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Climate

The Talk of the Town at Climate Week

Climate world turned out in New York.

NYC Climate Week.
Heatmap Illustration/The Climate Group

Who Isn’t Amped About Climate Policy?

On the first night of climate week, I headed over to a happy hour hosted by a bunch of progressive climate advocacy nonprofits, including Climate Cabinet, Data for Progress, and Evergreen Collaborative. The event was called “Progress No Matter What,” and the theme was states’ ability to advance climate action regardless of national politics.

On the packed back patio of a beer garden on the Lower East Side, a handful of speakers took turns climbing atop a picnic bench to address the boisterous crowd. State and federal officials celebrated the billions of dollars flowing to states to decarbonize and pressed attendees not to ignore the down-ballot climate champions running for office in November. Then, to close things out, White House Climate Advisor Ali Zaidi got up. Over the past year, I’ve heard Zaidi deliver the same impassioned but rehearsed preamble on press call after press call reminding us of President Biden’s climate accomplishments during his term. But here, Zaidi let loose. He said the Wall Street Journal had published a story that morning that started with the line “Climate optimism is fading.” He didn’t think so. “This is popular shit!” he declared, of efforts to fight climate change while reducing pollution, and the audience erupted in cheers. — Emily Pontecorvo

A Video Journal of Climate Extremes

Last weekend, I attended the U.S. premiere of The Here Now Project at the inaugural Climate Film Festival — and was totally wowed. The 75-minute documentary is unnarrated and composed entirely of archival cell phone videos, vlogs, and news clips that were shot during climate disasters in 2021, ranging from the Texas power crisis that left almost 250 people dead after a February cold snap to the “sea snot” that covered Turkey’s Sea of Marmara over that summer.

While it’s harrowing to see all the footage back-to-back — and to learn about disasters I hadn’t paid close attention to at the time, like the subway flooding in Zhengzhou or the dust storms in Brazil — I was even more struck by the seemingly universal urge people have to document the way extreme weather upends their lives, even when those lives are quite immediately at risk.

The movie’s power lies in echoes and patterns of human nature, from our curiosity to our horror to our powerful compassion and self-sacrifice. I spoke to the filmmakers, Greg Jacobs and Jon Siskel, for my article about the Climate Film Festival last week, and Jacobs told me they hope to make The Here Now Project an ongoing chronicle of climate change in the style of Michael Apted’s famous Up series; I very much hope they will succeed. — Jeva Lange

In Search of a Demand Signal for Carbon Dioxide Removal

At several events this week related to carbon dioxide removal, the conversation turned again and again to the challenge of finance and the scarcity of buyers. During a marine carbon removal panel on Monday, for instance, James Lindsay, the director of investments at the philanthropic Builders Initiative described the tension between simultaneously trying to raise capital for a given carbon removal approach while also trying to prove that it’s safe and actually works. While there are a few buyers, like the Frontier Climate initiative, that accept these conditions and are willing to support nascent approaches that may or may not work out, making one big deal with Frontier doesn’t provide the consistent cash flow that a startup needs to progress, he said.

Later that day, at a mini-conference hosted by the direct air capture company Climeworks, CEO Christoph Gebald declared that the industry simply cannot rely on voluntary purchases if it is going to scale. “We need to transition to regulated markets,” he said. Josh Becker, a California State Senator gave a brief presentation on a bill he introduced this year, SB 308, to do just that. It was a “government-enabled, market led” policy that would have required corporate polluters to begin paying for carbon removal. The bill “died a mysterious death,” he said, but he plans to try again in 2025.

The event closed out with a panel on “the economic opportunity of carbon removal in the U.S.,” and yet the talk once again turned to the economic obstacles. “Demand is an existential challenge,” Giana Amador, executive director of the Carbon Removal Alliance, said. “If we want deployment beyond these 1,000- to 10,000-ton facilities, we need a demand signal that is robust, steady, resilient, growing, in order to make sure these companies can raise the private and public sector funding they need.” — Emily

Clean Energy for the People

While most of the energy developers, technologists, and investors I spoke to and/or heard speak this week were excited about artificial intelligence as a way to bring forward demand for clean electrons, there was one interesting note of caution from Katie Rae, chief executive of Engine Ventures, the investment firm that has backed Commonwealth Fusion Systems and the long-duration battery company Form Energy. “The government has to think about it: Are the people going to get energy? Or are the hyperscalers going to get energy? The pitchforks can come.” — Matthew Zeitlin

Journey to the Center of the Earth (With My Face on It)

On Tuesday morning, I stopped by “Geothermal House,” a day-long event and installation at the Hall des Lumières near City Hall. It’s a former bank building that now hosts “immersive experiences,” which essentially amount to wandering around a room decorated with floor to ceiling projections of art, like the paintings of Chagall. This time, however, the room was made up to bring you miles deep within the Earth’s crust.

The VR lounge at Geothermal HouseThe VR lounge at Geothermal House.Emily Pontecorvo

The event was put on by Project InnerSpace, a nonprofit dedicated to transferring skills and knowledge from the oil and gas industry to scale geothermal energy. “This is the first time geothermal has shown up at NY Climate Week,” the group’s executive director, Jamie Beard, declared at the start of a series of panels held in the central hall. Unfortunately, the talks were nearly impossible to hear in the cavernous marble room, but I spent some time wandering around, watching the animated projections of geothermal power plants and hit up the “VR lounge,” which offered a much more convincing immersive experience and taught me about the difference between “enhanced” and “advanced” geothermal.

The event also had some of the best swag I saw at Climate Week, including a station where you could 3D print your face onto “the core of the Earth.” Jeva was accurate when she compared the resulting object to a Ferrero Rocher. — Emily

A Tribal Home, Lost

Two members of the Jean Charles Choctaw Nation — which is considered to be one of the first communities in the U.S. to be displaced by climate change — spoke at an event on Wednesday hosted by EarthRights International. They emphasized the way the state of Louisiana failed to keep the tribe intact during the relocation effort, with Chief Deme Naquin and Tribal Secretary Chantel Comardelle explaining that while their own story is one marked by failure, they hope other communities will be able to learn from it. After all, it’s not just a house or neighborhood that you lose to something like coastal erosion; it’s also the stories and memories of the place you’d called home. “We probably weren’t the first” community to be displaced by climate change, Chief Deme told the room, “but we’re definitely not the last.” — Jeva

‘AI Doesn’t Care Where It Goes to School’

And over in D.C., during “National Clean Energy Week,” a more industry-focused panel-ganza, the cofounder and chief executive of the most important company in energy was sharing his thoughts on the sector. That would be Nvidia's Jensen Huang, the head of the company that designs the chips that power many artificial intelligence models and applications.

During his one-hour chat with former Education Secretary Margaret Spellings at the Bipartisan Policy Center on Friday, Huang focused mostly on what good AI could do for energy and grid efficiency, including weather simulation and designing smart grids. While it's true, Huang said, “that AI does take energy,” AI-trained models can predict weather and climate “tens of thousands of times more energy efficiently” than supercomputers. But he was also straightforward about the intense energy demands of training artificial intelligence models.

“These data centers could consume, today, maybe 100 megawatts. In the future it will be 10, 20 times more than that.” To reduce strain on the grid, these data centers could be located “where the energy” is located, Huang suggested. “The AI doesn't care where it goes to school.” And like a student, “it’s okay” if it sometimes has to “take a nap” when the sun’s not out. — Matthew

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Plus

How to Solve a Problem Like a Wind Ban

And more of this week’s top policy news around renewables.

Trump.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

1. Trump’s Big Promise – Our nation’s incoming president is now saying he’ll ban all wind projects on Day 1, an expansion of his previous promise to stop only offshore wind.

  • “They litter our country like paper, like dropping garbage in a field,” Trump said at a press conference Tuesday. “We’re going to try and have a policy where no windmills are built.”
  • Is this possible? It would be quite tricky, as the president only has control over the usage of federal lands and waters. While offshore wind falls entirely under the president’s purview, many onshore wind projects themselves fall entirely on state lands.
  • This is where the whole “wind kills birds” argument becomes important. Nearly all wind projects have at least some federal nexus because of wildlife protection laws, such as the Endangered Species Act and Migratory Bird Treaty Act.
  • Then there are the cables connecting these projects to the grid and interstate transmission projects that may require approval from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.
  • I’m personally doubtful he will actually stop all wind in the U.S., though I do think offshore wind in its entirety is at risk (which I’ve written about). Trump has a habit of conflating things, and in classic fashion, he only spoke at the press conference about offshore wind projects. I think he was only referring to offshore wind, though I’m willing to eat my words.

2. The Big Nuclear Lawsuit – Texas and Utah are suing to kill the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s authority to license small modular reactors.

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Plus

Are Anti-Renewables Activists Going Unchallenged?

A conversation with J. Timmons Roberts, executive director of Brown University’s Climate Social Science Network


J. Timmons Roberts
Heatmap Illustration

This week’s interview is with Brown University professor J. Timmons Roberts. Those of you familiar with the fight over offshore wind may not know Roberts by name, but you’re definitely familiar with his work: He and his students have spearheaded some of the most impactful research conducted on anti-offshore wind opposition networks. This work is a must-read for anyone who wants to best understand how the anti-renewables movement functions and why it may be difficult to stop it from winning out.

So with Trump 2.0 on the verge of banning offshore wind outright, I decided to ask Roberts what he thinks developers should be paying attention to at this moment. The following interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

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Sparks

An Insurance Startup Faces a Major Test in Los Angeles

Kettle offers parametric insurance and says that it can cover just about any home — as long as the owner can afford the premium.

Los Angeles fire destruction.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

Los Angeles is on fire, and it’s possible that much of the city could burn to the ground. This would be a disaster for California’s already wobbly home insurance market and the residents who rely on it. Kettle Insurance, a fintech startup focused on wildfire insurance for Californians, thinks that it can offer a better solution.

The company, founded in 2020, has thousands of customers across California, and L.A. County is its largest market. These huge fires will, in some sense, “be a good test, not just for the industry, but for the Kettle model,” Brian Espie, the company’s chief underwriting officer, told me. What it’s offering is known as “parametric” insurance and reinsurance (essentially insurance for the insurers themselves.) While traditional insurance claims can take years to fully resolve — as some victims of the devastating 2018 Camp Fire know all too well — Kettle gives policyholders 60 days to submit a notice of loss, after which the company has 15 days to validate the claim and issue payment. There is no deductible.

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