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That’s how much the U.S. should be spending per year by 2050 to achieve net zero, according to a new Rhodium Group report.
Money seems to be pouring into the field of carbon removal from every direction. Every other week there’s an announcement about a new project. Multimillion dollar carbon removal procurement deals are on the rise. The Department of Energy is rolling out grants as part of its $3.5 billion “direct air capture” hubs program and also funding research and development. Some carbon removal companies can even start claiming a $130 tax credit for every ton of CO2 they suck up and store underground.
The federal government alone spends just under $1 billion per year on carbon removal research, development, and deployment. According to a new report from the Rhodium Group, however, the U.S. is going to have to spend a lot more — roughly $100 billion per year by 2050 — if carbon dioxide removal, or CDR, is ever going to become a viable climate solution.
“The current level of policy support is nowhere near what's needed for CDR to play the role that people say it needs to play in solving climate change,” Jonathan Larsen, one of the authors, told me. “We wanted to reset the policy conversation with that in mind.”
Carbon removal is what’s implied by the “net” in net-zero — a way to compensate for whatever polluting activities are going to take longer to replace with clean solutions. It will be impossible to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050, either at the national or global level, without removing carbon from the atmosphere. But how much carbon removal will we need, and how do we make sure we’re ready to deploy it?
These questions are, in a sense, unique to the field. When we talk about cutting carbon emissions from buildings or transportation, experts are relatively confident in the set of solutions and the scale of the task — they know how many buildings and cars there are and can make reasonable estimates of growth rates.
But carbon removal is a moving target. We know how much we’re removing today — roughly 5 million metric tons, mostly from nature-based solutions like planting trees. Based on current policies, Rhodium estimates we could scale that up to about 50 million metric tons by 2035. But figuring out how much we need depends entirely on how successful we are at decarbonizing everything else. Even if we know we need to electrify all our cars, for example, no one can say whether that will happen by 2050, or at least not with any meaningful degree of certainty.
The Rhodium Group report attempts to narrow the range of this uncertainty so that policymakers can better attack the problem. The authors looked at a handful of different decarbonization roadmaps for the U.S. and found that the minimum amount of carbon removal needed to compensate for residual emissions in 2050 is 1 gigaton, which is the same as one billion metric tons, or a 20x increase from where current policies will get us. It's also equal to about 20% of the carbon that the U.S. emitted last year. “There's a very likely scenario where we need a lot more than that,” said Larsen. “There's scenarios where we need less. But most of the studies out there say at least a gigaton.”
Even if it’s only a rough estimate, landing on a number is useful, he told me. Rhodium Group spends a lot of time answering questions about, for example, what some new policy means for achieving Biden’s goal of cutting emissions in half by 2030. “I don't know if we’d get those questions if there wasn't a 50% target to shoot for,” he said. “So I think this way, people can be like, what does this next wave of policy support for CDR do for getting the U.S. on track for a gigaton?”
The level of investment it will take to get there is also highly uncertain. The authors did a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation to land on $100 billion by 2050: We need to be removing a minimum of one billion tons by then, and the Department of Energy has a goal to bring the cost of carbon removal down to $100 per ton.
The meat of the new report focuses on how to bridge the gap between the roughly $1 billion we spend today and $100 billion, which starts, according to the authors, with treating carbon removal as a public service. It’s not like other climate solutions such as wind turbines or heat pumps, they write, which can rely on private markets to provide predictable demand or to stimulate innovation. “There are very few pathways one can envision where the private sector is going to both scale and deliver those tons,” Larsen told me. Voluntary carbon removal purchases by companies could play a role, he said, but it will not be big enough to get to a gigaton.
Rhodium recommends expanding and extending many of the federal policy programs that already exist — by, for example, providing more R&D funding, doing more government procurement, handing out more loan guarantees, and creating more “hubs” centered on other approaches besides direct air capture, like enhanced weathering or biomass burial. Right now, the tax credit for capturing carbon from the air and burying it underground can only be claimed for 12 years, and projects have to start construction by 2032. The authors call for extending the claim period and moving up the construction start deadline. They also recommend expanding the program to apply to a wider range of carbon removal methods.
A common criticism of government support for carbon removal is that policy makers will over-rely on it. If we aim to do 1 gigaton of carbon removal, does that mean we won’t cut emissions as much as we could have? What happens if, for whatever reason, we can’t achieve the 1 gigaton?
Larsen disagreed with that framing. For one, it’s easy to turn it around: If we don’t scale up the capacity to remove carbon, and we also don’t eliminate emissions by mid-century, we’re not even going to have the option to halt climate change at that point.
But also, decarbonization shouldn’t stop in 2050, he said. If we can achieve that 1 gigaton of annual removal and then keep cutting emissions from remaining sources, we could eventually get to net-negative emissions — even without more CDR. In other words, if we reach a point where we’re removing more than we’re emitting, we could start to reverse global warming, not just stop it.
“I know that's, like, sci-fi,” he told me. “But that's ultimately where we as a species have to go and that’s why setting a target here of at least a gigaton, to me, does not take away the need to reduce elsewhere.”
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On Nationally Determined Contributions, hurricane damage, and PFAS pollution.
Current conditions:Tropical Storm Dana touched down in India with 70 mile-per-hour winds, causing 600,000 people to be evacuated • Parts of the Northwestern U.S. and Canada’s British Columbia may see snow this weekend • Dallas is on track for its second-hottest October on record.
Only dramatic action on emissions over and above existing policy and pledges will keep warming below the targets set in the Paris Agreement,
according to this year’s United Nations Emissions Gap Report released on Thursday.
“Unless global emissions in 2030 are brought below the levels implied by existing policies and current [Nationally Determined Contributions], it will become impossible to reach a pathway that would limit global warming to 1.5°C with no or limited overshoot,” the report said. Policy goals “must deliver a quantum leap in ambition in tandem with accelerated mitigation action in this decade.”
Greenhouse gas emissions rose by 1.2% in 2023, which is faster than the annual average rate of change in the 2010s. Current policies would likely deliver 2.9 degrees of warming by 2100, while warming might be limited to around 2.5 degrees if countries meet the policy commitments they’ve already made.
President Donald Trump withheld disaster aid following devastating wildfires in Washington State in 2020 due to his disagreements with Governor Jay Inslee over climate and Covid-19 policy, E&E News reported. Trump “refused to act on Gov. Jay Inslee’s request for $37 million in federal disaster aid because of a bitter personal dispute with the Democratic governor,” reporters Thomas Frank and Scott Waldman wrote. President Biden approved the request for aid in early February, 2021. The reporters wrote earlier this month that Trump had similarly waffled on disaster aid for California in 2018, only changing his mind after aides showed him how many votes he got in Orange County.
Natural gas production from shale, the “tight” rocks that nearly always require hydraulic fracturing for gas production, has declined in the United States over the first nine months of the year, and may show its first annual decline since the Energy Information Administration started tracking shale production in 2000.
Shale production fell over 1% through September, according to EIA data, to just over 81 billion cubic feet per day. The production declines are specific to geological formations in Texas and Louisiana, as well as the Appalachian Basin. They are likely driven by declining natural gas prices, which fell to record lows earlier this year.
As many as 95 million people in the United States may rely on groundwater contaminated with PFAS, the perfluoroalkyls and polyfluoroalkyls otherwise known as “forever chemicals.”
The United States Geological Survey study published in Science looked at the lower 48 states and used a predictive model to estimate how many people may have exposure to PFAS in their drinking water. The researchers first collected samples from “principal aquifers” — the large geologic formations that contain much of the nation’s groundwater — and then used those samples to predict PFAS concentrations throughout the drinking water system. The highest observed PFAS concentration was found in southern Florida.
PFAS can cause a range of negative health effects, including “kidney and testicular cancer, decreased fertility, elevated cholesterol, weight gain, thyroid disease, the pregnancy complication pre-eclampsia, increased risk of preterm birth and low birth weight, hormone interference, and reduced vaccine response in children,” as my colleague Jeva Lange wrote earlier this year. The model “indicate[s] widespread occurrence of PFAS in groundwater at depths of public and domestic drinking-water supplies,” the USGS researchers write.
Damages from Hurricane Helene in North Carolina alone have added up to $53 billion, the state’s governor Roy Cooper said. The costs are the hurricane-prone state’s largest ever from a storm, and about three times the repairs from Hurricane Florence in 2018. Nearly 100 people were killed by the storm in North Carolina, with some still missing. Cooper requested almost $4 billion from the state legislature “to begin rebuilding critical infrastructure, homes, businesses, schools, and farms damaged during the storm.”
The aftermath of Hurricane Helene in North Carolina. Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images
“It is also essential that we continue to cooperate on climate, technology, debt, trade. Climate change and technology are unleashing transformations to the global economy that require global response. Only by working together can we seize the opportunities and mitigate the risks of these great changes.” — International Monetary Fund Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva presenting the organization’s latest Global Policy Agenda on Thursday.
An age-old tension, resolved.
For as long as I’ve been an energy reporter, I’ve been asked a scoffing question by moderates and conservatives: If Democrats really cared about climate change, shouldn’t they embrace nuclear power?
It’s a fair question. Nuclear energy, after all, can produce vast amounts of electricity without emitting planet-warming greenhouse gas pollution. It already generates more zero-carbon electricity in America than wind turbines and solar panels do combined; unlike renewables, it can provide power all day and night, even when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing. The countries that have seen the largest year-over-year drops in carbon pollution — e.g. France — have generally done so by building a new fleet of nuclear reactors.
It’s also a factual question. For years, even as Democrats railed against fossil fuels, they dilly-dallied on nuclear issues. The party’s leaders in statehouses and legislative chambers around the country worked to shut down aging nuclear reactors or approved nuclear-skeptical regulators. President Barack Obama cheered next-generation nuclear in speeches, but appointed extremely nuclear-skeptical regulators to oversee the industry. (One of his first appointees to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Gregory Jaczko, has called for a global ban on nuclear energy since leaving the government.)
Even though nuclear reactors produced most of America’s zero-carbon electricity, they remained the, well, glowing-blue-haired step-child of America’s grid: Democrats regularly railed against fossil fuels, and they felt comfortable paying lip service to far-off atomic technologies, but they did not lavish nuclear with the unqualified support that they gave renewables. Instead, they let the nuclear industry slip into senescence. This mild toleration was punctuated by moments of extreme cognitive dissonance, such as when New York Governor Andrew Cuomo shut down the Indian Point nuclear power plant in 2021 without lining up new zero-carbon generation to replace it — leading the state’s carbon emissions to soar.
Of course, Democrats didn’t have to do much to kill nuclear: At the same time, the market was doing a perfectly good job of it. As cheap natural gas flooded the American energy system in the 2010s, more and more nuclear plants became too expensive to run. From 2012 to 2022, 12 nuclear reactors shut down in the U.S., taking nearly 10,000 megawatts of low-carbon generation offline.
That was the status quo as recently as 2020 or even 2022. And it has remained the status quo in energy commentary. “What role, if any, does [Vice President Kamala Harris] see for nuclear power in her energy and climate plans?” askedThe New York Times columnist Bret Stephens last month, in a column titled “What Harris Must Do to Win Over Skeptics (Like Me).” At the vice presidential debate earlier this month, Republican nominee JD Vance even alluded to the argument amid a broader paean to fossil fuels. “If you really want to make the environment cleaner, you've got to invest in more energy production,” Vance said. “We haven't built a nuclear facility — I think one — in the past 40 years.”
In fact, Vance is wrong: The United States recently turned on two new nuclear reactors in Georgia — the first newly built reactors in America in 30 years. But this idea — Why aren’t we building more nuclear reactors? Why don’t Democrats do more to help nuclear? — has been a throughline of energy punditry since well before Vance was a best-selling author.
So I want to intervene in this conversation and note that the answer has now changed. Democrats are a pro-nuclear party now — not uniformly, but then again, neither are Republicans. Over the past several years, Democratic lawmakers and officials have adopted a slate of aggressively pro-nuclear policies and characterized the technology as pro-climate. Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm has called for America to build a new wave of conventional nuclear reactors — going much further than Obama ever did. Sometimes working with Republicans — but sometimes working alone, too — Democrats have pushed billions of dollars of support toward conventional nuclear reactors and the nascent advanced nuclear industry.
It’s worth stepping back here and going over what has actually changed.
For the past 10 years at least, both parties have been credibly committed to building up the advanced nuclear industry — the theoretical next generation of nuclear reactors that will be smaller, cleaner, and safer than the behemoths built during the Cold War. During the Trump administration, Congress passed a bipartisan bill meant to push along the advanced nuclear industry. It also passed the Energy Act of 2020, which authorized a demonstration program for advanced nuclear reactors.
The Biden administration has continued this support. The bipartisan infrastructure law created a $6 billion program that would pay existing nuclear power plants to stay open. At least $1.1 billion of that money will go to keeping Diablo Canyon, California’s only operating nuclear facility and its largest power plant, from shutting down; it was originally slated to close in 2025.
Earlier this year, Biden also extended a key program that indemnifies the nuclear industry for the cost of nuclear accidents and disasters above $16.1 billion.
But perhaps the most important nuclear law passed in the past five years is the Inflation Reduction Act, the Biden administration’s signature climate package. For the first time ever, that law embraced the idea of “technology neutrality,” which means that electricity generated by nuclear reactors is now on the same footing as power from wind turbines or solar panels. If a method of electricity generation emits almost no carbon, then the government subsidizes it under the IRA.
The law is already helping restart nuclear reactors that have recently closed such as the Palisades reactor in Michigan and Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania. The utility giant NextEra is also exploring plans to restart the Duane Arnold nuclear plant in Iowa, which closed in 2020. If those go through, then it will be able to take advantage of Inflation Reduction Act funding, as well.
Lawmakers from both parties have continued to back advanced nuclear research and deployment. Under Biden, Congress passed the ADVANCE Act, containing a hodgepodge of policies meant to help the advanced nuclear industry. Among other changes, it instructs the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to move faster when approving new reactor designs, and it changes that agency’s mission statement to more affirmatively support nuclear development.
Biden administration officials haven’t just backed that legislation, they’ve also asserted that it will “help us build new reactors at a clip that we haven’t seen since the 1970s,” as Michael Goff, who leads the Energy Department’s nuclear office, bragged in a statement.
The irony is that nuclear plants are now doing well enough that Congress has clawed back some of the money from the bipartisan infrastructure law. The industry, seemingly, doesn’t need it any more, and no additional nuclear reactors have been scheduled to shut down. In 2024, Congress stripped up to $3.7 billion to pay for a program to produce a type of high-assay used in next-generation nuclear reactors.
Democrats have begun to brag about their nuclear policymaking efforts on the campaign trail, as well. In her speech on economic policy earlier this month, Kamala Harris included “advanced nuclear” in a list of technologies that her administration would support.
“We will invest in biomanufacturing and aerospace; remain dominant in AI and quantum computing, blockchain and other emerging technologies; expand our lead in clean energy innovation and manufacturing,” she said, “so the next generation of breakthroughs — from advanced batteries to geothermal to advanced nuclear — are not just invented but built here in America by American workers.”
The party’s Senate candidates have become even more positive about nuclear energy. Candidates in Arizona, Michigan, Florida, and Texas have all backed nuclear power, as the reporter Alexander Kaufman at Huffpost has shown.
This transformation has happened even though the big big environmental groups that have historically set the party’s energy priorities have not changed their mind on nuclear. Although many green groups have scaled back or defunded their anti-nuclear activism, their rhetoric remains staunchly anti-nuclear. The Sierra Club calls nuclear power a “uniquely dangerous energy technology for humanity” and states on its website: “The Sierra Club remains unequivocally opposed to nuclear energy.”
The party’s approach to nuclear hasn’t informed all its policy yet. The Biden administration’s nominations to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission have been criticized by pro-nuclear advocates for continuing the status quo or for not knowing enough about the advanced nuclear industry.
But Democrats are, by any measure, much more pro-nuclear now than they were 10 years ago — and much more pro-nuclear than they were a decade before that. (It’s often forgotten now that President Bill Clinton’s would-be climate policy, the BTU tax, also would have levied a fee on nuclear reactors.) Republicans also remain fairly pro-nuclear: Donald Trump has promised to approve “hundreds of new power plants,” including “new reactors,” during his presidency.
What remains unclear is whether both parties can persist in this new pro-nuclear formation. Nuclear energy is popular with a majority of the public, but only just; 56% of Americans favor building more nuclear power plants, according to the Pew Research Center. And there are signs, if you squint, of a potential coming era of GOP skepticism of nuclear power — part of the party’s broader turn against science and high-trust institutions.
Signs like: Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who has been added to Trump’s transition team, believes that nuclear power is unsafe and uneconomical. Even Trump himself, in conversation with Elon Musk, has worried about “nuclear warming” — it’s not clear what he was talking about, but it might be nuclear war — and said that nuclear has a “branding problem.” Even if Trump continues to support the idea of building “new reactors,” his potentially illegal plan to claw back the Inflation Reduction Act’s unspent funding may lead to pandemonium in the sector. If the nuclear industry is now planning on receiving IRA subsidies, then ending those subsidies — especially in a messy or chaotic way — could spell disaster.
There are identity-driven reasons for Republicans to turn on nuclear, too: The nuclear energy industry is more unionized than any other energy source, and it requires a highly institutionalized and educated workforce. (Yet not all the trends augur a realignment: Nuclear power remains much more popular with men than women.)
For now, though, both parties — including Democrats — support building new nuclear power plants. The economics are good for once, too. The question now is how long that will hold.
Current conditions:Tropical Storm Trami brought widespread flooding to the Philippines, killing at least 24 people • The Southwestern U.S. is experiencing a heatwave, with temperatures as high as 25 degrees Fahrenheit above normal • The three NASA astronauts stuck at the International Space Station due to inclement weather are finally on their way home.
The Swiss direct air capture company Climeworks has found a new, deep-pocketed partner in Morgan Stanley. The financial services company will pay an undisclosed amount to Climeworks to suck 40,000 tons of CO2 from the air and store the greenhouse gas underground on its behalf. This is the second largest deal Climeworks has secured to date, following an 80,000-ton sale to Boston Consulting Group, and the company says the purchase will help accelerate progress on its first project in the United States, a direct air capture hub in Louisiana called Project Cypress.
Meanwhile, Microsoft is rounding out its already extensive carbon removal portfolio with its first major investment in ocean-based technology. The tech giant agreed to buy up to 350,000 tons of CO2 removal from a startup called Ebb Carbon over the next 10 years, slightly more than its deal with the direct air capture company Heirloom.
Ebb uses electricity to separate seawater into acidic and basic streams, then returns the basic stream back to the ocean, where it reacts with carbon in the water and promotes faster CO2 absorption from the air. The company must achieve and verify an initial 1,300 tons of CO2 removal before Microsoft commits to buying the remainder. The company has a small pilot project up and running at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Washington, and is working with federal scientists and the University of Washington to measure and model the results.
The Treasury Department issued final rules this morning for the Advanced Manufacturing Production Tax Credit, also known as 45X. The program is the backbone of the Inflation Reduction Act, offering incentives for domestic manufacturing of the components of solar panels, wind turbines, and batteries, subsidizing every step of the supply chain for these technologies. During a call with reporters on Wednesday, Deputy Secretary of the Treasury Wally Adeyemo said the tax credit has already driven more than $126 billion in private sector clean energy manufacturing investments.
The biggest change introduced in the final rule that the administration highlighted was allowing critical mineral extraction — separately and in addition to mineral processing — to qualify for a 10% tax credit. “The U.S. has major deposits of critical minerals like lithium and palladium. Extracting and processing them here in America, as opposed to relying on China, Russia, and other countries with weak worker and environmental protection, is an economic and national security priority for us,” Adeyemo said.
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Engineers at GE Vernova, the manufacturer of the Vineyard Wind offshore turbine blade that crashed into the ocean this summer, have been poring over ultrasound images of its other blades and conducting physical inspections with drones to figure out whether the fiasco was a one-off or a more widespread issue. During an earnings call on Wednesday, CEO Scott Strazik revealed that the company did, in fact, find a similar “manufacturing deviation” in “a very small proportion, low single-digit proportion” of the blades. The company now intends to “remove some blades from the Vineyard Wind farm while strengthening other blades as needed,” according to an update from Vineyard Wind.
The 600 megawatt Duane Arnold Energy Center just outside Cedar Rapids, Iowa could be the next shuttered nuclear plant to come back from the dead. The plant’s owner, NextEra, is evaluating a restart, CEO John Ketchum told investors on an earnings call yesterday. “It goes without saying, there’s very strong interest from customers, data-center customers in particular, in that site,” Ketchum said. “We’re in a period of substantial power demand.”
Grizzly 399, the world-renowned, 400-pound bear that roamed Grand Teton National Park for nearly 30 years, died tragically on Tuesday after being hit by a Subaru on the highway. She leaves behind more than a dozen offspring, including a cub born just last year that fans have nicknamed “Spirit.”
Jonathan Steele/Getty Images