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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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Breakthrough Energy is winding down its policy and advocacy office, depriving the Inflation Reduction Act of a powerful defender.
This is part of a Heatmap series on the “green freeze” under Trump.
A major chapter in climate giving has ended.
Breakthrough Energy, the climate philanthropy organization founded by Bill Gates, is closing its policy and advocacy office and has laid off much of its staff in Washington, D.C., Heatmap News has learned.
The layoffs will effectively gut an organization central to the effort to enact the package of clean energy tax cuts passed during the Biden administration. They will also silence one of the few environmental nonprofits that supported nuclear energy, direct air capture, and other new zero-carbon energy innovations.
More than three dozen employees across the United States and Europe are affected by the layoffs, including the office’s senior leadership.
The layoffs, first reported by The New York Times, come amid a wider billionaire pullback from donating to climate causes. The president and CEO of the Bezos Earth Fund departed last month, and the fund has yet to name a permanent replacement. Gates had already significantly diminished his climate giving earlier this year, slashing Breakthrough Energy’s grantmaking budget last month.
Gates’s investments in clean energy companies do not seem affected by the cutback. Breakthrough Energy’s venture capital and investment arm, its fellows program, and its efforts to catalyze new green products remain intact.
“Gates and Breakthrough Energy remain committed to advancing the clean energy innovations needed to address climate change,” a Breakthrough Energy spokesperson told me in a statement. “Our work is focused on accelerating the transition to a cleaner, more prosperous world.”
The closure of Breakthrough’s policy arm — and the presumed end of its grant-making operation — will alter the world of climate nonprofits. Breakthrough Energy was unusual among environmental and energy nonprofits for its enthusiastic support of all forms of zero-carbon energy, including nuclear fission, geothermal power, carbon capture and removal, and nuclear fusion. Many other prominent nonprofits — even some that have shifted to principally fighting against climate change, like the Sierra Club — are more traditional and conservation-minded, and actively oppose the expansion of nuclear power.
“The closure of Breakthrough is indicative of a broader trend that often happens when there’s a change in power in Washington, which is a retreat from federal policy and also often a retreat from the center,” Josh Freed, the senior vice president for climate and energy at Third Way, told me. The Third Way energy team was funded in part by grants from Breakthrough Energy.
“Breakthrough played a critical role in elevating and making clean energy innovation policy very mainstream. That’s going to continue — in part because of … the partners who they brought together, who remain committed to working on this,” Freed added.
The unwinding of Breakthrough Energy’s policy and advocacy arm means that the group will not see the coming battle over the Inflation Reduction Act’s clean tax cuts, which some Republican lawmakers hope to repeal later this year as part of President Trump’s broader package of tax cuts. Gates was seen as instrumental to the lobbying effort to pass the IRA, meeting with Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia and other lawmakers to support the 2022 legislation.
In an exclusive interview with Heatmap News in 2023, Gates warned that re-electing Donald Trump could derail the Inflation Reduction Act’s effectiveness.
“Right now, companies are responding to the IRA incentives. But you know, if you get Trump elected, and he really gets rid of it, there’s a lot of business plans that will [make people] feel foolish,” he said.
Even if Democrats ultimately enact new provisions similar to the IRA after Trump leaves office, Gates said, the damage of repealing the law would be permanent. “People [will] say, ‘Well, you’re asking me to make a 30-year investment. And half the time, I’m stupid.’”
Just over a year and one election later, Gates reportedly had a more than three-hour dinner with Trump at Mar-a-Lago. He later told Emma Tucker, The Wall Street Journal’s editor in chief, that he was “frankly impressed” by the president-elect.
Tesla already looked beleaguered last week as a tumbling stock price tied to public anger at CEO Elon Musk wiped out more than a half-billion dollars in value. The slide erased all the gains the company had garnered since new Musk ally Donald Trump was reelected as president. On Monday the stock went into full freefall, losing 15% of its value in one day. By Tuesday, Trump had to pose with Tesla vehicles outside the White House to try to defend them.
With a crashing market valuation and rising rage against its figurehead, Tesla’s business is in real jeopardy, something that’s true regardless of Musk’s power in the federal government. If he can’t magically right the ship this time, this self-sabotaging MAGA turn will go down as one of the great self-owns.
Musk’s heel turn has also upended EV culture and meaning. Tesla ownership, once a signal of climate virtue for those who bought in early, has been rebranded as a badge of shame. I’m annoyed that a vehicle I chose for the purpose of not burning fossil fuels has become a political albatross, and that many drivers are resorting to self-flagellating bumper stickers in the hopes it will stop vandals from spray-painting their doors. I wish I knew then what we know now, of course. But what would have become of the EV revolution if we had?
When, exactly, we should have seen Elon’s true self is a question that will inspire countless arguments amid the wave of Tesla hate. Signs were there early. By 2018, before the Model 3 even hit the road, Musk had been hit by so much criticism of his bad tweets and weird behavior that the magazine I worked for at the time felt the need to publish a contrarian defense of him as just the kind of risk-taking innovator the world needs.
That angle aged like milk, but within it lay a few grains of truth. Tesla truly did the bulk of the work in transforming the image of the electric car from a dumpy potato that only climate advocates would ever own, like the original Nissan Leaf, into a desirable consumer product. This is the company’s signature achievement, one that kickstarted the widespread adoption of EVs.
As I’ve written before, Musk wasn’t exactly untainted by 2019, when I bought my own Model 3. The Tony Stark luster of the new space age entrepreneur had worn off as the man sullied himself with pointless “pedo guy” accusations leveled at a rescuer in the Thailand cave incident. But the man had the best electric vehicle on the market, and more importantly, the best charging network. Having just moved to Los Angeles and in need of a vehicle, I wanted an EV to be my family’s only car. Without a home charger in the apartment, I simply couldn’t have lived with a Chevy Bolt or Hyundai Kona EV and the inferior charging networks they relied on at the time.
Millions of people who bought Teslas between then and now made the same choice. Some did it because a Tesla became a status symbol; many others were like me, simply interested in the most practical EV they could get. The ascendance of the Model Y to the world’s best-selling car of any kind in 2023 — a fact that feels astonishing in this flood of horrible vibes and MAGA antagonism just two years later — turned countless people into EV drivers.
After Musk’s far-right reveal, sales are tanking in the U.S., Europe, Australia, and other places that just saw a Tesla boom. Many owners, at least those with the financial wherewithal to buy a new car based on the prevailing political winds, are trying to unload their Musk-affiliated vehicles.
All those people in search of a new ride have a much better selection of electric vehicles to choose from than I did in 2019, which, weirdly, is thanks to the legacy carmakers and new EV startups that raced to catch up to Tesla. If I hadn’t bought a Model 3 in 2019, I would’ve had to get a hybrid and keep burning gasoline. If you want to avoid Musk in 2025, there are great Hyundai, Chevrolet, and other EVs waiting for you.
This isn’t to say there’s no alternate history where electric vehicles take off without Tesla. It didn’t invent the EV. Other automakers were experimenting with EVs before Musk’s company took off and conquered the market, and government environmental goals pushed carmakers toward electrification. Yet it’s hard to argue we’d be where we are now, with tens of millions of EVs on the world’s roads, without the meteoric rise of Musk’s car brand.
It stinks, simply put, to say anything nice about Tesla now, even if one is stating facts. Yes, Musk’s success buoyed electrification on multiple fronts: selling tons of EVs, forcing the other automakers to get serious about their electrification goals, and building a charging network that let his vehicles go just about anywhere a gas car would go. It also made him the world’s richest man, giving him the resources to buy and ruin Twitter and then help Trump get re-elected and undo federal policy support for the very cars he helped popularize. He made the world a better place for a moment, then ruined it because he could.
As an EV advocate, I can’t ignore the fact that Tesla got us to here. But as a human, I eagerly await the time Musk’s company no longer dominates the market it created. Thank goodness, that time seems to be coming soon.
On Lee Zeldin’s announcement, coal’s decline, and Trump’s Tesla promo
Current conditions: Alaska just had its third-warmest winter on record • Spain’s four-year drought is nearing an end • Another atmospheric river is bearing down on the West Coast, triggering evacuation warnings around Los Angeles’ burn scars.
EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said yesterday he had terminated $20 billion in congressionally-approved climate change and clean energy grants “following a comprehensive review and consistent with multiple ongoing independent federal investigations into programmatic fraud, waste, abuse and conflicts of interest.”
The grants were issued to a handful of nonprofits through the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, a $27 billion program that was the single largest and most flexible program in the Inflation Reduction Act. Zeldin has been targeting the funds since taking office, suggesting they were awarded hastily and without proper oversight. Citibank, where the funds were being held, has frozen the accounts without offering grantees an explanation, prompting lawsuits from three of the nonprofit groups. The EPA’s latest move will no doubt escalate the legal battles. As Politicoexplained, the EPA can cancel the grant contracts if it can point to specific and “legally defined examples of waste, fraud, and abuse by the grantees,” but it hasn’t done that. House Democrats on the Energy and Commerce Committee launched an investigation yesterday into the EPA’s freezing of the funds and Zeldin’s “false and misleading statements” about the GGRF program.
In other EPA news, the agency reportedly plans to eliminate its environmental justice offices, a move that “effectively ends three decades of work at the EPA to try to ease the pollution that burdens poor and minority communities,” as The New York Timesexplained.
President Trump’s 25% tariffs on all steel and aluminum imports came into effect today. As Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo has explained, the move could work against Trump’s plans of making America a leader in energy and artificial intelligence. “The reason has to do with a crucial piece of electrical equipment for expanding the grid,” Pontecorvo wrote. “They’re called transformers, and they’re in critically short supply.” Transformers are made using a specific type of steel called grain oriented electrical steel, or GOES. There’s only one domestic producer of GOES — Cleveland Cliffs — and at full capacity it cannot meet even half of the demand from domestic transformer manufacturers. On a consumer level, the tariffs are likely to raise costs on all kinds of things, from cars to construction materials and even canned goods.
The European Union quickly hit back with plans to impose duties on up to $28.3 billion worth of American goods. Trump had threatened to slap an extra 25% duty on Canadian steel and aluminum in retaliation for Ontario’s 25% surcharge on electricity (which was a response to Trump’s tariffs on Canadian goods, including a 10% tariff on Canadian energy resources), but held off after the surcharge was paused and the countries agreed to trade talks.
Wind and solar surpassed coal for power generation in the U.S. in 2024 for the first time, even as electricity demand rose, according to energy think tank Ember. Coal power peaked in 2007 but has since fallen to an all-time low, accounting for 15% of total U.S. electricity generation last year, while combined solar and wind generation rose to 17%.
Gas generation also grew by 3.3% last year, however, now accounting for 43% of the U.S. energy mix and resulting in an overall rise in power-sector emissions. But solar grew by 27%, remaining the nation’s fastest-growing power source and rising to 7% of the mix. Wind saw a more modest 7% rise, but still still accounted for 10% of total U.S. electricity generation.
Ember
“Despite growing emissions, the carbon intensity of electricity continued to decline,” according to the report. “The rise in power demand was much faster than the rise in power sector CO2 emissions, making each unit of electricity likely the cleanest it has ever been.” The report emphasizes that the rise of batteries “will ensure that solar can grow cheaper and faster than gas.”
A group of major companies including tech giants Amazon, Google, and Meta, as well as Occidental Petroleum, have pledged to support a target of tripling global nuclear capacity by 2050 “to help achieve global goals for enhanced energy resiliency and security, and continuous firm clean energy supply.” The pledge, facilitated by the World Nuclear Association, came together on the sidelines of the energy industry’s annual CERAWeek conference in Houston. According to a press release, “this is the first time major businesses beyond the nuclear sector have come together to publicly back an extensive and concerted expansion of nuclear power to meet increasing global energy demand.”
In case you missed it: Toyota plans to roll out an electric truck for the masses by 2026. At least, that’s what can be gleaned from a presentation the company gave last week in Brussels. Details haven’t been released, but Patrick George at InsideEVsspeculates it could be an electric Tacoma, or something more akin to the 2023 EPU Concept truck, but we’ll see. “While Toyota officials stressed that the cars revealed in Belgium last week were for the European market specifically, we all know Europe doesn't love trucks the way Americans love trucks,” George wrote. “And if Toyota is serious about getting into the EV truck game alongside Chevy, Ford, Ram, Rivian and even Tesla, it could be a game-changer.”
President Trump and Elon Musk showed off Tesla vehicles on the White House lawn yesterday, with Trump (who doesn’t drive) pledging to buy one and to label violence against Tesla dealerships as domestic terrorism. Tesla shares rose slightly, but are still down more than 30% for the month.
Andrew Harnik/Getty Images