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According to IPCC author Andy Reisinger, “net zero by 2050” misses some key points.
Tackling climate change is a complex puzzle. Hitting internationally agreed upon targets to limit warming requires the world to reduce multiple types of greenhouse gases from a multiplicity of sources on diverse timelines and across varying levels of responsibility and control by individual, corporate, and state actors. It’s no surprise the catchphrase “net zero by 2050” has taken off.
Various initiatives have sprung up to distill this complexity for businesses and governments who want to do (or say they are doing) what the “science says” is necessary. The nonprofit Science Based Targets initiative, for example, develops standard roadmaps for companies to follow to act “in line with climate science.” The groups also vets corporate plans and deems them to either be “science based” or not. Though entirely voluntary, SBTi’s approval has become a nearly mandatory mark of credibility. The group has validated the plans of more than 5,500 companies with more than $46 trillion in market capitalization — nearly half of the global economy.
But in a commentary published in the journal Nature last week, a group of Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change experts argue that SBTi and other supposedly “science based” target-setting efforts misconstrue the science and are laden with value judgments. By striving to create straightforward, universal rules, they flatten more nuanced considerations of which emissions must be reduced, by whom and by when.
“We are arguing that those companies and countries that are best resourced, have the highest capacity to act, and have the highest responsibility for historical emissions, probably need to go a lot further than the global average,” Andy Reisinger, the lead author of the piece, told me.
In response to the paper, SBTi told me it “welcomes debate,” and that “robust debate is essential to accelerate corporate ambition and climate action.” The group is currently in the process of reviewing its Net-Zero Standard and remains “committed to refining our approaches to ensure they are effective in helping corporates to drive the urgent emissions reductions needed to combat the climate crisis.”
The commentary comes as SBTi’s reputation is already on shaky ground. In April, its board appeared to go rogue and said that the group would loosen its standards for the use of carbon offsets. The announcement was met first with surprise and later with fierce protest from the nonprofit’s staff and technical council, who had not been consulted. Environmental groups accused SBTi of taking the “science” out of its targets. The board later walked back its statement, saying that no change had been made to the rules, yet.
But interestingly enough, the new Nature commentary argues that SBTi’s board was actually on the right track. I spoke to Reisinger about this, and some of the other ways he thinks science based targets “miss the mark.”
Reisinger, who’s from New Zealand, was the vice-chair of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s mega-report on climate mitigation from 2022. I caught him just as he had arrived in Sofia, Bulgaria, for a plenary that will determine the timeline for the next big batch of UN science reports. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Was there something in particular that inspired you to write this? Or were you just noticing the same issues over and over again?
There were probably several things. One is a confusion that’s quite prevalent between net zero CO2 emissions and net zero greenhouse gas emissions. The IPCC makes clear that to limit warming at any level, you need to reach net zero CO2 emissions, because it’s a long lived greenhouse gas and the warming effect accumulates in the atmosphere over time. You need deep reductions of shorter lived greenhouse gases like methane, but they don’t necessarily have to reach zero. And yet, a lot of people claim that the IPCC tells us that we have to reach net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, which is simply not the case.
Of course, you can claim that there’s nothing wrong, surely, with going to net zero greenhouse gas emissions because that’s more ambitious. But there’s two problems with that. One is, if you want to use science, you have to get the science correct. You can’t just make it up and still claim to be science-based. Secondly, it creates a very uneven playing field between those who mainly have CO2 emissions and those who have non-CO2 emissions as a significant part of their emissions portfolio — which often are much harder to reduce.
Can you give an example of what you mean by that?
You can rapidly decarbonize and actually approach close to zero emissions in your energy generation, if that’s your dominant source of emissions. There are viable solutions to generate energy with very low or no emissions — renewables, predominantly. Nuclear in some circumstances.
But to give you another example, in Australia, the Meat and Livestock Association, they set a net zero target, but they subsequently realized it’s much harder to achieve it because methane emissions from livestock are very, very difficult to reduce entirely. Of course you can say, we’ll no longer produce beef. But if you’re the Cattle Association, you’re not going to rapidly morph into producing a different type of meat product. And so in that case, achieving net zero is much more challenging. Of course, you can’t lean back and say, Oh, it’s too difficult for us, therefore we shouldn’t try.
I want to walk through the three main points to your argument for why science-based targets “miss the mark.” I think we’ve just covered the first. The second is that these initiatives put everyone on the same timeline and subject them to the same rules, which you say could actually slow emissions reductions in the near term. Can you explain that?
The Science Based Targets initiative in particular, but also other initiatives that provide benchmarks for companies, tend to want to limit the use of offsets, where a company finances emission reductions elsewhere and claims them to achieve their own targets. And there’s very good reasons for that, because there’s a lot of greenwashing going on. Some offsets have very low integrity.
At the same time, if you set a universal rule that all offsets are bad and unscientific, you’re making a major mistake. Offsets are a way of generating financial flows towards those with less intrinsic capacity to reduce their emissions. So by making companies focus only on their own reductions, you basically cut off financial flows that could stimulate emission reductions elsewhere or generate carbon dioxide removals. Then you’re creating a problem for later on in the future, when we desperately need more carbon dioxide removal and haven’t built up the infrastructure or the accountability systems that would allow that.
As you know, there’s a lot of controversy about this right now. There are many scientists who disagree with you and don’t want the Science Based Targets initiative to loosen its rules for using offsets. Why is there this split in the scientific community about this?
I think the issue arises when you think that net zero by 2050 is the unquestioned target. But if you challenge yourself to say, well net zero by 2050 might be entirely unambitious for you, you have to reduce your own emissions and invest in offsets to go far beyond net zero by 2050 — then you might get a different reaction to it.
I think everybody would agree that if offsets are being used instead of efforts to reduce emissions that are under a company’s direct control, and they can be reduced, then offsets are a really bad idea. And of course, low integrity offsets are always a bad idea. But the solution to the risk of low integrity cannot be to walk away from it entirely, because otherwise you’ve further reduced incentives to actually generate accountability mechanisms. So the challenge would be to drive emission reductions at the company level, and on top of that, create incentives to engage in offsets, to increase financial flows to carbon dioxide removal — both permanent and inherently non permanent — because we will need it.
My understanding is that groups like SBTi and some of these other carbon market integrity initiatives agree with what you’ve just said — even if they don’t support offsetting emissions, they do support buying carbon credits to go above and beyond emissions targets. They are already advocating for that, even if they’re not necessarily creating the incentives for it.
I mean, that’s certainly a move in the right direction. But it’s creating this artificial distinction between what the science tells you, the “science based target,” and then the voluntary effort beyond that. Whereas I think it has to become an obligation. So it’s not a distinction between, here’s what the science says, and here’s where your voluntary, generous, additional contribution to global efforts might go. It is a much more integrated package of actions.
I think we’re starting to get at the third point that your commentary makes, which is about how these so-called science-based targets are inequitable. How does that work?
There’s a rich literature on differentiating targets at the country level based on responsibility for warming, or a capacity-based approach that says, if you’re rich and we have a global problem, you have to use your wealth to help solve the global problem. Most countries don’t because the more developed you are, the more unpleasant the consequences are.
At the company level, SBTi, for example, tends to use the global or regional or sectoral average rate of reductions as the benchmark that an individual company has to follow. But not every company is average, and systems transitions follow far more complex dynamics. Some incumbents have to reduce emissions much more rapidly, or they go out of business in order to create space for innovators to come in, whose emissions might rise in the near term before they go down, but with new technologies that allow deeper reductions in the long term. Assuming a uniform rate of reduction levels out all those differences.
It’s far more challenging to translate equity into meaningful metrics at the company level. But our core argument is, just because it’s hard, that cannot mean let’s not do it. So how can we challenge companies to disclose their thinking, their justification about what is good enough?
The Science Based Targets initiative formed because previously, companies were coming up with their own interpretations of the science, and there was no easy way to assess whether these plans were legitimate. Can you really imagine a middle ground where there is still some sort of policing mechanism to say whether a given corporate target is good enough?
That’s what we try to sketch as a vision, but it certainly won’t be easy. I also want to emphasize that we’re not trying to attack SBTi in principle. It’s done a world of good. And we certainly don’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater to just cancel the idea. It’s more to use it as a starting point. As we say in our paper, you can almost take an SBTi target as the definition of what is not sufficient if you’re a company located in the Global North or a multinational company with high access to resources — human, technology and financial.
It was a wild west before SBTi and we’re not saying let’s go back to the wild west. We’re saying the pendulum might have swung too far to a universal rule that applies to everybody, but therefore applies to nobody.
There’s one especially scathing line in this commentary. You write that these generic rules “result in a pseudo-club that inadequately challenges its self-selected members while setting prohibitive expectations for those with less than average capacity.” We’ve already talked about the second half of this statement, but what do you mean by pseudo-club?
You write a science based target as a badge of achievement, a badge of honor on your company profile, assuming that therefore you have done all that can be expected of you when it comes to climate change. Most of the companies that have adopted science based targets are located in the Global North, or operate on a multinational basis and have therefore quite similar capacity. If that’s what we’re achieving — and then there’s a large number of companies that can’t possibly, under their current capacity, set science-based targets because they simply don’t have the resources — then collectively, we will fail. Science cannot tell you whether you have done as much as you could be doing. If we let the simplistic rules dominate the conversation, then we’re not going to be as ambitious as we need to be.
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If the Senate reconciliation bill gets enacted as written, you’ve got about 92 days left to seal the deal.
If you were thinking about buying or leasing an electric vehicle at some point, you should probably get on it like, right now. Because while it is not guaranteed that the House will approve the budget reconciliation bill that cleared the Senate Tuesday, it is highly likely. Assuming the bill as it’s currently written becomes law, EV tax credits will be gone as of October 1.
The Senate bill guts the subsidies for consumer purchases of electric vehicles, a longstanding goal of the Trump administration. Specifically, it would scrap the 30D tax credit by September 30 of this year, a harsher cut-off than the version of the bill that passed the House, which would have axed the credit by the end of 2025 except for automakers that had sold fewer than 200,000 electric vehicles. The credit as it exists now is worth up to $7,500 for cars with an MSRP below $55,000 (and trucks and sports utility vehicles under $80,000), and, under the Inflation Reduction Act, would have lasted through the end of 2032. The Senate bill also axes the $4,000 used EV tax credit at the end of September.
“Long story short, the credits under the current legislation are only going to be on the books through the end of September,” Corey Cantor, the research director of the Zero-Emissions Transportation Association, told me. “Now is definitely a good time, if you’re interested in an EV, to look at the market.”
The Senate applied the same strict timeline to credits for clean commercial vehicles, both new and used. For home EV chargers, the tax credit will now expire at the end of June next year.
While EVs were on the road well before the 2022 passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, what the new tax credit did was help build out a truly domestic electric vehicle market, Cantor said. “You have a bunch of refreshed EV models from major automakers,” Cantor told me, including “more affordable models in different segments, and many of them quality for the credit.”
These include cars produceddomestically by Kia,Hyundai, and Chevrolet. But of course, the biggest winner from the credit is Tesla, whose Model Y was the best-selling car in the world in 2023.
Tesla shares were down over 5.5% in Tuesday afternoon trading, though not just because of Congress. JPMorgan also released an analyst report Monday arguing that the decline in sales seen in the first quarter would accelerate in the second quarter. President Trump, with whom Tesla CEO Elon Musk had an extremely public falling out last month, suggested on social media Monday night that the government efficiency department Musk himself formerly led should “take a good, hard, look” at the subsidies Musk receives across his many businesses. Trump also said that he would “take a look” at Musk’s United States citizenship in response to reporters’ questions about it.
Cantor told me that he expects a surge of consumer attention to the EV market if the bill passes in its current form. “You’ve seen more customers pull their purchase ahead” when subsidies cut-offs are imminent, he said.
But overall, the end of the subsidy is likely to reduce EV sales from their previously expected levels.
Harvard researchers have estimated that the termination of the EV tax credit “would cut the EV share of new vehicle sales in 2030 by 6.0 percentage points,” from 48% of new sales by 2030 to 42%. Combined with other Trump initiatives such as terminating the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure program for publicly funded chargers (currently being litigated) and eliminating California’s waiver under the Clean Air Act that allowed it to set tighter vehicle emissions standards, the share of new car sales that are electric could fall to 32% in 2030.
But not all government support for electric vehicles will end by October 1, even if the bill gets the president’s signature in its current form.
“It’s important for consumers to know there are many states that offer subsidies, such as New York, and Colorado,” Cantor told me. That also goes for California, New Jersey, Nevada, and New Mexico. You can find the full list here.
Editor’s note: This story has been edited to include a higher cost limit for trucks and SUVs.
Excise tax is out, foreign sourcing rules are in.
After more than three days of stops and starts on the Senate floor, Congress’ upper chamber finally passed its version of Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act Tuesday morning, sending the tax package back to the House in hopes of delivering it to Trump by the July 4 holiday, as promised.
An amendment brought by Senators Joni Ernst and Chuck Grassley of Iowa and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska that would have more gradually phased down the tax credits for wind and solar rather than abruptly cutting them off was never brought to the floor. Instead, Murkowski struck a deal with the Senate leadership designed to secure her vote that accomplished some of her other priorities, including funding for rural hospitals, while also killing an excise tax on renewables that had only just been stuffed into the bill over the weekend.
The new tax on wind and solar would have driven up development costs by as much as 20% — a prospect that industry groups said would “kill” investment altogether. But even without the tax, the Senate’s bill would gum up the works for clean energy projects across the spectrum due to new phase-out schedules for tax credits and fast-approaching deadlines to meet complex foreign sourcing rules. While more projects will likely be built under this version than the previous one, the basic outcomes haven’t changed: higher energy costs, project delays, lost jobs, and ceding leadership in artificial intelligence and manufacturing to China.
"This bill will hit Americans hard, terminating credits that have helped families lower their energy and transportation costs, shrinking demand for American-made advanced energy technologies, and squeezing new domestic energy production at a time of rising demand and prices,” Heather O’Neill, the CEO and president of the trade group Advanced Energy United, said in a statement Tuesday. “The advanced energy industry will endure, but the downstream effects of these rollbacks and punitive policies will be felt by American families and businesses for years to come.”
Here’s what’s in the final Senate bill.
The final Senate bill bifurcates the previously technology-neutral tax credits for clean electricity into two categories with entirely different rules and timelines — wind and solar versus everything else.
Tax credits for wind and solar farms would end abruptly with no phase-out period, but the bill includes a significant safe harbor for projects that are already under construction or close to breaking ground. As long as a project starts construction within 12 months of the bill’s passage, it will be able to claim the tax credits as originally laid out in the Inflation Reduction Act. All other projects must be “placed in service,” i.e. begin operating, by the start of 2028 to qualify.
That means if Trump signs the bill into law on July 4, wind and solar developers will have until July 4 of 2026 to “start construction.” Otherwise, they will have less than a year and a half to bring their projects online and still qualify for the credits.
Meanwhile, all other sources of zero-emissions electricity, including batteries, advanced nuclear, geothermal, and hydropower, will be able to continue claiming the tax credits for nearly a decade. The credits would start phasing down for projects that start construction in 2034 and terminate in 2036.
While there are some potential wins in the bill for clean energy development, many of the safe harbored projects will still be subject to complex foreign sourcing rules that may prove too much of a burden to meet.
The bill requires that any zero-emissions electricity or advanced manufacturing project that starts construction after December of this year abide by strict new “foreign entities of concern,” or FEOC rules in order to be eligible for tax credits. The rules penalize companies for having financial or material connections to people or businesses that are “owned by, controlled by, or subject to the jurisdiction or direction of” any of four countries — Russia, Iran, North Korea, and most importantly for clean energy technology, China.
As with the text that came out of the Senate Finance committee, the text in the final bill would phase in supply chain restrictions, requiring project developers and manufacturers to use fewer and fewer Chinese-sourced inputs over time. For clean electricity projects starting construction next year, 40% of the value of the materials used in the project must be free of ties to a FEOC. By 2030, the threshold would rise to 60%. Energy storage facilities are subject to a more aggressive timeline and would be required to prove that 55% of the project materials are non-FEOC in 2026, rising to 75% by 2030. Each covered advanced manufacturing technology gets its own specific FEOC benchmarks.
Unlike the text from the Finance Committee, however, the final text includes a clear exception for developers who already have procurement contracts in place prior to the bill’s enactment. If a solar developer has already signed a contract to get its cells from a Chinese company, for example, it could exempt that cost from the calculation. That would make it easier for companies further along in the development process to comply with the eligibility rules.
That said, these materials sourcing rules come on top of strict ownership and licensing rules likely to block more than 100 existing and planned solar and battery factories with partial Chinese ownership or licensing deals with Chinese firms from receiving the tax credits, per a BloombergNEF analysis I reported on previously.
Once again, the details of how any of this will work — and whether it will, in fact, be “workable” — will depend heavily on guidance written by the Treasury department. That not only gives the Trump administration significant discretion over the rules, it also assumes that the nTreasury department, which is now severely understaffed after Trump’s efficiency department cleaned house earlier this year, will actually have the bandwidth to write them. Without Treasury guidance, developers may not have the cost certainty they need to continue moving forward on projects.
Up until today, the Senate and House looked poised to destroy the business model for companies like Sunrun that lease rooftop solar installations to homeowners and businesses by cutting them off from the investment tax credit, which can bring down the cost of a solar array by as much as 70%. The final Senate bill, however, got rid of this provision and replaced it with a much more narrow version.
Now, the only “leasing” schemes that are barred from claiming tax credits are those for solar water heaters and small wind installations. Companies that lease solar panels, batteries, fuel cells, and geothermal heating equipment are still eligible. SunRun’s stock jumped nearly 10% on Tuesday.
Other than the new FEOC rules, which will have truly existential consequences for a great many projects, there aren’t many changes to the advanced manufacturing tax credit, or 45X, than in previous versions of the bill. The OBBBA would create a new phase-out schedule for critical mineral producers claiming the tax credit that begins in 2031. Previously, critical minerals were set to be eligible indefinitely. It would also terminate the credit for wind energy components early, in 2028.
One significant change from the Senate Finance text is that the bill would allow vertically integrated companies to stack the tax credit for multiple components.
But perhaps the biggest change, which was introduced last weekend, is a twisted new definition of “critical mineral” that allows metallurgical coal — the type of coal used in steelmaking — to qualify for the tax credit. As my colleague Matthew Zeitlin wrote, most of the metallurgical coal the U.S. produces is exported, meaning this subsidy will mostly help other countries produce cheaper steel.
It looks like the hydrogen industry’s intense lobbying efforts finally paid off: The final Senate bill is the first text we’ve seen since this process began in May that would extend the lifespan of the tax credit for clean hydrogen production. Now, projects that begin construction before January 1, 2028 will still qualify for the credit. This is shorter than the Inflation Reduction Act’s 2033 cut-off, but much longer than the end-of-year cliff earlier versions of the bill would have imposed.
The tax credits for electric vehicles and energy efficiency building improvements would end almost immediately. Consumers will have to purchase or lease a new or used EV before September 30, 2025, in order to benefit. There would be a slightly longer lead time to get an EV charger installed, but that credit (30C) would expire on June 30, 2026.
Meanwhile, energy efficiency upgrades such as installing a heat pump or better-insulated windows and doors would have to be completed by the end of this year in order to qualify. Same goes for self-financed rooftop solar. The tax credit for newly built energy efficiency homes would expire on June 30, 2026.
The bill would make similar changes to the carbon sequestration (45Q) and clean fuels (45Z) tax credits as previous versions, boosting the credit amount for carbon capture projects that do enhanced oil recovery, and extending the clean fuels credit to corn ethanol producers.
The House Rules Committee met on Tuesday afternoon shortly after the Senate vote to deliberate on whether to send it to the House floor, and is still debating as of press time. As of this writing, Rules members Ralph Norman and Chip Roy have said they’ll vote against it.
On sparring in the Senate, NEPA rules, and taxing first-class flyers
Current conditions: A hurricane warning is in effect for Mexico as the Category 1 storm Flossie approaches • More than 50,000 people have been forced to flee wildfires raging in Turkey • Heavy rain caused flash floods and landslides near a mountain resort in northern Italy during peak tourist season.
Senate lawmakers’ vote-a-rama on the GOP tax and budget megabill dragged into Monday night and continues Tuesday. Republicans only have three votes to lose if they want to get the bill through the chamber and send it to the House. Already Senators Thom Tillis and Rand Paul are expected to vote against it, and there are a few more holdouts for whom clean energy appears to be one sticking point. Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, for example, has put forward an amendment (together with Iowa Senators Joni Ernst and Chuck Grassley) that would eliminate the new renewables excise tax, and phase out tax credits for solar and wind gradually (by 2028) rather than immediately, as proposed in the original bill. “I don’t want us to backslide on the clean energy credits,” Murkowski told reporters Monday. E&E News reported that the amendment could be considered on a simple majority threshold. (As an aside: If you’re wondering why wind and solar need tax credits if they’re so cheap, as clean energy advocates often emphasize, Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo has a nice explainer worth reading.)
At the same time, Utah’s Senator John Curtis has proposed an amendment that tweaks the new excise tax to make it more “flexible.” The amendments are “setting up a major intra-party fight,” Politicoreported, adding that “fiscal hawks on both sides of the Capitol are warning they will oppose the bill if the phase-outs of Inflation Reduction Act provisions are watered down.” Senators have already defeated amendments proposed by Democrats Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire and John Hickenlooper of Colorado to defend clean energy and residential solar tax credits, respectively. The session has broken the previous record for most votes in a vote-a-rama, set in 2008, with no end in sight.
The Department of Energy on Monday rolled back most of its regulations relating to the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA, and published a new set of guidance procedures in their place. The longstanding NEPA law requires that the government study the environmental impacts of its actions, and in the case of the DOE, this meant things like permitting and public lands management. In a press release outlining the changes, the agency said it was “fixing the broken permitting process and delivering on President Trump’s pledge to unleash American energy dominance and accelerate critical energy infrastructure.” Secretary of Energy Chris Wright said the agency was cutting red tape to end permitting paralysis. “Build, baby, build!” he said.
Nearly 300 employees of the Environmental Protection Agency signed a letter addressed to EPA head Lee Zeldin declaring their dissent toward the Trump administration’s policies. The letter accuses the administration of:
“Going forward, you have the opportunity to correct course,” the letter states. “Should you choose to do so, we stand ready to support your efforts to fulfill EPA’s mission.” It’s signed by more than 420 people, 270 being EPA workers. Many of them asked to sign anonymously. In a statement to The New York Times, EPA spokesperson Carolyn Horlan said “the Trump EPA will continue to work with states, tribes and communities to advance the agency’s core mission of protecting human health and the environment and administrator Zeldin’s Powering the Great American Comeback Initiative, which includes providing clean air, land and water for EVERY American.”
At the fourth International Conference on Financing for Development taking place in Spain this week, a group of eight countries including France and Spain announced they’re banding together in an effort to tax first- and business-class flyers as well as private jets to raise money for climate mitigation and sustainable development. “The aim is to help improve green taxation and foster international solidarity by promoting more progressive and harmonised tax systems,” the office of Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez said in a statement. Other countries in the coalition include Kenya, Barbados, Somalia, Benin, Sierra Leone, and Antigua & Barbuda. The group said it will “work towards COP30 on a better contribution of the aviation sector to fair transitions and resilience.” Wopke Hoekstra, who heads up the European Commission for Climate, called for other countries to join the group in the lead-up to COP30 in November.
In case you missed it: Google announced on Monday that it intends to buy fusion energy from nuclear startup Commonwealth Fusion Systems. Of course, CFS will have to crack commercial-scale fusion first (minor detail!), but as The Wall Street Journal noted, the news is significant because it is “the first direct deal between a customer and a fusion energy company.” Google will buy 200 megawatts of energy supplied by CFS’s ARC plant in Virginia. “It’s a pretty big signal to the market that fusion’s coming,” CFS CEO Bob Mumgaard told the Journal. “It’s desirable, and that people are gonna work together to make it happen.” Google’s head of advanced energy Michael Terrell echoed that sentiment, saying the company hopes this move will “prove out and scale a promising pathway toward commercial fusion power.” CFS, which is backed by Bill Gates’ Breakthrough Energy Ventures, aims to produce commercial fusion energy in the 2030s.
All the public property owned by Britain’s King Charles earned a net profit of £1.15 billion ($1.58 billion) last year. The biggest source of income? Offshore wind leases.