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Now back at the University of Pennsylvania, she talks to Heatmap about community engagement, gaps in the decarbonization market, and goats.
In November of 2020, Jennifer Wilcox had just moved to Philadelphia and was preparing to start a new chapter in her career as a tenured “Presidential Distinguished Professor” at the University of Pennsylvania. Then she got the call: Wilcox was asked to join the incoming Biden administration as the principal deputy assistant secretary for the Office of Fossil Energy, a division of the Department of Energy.
Wilcox had never even heard of the Office of Fossil Energy and was somewhat uneasy about the title. A chemical engineer by training, Wilcox had dedicated her work to climate solutions. She was widely known for having written the first textbook on carbon capture, published in 2012, and for her trailblazing research into removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. With Penn’s blessing, she decided to take the job. And in the just over three years she was in office, she may have altered the course of U.S. climate action forever.
First, Wilcox led a total transformation of the department to align it with the Biden administration’s climate goals. She started by arranging 15-minute meetings with each of the nearly 150 employees who worked with her at the D.C. office to understand their perspectives on their work, whether they were happy, and their fears and challenges. She admits she can be intense.
“I took all that information, and I sat on it with many weekends and a blank piece of paper and a pencil and drew crazy diagrams,” she told me, trying to funnel everyone’s feedback into a new vision for the department.
Previously, the Office of Fossil Energy’s primary function was to support research into oil, gas, and coal extraction and use. Wilcox flipped the mission on its head, reorganizing the department into one that would support research, development, and deployment of solutions that reduced dependency on those resources and minimized their environmental impacts. By July, she had codified that mission in a new name — the Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management.
Wilcox maxed out her leave this spring. I caught up with her about a week after she left the DOE, as she was picking up where she left off — preparing for her first semester as a professor of chemical engineering and energy policy at Penn. She’s also starting a new side gig as chief scientist at Isometric, a carbon credit certification company that’s trying to improve trust in carbon removal measurement and verification through rigorous standards and transparency.
I asked her to reflect on her time at the Department of Energy, the changes she oversaw, and what she’s looking to do next. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
When was your last day at DOE? Did you leave because you had an obligation to come back to Penn?
My last day was Friday, May 31, so just a week or so ago. Typically, when you’re in an academic tenured position, you can have a maximum of a two-year leave. Within the first year of my appointment at DOE, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law went through, and then in the second year, the IRA went through — the Inflation Reduction Act. And I was like, this is big stuff. It felt like just a defining moment — in my career, but also in terms of climate legislation. And I thought, how could I possibly leave now? So I went back to Penn and I wrote, I thought, a pretty thoughtful letter of the impact that I could have if I could stay just a year and a half longer. And they said yes.
Could you share the story of how you were asked to go work for the department in the first place?
Sure, it’s pretty funny. Something that many people don’t know is we have a small farm — we had 22 acres in Massachusetts, and goats and a pig and chickens and oh my goodness. Penn was like, “We’ll move your goats, too,” and so we moved everybody. And here I am at the kitchen table amidst boxes, and the goats are outside, and I’m on my laptop, and I get this email from the Biden-Harris transition team. I was like, ain’t nobody got time for that. That’s spam. Delete! And then a couple days go by and I get another one, and I was like, come on. Is this real? And I forwarded it to my husband. He’s an ER doctor, and he’s like, “Honey, that’s real. You have to respond!” And so I sent my CV.
One of the first things you did was rename the department. How did that happen?
When I came in, it was really early days of, okay, net zero by 2050, and there was a question of, what does that mean for our office? Should this office exist in a net zero world?I knew that I was being recruited to think about reshaping, rethinking the portfolio.
We only had two R&D offices at the time. One was called Oil and Gas — we renamed that Office of Resource Sustainability. The other was literally the Office of Coal. What I decided to do was take that program and move it over. That whole office is all about, if you’re choosing to extract energy resources from the Earth, how do you do it in a way that’s minimal impact?
Now, what’s left is how you manage the pollution of how we use fossil fuels — that’s the carbon dioxide. And so we built out a whole new division on carbon removal. We teased out a whole program on hydrogen, and then we also separated out carbon conversion into its own division, and then carbon transport and storage. And so rather than one program focused on carbon, we had five, which is pretty cool. I mean, the amount that I was empowered and supported — and by the way, we got it all through without a single pushback, in nine months. So that was huge.
How would you characterize how the field changed from the time that you entered the office until now? Have research questions changed? Have policy priorities changed?
I think things are starting to change. One of the things from these last few years of having the resources that have started to become mobilized, it’s helping us to recognize where the gaps really are. When you have money to be able to put out for certain topic areas, you get to see who’s going to apply, and who applies gives you an indication of where the technology is at and how much of it’s ready.
For instance, if you look at the $3.5 billion for direct air capture hubs, we had to write the funding opportunity announcement to meet industry where they’re at. There’s only a couple of companies that are really even at a stage where they can start to think about demonstration on the tens of thousands of tons of removal, let alone a million tons per year.
Some of the gaps that we saw were, in direct air capture, making sure that there’s enough companies that are supported to be able to get us to the scale that we need to. And then for the other approaches to carbon removal, making sure that if we want these projects to be durable, in terms of carbon removed on a time scale that impacts climate, we need to figure out how to quantify the net carbon that’s removed.
And then one significant gap that we saw that we are trying to fill with this funding: When we think about corporations and net zero pledges, a lot of times the carbon removal purchasing is associated with Scope 3 emissions that companies don’t have the ability to control. These are supply chains. It could be paper, it could be fuel, food, glass, cement, steel. And so looking at that whole sector, it’s about 10 different industrial sectors that we need to figure out how to decarbonize. If we can think about decarbonizing these supply chains, it’ll take some of the pressure off of the carbon removals to counterbalance those.
The last piece that I feel like gets forgotten is, in the infrastructure law, we had $2.5 billion for building out geologic storage. That’s an issue because you can do the carbon capture, but the big question is, where are you going to put it? And can you get it from point A to point B? We have a whole program called CarbonSAFE that essentially shepherds the industry through the process, starting with characterization all the way to a class six permit from EPA. Building that capacity out means that’s one less thing that industry has to worry about as they’re looking at carbon capture.
During your time there, the department was interfacing with hundreds of researchers and startup founders who were all trying to get new projects or companies off the ground. I’m curious, what are some of the most common misunderstandings you saw from applicants?
There’s a couple of things, but one that stands out — and maybe this is because I have a background in academia — there’s a lot of technologies out there that are actually pretty far along, especially in point source capture [technologies that capture carbon from the smokestacks of industrial facilities before it enters the atmosphere]. Yet, at universities, they’re still trying to develop the next solvent or solid sorbent. It’s like, we can stop doing that.
Where the R&D comes in is actually getting data over a long period of time. How does the material behave? How can we recycle it and reuse it over and over again? How can we design it in a way that reduces NOx, SOx pollution, particulate matter, making the air cleaner? But it’s not about how do we just develop a new technology, because there’s a lot out there.
It seems like one of the hardest things the department was trying to do under your leadership was to strengthen its work on community engagement and community benefits — hard because many advocates for fenceline communities are so skeptical of the solutions you were working on. How did you navigate that tension?
Well, one thing is, I know what I don’t know, and I’m usually pretty willing to say what I’m good at and what I’m not good at. In the early days, I knew that this was going to be a challenge for our office and so I recruited a social scientist: Holly Jean Buck, she’s a professor at the University of Buffalo. We brought Holly in to help us develop some of the language around … it started off with community benefits, but some of our investments don’t always lead to benefits, so let’s be honest, right? And so what we wanted to think about is, what are the societal considerations and impacts of our investments? We ended up recruiting a few others, and now we have a team that’s focused on domestic engagement, and also communications and outreach.
What do you think it could mean for some of what you’ve accomplished and other things you’ve set in motion if Biden is not reelected?
I feel pretty good about what we’ve put in place, that it’s sustainable. The other thing about what I saw is that industry is really leaning in on doing these things. The low-carbon supply chains — a lot of glassmakers, cement facilities — are very interested in improving energy efficiency, are interested in carbon capture or using hydrogen as a heat source. And so what we have done is really looking at making sure they’re economic. All of these efforts that we’ve put in place are extremely bipartisan, and they’re essentially just supporting industry in a way such that they’re achievable because they’re economic.
Let’s talk a little bit about what’s next. Why did you want to work with Isometric? What are you going to be doing there?
When I was at DOE, from the beginning, we were looking at, you know, there’s a lot of the carbon removal portfolio where we don’t have the rigor in place to be able to determine the durability of the removals, the additionality of them, the time scale on which the carbon is actually removed, quantifying net removed. And so we started a commercialization effort, leveraging our national labs to help us to develop the framework. Isometric is working toward establishing rigorous frameworks, and I’m hoping to leverage the efforts ongoing at DOE — and with transparency, so that others may follow, which could lead to more durable removals and greater impact at the end of the day.
What about on the academic side of your career. Where do you plan to focus your research?
Some of the work that we were doing, or the team has been continuing to do while I’m at DOE, is mineralization, looking at different waste feedstocks that have alkalinity [a property that’s useful for carbon removal], like magnesium and calcium. One of the things that we’re going to focus a little bit more on is asking the question of, what else is there? You know, if there’s rare earth elements or critical minerals that could be used for clean energy technologies, EV motors, magnets for wind turbines. And so, I’m really excited about looking at these materials and seeing what value is there.
I’m also really excited about helping with the measurement and quantification of some of the more natural systems of removal, like forests. One of the new majors at Penn is artificial intelligence. I think there’s an opportunity right now to think about, how can we take data, whether it’s from drones or whether it’s from Lidar and airplanes or satellite data, bringing it together in an integrated way again, so that we have more robust databases that are also transparent.
There’s so many debates going on around carbon removal right now, and it feels like they often come down to philosophical differences. Are these debates important? Or do we just need to decide what we’re going to do and then reevaluate it later?
We’re not in a position anymore to think we can just decarbonize and not do greenhouse gas removals. We know we need to do both. And so I think that there are some kind of “no regrets” things that we can do — opportunities, as we’re scaling up both in the near term, to think about them in a coordinated way. In communities that don’t have solar today, imagine you have a direct air capture facility going in, and then they’re bringing clean energy that they’re using for direct air capture, but they’re bringing it for the first time ever to a community that wouldn’t otherwise have access.
But it really is regional. I think it’s regional in that there’s limited resources in any given region, whether it’s low-carbon energy, land, clean water, even geologic pore space. You have it in some states and not others. And so we really need to look at those resources and always prioritize decarbonizing, but recognize that it’s not necessarily one or the other.
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On executive orders, the Supreme Court, and a “particularly dangerous situation” in Los Angeles.
Current conditions:Nearly 10 million people are under alert today for fire weather conditions in southern California • The coastal waters off China hit their highest average temperature, 70.7 degrees Fahrenheit, since record-keeping began • A blast of cold air will bring freezing temperatures to an estimated 80% of Americans in the next week.
High winds returned to Los Angeles on Monday night and will peak on Tuesday, the “most dangerous” day of the week for the city still battling severe and deadly fires. In anticipation of the dry Santa Ana winds, the National Weather Service issued its highest fire weather warning, citing a “particularly dangerous situation” in Los Angeles and Ventura Counties for the first time since December 2020.
A new brush fire, the Auto Fire, ignited in Oxnard, Ventura County, on Monday evening. It spread 55 acres before firefighters stopped it. Meanwhile, investigators continue to look for the cause of the Palisades Fire, which ignited near a week-old burn scar, a popular partying spot, and damaged wooden utility poles, according to a New York Times analysis.
National Weather Service
Trump is planning an executive order banning offshore wind developments on the East Coast, Heatmap’s Jael Holzman reported Monday. The news came from New Jersey Republican Representative Jeff Van Drew, who said he’s working with Trump’s team to “to prevent this offshore wind catastrophe from wreaking havoc on the hardworking people who call our coastal towns home.”
Van Drew’s press release also said that this order is “just the beginning,” and that it would be finalized “within the first few months of the administration,” a far cry from the Day One action Trump has promised. Van Drew had earlier told New Jersey reporters that the ban would last six months.
Meanwhile, in other executive order news, Biden issued an order on Tuesday directing the Energy and Defense departments to lease federal lands for “gigawatt-scale” data centers, according to E&E News, but only if they bring online enough clean energy to match their facilities’ needs.
On Monday, the Supreme Court refused to hear a lawsuit brought by Utah attempting to seize control of the “unappropriated” federal lands in the state. Opponents argued that the lawsuit, if successful, would have put public lands across the West on the path to privatization since Utah and other states likely couldn’t afford to manage them and would have had to sell off much of them. However, “while the Court’s decision denying original review of Utah’s claims is welcome news for our shared public lands, we fully expect Utah’s misguided attacks to continue,” Alison Flint, the senior legal director at The Wilderness Society, said in a statement.
As I reported last month, the Utah lawsuit organizers “seem prepared to make an appeal to Congress or the Trump administration if the Supreme Court doesn’t make a move in their favor,” given that “funding for the messaging for Stand for Our Land, the publicity arm of the lawsuit, has reportedly outpaced the spending on lawyers.
Also on Monday, the Supreme Court declined to hear a fossil fuel industry argument to block states, municipalities, and other groups from seeking damages for the harms caused by climate change. The appeal by Sunoco, Exxon Mobil, Chevron, and others stemmed from a high-profile lawsuit in Honolulu that seeks to hold energy companies accountable for causing “a substantial portion” of the effects of climate change. Had the Supreme Court taken up the case, similar lawsuits by California and others likely would have been paused during deliberations. The American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, responded to Monday’s decision by claiming activists will now “make themselves the nation’s energy regulators.”
A little over a week after the start of New York City’s congestion pricing, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority released data showing significant decreases in the amount of time passengers spend in inbound traffic. On average, during the morning commute, traffic times have decreased by 30% to 40%; in some cases, such as during rush hour in the Holland Tunnel, travel time has been cut in half, going from over 11 minutes to under five. Due to the traffic reductions, some bus routes are up to 28% faster now than at the same time last year. “It has been a very good week here in New York,” MTA deputy chief Juliette Michaelson said in a news conference.
So far, the MTA has seen an average of 43,000 fewer drivers entering the congestion pricing zone, which begins below 60th St. and costs $9 during the day. While Gothamist notes that this is only a 7.3% reduction compared to last January, many New Yorkers say congestion pricing effects are visibly noticeable in the streets of lower Manhattan.
The Brooklyn Bridge as congestion pricing went into effect. Photo by Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images
Oil and gas magnate Harold Hamm is throwing a “swanky party” to celebrate the inauguration of Donald Trump, on whose campaign he spent more than $4.3 million, according to the research group Fieldnotes and The New York Times. Interior Secretary nominee Doug Burgum was among the invitees, although an advisor has said he does not plan to attend; one of the party’s several major oil and gas industry sponsors, Liberty Energy, was founded by Chris Wright, Trump’s nominee for Energy Secretary.
In May, Trump met with oil and gas executives at his Mar-a-Lago resort and promised industry-friendly tax and regulatory policies and an aggressive stance against wind energy if they helped fund his White House bid. The oil and gas industry ultimately invested some $75 million in efforts to help re-elect the former president and contributed millions to his legal defense.
25% — That’s the level of tariff Alberta Premier Danielle Smith said Canada should prepare for after a meeting with incoming President Trump — and not expect exceptions for its crude oil exports to the U.S., per Bloomberg’s Javier Blas.
Though it might not be as comprehensive or as permanent as renewables advocates have feared, it’s also “just the beginning,” the congressman said.
President-elect Donald Trump’s team is drafting an executive order to “halt offshore wind turbine activities” along the East Coast, working with the office of Republican Rep. Jeff Van Drew of New Jersey, the congressman said in a press release from his office Monday afternoon.
“This executive order is just the beginning,” Van Drew said in a statement. “We will fight tooth and nail to prevent this offshore wind catastrophe from wreaking havoc on the hardworking people who call our coastal towns home.”
The announcement indicates that some in the anti-wind space are leaving open the possibility that Trump’s much-hyped offshore wind ban may be less sweeping than initially suggested.
In its press release, Van Drew’s office said the executive order would “lay the groundwork for permanent measures against the projects,” leaving the door open to only a temporary pause on permitting new projects. The congressman had recently told New Jersey reporters that he anticipates only a six-month moratorium on offshore wind.
The release also stated that the “proposed order” is “expected to be finalized within the first few months of the administration,” which is a far cry from Trump’s promise to stop projects on Day 1. If enacted, a pause would essentially halt all U.S. offshore wind development because the sought-after stretches of national coastline are entirely within federal waters.
Whether this is just caution from Van Drew’s people or a true moderation of Trump’s ambition we’ll soon find out. Inauguration Day is in less than a week.
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Imagine for a moment that you’re an aerial firefighter pilot. You have one of the most dangerous jobs in the country, and now you’ve been called in to fight the devastating fires burning in Los Angeles County’s famously tricky, hilly terrain. You’re working long hours — not as long as your colleagues on the ground due to flight time limitations, but the maximum scheduling allows — not to mention the added external pressures you’re also facing. Even the incoming president recently wondered aloud why the fires aren’t under control yet and insinuated that it’s your and your colleagues’ fault.
You’re on a sortie, getting ready for a particularly white-knuckle drop at a low altitude in poor visibility conditions when an object catches your eye outside the cockpit window: an authorized drone dangerously close to your wing.
Aerial firefighters don’t have to imagine this terrifying scenario; they’ve lived it. Last week, a drone punched a hole in the wing of a Québécois “Super Scooper” plane that had traveled down from Canada to fight the fires, grounding Palisades firefighting operations for an agonizing half-hour. Thirty minutes might not seem like much, but it is precious time lost when the Santa Ana winds have already curtailed aerial operations.
“I am shocked by what happened in Los Angeles with the drone,” Anna Lau, a forestry communication coordinator with the Montana Department of Natural Resources and Conservation, told me. The Montana DNRC has also had to contend with unauthorized drones grounding its firefighting planes. “We’re following what’s going on very closely, and it’s shocking to us,” Lau went on. Leaving the skies clear so that firefighters can get on with their work “just seems like a no-brainer, especially when people are actively trying to tackle the situation at hand and fighting to save homes, property, and lives.”
Courtesy of U.S. Forest Service
Although the Super Scooper collision was by far the most egregious case, according to authorities there have been at least 40 “incidents involving drones” in the airspace around L.A. since the fires started. (Notably, the Federal Aviation Administration has not granted any waivers for the air space around Palisades, meaning any drone images you see of the region, including on the news, were “probably shot illegally,” Intelligencer reports.) So far, law enforcement has arrested three people connected to drones flying near the L.A. fires, and the FBI is seeking information regarding the Super Scooper collision.
Such a problem is hardly isolated to these fires, though. The Forest Service reports that drones led to the suspension of or interfered with at least 172 fire responses between 2015 and 2020. Some people, including Mike Fraietta, an FAA-certified drone pilot and the founder of the drone-detection company Gargoyle Systems, believe the true number of interferences is much higher — closer to 400.
Law enforcement likes to say that unauthorized drone use falls into three buckets — clueless, criminal, or careless — and Fraietta was inclined to believe that it’s mostly the former in L.A. Hobbyists and other casual drone operators “don’t know the regulations or that this is a danger,” he said. “There’s a lot of ignorance.” To raise awareness, he suggested law enforcement and the media highlight the steep penalties for flying drones in wildfire no-fly zones, which is punishable by up to 12 months in prison or a fine of $75,000.
“What we’re seeing, particularly in California, is TikTok and Instagram influencers trying to get a shot and get likes,” Fraietta conjectured. In the case of the drone that hit the Super Scooper, it “might have been a case of citizen journalism, like, Well, I have the ability to get this shot and share what’s going on.”
Emergency management teams are waking up, too. Many technologies are on the horizon for drone detection, identification, and deflection, including Wi-Fi jamming, which was used to ground climate activists’ drones at Heathrow Airport in 2019. Jamming is less practical in an emergency situation like the one in L.A., though, where lives could be at stake if people can’t communicate.
Still, the fact of the matter is that firefighters waste precious time dealing with drones when there are far more pressing issues that need their attention. Lau, in Montana, described how even just a 12-minute interruption to firefighting efforts can put a community at risk. “The biggest public awareness message we put out is, ‘If you fly, we can’t,’” she said.
Fraietta, though, noted that drone technology could be used positively in the future, including on wildfire detection and monitoring, prescribed burns, and communicating with firefighters or victims on the ground.
“We don’t want to see this turn into the FAA saying, ‘Hey everyone, no more drones in the United States because of this incident,’” Fraietta said. “You don’t shut down I-95 because a few people are running drugs up and down it, right? Drones are going to be super beneficial to the country long term.”
But critically, in the case of a wildfire, such tools belong in the right hands — not the hands of your neighbor who got a DJI Mini 3 for Christmas. “Their one shot isn’t worth it,” Lau said.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to reflect that the Québécois firefighting planes are called Super Scoopers, not super soakers.