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“I am increasingly becoming irrelevant in the public conversation,” says Kate Marvel, a climate scientist who until recently worked at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies. “And I love it.”
For years, such an exalted state was denied to Marvel. Every week, it seemed, someone — a high-profile politician, maybe, or a CEO — would say something idiotic about climate science. Journalists would dutifully call her to get a rebuttal: Yes, climate change is real, she would say, yes, we’re really certain. The media would print the story. Rinse, repeat.
A few years ago, she told a panel, half as a joke, that her highest professional ambition was not fame or a Nobel Prize but total irrelevance — a moment when climate scientists would no longer have anything useful to tell the public.
That 2020 dream is now her 2023 reality. “It’s incredible,” she told me last week. “Science is no longer even a dominant part of the climate story anymore, and I think that’s great. I think that represents just shattering progress.”
We were talking about a question, a private heresy, I’ve been musing about for some time. Because it’s not just the scientists who have faded into the background — over the past few years, the role of climate science itself has shifted. Gradually, then suddenly, a field once defined by urgent questions and dire warnings has become practical and specialized. So for the past few weeks, I’ve started to ask researchers my big question: Have we reached the end of climate science?
“Science is never done,” Michael Oppenheimer, a professor of geosciences and international affairs at Princeton, told me. “There’s always things that we thought we knew that we didn’t.”
“Your title is provocative, but not without basis,” Katharine Hayhoe, a climate scientist at Texas Tech University and one of the lead authors of the National Climate Assessment, said.
Not necessarily no, then. My question, I always clarified, had a few layers.
Since it first took shape, climate science has sought to answer a handful of big questions: Why does Earth’s temperature change so much across millennia? What role do specific gases play in regulating that temperature? If we keep burning fossil fuels, how bad could it be — and how hot could it get?
The field has now answered those questions to any useful degree. But what’s more, scientists have advocated and won widespread acceptance of the idea that inevitably follows from those answers, which is that humanity must decarbonize its economy as fast as it reasonably can. Climate science, in other words, didn’t just end. It reached its end — its ultimate state, its Really Big Important Point.
In the past few years, the world has begun to accept that Really Big Important Point. Since 2020, the world’s three largest climate polluters — China, the United States, and the European Union — have adopted more aggressive climate policies. Last year, the global clean-energy market cracked $1 trillion in annual investment for the first time; one of every seven new cars sold worldwide is now an electric vehicle. In other words, serious decarbonization — the end of climate science — has begun.
At the same time, climate science has resolved some of its niggling mysteries. When I became a climate reporter in 2015, questions still lingered about just how bad climate change would be. Researchers struggled to understand how clouds or melting permafrost fed back into the climate system; in 2016, a major paper argued that some Antarctic glaciers could collapse by the end of the century, leading to hyper-accelerated sea-level rise within my lifetime.
Today, not all of those questions have been completely put aside. But scientists now have a better grasp of how clouds work, and some of the most catastrophic Antarctic scenarios have been pushed into the next century. In 2020, researchers even made progress on one of the oldest mysteries in climate science — a variable called “climate sensitivity” — for the first time in 41 years.
Does the field have any mysteries left? “I wouldn’t go quite so far as angels dancing on the head of a pin” to describe them, Hayhoe told me. “But in order to act, we already know what we need.”
“I think at the macro level, what we discover [next] is not necessarily going to change policymakers’ decisions, but you could argue that’s been true since the late 90s,” Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist at Berkeley Earth, agreed.
“Physics didn’t end when we figured out how to do engineering, and now they are both incredibly important,” Marvel said.
Yet across the discipline, you can see research switching their focus from learning to building — from physics, as it were, to engineering. Marvel herself left NASA last year to join Project Drawdown, a nonprofit that focuses on emissions reduction. Hausfather now works at Frontier, a tech-industry consortium that studies carbon-removal technology. Even Hayhoe — who trained as a climate scientist — joined a political-science department a decade ago. “I concluded that the biggest barriers to action were not more science,” she said this week.
To fully understand whether climate science has ended, it might help to go back to the very beginning of the field.
By the late 19th century, scientists knew that Earth was incredibly ancient. They also knew that over long enough timescales, the weather in one place changed dramatically. (Even the ancient Greeks and Chinese had noticed misplaced seashores or fossilized bamboo and figured out what they meant.) But only slowly did questions from chemistry, physics, and meteorology congeal into a new field of study.
The first climate scientist, we now know, was Eunice Newton Foote, an amateur inventor and feminist. In 1856, she observed that glass jars filled with carbon dioxide or water vapor trapped more of the sun’s heat than a jar containing dry air. “An atmosphere of that gas,” she wrote of CO₂, “would give to our earth a high temperature.”
But due to her gender and nationality, her work was lost. So the field began instead with the contributions of two Europeans: John Tyndall, an Irish physicist who in 1859 first identified which gases cause the greenhouse effect; and Svante Arrhenius, a Swedish chemist who in 1896 first described Earth’s climate sensitivity, perhaps the discipline’s most important number.
Arrhenius asked: If the amount of CO₂ in the atmosphere were to double, how much would the planet warm? Somewhere from five to six degrees Celsius, he concluded. Although he knew that humanity’s coal consumption was causing carbon pollution, his calculation was a purely academic exercise: We would not double atmospheric CO₂for another 3,000 years.
In fact, it might take only two centuries. Atmospheric carbon-dioxide levels are now 50 percent higher than they were when the Industrial Revolution began — we are halfway to doubling.
Not until after World War II did climate science become an urgent field, as nuclear war, the space race, and the birth of environmentalism forced scientists to think about the whole Earth system for the first time — and computers made such a daring thing possible. In the late 1950s and 1960s, the physicists Syukuro Manabe and Richard Wetherald produced the first computer models of the atmosphere, confirming that climate sensitivity was real. (Last year, Manabe won the Nobel Prize in Physics for that work.) Half a hemisphere away, the oceanographer Charles Keeling used data collected from Hawaii’s Mauna Loa Observatory to show that fossil-fuel use was rapidly increasing the atmosphere’s carbon concentration.
Suddenly, the greenhouse effect — and climate sensitivity — were no longer theoretical. “If the human race survives into the 21st century,” Keeling warned, “the people living then … may also face the threat of climatic change brought about by an uncontrolled increase in atmospheric CO₂ from fossil fuels.”
Faced with a near-term threat, climate science took shape. An ever-growing group of scientists sketched what human-caused climate change might mean for droughts, storms, floods, glaciers, and sea levels. Even oil companies opened climate-research divisions — although they would later hide this fact and fund efforts to discredit the science. In 1979, the MIT meteorologist Jules Charney led a national report concluding that global warming was essentially inevitable. He also estimated climate sensitivity at 1.5 to 4 degrees Celsius, a range that would stand for the next four decades.
“In one sense, we’ve already known enough for over 50 years to do what we have to do,” Hayhoe, the Texas Tech professor, told me. “Some parts of climate science have been simply crossing the T’s and dotting the I’s since then.”
Crossing the T’s and dotting the I’s—such an idea would have made sense to the historian Thomas Kuhn. In his book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, he argued that science doesn’t progress in a dependable and linear way, but through spasmodic “paradigm shifts,” when a new theory supplants an older one and casts everything that scientists once knew in doubt. These revolutions are followed by happy doldrums that he called “normal science,” where researchers work to fit their observations of the world into the moment’s dominant paradigm.
By 1988, climate science had advanced to the degree that James Hansen, the head of NASA’s Goddard Institute, could confidently warn the Senate that global warming had begun. A few months later, the United Nations convened the first Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, an expert body of scientists asked to report on current scientific consensus.
Yet core scientific questions remained. In the 1990s, the federal scientist Ben Santer and his colleagues provided the first evidence of climate change’s “fingerprint” in the atmosphere — key observations that showed the lower atmosphere was warming in such a way as to implicate carbon dioxide.
By this point, any major scientific questions about climate change were effectively resolved. Paul N. Edwards, a Stanford historian and IPCC author, remembers musing in the early 2000s about whether the IPCC’s physical-science team should pack it up: They had done the job and shown that climate change was real.
Yet climate science had not yet won politically. Santer was harassed over his research; fossil-fuel companies continued to seed lies and doubt about the science for years. Across the West, only some politicians acted as if climate change was real; even the new U.S. president, Barack Obama, could not get a climate law through a liberal Congress in 2010.
It took one final slog for climate science to win. Through the 2010s, scientists ironed out remaining questions around clouds, glaciers, and other runaway feedbacks. “It’s become harder in the last decade to make a publicly skeptical case against mainstream climate science,” Hausfather said. “Part of that is climate science advancing one funeral at a time. But it’s also become so clear and self-evident — and so much of the scientific community supports it — that it’s harder to argue against with any credibility.”
Three years ago, a team of more than two dozen researchers — including Hausfather and Marvel — finally made progress on solving climate science’s biggest outstanding mystery, cutting our uncertainty around climate sensitivity in half. Since 1979, Charney’s estimate had remained essentially unchanged; it was quoted nearly verbatim in the 2013 IPCC report. Now, scientists know that if atmospheric CO₂ were to double, Earth’s temperature would rise 2.6 to 3.9 degrees Celsius.
That’s about as much specificity as we’ll ever need, Hayhoe told me. Now, “we know that climate sensitivity is either bad, really bad, or catastrophic.”
So isn’t climate science over, then? It’s resolved the big uncertainties; it’s even cleared up climate sensitivity. Not quite, Marvel said. She and other researchers described a few areas where science is still vital.
The first — and perhaps most important — is the object that covers two-thirds of Earth’s surface area: the ocean, Edwards told me. Since the 1990s, it has absorbed more than 90% of the excess heat caused by greenhouse gases, but we still don’t understand how it formed, much less how it will change over the next century.
Researchers also know some theories need to be revisited. “Antarctica is melting way faster than in the models,” Marvel said, which could change the climate much more quickly than previously imagined. And though the runaway collapse of Antarctica now seems less likely, we could be wrong, Oppenheimer reminded me. “The money that we put into understanding Antarctica is a pittance compared to what you would need to truly understand such a big object,” he said.
And these, mind you, are the known unknowns. There’s still the chance that we discover some huge new climatic process out there — at the bottom of the Mariana Trench, perhaps, or at the base of an Antarctic glacier — that has so far eluded us.
Yet in the wildfires of the old climate science, a new field is being born. The scientists who I spoke with see three big projects.
First, in the past decade, researchers have gotten much better at attributing individual weather events to climate change. They now know that the Lower 48 states are three times more likely to see a warm February than they would without human-caused climate change, for instance, or that Oregon and Washington’s record-breaking 2021 heat wave was “virtually impossible” without warming. This work will keep improving, Marvel said, and it will help us understand where climate models fail to predict the actual experience of climate change.
Second, scientists want to make the tools of climate science more useful to people at the scales where they live, work, and play. “We just don’t yet have the ability to understand in a detailed way and at a small-enough scale” what climate impacts will look like, Oppenheimer told me. Cities should be able to predict how drought or sea-level rise will affect their bridges or infrastructure. Members of Congress should know what a once-in-a-decade heat wave will look like in their district five, 10, or 20 years hence.
“It’s not so much that we don’t need science anymore; it’s that we need science focused on the questions that are going to save lives,” Oppenheimer said. The task before climate science is to steward humanity through the “treacherous next decades where we are likely to warm through the danger zone of 1.5 degrees.”
That brings us to the third project: That climatologists must create a “smoother interface between physical science and social science,” he said. The Yale economist Richard Nordhaus recently won a Nobel Prize for linking climate science with economics, “but other aspects of the human system are still totally undone.” Edwards wanted to get beyond economics altogether: “We need an anthropology and sociology of climate adaptation,” he said. Marvel, meanwhile, wanted to zoom the lens beyond just people. “We don’t really understand ... what the hell plants do,” she told me. Plants and plankton have absorbed half of all carbon pollution, but it’s unclear if they’ll keep doing so or how all that extra carbon has changed how they might respond to warming.
Economics, sociology, botany, politics — you can begin to see a new field taking shape here, a kind of climate post-science. Rooted in climatology’s theories and ideas, it stretches to embrace the breadth of the Earth system. The climate is everything, after all, and in order to survive an era when human desire has altered the planet’s geology, this new field of study must encompass humanity itself — and all the rest of the Earthly mess.
Nearly a century ago, the philosopher Alexander Kojéve concluded it was possible for political philosophy to gain a level of absolute knowledge about the world and, second, that it had done so. In the wake of the French Revolution, some fusion of socialism or capitalism would win the day, he concluded, meaning that much of the remaining “work to do” in society lay not in large-scale philosophizing about human nature, but in essentially bureaucratic questions of economic and social governance. So he became a technocrat, and helped design the market entity that later became the European Union.
Is this climate science’s Kojéve era? It just may be — but it won’t last forever, Oppenheimer reminded me.
“Generations in the future will still be dealing with this problem,” he said. “Even if we get off fossil fuels, some future idiot genius will invent some other climate altering substance. We can never put climate aside — it’s part of the responsibility we inherited when we started being clever enough to invent problems like this in future.”
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The Republican effort at permitting reform by way of the reconciliation process appears to have failed — or at least gotten washed out in the “Byrd Bath.”
Democrats on the Senate Budget Committee announced late Thursday night that the chamber’s parliamentarian had advised that several provisions of the new reconciliation bill text violated the “Byrd Rule” and thus were subject to a 60-vote threshold instead of simple majority rule. The parliamentarian has been going over the Senate bill for the past week and her rulings on more sections of the bill are expected this weekend.
The permitting reform plan drawn by the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee essentially allowed project developers to prevent environmental reviews from being subject to litigation if they paid an upfront fee of 125% of the review’s expected cost. A similar provision was included in the House bill.
Rhode Island Democrat Sheldon White House, the ranking member on the Committee, described the permitting language as “turning the National Environmental Policy Act into a pay-to-play scheme” and “a scam ripe for Trump-style corruption.”
Clean energy groups have historically supported efforts to streamline and speed up permitting (and many environmental groups have opposed them), although typically bipartisan ones, like the legislation worked out by the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee in the previous Congress, that never gained support in the House of Representatives. Environmental groups have long worried that permitting reform, even bipartisan bills, would benefit the fossil fuel industry by disabling checks against massive oil, coal, and gas projects, whereas the renewable energy industry often sees as an opportunity to more quickly and cheaply advance their own projects.
Payment of the fee would also impose a one year timeline for an environmental impact statement, the most extensive type of review, and a six month timeline for an environmental assessment. The timelines were not ruled out by the parliamentarian, according to the Senate Budget Democrats.
The payment aspect of the plan was crucial to give it a shot at surviving the Byrd Rule, because it meant that the provisions decreased the deficit and thus could be argued to be primarily budgetary in nature (the same way, say, a new tax is).
While the parliamentarian or the Budget Committee didn’t disclose the justification for ruling out the judicial review provisions, Bobby Kogan, a former Budget Committee staffer who works at the liberal Center for American Progress, told me that the provision could have tripped up multiple provisions of the Byrd Rule.
“My guess is that judicial review is presumably outside the jurisdiction of EPW and it’s also probably non-budgetary. If it was budgetary, it’s probably merely incidental — it’s fundamentally about permitting,” Kogan said. “Almost certainly, the judicial thing was killed for merely incidental,” Kogan told me.
A Senate Budget spokesperson did not return a request for comment.
Republicans in the Senate could simply drop the provision or force the whole Senate to take a vote on it — but that vote would be subject to the 60-vote threshold to defeat a filibuster.
While the parliamentarian’s ruling probably means that this attempt at meaningful permitting reform is likely dead, the Trump administration and the Supreme Court have taken several whacks at the National Environmental Policy Act, with the Court recently ruling that agencies can limit themselves to the immediately environmental impact of government actions and instructing lower courts to give more deference to agencies’ reviews.
A new “foreign entities of concern” proposal might be just as unworkable as the House version.
In the House’s version of Trump’s One, Big, Beautiful Bill Act Republicans proposed denying tax credits to clean energy companies whose supply chains contained any ties — big or small — to China. The rules were so administratively and logistically difficult, industry leaders said, that they were effectively the same as killing the tax credits altogether.
Now the Senate is out with a different proposal that, at least on its face, seems to be more flexible and easier to comply with. But upon deeper inspection, it may prove just as unworkable.
“It has the veneer of giving more specificity and clarity,” Kristina Costa, a Biden White House official who worked on Inflation Reduction Act implementation, told me. “But a lot of the fundamental issues that were present in the House bill remain.”
The provisions in question are known as the “foreign entities of concern” or FEOC rules. They penalize companies for having financial or material relationships with 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.
The Inflation Reduction Act imposed FEOC restrictions on just one clean energy tax credit — the $7,500 consumer credit for electric vehicles. Starting in 2024, if automakers wanted their cars to qualify, they could not use battery components that were manufactured or assembled by a FEOC. The rules ratcheted up over time, later disallowing critical minerals extracted or processed by a FEOC.
The idea, Costa told me, was to “target the most economically important components and materials for our energy security and economic security.” But now, the GOP is attempting to impose FEOC restrictions liberally to every tax credit and every component, in a world where China is the biggest lithium producer and dominates roughly 80% of the solar supply chain.
Not only would sourcing outside China be challenging, it would also be an administrative nightmare. The way the House’s reconciliation bill was written, a single bolt or screw sourced from a Chinese company, or even a business partially owned by Chinese citizens, could disqualify an entire project. “How in the world are you going to trace five layers down to a subcontractor who’s buying a bolt and a screw?” John Ketchum, the CEO of the energy company NextEra, said at a recent Politico summit. Ketchum deemed the rules “unworkable.”
The Senate proposal would similarly attach FEOC rules to every tax credit, but it has a slightly different approach. Rather than a straight ban on Chinese sourcing, the bill would phase-in supply chain restrictions, requiring project developers and manufacturers to use fewer and fewer Chinese-sourced inputs over time. For example, starting next year, in order for a solar farm to qualify for tax credits, 40% of the value of the materials used to develop the project could not be tied to a FEOC. By 2030, the threshold would rise to 60%. The bill includes a schedule of benchmarks for each tax credit.
“That might be strict, but it’s clearer and more specific, and it’s potentially doable,” Derrick Flakoll, the senior policy associate for North America at BloombergNEF, told me. “It’s not an all or nothing test.”
But how companies should calculate this percentage is not self-evident. The Senate bill instructs the Treasury department to issue guidance for how companies should weigh the various sub-components that make up a project. It references guidance issued by the Biden administration for the purposes of qualifying for a domestic content bonus credit, and says companies can use this for the FEOC rules until new guidance is issued.
Mike Hall, the CEO of a company called Anza that provides supply chain data and analytics to solar developers, told me he felt that the schedule was achievable for solar farm developers. But the Biden-era guidance only contains instructions for wind, solar, and batteries. It’s unclear what a company building a geothermal project or seeking to claim the manufacturing tax credit would need to do.
Costa was skeptical that the Senate bill was, in fact, clearer or more specific than the House version. “They’re not providing the level of precision in their definitions that it would take to be confident that the effect of what they’re doing here will not still require going upstream to every nut, bolt, screw, and wire in a project,” she said.
It’s also hard to tell whether certain parts of the text are intentional or a drafting error. There’s a section that Flakoll had interpreted as a grandfathering clause to allow companies to exempt certain components from the calculation if they had pre-existing procurement contracts for those materials. But Costa said that even though that seems to have been the intent, the way that it’s written does not actually achieve that goal.
In addition to rules on sourcing, the Senate bill would introduce strict ownership rules that could potentially disqualify projects that are already under construction or factories that are already producing eligible components. The text contains a long list defining various relationships with Chinese entities that would disqualify a company from tax credits. Perhaps the simplest one is if a Chinese entity owns just 25% of the company.
BloombergNEF analyzed the pipeline of solar and battery factories that are operational, under construction, or have been announced in the U.S. as of March, and quite a few have links to China. The research firm identified 22 firms “headquartered in China with Chinese parent companies or majority-Chinese shareholders” that are behind more than 100 existing or planned solar or battery factories in the U.S.
One example is AESC, a Japanese battery manufacturer that sold a controlling stake in the business to a Chinese company in 2018. AESC has two gigafactories under construction in Kentucky and South Carolina, both of which are currently paused, and a third operating in Tennessee. Another is Illuminate USA, a joint venture between U.S. renewables developer Invenergy and Chinese solar panel manufacturer LONGi; it began producing solar panels at a new factory in Ohio last year. The sources I reached out to would not comment on whether they thought that Ford, which has a licensing deal with Chinese battery maker CATL, would be affected. Ford did not respond to a request for comment.
Hall told me he would expect to see Chinese companies try to divest from these projects. But even then, if the business is still using Chinese intellectual property, it may not qualify. “It’s just a lot of hurdles for some of these factories that are already in flight to clear,” he said.
In general, the FEOC language in the Senate bill was “still not good,” he said, but “a big improvement from what was in the House language, which just seemed like an insurmountable challenge.”
Albert Gore, the executive director of the Zero Emissions Transportation Association, had a similar assessment. “Of course, the House bill isn’t the only benchmark,” he told me. “Current law is, in my view, the current benchmark, and this is going to have a pretty negative impact on our industry.”
A statement from the League of Conservation Voters’ Vice President of Federal Policy Matthew Davis was more grave, warning that the Trump administration could use the ambiguity in the bill to block projects and revoke credits. “The FEOC language remains a convoluted, barely workable maze that invites regulatory chaos, giving the Trump administration wide-open authority to worsen and weaponize the rules through agency guidance,” he wrote.
On storm damage, the Strait of Hormuz, and Volkswagen’s robotaxi
Current conditions: A dangerous heat dome is forming over central states today and will move progressively eastward over the next week • Wildfire warnings have been issued in London • Typhoon Wutip brought the worst flooding in a century to China’s southern province of Guangdong.
Hurricane Erick made landfall as a Category 3 storm on Mexico’s Pacific coast yesterday with maximum sustained winds around 125 mph. Damages are reported in Oaxaca and Guerrero. The storm is dissipating now, but it could drop up to 6 inches of rain in some parts of Mexico and trigger life-threatening flooding and mudslides, according to the National Hurricane Center. Erick is the earliest major hurricane to make landfall on Mexico's Pacific coast, and one of the fastest-intensifying storms on record: It strengthen from a tropical storm to a Category 4 storm in just 24 hours, a pattern of rapid intensification that is becoming more common as the Earth warms due to human-caused climate change. As meteorologist and hurricane expert Michael Lowry noted, Mexico’s Pacific coast was “previously unfamiliar with strong hurricanes” but has been battered by epic storms over the last two years. Acapulco is still recovering from Category 5 Hurricane Otis, which struck in late 2023.
AccuWeather
An oil tanker collision near the Strait of Hormuz is raising environmental and security concerns. The accident in the Gulf of Oman involved the Adalynn and Front Eagle tankers. It caused a “small oil spill,” according to the Emirati government, but Greenpeace analyzed satellite images and said the oil plume stretches some six square miles from the collision site. “This is just one of many dangerous incidents to take place in the past years,” said Greenpeace campaigner Farah Al Hattab. The Strait of Hormuz is a choke point for oil shipments, with about one-third of the volume of crude exported by sea moving through that route. Oil prices have been on a roller coaster ride since Israel launched airstrikes against Iran on June 13. Ships in the region have been reporting more GPS navigation interference in recent days. “If the conflict continues, we expect these interferences to continue as well,” Jean-Charles Gordon, senior director of ship tracking at research firm Kpler, toldThe New York Times.
North Carolina lawmakers finalized a bill repealing a mandate that directs electric regulators to reduce their carbon dioxide emissions by 70% by 2030. The mandate was part of a landmark 2021 law aimed at dramatically reducing the state’s power plant emissions. While at least 17 other states have similar laws in place, just two – North Carolina and Virginia – are in the Southeast. The new bill’s supporters say that the interim emissions goal would require energy providers to switch to more expensive power sources and that the costs would be passed on to consumers in the form of higher power bills.
Confusingly, regulators would still be asked to work toward carbon neutrality by 2050, even while the short-term emissions goal might be nixed. “Not having any target, even an aspirational target, could mean that we don’t stay on track to get to our 2050 goal,” Democratic Sen. Julie Mayfield said. The bill now goes to Democratic Gov. Josh Stein’s desk. There’s a chance he might veto it, but “with over a dozen House and Senate Democrats voting for the final version, the chances that any Stein veto could be overridden are higher,” The Associated Pressreported.
The United Kingdom issued long-awaited environmental guidance that it will use to determine whether new oil and gas proposals should be approved. The guidance requires that developers estimate and include scope 3 emissions – or the downstream pollution from burning oil and gas – in their drilling applications. This “will ensure the full effects of fossil fuel extraction on the environment are recognized in consenting decisions,” the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero said. The government will consider these emissions, as well as other factors like “the potential economic impact” of a project and a company’s efforts to remove carbon dioxide when granting or denying approval. The guidance will help determine whether major new drilling projects from oil giants Shell and Equinor are approved for the North Sea.
Volkswagen Group unveiled its first fully autonomous production vehicle, the ID. Buzz AD. The electric robotaxis will target corporate customers and mobility services. They “come packed with everything that’s needed to operate them,” explained Iulian Dnistran at InsideEVs. “What makes this solution interesting compared to other ride-hailing platforms is that it enables anybody to start an Uber or Waymo rival without investing hundreds of millions of dollars in research, development, and certification.” The shuttles are slated for launch across Europe and the U.S. next year. Tesla recently announced that its first Robotaxis would hit the streets in Austin, Texas, sometime this month.
Volkswagen
In a new peer-reviewed paper published in the journal Communications Earth & Environment, researchers conclude that offsetting the potential carbon emissions from reserves held by the world’s 200 largest fossil fuel companies would require planting new forests that are larger than the entire continent of North America.