You’re out of free articles.
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
Sign In or Create an Account.
By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy
Welcome to Heatmap
Thank you for registering with Heatmap. Climate change is one of the greatest challenges of our lives, a force reshaping our economy, our politics, and our culture. We hope to be your trusted, friendly, and insightful guide to that transformation. Please enjoy your free articles. You can check your profile here .
subscribe to get Unlimited access
Offer for a Heatmap News Unlimited Access subscription; please note that your subscription will renew automatically unless you cancel prior to renewal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period. We will let you know in advance of any price changes. Taxes may apply. Offer terms are subject to change.
Subscribe to get unlimited Access
Hey, you are out of free articles but you are only a few clicks away from full access. Subscribe below and take advantage of our introductory offer.
subscribe to get Unlimited access
Offer for a Heatmap News Unlimited Access subscription; please note that your subscription will renew automatically unless you cancel prior to renewal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period. We will let you know in advance of any price changes. Taxes may apply. Offer terms are subject to change.
Create Your Account
Please Enter Your Password
Forgot your password?
Please enter the email address you use for your account so we can send you a link to reset your password:
Life cycle analysis has some problems.
About six months ago, a climate scientist from Arizona State University, Stephanie Arcusa, emailed me a provocative new paper she had published that warned against our growing reliance on life cycle analysis. This practice of measuring all of the emissions related to a given product or service throughout every phase of its life — from the time raw materials are extracted to eventual disposal — was going to hinder our ability to achieve net-zero emissions, she wrote. It was a busy time, and I let the message drift to the bottom of my inbox. But I couldn’t stop thinking about it.
Life cycle analysis permeates the climate economy. Businesses rely on it to understand their emissions so they can work toward reducing them. The Securities and Exchange Commission’s climate risk disclosure rule, which requires companies to report their emissions to investors, hinges on it. The clean hydrogen tax credit requires hydrogen producers to do a version of life cycle analysis to prove their eligibility. It is central to carbon markets, and carbon removal companies are now developing standards based on life cycle analysis to “certify” their services as carbon offset developers did before them.
At the same time, many of the fiercest debates in climate change are really debates about life cycle analysis. Should companies be held responsible for the emissions that are indirectly related to their businesses, and if so then which ones? Are carbon offsets a sham? Does using corn ethanol as a gasoline substitute reduce emissions or increase them? Scientists have repeatedly reached opposite conclusions on that one depending on how they accounted for the land required to grow corn and what it might have been used for had ethanol not been an option. Though the debate plays out in calculations, it’s really a philosophical brawl.
Everybody, for the most part, knows that life cycle analysis is difficult and thorny and imprecise. But over and over, experts and critics alike assert that it can be improved. Arcusa disagrees. Life cycle analysis, she says, is fundamentally broken. “It’s a problematic and uncomfortable conclusion to arrive at,” Arcusa wrote in her email. “On the one hand, it has been the only tool we have had to make any progress on climate. On the other, carbon accounting is captured by academia and vested interests and will jeopardize global climate goals.”
When I recently revisited the paper, I learned that Arcusa and her co-authors didn’t just critique life cycle analysis, they proposed a bold alternative. Their idea is not economically or politically easy, but it also doesn’t suffer from the problems of trying to track carbon throughout the supply chain. I recently called her up to talk through it. Our conversation has been edited for clarity.
Can you walk me through what the biggest issues with life cycle analysis are?
So, life cycle analysis is a qualitative tool —
It seems kind of counterintuitive or even controversial to call it a qualitative tool because it’s specifically trying to quantify something.
I think the best analogy for LCA is that it’s a back-of-the-envelope tool. If you really could measure everything, then sure, LCA is this wonderful idea. The problem is in the practicality of being able to collect all of that data. We can’t, and that leads us to use emissions factors and average numbers, and we model this and we model that, and we get so far away from reality that we actually can’t tell if something is positive or negative in the end.
The other problem is that it’s almost entirely subjective, which makes one LCA incomparable to another LCA depending on the context, depending on the technology. And yes, there are some standardization efforts that have been going on for decades. But if you have a ruler, no matter how much you try, it’s not going to become a screwdriver. We’re trying to use this tool to quantify things and make them the same for comparison, and we can’t because of that subjectivity.
In this space where there is a lot of money to be made, it’s very easy to manipulate things one way or another to make it look a little bit better because the method is not robust. That’s really the gist of the problems here.
One of the things you talk about in the paper is the way life cycle analysis is subject to different worldviews. Can you explain that?
It’s mostly seen in what to include or exclude in the LCA — it can have enormous impacts on the results. I think corn ethanol is the perfect example of how tedious this can be because we still don’t have an answer, precisely for that reason. The uncertainty range of the results has shrunk and gotten bigger and shrunk and gotten bigger, and it’s like, well, we still don’t know. And now, this exact same worldview debate is playing into what should be included and not included in certification for things [like carbon removal] that are going to be sold under the guise of climate action, and that just can’t be. We’ll be forever debating whether something is true.
Is this one of those things that scientists have been debating for ever, or is this argument that we should stop using life cycle analysis more of a fringe idea?
I guess I would call it a fringe idea today. There’s been plenty of criticism throughout the years, even from the very beginning when it was first created. What I have seen is that there is criticism, and then there is, “But here’s how we can solve it and continue using LCA!” I’ve only come across one other publication that specifically said, “This is not working. This is not the right tool,” and that’s from Michael Gillenwater. He’s at the Greenhouse Gas Management Institute. He was like, “What are we doing?” There might be other folks, I just haven’t come across them.
Okay, so what is the alternative to LCA that you’ve proposed in this paper?
LCA targets the middle of the supply chain, and tries to attribute responsibility there. But if you think about where on the supply chain the carbon is the most well-known, it is actually at the source, at the point of origin, before it becomes an emission. At the point where it is created out of the ground is where we know how much carbon there is. If we focus on that source through a policy that requires mandatory sequestration — for every ton of carbon that is now produced, there is a ton of carbon that’s been put away through carbon removal, and the accounting happens there, before it is sold to anybody — anybody who’s now downstream of that supply chain is already carbon neutral. There is no need to track carbon all the way down to the consumer.
We know this is accurate because that is where governments already collect royalties and taxes — they want to know exactly how much is being sold. So we already do this. The big difference is that the policy would be required there instead of taxing everybody downstream.
You’re saying that fossil fuel producers should be required to remove a ton of carbon from the atmosphere for every ton of carbon in the fuels they sell?
Yeah, and maybe I should be more specific. They should pay for an equal amount of carbon to be removed from the atmosphere. In no way are we implying that a fossil carbon producer needs to also be doing the sequestration themselves.
What would be the biggest challenges of implementing something like this?
The ultimate challenge is convincing people that we need to be managing carbon and that this is a waste management type of system. Nobody really wants to pay for waste management, and so it needs to be regulated and demanded by some authority.
What about the fact that we don’t really have the ability to remove carbon or store carbon at scale today, and may not for some time?
Yes, we need to build capacity so that eventually we can match the carbon production to the carbon removal, which is why we also proposed that the liability needs to start today, not in the future. That liability is as good as a credit card debt — you actually have to pay it. It can be paid little by little every year, but the liability is here now, and not in the future.
The risk in the system that I’m describing, or even the system that is currently being deployed, is that you have counterproductive technologies that are being developed. And by counterproductive, I mean [carbon removal] technologies that are producing more emissions than they are storing, and so they’re net-positive. You can create a technology that has no intention of removing more carbon than its sequesters. The intention is just to earn money.
Do you mean, like, the things that are supposed to be removing carbon from the atmosphere and sequestering it, they are using fossil fuels to do that, and end up releasing more carbon in the process?
Yeah, so basically, what we show in the paper is that when we get to full carbon neutrality, the market forces alone will eliminate those kinds of technologies that are counterproductive. The problem is during the transition, these technologies can be economically viable because they are cheaper than they would be if 100% of the fossil fuel they used was carbon neutral through carbon removal. And so in order to prevent those technologies from gaming the system, we need a way to artificially make the price of fossil carbon as expensive as it would be if 100% of that fossil carbon was covered by carbon removal.
That’s where the idea of permits comes in. For every amount that I produce, I now have an instant liability, which is a permit. Each of those permits has to be matched by carbon removal. And since we don’t have enough carbon removal, we have futures and these futures represent the promise of actually doing carbon removal.
What if we burn through the remaining carbon budget and we still don’t have the capacity to sequester enough carbon?
Well, then we’re going into very unchartered territory. Right now we’re just mindlessly going through this thinking that if we just reduce emissions it will be good. It won’t be good.
In the paper, you also argue against mitigating greenhouse gases other than carbon, and that seems pretty controversial to me. Why is that?
We’re not arguing against mitigating, per se. We’re arguing against lumping everything under the same carbon accounting framework because lumping hides the difficulty in actually doing something about it. It’s not that we shouldn’t mitigate other greenhouse gases — we must. It’s just that if we separate the problem of carbon away from the problem of methane, away from the problem of nitrous oxide, or CFCs, we can tackle them more effectively. Because right now, we’re trying to do everything under the same umbrella, and that doesn’t work. We don’t tackle drinking and driving by sponsoring better tires. That’s just silly, right? We wouldn’t do that. We would tackle drinking and driving on its own, and then we would tackle better tires in a different policy.
So the argument is: Most of climate change is caused by carbon; let’s tackle that separately from the others and leave tackling methane and nitrous oxide to purposefully created programs to tackle those things. Let’s not lump the calculations altogether, hiding all the differences and hiding meaningful action.
Is there still a role for life cycle analysis?
You don’t want to be regulating carbon using life cycle analysis. So you can use the life cycle analysis for qualitative purposes, but we’re pretending that it is a tool that can deliver accurate results, and it just doesn’t.
What has the response been like to this paper? What kind of feedback have you gotten?
Stunned silence!
Nobody has said anything?
In private, they have. Not in public. In private, it’s been a little bit like, “I’ve always thought this, but it seemed like there was no other way.” But then in public, think about it. Everything is built on LCA. It’s now in every single climate bill out there. Every single standard. Every single consulting company is doing LCA and doing carbon footprinting for companies. It’s a huge industry, so I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised to hear nothing publicly.
Yeah, I was gonna ask — I’ve been writing about the SEC rules and this idea that companies should start reporting their emissions to their investors, and that would all be based on LCA. There’s a lot of buy-in for that idea across the climate movement.
Yeah, but there’s definitely a fine line with make-believe. I think in many instances, we kid ourselves thinking that we’re going to have numbers that we can hang our hats on. In many instances we will not, and they will be challenged. And so at that point, what’s the point?
One thing I hear when I talk to people about this is, well, having an estimate is better than not having anything, or, don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good, or, we can just keep working to make them better and better. Why not?
I mean, I wouldn’t say don’t try. But when it comes to actually enforcing anything, it’s going to be extremely hard to prove a number. You could just be stuck in litigation for a long time and still not have an answer.
I don’t know, to me it just seems like an endless debate while time is ticking and we will just feel good because we’ll have thought we measured everything. But we’re still not doing anything.
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
Analysts are betting that the stop work order won’t last. But the risks for the developer could be more serious.
The Danish offshore wind company Orsted was already in trouble. It was looking to raise about half of its market value in new cash because it couldn’t sell stakes in its existing projects. The market hated that idea, and the stock plunged almost 30% following the announcement of the offering. That was two weeks ago.
The stock has now plunged again by 16% to a record low on Monday. That follows the announcement late Friday night that the Department of the Interior had issued a stop work order for the company’s Revolution Wind project, off the coasts of Rhode Island and Connecticut. This would allow regulators “to address concerns related to the protection of national security interests of the United States,” the DOI’s letter said. The project is already 80% complete, according to the company, and was due to be finished and operating by next year.
While Donald Trump’s antipathy towards the wind industry — and especially the offshore wind industry — is no secret, analysts were not convinced the order would be a death blow to project, let alone Orsted. But it’s still quite bad news.
“This is another setback for Orsted, and the U.S. offshore wind industry,” Jefferies analyst Ahmed Farman wrote in a note to clients on Sunday. “The question now is whether a deal can be struck to restart the project like Empire Wind,” the New York offshore wind farm that received a similar stop work order in April, only to have it lifted in May.
Morningstar analyst Tancrede Fulop tacked in the same direction on Monday. “We expect the order to be lifted, as was the case for Equinor’s Empire Wind project off the coast of New York last May,” he wrote in a note to clients, adding an intriguing post-script: “The Empire Wind case suggests President Donald Trump’s administration uses stop-work orders to exert pressure on East Coast Democratic governors regarding specific issues.”
When the federal government lifted its stop work order on Empire Wind, Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum wrote on X that he was “encouraged by Governor Hochul’s comments about her willingness to move forward on critical pipeline capacity,” likely referring to two formerly moribund pipeline proposals meant to carry shale gas from Pennsylvania into the Northeast. Hochul herself denied there was any quid pro quo between the project restarting and any pipeline developments. Meanwhile, the White House said days later that Hochul had “caved.”
The natural question becomes, then, what can the governors of Rhode Island and Connecticut offer Trump? At least so far, the states’ Democratic governors have criticized the administration for issuing the stop work order and said they will “pursue every avenue to reverse the decision to halt work on Revolution Wind.”
Yet they have no obvious card to play, Allen Brooks, a former Wall Street analyst and a senior fellow at the National Center for Energy Analytics, told me. “They were not blocking pipelines the way the state of New York was, so there’s not much they can do,” he said.
Even if Interior does reverse the order, the risk of a catastrophic outcome for Orsted has certainly gone up. The company’s rights issue, where existing shareholders have an option to expand their stakes at a discount, is intended to raise 60 billion Danish kroner, or around $9 billion, with some 5 billion kroner, or $800 million, due to complete Revolution. Jefferies has estimated that Revolution, which Orsted owns half of, will ultimately cost the company $4 billion.
The administration’s active hostility toward wind development “calls into question that business model,” Brooks told me. “There’s going to be a lot of questions as to whether [offshore wind developers] are going to be able to raise money.”
The Danish government, which is the majority shareholder of Orsted, said soon after the announcement that it would participate in the fundraising. The company reaffirmed that patronage on Monday, saying that it has the “continued support and commitment to the rights issue from its majority shareholder.”
Orsted’s big drop will also drag down the fortunes of its neighbor Norway, via the latter’s majority state-owned wind power company Equinor, which bought a 10% stake in Orsted late last year.
“Their investment decision looks terrible,” Brooks told me.
At the close of trading in Europe, Orsted’s market capitalization stood at around $12 billion. That’s about a third less than where it sat before the share sale announcement.
In a worst case scenario involving the cancellation of both Revolution and Sunrise Wind, another troubled offshore project planned to serve customers in Massachusetts, Fulop predicts that the long-run value of Orsted would go down enough that it would have to offer its new shares at a greater discount — which would, of course, raise less money.
The best case scenario may be that Orsted will join its Scandinavian peer in resolving a hostage negotiation with the White House, with billions of dollars of investment and over 1,000 jobs in the balance.
“The Empire Wind case suggests President Donald Trump’s administration uses stop-work orders to exert pressure on East Coast Democratic governors regarding specific issues,” Fulop wrote. Right now, it’s workers, investors, elected officials, and New England ratepayers feeling the pressure.
Using the Supercharger network with a non-Tesla is great — except for one big, awkward problem.
You can drive your life away and never notice the little arrow on the dashboard — the one next to the fuel canister icon that points out which side of the car the gas cap is on. The arrow is a fun piece of everyday design that has inspired many a know-it-all friend or TikTok. But while the intel it relays can be helpful if you’re driving a rental car, or are just generally forgetful, it doesn’t really matter in the grand scheme what side your fuel filler is on. Service stations are so big that there’s generally enough space to park at an open pump in whatever orientation a vehicle demands.
That’s not quite the case with electric cars.
When I test-drove the new Hyundai Ioniq 9 this summer, the industrial designers had included their own version of the little arrow to point out the location of the EV’s charging port. In the Ioniq 9’s case, it’s on the passenger’s side, the opposite of where you’d find the port on a Tesla. Turns out, that’s a problem. On our trip from L.A. to San Jose, Hyundai's navigation system directed me to a busy Tesla Supercharger just off the interstate in the parking lot of a Denny’s. But because of the big EV’s backward port placement, I needed two empty stalls next to each other — both of which I wound up blocking when I backed in to charge. The episode is an example of how we screwed over the present by not thinking hard enough when we built the infrastructure of the recent past.
Let’s back up. In the opening stage of the EV race, the charging question was split between Tesla and everybody else. The other electric carmakers adopted a few shared plug standards. But just like with gas cars, where the left-or-right placement of the gas cap seemed to vary arbitrarily vehicle to vehicle, there was no standardized placement of the charging port. Because all manner of different EVs pulled in, companies like Electrify America and Chargepoint built their chargers with cords long enough to reach either side of a car.
Tesla, meanwhile, built out its excellent but vertically integrated Supercharger network with only Tesla cars in mind. In most cases, a station amounted to eight or more parking spaces all in a row. The cable that came off each charging post was only long enough to reach the driver’s side rear, where all the standardized ports on Teslas can be found. The thinking made sense at the time. Other EVs weren’t allowed to use the Supercharger network. Why, then, would you pay for extra cabling to reach the other side of the vehicle?
It became a big issue late in 2022. At that point, Musk made Tesla’s proprietary plug an open-source standard and encouraged the other carmakers to adopt it. One by one they fell in line. The other car companies pledged to use the newly renamed North American Charging Standard, or NACS, in their future EVs. Then Tesla began to open many, but not all, of its stations to Rivians, Hyundais, and other electric cars.
Which leads us to today. The Ioniq 9, which began deliveries this summer, comes with a NACS port. This allows drivers to use Tesla stations without the need to keep an annoying dongle handy. But because Hyundai put the port on the opposite side, the car is oriented in the opposite direction from the way hundreds or thousands of Supercharger stations are set up. Suppose you find an empty spot between two Teslas and back in — the plug that could reach your passenger’s side port actually belongs to the stall next to you, and is in use by the EV parked there. The available cord, the one meant for the stall you actually parked in, can’t reach over to the passenger’s side.
The result is a mess. Find two open stalls next to each other and you can make it work, though it means you’re taking up both of them (stealing the cord meant for the neighboring stall and blocking the cord meant for the one you’re parked in). At giant stations with dozens of plugs, this is no big deal. At smaller ones with just 12 or 16 plugs, it’s a nuisance. I’ve walked out and moved the Rivian I was test-driving before I had all the electricity I wanted because I felt guilty about blocking two stalls. To avoid this breach of etiquette you might need to park illegally, leaving your EV in a non-spot or in a place where it’s blocking the sidewalk just so it can reach the plug. (Says Tesla FAQ: “In some cases you might have to park over the line in order to charge comfortably. Avoid parking diagonally to reach the cable and try to obstruct as few charge posts as possible.)
Some relief from this short-sightnedness is coming. Tesla’s new “V4” stations that are currently opening around the world are built with this complexity in mind and include longer cables and an orientation meant to reach either side of the vehicle. The buildout of EV chargers of all kinds is slated to continue even with the Trump administration’s opposition to funding them, and new stations should be flexible to any kind of electric car. And the idea of making sure EVs of any size and shape can charge is picking up steam. For example, many of the stations in Rivian’s Adventure Network include at least one stall where the charging post is off to the side of an extra-long parking space so that an EV towing a trailer can reach its charging port.
Yet for now, we’re stuck with what we’ve already built. There are more than 2,500 Tesla Supercharger stations in the U.S., representing more than 30,000 individual plugs, and most of those were built with the V2 and V3 versions of Tesla’s technology that have this orientation problem. For years to come, many of those stations will be the best or only option for non-Tesla EVs on a road trip, which means we’re all in for some extra inconvenience.
On $20 billion in lost projects, Alligator Alcatraz’s closure, and Amazon state’s rally
Current conditions: The highest wave measured from Hurricane Erin was 45 feet by a buoy located 150 miles off North Carolina’s Cape Hetteras • Intense rainfall is flooding Rajasthan in India • Wildfires continue raging across North America and southern Europe.
The Trump administration issued a stop-work order to halt construction of Orsted’s flagship project off the coast of Rhode Island. The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management halted work on the Revolution Wind project while its regulators were “seeking to address concerns related to the protection of national security interests of the United States,” a letter from the agency stated. The project was nearly completed, and already connected to the grid. The Danish state-owned Orsted said it was “evaluating all options to resolve the matter expeditiously.”
Earlier this month, the company put out a bid for $9.4 billion from the stock market to fund its work in the U.S. amid President Donald Trump’s crackdown. As Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin wrote of the sale, “While the market had been expecting Orsted to raise capital in some form, the scale of the raise is about twice what was anticipated,” causing its stock to plunge almost 30%. The White House has aggressively targeted policies that benefit wind energy in recent weeks. Following the Friday announcement, shares in Orsted tumbled 17% to a record low.
Trump’s clampdown on wind and solar has sent the industry spiraling in recent weeks as federal agencies limit access to clean energy tax credits and rework rules to disfavor the industry’s two largest sources of energy. Already, $18.6 billion worth of clean energy projects have been canceled this year, compared to just $827 million last year, according to data from Atlas Public Policy’s Clean Economy Tracker cited in the Financial Times.
Trump has blamed renewables for the rising price of electricity. But data Matthew covered last week showed that renewables are, if anything, correlated with lower prices. Instead, he wrote, at the “top of the list” of reasons electricity prices are surging “is the physical reality of the grid itself,” the poles and wires required to send energy into people’s homes and businesses. “Beyond that, extreme weather, natural gas prices, and data center-induced demand growth all play a part.”
The entrance to Florida's state-managed immigrant detention facility. Joe Raedle/Getty Images
Together with the state of Florida, the Trump administration rushed to build what it calls “Alligator Alcatraz,” a detention facility designed to hold several thousand migrants at a time in southern Florida. In its haste to complete the facility, however, the government failed to conduct the proper environmental reviews, according to a federal judge who ordered its closure late last week, The Wall Street Journal reported. Back in June, a pair of nonprofits filed a lawsuit alleging that the government had failed to conduct assessments of what impact the facility would have on endangered animals such as the Florida panther and the Florida bonneted bat. The Miccosukee Tribe of Indians of Florida later joined the lawsuit.
The Trump administration argued that the law in question, the National Environmental Policy Act, only applies to federal projects, whereas this one was state-driven, an argument Judge Kathleen Williams rejected, according to the Journal. “Every Florida governor, every Florida senator, and countless local and national political figures, including presidents, have publicly pledged their unequivocal support for the restoration, conservation, and protection of the Everglades,” she wrote. “This Order does nothing more than uphold the basic requirements of legislation designed to fulfill those promises.”
The eight countries that ring the Amazon rainforest pledged support over the weekend for a global pool of financing for conservation. In a joint declaration, the Amazonian nations — Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Guyana, Peru, Suriname, and Venezuela — expressed support for preserving the rainforest but stopped short of endorsing any curbs on fossil fuels. The statement comes as South America has emerged as the world’s hottest oil patch, with new discoveries moving forward off the coasts of Guyana and Brazil and Argentina advancing plans for a fracking boom.
“Abrupt changes” like the precipitous loss of sea ice are unfolding in Antarctica, highlighting the growing threat global warming poses to the frozen continent, according to a new paper in the journal Nature. These changes could push the Antarctic ecosystem past a point of no return, the authors wrote.
“We’re seeing a whole range of abrupt and surprising changes developing across Antarctica, but these aren’t happening in isolation,” climate scientist Nerilie Abram, lead author of the paper, told Grist. “When we change one part of the system, that has knock-on effects that worsen the changes in other parts of the system. And we’re talking about changes that also have global consequences.”
Bad news for vegans who evangelize their diets on good health grounds: New research found no increased risk of death “associated with higher intake of animal protein. In fact, the data showed a modest but significant reduction in cancer-related mortality among those who ate more animal protein.” That, however, doesn’t change the huge difference in emissions between red meat and plant food products.