re buying a big battery with a long warranty but no clear plan for replacement. The companies imagine their EVs as something like a smartphone: It’s far from impossible to replace the battery and give the car a new life, but most people won’t bother and will simply move on to a new car when they can’t take the limitations of their old one anymore.
I think about this impasse a lot. My 2019 Tesla Model 3 began its life with a nominal 240 miles of range. Now that the vehicle has nearly six years and 70,000 miles on it, its maximum range is down to just 200, while its functional range at highway speed is much less than that. I don’t want to sink money into another vehicle, which means living with an EV’s range that diminishes as the years go by.
But what if, one day, I replaced its battery? Even if it costs thousands of dollars to achieve, a big range boost via a new battery would make an older EV feel new again, and at a cost that’s still far less than financing a whole new car. The thought is even more compelling in the age of Trump-imposed tariffs that will raise already-expensive new vehicles to a place that’s simply out of reach for many people (though new battery units will be heavily tariffed, too).
This is no simple weekend task. Car enthusiasts have been swapping parts and modifying gas-burning vehicles since the dawn of the automotive age, but modern EVs aren’t exactly made with the garage mechanic in mind. Because so few EVs are on the road, there is a dearth of qualified mechanics and not a huge population of people with the savvy to conduct major surgery on an electric car without electrocuting themselves. A battery-replacing owner would need to acquire not only the correct pack but also potentially adapters and other equipment necessary to make the new battery play nice with the older car. Some Nissan Leaf modifiers are finding their replacement packs aren’t exactly the same size, shape or weight, The Autopian says, meaning they need things like spacers to make the battery sit in just the right place.
A new battery isn’t a fix-all either. The motors and other electrical components wear down and will need to be replaced eventually, too. A man in Norway who drove his Tesla more than a million miles has replaced at least four battery packs and 14 motors, turning his EV into a sort of car of Theseus.
Crucially, though, EVs are much simpler, mechanically, than combustion-powered cars, what with the latter’s belts and spark plugs and thousands of moving parts. The car that surrounds a depleted battery pack might be in perfectly good shape to keep on running for thousands of miles to come if the owner were to install a new unit, one that could potentially give the EV more driving range than it had when it was new.
The battery swap is still the domain of serious top-tier DIYers, and not for the mildly interested or faint of heart. But it is a sign of things to come. A market for very affordable used Teslas is booming as owners ditch their cars at any cost to distance themselves from Elon Musk. Old Leafs, Chevy Bolts and other EVs from the 2010s can be had for cheap. The generation of early vehicles that came with an unacceptably low 100 to 150 miles of range would look a lot more enticing if you imagine today’s battery packs swapped into them. The possibility of a like-new old EV will look more and more promising, especially as millions of Americans realize they can no longer afford a new car.
On the shifting energy mix, tariff impacts, and carbon capture
Current conditions: Europe just experienced its warmest March since record-keeping began 47 years ago • It’s 105 degrees Fahrenheit in India’s capital Delhi where heat warnings are in effect • The risk of severe flooding remains high across much of the Mississippi and Ohio Valleys.
The severe weather outbreak that has brought tornadoes, extreme rainfall, hail, and flash flooding to states across the central U.S. over the past week has already caused between $80 billion and $90 billion in damages and economic losses, according to a preliminary estimate from AccuWeather. The true toll is likely to be costlier because some areas have yet to report their damages, and the flooding is ongoing. “A rare atmospheric river continually resupplying a firehose of deep tropical moisture into the central U.S., combined with a series of storms traversing the same area in rapid succession, created a ‘perfect storm’ for catastrophic flooding and devastating tornadoes,” said AccuWeather’s chief meteorologist Jonathan Porter. The estimate takes into account damages to buildings and infrastructure, as well as secondary effects like supply chain and shipping disruptions, extended power outages, and travel delays. So far 23 people are known to have died in the storms. “This is the third preliminary estimate for total damage and economic loss that AccuWeather experts have issued so far this year,” the outlet noted in a release, “outpacing the frequency of major, costly weather disasters since AccuWeather began issuing estimates in 2017.”
AccuWeather
Low-emission energy sources accounted for 41% of global electricity generation in 2024, up from 39.4% in 2023, according to energy think tank Ember’s annual Global Electricity Review. That includes renewables as well as nuclear. If nuclear is left out of the equation, renewables alone made up 32% of power generation last year. Overall, renewables added a record 858 terawatt hours, nearly 50% more than the previous record set in 2022. Hydro was the largest source of low-carbon power, followed by nuclear. But wind and solar combined overtook hydro last year, while nuclear’s share of the energy mix reached a 45-year low. More solar capacity was installed in 2024 than in any other single year.
Ember
The report notes that demand for electricity rose thanks to heat waves and air conditioning use. This resulted in a slight, 1.4% annual increase in fossil-fuel power generation and pushed power-sector emissions to a new all-time high of 14.5 billion metric tons. “Clean electricity generation met 96% of the demand growth not caused by hotter temperatures,” the report said.
President Trump’s new tariffs will have a “limited” effect on the amount of solar components the U.S. imports from Asia because the U.S. already imposes tariffs on these products, according to a report from research firm BMI. That said, the U.S. still relies heavily on imported solar cells, and the new fees are likely to raise costs for domestic manufacturers and developers, which will ultimately be passed on to buyers and could slow solar growth. “Since the U.S.’s manufacturing capacity is insufficient to meet demand for solar, wind, and grid components, we do expect that costs will increase for developers due to the tariffs which will now be imposed upon these components,” BMI wrote.
In other tariff news, the British government is adjusting its 2030 target of ending the sale of new internal combustion engine cars to ease some of the pain from President Trump’s new 25% auto tariffs. Under the U.K.’s new EV mandate, carmakers will be able to sell new hybrids through 2035 (whereas the previous version of the rules banned them by 2030), and gas and diesel vans can also be sold through 2035. The changes also carve out exemptions for luxury supercar brands like McLaren and Aston Martin, which will be allowed to keep selling new ICE vehicles beyond 2030 because, the government says, they produce so few. The goal is to “help ease the transition and give industry more time to prepare.” British Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander insisted the changes have been “carefully calibrated” and their impact on carbon emissions is “negligible.” As The New York Timesnoted, the U.S. is the largest single-country export market for British cars.
The Environmental Protection Agency has approved Occidental Petroleum’s application to capture and sequester carbon dioxide at its direct air capture facility in Texas, and issued permits that will allow the company to drill and inject the gas more than one mile underground. The Stratos DAC plant is being developed by Occidental subsidiary 1PointFive. As Heatmap’s Katie Brigham has reported, Stratos is designed to remove up to 500,000 metric tons of CO2 annually and set to come online later this year. Its success (or failure) could shape the future of DAC investment at a time when the Trump administration is hollowing out the Department of Energy’s nascent Carbon Dioxide Removal team and casting doubt over the future of the DOE’s $3.5 billion Regional Direct Air Capture Hubs program. While Stratos is not a part of the hubs program, it will use the same technology as Occidental’s South Texas DAC hub.
The Bezos Earth Fund and the Global Methane Hub are launching a $27 million effort to fund research into selectively breeding cattle that emit less methane.