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The UN panel will write its next round of reports against the backdrop of a world hitting its climate deadlines — and facing the consequences.
Our world is on the edge of a climate precipice, says a major new report from a panel of UN climate scientists, and the next decade will be crucial in deciding what its future will look like. But catastrophe is not inevitable, the scientists said, and the report laid out a path back from the edge.
“The climate time-bomb is ticking,” said UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres, calling the report a “survival guide for humanity.”
This report, known as a “synthesis,” brings together the key findings of the work done by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) over the last few years as part of its regular review of climate science and the state of the world’s efforts to address climate change. If climate science is over, this report is the endcap. The next round of IPCC reports won’t be published until around 2030, which means they’ll be written against the backdrop of a world hitting its climate deadlines — and facing the consequences.
Earth has warmed by 1.1 degrees Celsius since preindustrial times, a change the report says was “unequivocally caused” by human activities, primarily greenhouse gas emissions. That brings us perilously close to the crucial figure of 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming, the target agreed to in the 2015 Paris Agreement that is commonly considered the upper edge of acceptable warming before climate impacts become catastrophic.
Despite pledges to reduce emissions, carbon emissions have been increasing, the report says, and the impacts of climate change are already appearing faster and more intensely than previously predicted. But there is still time to change course, and every bit of progress will be crucial — the severity of climate impacts depends on fractions of degrees, and even if we blow through our 1.5 degree target, we should be doing our best to stop any additional warming.
“Almost irrespective of our choices in the near term, we will probably reach 1.5 degrees in the first half of the next decade,” said Peter Thorne, a lead author of the synthesis report, in a press conference on Monday. “The real question is whether our will to reduce emissions means we reach 1.5 degrees, maybe go a little bit over, but then come back down, or whether we go blasting through 1.5 degrees, go through even 2 degrees, and keep on going. So the future really is in our hands. That’s why the rest of this decade is key.”
The report doesn’t include any new solutions; we already know what needs to happen. To keep warming under 1.5 degrees Celsius, greenhouse gas emissions would need to peak in the next two years, and carbon dioxide emissions would have to be reduced by 65% by 2035, the report says — a new benchmark that illustrates just how drastic cuts to emissions would have to be to avert catastrophe.
But the report comes amidst a mixed backdrop. Last year President Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act — which “stand[s] to turbocharge the transformation of the American energy system” — into law, and Europe has seen a major push in decarbonization, particularly in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. In 2020, Chinese president Xi Jinping pledged his country’s carbon emissions would peak by 2030.
But that’s not the whole story. Major polluters, including the U.S. and China, are still approving new fossil fuel extraction projects that will doubtless contribute to increased greenhouse gas emissions. Even though renewable energy generation surpassed coal in the U.S. last year, carbon emissions still rose by 1.3 percent — and new major drilling projects in Alaska haven’t even started yet.
Even the IPCC’s work itself has previously been delayed by fossil fuel interests — UN member states have to approve the language of the text, and last year the Saudi Arabian government successfully lobbied to delay the release of a report in order to tone down language that called for the phase-out of fossil fuels and inject an emphasis on unproven carbon-capture technologies. Negotiations for this year’s synthesis report, which was supposed to be approved on Friday, dragged into Sunday as countries quibbled over language.
In November, countries will gather in Dubai for the UN’s climate conference, where they will witness the conclusion of the first global stocktake, which assesses the world’s progress towards the goals set out in the Paris Agreement. Combined with the stocktake, the findings in the synthesis report will provide a firm scientific foundation for negotiations at the conference. What remains to be seen is whether the science can outweigh capital — last year, major oil producers blocked an effort to include language calling for a “phase-down” of all fossil fuels in the final agreement.
The IPCC was founded in 1988 to provide a comprehensive look at everything we knew about climate change and how it might impact our lives in the future; at the time, climate change was more of an abstraction than a lived reality, and the panel’s reports gave shape to that abstraction. The release of the synthesis is a sign that the IPCC’s work, for now, is done. In the press conference on Monday, the report’s authors stressed the urgency of action from governments, businesses, and individuals alike.
“We at all levels: governments, communities, individuals, have made climate change someone else’s problem,” said Thorne. “We have to stop that. We have to act now.”
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The Loan Programs Office is good for more than just nuclear funding.
That China has a whip hand over the rare earths mining and refining industry is one of the few things Washington can agree on.
That’s why Alex Jacquez, who worked on industrial policy for Joe Biden’s National Economic Council, found it “astounding”when he read in the Washington Post this week that the White House was trying to figure out on the fly what to do about China restricting exports of rare earth metals in response to President Trump’s massive tariffs on the country’s imports.
Rare earth metals have a wide variety of applications, including for magnets in medical technology, defense, and energy productssuch as wind turbines and electric motors.
Jacquez told me there has been “years of work, including by the first Trump administration, that has pointed to this exact case as the worst-case scenario that could happen in an escalation with China.” It stands to reason, then, that experienced policymakers in the Trump administration might have been mindful of forestalling this when developing their tariff plan. But apparently not.
“The lines of attack here are numerous,” Jacquez said. “The fact that the National Economic Council and others are apparently just thinking about this for the first time is pretty shocking.”
And that’s not the only thing the Trump administration is doing that could hamper American access to rare earths and critical minerals.
Though China still effectively controls the global pipeline for most critical minerals (a broader category that includes rare earths as well as more commonly known metals and minerals such as lithium and cobalt), the U.S. has been at work for at least the past five years developing its own domestic supply chain. Much of that work has fallen to the Department of Energy, whose Loan Programs Office has funded mining and processing facilities, and whose Office of Manufacturing and Energy Supply Chains hasfunded and overseen demonstration projects for rare earths and critical minerals mining and refining.
The LPO is in line for dramatic cuts, as Heatmap has reported. So, too, are other departments working on rare earths, including the Office of Manufacturing and Energy Supply Chains. In its zeal to slash the federal government, the Trump administration may have to start from scratch in its efforts to build up a rare earths supply chain.
The Department of Energy did not reply to a request for comment.
This vulnerability to China has been well known in Washington for years, including by the first Trump administration.
“Our dependence on one country, the People's Republic of China (China), for multiple critical minerals is particularly concerning,” then-President Trump said in a 2020 executive order declaring a “national emergency” to deal with “our Nation's undue reliance on critical minerals.” At around the same time, the Loan Programs Office issued guidance “stating a preference for projects related to critical mineral” for applicants for the office’s funding, noting that “80 percent of its rare earth elements directly from China.” Using the Defense Production Act, the Trump administration also issued a grant to the company operating America's sole rare earth mine, MP Materials, to help fund a processing facility at the site of its California mine.
The Biden administration’s work on rare earths and critical minerals was almost entirely consistent with its predecessor’s, just at a greater scale and more focused on energy. About a month after taking office, President Bidenissued an executive order calling for, among other things, a Defense Department report “identifying risks in the supply chain for critical minerals and other identified strategic materials, including rare earth elements.”
Then as part of the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022, the Biden administration increased funding for LPO, which supported a number of critical minerals projects. It also funneled more money into MP Materials — including a $35 million contract from the Department of Defense in 2022 for the California project. In 2024, it awarded the company a competitive tax credit worth $58.5 million to help finance construction of its neodymium-iron-boron magnet factory in Texas. That facilitybegan commercial operation earlier this year.
The finished magnets will be bought by General Motors for its electric vehicles. But even operating at full capacity, it won’t be able to do much to replace China’s production. The MP Metals facility is projected to produce 1,000 tons of the magnets per year.China produced 138,000 tons of NdFeB magnets in 2018.
The Trump administration is not averse to direct financial support for mining and minerals projects, but they seem to want to do it a different way. Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum has proposed using a sovereign wealth fund to invest in critical mineral mines. There is one big problem with that plan, however: the U.S. doesn’t have one (for the moment, at least).
“LPO can invest in mining projects now,” Jacquez told me. “Cutting 60% of their staff and the experts who work on this is not going to give certainty to the business community if they’re looking to invest in a mine that needs some government backstop.”
And while the fate of the Inflation Reduction Act remains very much in doubt, the subsidies it provided for electric vehicles, solar, and wind, along with domestic content requirements have been a major source of demand for critical minerals mining and refining projects in the United States.
“It’s not something we’re going to solve overnight,” Jacquez said. “But in the midst of a maximalist trade with China, it is something we will have to deal with on an overnight basis, unless and until there’s some kind of de-escalation or agreement.”
A conversation with VDE Americas CEO Brian Grenko.
This week’s Q&A is about hail. Last week, we explained how and why hail storm damage in Texas may have helped galvanize opposition to renewable energy there. So I decided to reach out to Brian Grenko, CEO of renewables engineering advisory firm VDE Americas, to talk about how developers can make sure their projects are not only resistant to hail but also prevent that sort of pushback.
The following conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.
Hiya Brian. So why’d you get into the hail issue?
Obviously solar panels are made with glass that can allow the sunlight to come through. People have to remember that when you install a project, you’re financing it for 35 to 40 years. While the odds of you getting significant hail in California or Arizona are low, it happens a lot throughout the country. And if you think about some of these large projects, they may be in the middle of nowhere, but they are taking hundreds if not thousands of acres of land in some cases. So the chances of them encountering large hail over that lifespan is pretty significant.
We partnered with one of the country’s foremost experts on hail and developed a really interesting technology that can digest radar data and tell folks if they’re developing a project what the [likelihood] will be if there’s significant hail.
Solar panels can withstand one-inch hail – a golfball size – but once you get over two inches, that’s when hail starts breaking solar panels. So it’s important to understand, first and foremost, if you’re developing a project, you need to know the frequency of those events. Once you know that, you need to start thinking about how to design a system to mitigate that risk.
The government agencies that look over land use, how do they handle this particular issue? Are there regulations in place to deal with hail risk?
The regulatory aspects still to consider are about land use. There are authorities with jurisdiction at the federal, state, and local level. Usually, it starts with the local level and with a use permit – a conditional use permit. The developer goes in front of the township or the city or the county, whoever has jurisdiction of wherever the property is going to go. That’s where it gets political.
To answer your question about hail, I don’t know if any of the [authority having jurisdictions] really care about hail. There are folks out there that don’t like solar because it’s an eyesore. I respect that – I don’t agree with that, per se, but I understand and appreciate it. There’s folks with an agenda that just don’t want solar.
So okay, how can developers approach hail risk in a way that makes communities more comfortable?
The bad news is that solar panels use a lot of glass. They take up a lot of land. If you have hail dropping from the sky, that’s a risk.
The good news is that you can design a system to be resilient to that. Even in places like Texas, where you get large hail, preparing can mean the difference between a project that is destroyed and a project that isn’t. We did a case study about a project in the East Texas area called Fighting Jays that had catastrophic damage. We’re very familiar with the area, we work with a lot of clients, and we found three other projects within a five-mile radius that all had minimal damage. That simple decision [to be ready for when storms hit] can make the complete difference.
And more of the week’s big fights around renewable energy.
1. Long Island, New York – We saw the face of the resistance to the war on renewable energy in the Big Apple this week, as protestors rallied in support of offshore wind for a change.
2. Elsewhere on Long Island – The city of Glen Cove is on the verge of being the next New York City-area community with a battery storage ban, discussing this week whether to ban BESS for at least one year amid fire fears.
3. Garrett County, Maryland – Fight readers tell me they’d like to hear a piece of good news for once, so here’s this: A 300-megawatt solar project proposed by REV Solar in rural Maryland appears to be moving forward without a hitch.
4. Stark County, Ohio – The Ohio Public Siting Board rejected Samsung C&T’s Stark Solar project, citing “consistent opposition to the project from each of the local government entities and their impacted constituents.”
5. Ingham County, Michigan – GOP lawmakers in the Michigan State Capitol are advancing legislation to undo the state’s permitting primacy law, which allows developers to evade municipalities that deny projects on unreasonable grounds. It’s unlikely the legislation will become law.
6. Churchill County, Nevada – Commissioners have upheld the special use permit for the Redwood Materials battery storage project we told you about last week.