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Anu Khan is pushing carbon credits to better serve the public good.
There’s a new player in carbon removal. It’s not another startup building machines to suck carbon from the air. And it’s not another trade association or consulting firm or marketplace peddling carbon removal credits. Instead, it wants to help establish a different system for advancing carbon removal — one where the challenging but important goal of scrubbing CO2 from the atmosphere is treated as a public good and not just a business opportunity.
It’s called the Carbon Removal Standards Initiative, and it’s run by Anu Khan, the former deputy director of science and innovation at Carbon180. CRSI (pronounced like the Lannister queen in Game of Thrones, “Cersei”) is a “financially unconflicted, independent nonprofit,” that will provide technical assistance to policymakers, regulators, and nongovernmental organizations in quantifying carbon removal outcomes.
A group providing technical assistance may not sound like a revolutionary development. But Khan hopes CRSI will be a fulcrum around which the entire industry can begin to pivot.
Today’s carbon removal industry is built on selling credits, each of which is supposed to represent one ton of CO2 pulled out of the atmosphere. But the market is almost entirely self-regulated. The standards for measuring and reporting how much carbon a given project is removing have either been developed by the carbon credit registries that take a cut of the sales or by the developers themselves — in both cases a conflict of interest, even if governed by the best of intentions. Plus, there’s a multitude of standards for every type of project, and they vary in quality.
Take carbon farming, for example. If a farmer alters their practices to increase the carbon stored in their soil, they can choose from more than a dozen standards to quantify the effects. In theory, the standards all produce an identical product — a fungible carbon credit equivalent to one ton of carbon removed from the atmosphere. In reality, they vary widely in quality, with some standards producing more accurate results than others.
In watching this environment develop over the past several years, I’ve often wondered if some independent, unbiased entity might eventually step forward to enact one set of standards to rule them all. Khan told me that about a year and a half ago, she had the same thought. “Oh, to be so young,” she said.
At the time, there was growing concern that the carbon removal industry would suffer from the same credibility issues that plagued the wider market for carbon credits. “You have a multiplicity of these verification entities driven by profit motives, some of which have very loose standards,” Wil Burns, the co-executive director of the Institute for Carbon Removal Law and Policy at American University, told me. “From the standpoint of those purchasing credits or those viewing whether companies are doing anything meaningful, nobody can really distinguish.”
In early 2023, dozens of carbon removal suppliers, buyers, verifiers, academics, and nonprofit staff — including Khan — signed an open letter that now reads like an early draft of CRSI’s missions statement. It called for the creation of “an independent, not-for-profit initiative that conscientiously avoids conflicts of interest and has funding that does not depend on issuing or selling carbon credits.” This new body would “provide a trusted, scientific stamp of approval for CDR protocols through an inclusive process to identify scientific consensus.”
The letter focused on the issues with measuring carbon removal in the context of the voluntary sale of carbon credits. But over the next year, it became clear to Khan that carbon removal won’t reach the scale necessary to make a dent in climate change without government policy. “Even the market enthusiasts recognize that we’re going to need policy as quickly as possible to shore this up,” she said, “and it’s going to be policy, long term, that gets us to gigaton scale.”
So instead of providing “a trusted, scientific stamp of approval” to private businesses, CRSI is laser focused on working with policymakers. It’s not entirely clear yet what that will look like, and it’s likely to evolve as CRSI finds its footing. But the group is launching with a few projects that are already underway. It has created a database of “quantification resources,” which is basically a list of all of the methodologies published by companies, academics, government agencies, and international standards organizations, for measuring different kinds of carbon removal. It also has a database of carbon removal policies, both those enacted and proposed. Eventually, Khan plans to have them link out to each other, so you can see which standards underpin which policies.
Khan wants CRSI to be a go-to resource for policymakers and agency staff to ensure that carbon removal programs actually result in climate benefits. “We are fundamentally a mission organization,” she told me. “We believe that carbon removal is a tool for climate justice. Justice requires accountability, and in carbon removal, that means knowing how to count the carbon. We want to make sure that if we're putting public dollars into these policies, that they are backed by the ability to actually measure the carbon.”
Khan isn’t the only one whose thinking on standards has shifted toward a government-led approach. Burns, who also signed the letter, told me he’s seeing more carbon removal companies pushing for a compliance market, where the government requires polluting businesses to buy carbon removal. “They would like to both have government standards that would provide more confidence, for example, to investors,” he said, “and they would like government mandates that generate more demand.”
Freya Chay is the program lead at the nonprofit Carbon Plan, which spearheaded the letter. She told me many in the industry are now thinking about carbon removal programs that don’t revolve around selling credits at all, and therefore may have very different measurement and verification needs.
One of CRSI’s first projects is an illustrative example. Imagine if the Department of Agriculture developed a program to help farmers restore the pH of soils that have gotten too acidic, by adding basalt — a mineral that also happens to capture CO2 from the atmosphere as it dissolves. Today, carbon removal companies that sell carbon credits based on this process are taking hundreds of soil samples to measure the outcomes. The USDA likely wouldn’t need that level of precision — the captured CO2 is a co-benefit, not the entire point of the program — but “at some point you probably do want to know if you removed carbon through this policy,” said Khan. CRSI is working on figuring out how you would do that.
Similarly, we might see the development of building codes that encourage the use of concrete cured with CO2 from the atmosphere, or waste management regulations that govern the injection of carbon-rich organic waste into underground storage wells. Bigger picture, the U.S. will eventually have to measure and report how much carbon removal it’s doing across all of these little programs as part of its obligation under the Paris Agreement.
In many of these cases, those setting the rules won’t be experts in carbon removal science. “They’re going to need technical expertise,” said Khan. “We want to make sure that when they are doing that work, they have access to all of the relevant information, and that it’s organized in a way that’s legible for the expertise that they already have.”
Shuchi Talati, the former chief of staff in the office of fossil energy and carbon management at the Department of Energy, told me that having this kind of centralized resource would definitely have been useful. “The private sector has a lot of power right now in setting standards because the public sector doesn’t have the capacity,” she said. And since the field is so diverse, efforts are spread across a bunch of different agencies that don’t always talk to each other. Talati sits on the board of CRSI, and for her, the focus on government is not just about helping carbon removal scale.
“If we’re allowing the private sector to set standards and norms — and maybe they’re fine right now — but if we continue to let that happen, I can see the actual climate benefit of CDR slipping away,” Talati said. “That’s really where I see Anu’s organization fit in, where we are trying to set standards and norms from this core, foundational principle of a public good.”
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The department creates a seemingly impossible new permitting criteria for renewable energy.
The Interior Department released a new secretarial order Friday saying it may no longer issue any permits to a solar or wind project on federal lands unless the agency believes it will generate as much energy per acre as a coal, gas, or nuclear power plant.
Hypothetically, this could kill off any solar or wind project going through permitting that is sited on federal lands, because these facilities would technically be less energy dense than coal, gas, and nuclear plants. This is irrespective of the potential benefits solar and wind may have for the environment or reducing carbon emissions – none of which are mentioned in the order.
“Gargantuan, unreliable, intermittent energy projects hold America back from achieving U.S. Energy Dominance while weighing heavily on the American taxpayer and environment,” Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said in a statement included in a press release announcing the move. “By considering energy generation optimization, the Department will be able to better manage our federal lands, minimize environmental impact, and maximize energy development to further President Donald Trump’s energy goals.”
Here’s how this new regime, which I and many in the energy sector are now suddenly trying to wrap their heads around, is apparently going to work: solar and wind facilities will now be evaluated based on their “capacity density,” which is calculated based on the ratio of acres used for a project compared to its power generation capacity. If a project has a lower “capacity density” than what the department considers to be a “reasonable alternative,” then it may no longer be able to get a permit.
“On a technology-neutral basis,” the order states, “wind and solar projects use disproportionate Federal lands relative to their energy generation when compared to other energy sources, like nuclear, gas, and coal.” The document going on to give an example, claiming that data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration shows an advanced nuclear plant uses less federal acreage than an offshore wind farm and “thus, when there are reasonable alternatives that can generate the same amount of or more energy on far less Federal land, wind and solar projects may unnecessarily and unduly degrade Federal lands.” The order also includes a chart comparing the capacity density of wind and solar facilities to conventional nuclear, gas, and coal, as well as geothermal, and claims that these sources are superior as well. The document does not reference hydropower.
There’s also a whole host of other implications in this order. Crucially, does the Interior expect that by choking off the flow of permits, cities and companies will just pony up to build what the Trump administration considers “reasonable alternatives” instead? Is the federal government going to tell communities in Nevada, for example, that they must suddenly build gas plants in the desert instead of solar farms to meet their increasing energy needs?
In any case, much more is coming, as this order simply built off of a separate secretarial order earlier this week commanding staff to prepare a litany of recommendations on ending alleged “preferential treatment” for solar and wind facilities. In other words hold my beer – and hold onto yours, too.
That’s okay for clean energy firms, terrible for manufacturers, and a big risk for everyone.
Over the past few months, you could put together three different — and somewhat conflicting — pictures of the American economy.
For companies exposed to the AI boom, business has been good — excellent, even. The surge in ongoing capital investment into data centers and electricity has been larger than other recent booms, such as the telecom buildout. Electricity demand is soaring, especially in Texas and the Mid-Atlantic. Technology companies have signed power offtake deals with nuclear and hydroelectricity companies. If anything, companies exposed to artificial intelligence are more afflicted by congested supply chains and shortages than by slack demand — see the yearslong waiting lists to get a new transformer or natural gas turbine.
Outside of the AI economy, though, the economy has been a fair bit colder. You might even say it’s been frozen by indecision. When you talk to business leaders, they confess confusion about where things are heading. President Trump’s constantly changing tariffs — and his administration’s mercurial policy shifts — have made it difficult for non-AI-exposed businesses to plan long-term capital investment.
You could hear this view from clean energy manufacturing and traditional fossil firms alike. When I talked to John Henry Harris, the CEO of the medium-duty truck maker Harbinger Motors, for an episode of Heatmap’s Shift Key podcast in June, he told me that his company was just about to shift a production process to Mexico when a last-minute Trump change made it cheaper to keep it in China. Meanwhile, an oil and gas executive recently told the Dallas Federal Reserve: “The Liberation Day chaos and tariff antics have harmed the domestic energy industry. Drill, baby, drill will not happen with this level of volatility.”
But the data contradicted that tepid view. This was the third picture that we were getting of the economy. Through the summer, federal surveys showed an economy that was performing okay. In May, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the U.S. economy added 139,000 jobs; it gained another 147,000 jobs, apparently, in June. The AI boom was clearly contributing to those robust reports. But how could an economy that business leaders otherwise described as difficult be going so well?
Now we can finally square these disparate pictures.
On Friday, the federal government released its newest tranche of job numbers. The headline number was mediocre — the U.S. added a mere 73,000 jobs in July — but the guts of the report were worse. The government revised down its estimate of the May and June reports by a total of 258,000 jobs. With these new numbers in hand, it’s clear that the labor market has essentially stalled out since Liberation Day in April.
The unemployment rate slightly rose to 4.2%, which was in line with what economists predicted.
These new reports clarify that the broader American economy wasn’t actually thriving. Its summer strength was a mirage the whole time. Outside of AI, things are downright frigid. And as President Trump continues to shuffle tariffs and increase trade uncertainty, we can expect conditions to worsen. Trump seems hellbent even on clouding our ability to understand the underlying economy: on Friday afternoon, he fired the Bureau of Labor Statistics commissioner, a career civil servant.
If you squint, you can see a hazy “AI sector” versus “non-AI sector” distinction in the data, even among the energy and decarbonization companies we cover at Heatmap. But it’s not obvious. Contrary to what you might expect when power demand is surging, utility employment was basically flat last month. Heavy and civil engineering construction jobs were up by 6,000, and “nonresidential specialty trade contractors” — a category that can include electricians — gained nearly 2,000 jobs.
But manufacturing lost 11,000 jobs last month, with the motor vehicles industry driving 2,600 of those losses. Mining, quarrying, and oil and gas jobs were down. The Institute of Supply Management report, a private survey of U.S. manufacturing activity, showed the sector shrank in July for the fifth month in a row.
And even though the Department of Government Efficiency’s deferred buyout program for more than 150,000 people has yet to hit, the federal government bled 12,000 jobs.
In a way, the clean energy industry — or at least solar, battery, nuclear, and geothermal developers — might consider themselves lucky. Despite the best efforts of Trump’s officials, and despite the chaos of President Trump’s policies, they have been able to eke through the past few months because of the AI boom. Nearly 70% of all new power-generating capacity added to the U.S. grid in the first quarter of this year came from solar panels, and the government has thrown its weight behind next-generation nuclear and geothermal technologies. A tepid jobs report might even bring some interest rate relief from the Federal Reserve.
But if that AI boom slows down, we should all watch out below.
A conversation with Heather O’Neill of Advanced Energy United.
This week’s conversation is with Heather O’Neill, CEO of renewables advocacy group Advanced Energy United. I wanted to chat with O’Neill in light of the recent effective repeal of the Inflation Reduction Act’s clean electricity tax credits and the action at the Interior Department clamping down on development. I’m quite glad she was game to talk hot topics, including the future of wind energy and whether we’ll see blue states step into the vacuum left by the federal government.
The following conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.
During Trump 1.0 we saw blue states really step into the climate role in light of the federal government. Do you see anything similar taking place now?
I think this moment we’re in – it is a different moment.
How are we handling load growth? How are we making sure consumers are not paying for expensive stranded assets? Thinking about energy affordability? All of those challenges absolutely present a different moment and will result in a different response from state leaders.
But that’s where some of the changes our industry has gone through mean we’re able to meet that moment and provide solutions to those challenges. I think we need aggressive action from state leaders and I think we’ll see that from them, because of the challenges in front of them.
What does that look like?
Every state is different. Take Virginia for example. Five years after we passed the Virginia Clean Economy Act – a big, bold promise of action – we’re not on track. So what are the things we need to do to keep the foot on the accelerator there? This last legislative session we passed the virtual power plant legislation that’ll help tremendously in terms of grid flexibility. We made a big push around siting and permitting reform, and we didn’t quite get it over the finish line but that’s the kind of thing where we made a good foundation.
Or Texas. There’s so much advanced energy powering Texas right now. You had catastrophic grid failure in Hurricane Uri and look at what they’ve been able to build out in response to that: wind, solar, and in the last few years, battery storage, and they just passed the energy waste reduction [bill].
We need to build things and make it easier to build – siting and permitting reform – but it’s also states depending on their environment looking at and engaging with their regional transmission organization.
You saw that last week, a robust set of governors across the PJM region called on them to improve their interconnection queue. It’s about pushing and finding reforms at the market level, to get these assets online and get on the grid deployed.
I think the point about forward momentum, I definitely see what you’re saying there about the need for action. Do you see state primacy laws or pre-emption laws? Like what Michigan, New York, and California have done…
I’m not a siting expert, but the reform packages that work the best include engagement from communities in meaningful ways. But they also make sure you’re not having a vocal minority drowning out the benefits and dragging out the process forever. There are timelines and certainty attached to it while still having meaningful local engagement.
Our industry absolutely has to continue to lean into more local engagement and community engagement around the benefits of a project and what they can deliver for a community. I also think there’s a fair amount of making sure the state is creating that pathway, providing that certainty, so we can actually move forward to build out these projects.
From the federal government’s perspective, they’re cracking down on wind and solar projects while changing the tax credits. Do you see states presenting their own incentives for renewables in lieu of federal incentives? I’ve wondered if that’ll happen given inflation and affordability concerns.
No, I think we have to be really creative as an industry, and state leaders have to be creative too. If I’m a governor, affordability concerns were already front and center for me, and now given what just happened, they’re grappling with incredibly tight state budgets that are about to get tighter, including health care. They’re going to see state budgets hit really hard. And there’s energy impacts – we’re cutting off supply, so we’re going to see prices go up.
This is where governors and state leaders can act but I think in this context of tight state budgets I don’t think we can expect to see states replacing incentive packages.
It’ll be: how do we take advantage of all the flexible tools that we have to help shape and reduce demand in meaningful ways that’ll save consumers money, as well as push on building out projects and getting existing juice out of the transmission system we have today.
Is there a future for wind in the United States?
It is an incredibly challenging environment – no question – for all of our technologies, wind included. I don’t want to sugar-coat that at all.
But I look at the whole picture, and I include wind in this: the technologies have improved dramatically in the past couple of decades and the costs have come down. When you look around at what resources are around to deploy, it’s advanced energy. We’re seeing it continue to grow. There’ll be headwinds, and it’ll be more expensive for all of us. But I look at what our industry and our technologies are able to offer and deliver, and I am confident we’ll continue to see growth.