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Carbon removal would seem to have a pretty clear definition. It’s the reverse of carbon emissions. It means taking carbon out of the atmosphere and putting it somewhere else — underground, into products, into the ocean — where it won’t warm the planet. But a new kind of carbon removal project shows how this formula can conceal consequential differences between approaches.
A few months ago, Puro.earth, a carbon removal registry, certified a small ethanol refinery in North Dakota to sell carbon removal credits — the first ethanol plant to earn this privilege. Red Trail Energy, which owns the facility, captures the CO2 released from the plant when corn is fermented into ethanol, and injects it into a porous section of rock more than 6,000 feet underground. Since Red Trail started doing this in June of 2022, it’s prevented some 300,000 metric tons of CO2 from entering the atmosphere, according to data published by the North Dakota Department of Mineral Resources.
There are two ways to look at what’s happening here.
If you just follow the carbon, it started in the atmosphere and ended up underground. In between, the corn sucked up carbon through photosynthesis; when it was processed into ethanol, about a third of that carbon went into the fuel, a third was left behind as dried grain, and the remainder was captured as it wafted out of the fermentation tank and stashed underground. “That is, in a broad sense, how that looks like carbon removal,” Daniel Sanchez, an assistant professor at the University of California, Berkeley who studies biomass carbon removal, told me.
But if you zoom out, the picture changes. For the carbon to get from the atmosphere to the ground, a few other things had to happen. The corn had to be grown, harvested, and transported in trucks to the plant. It had to be put through a mill, cooked, and then liquified using heat from a natural gas boiler. And this was all in service, first and foremost, of producing ethanol to be burned, ultimately, in a car engine. If you account for the CO2 emitted during these other steps, the process as a whole is putting more into the atmosphere than it’s taking out.
So, is Red Trail Energy really doing carbon removal?
Puro.earth takes the first view — the registry’s rules essentially draw a box around the carbon capture and storage, or CCS, part of the process. Red Trail has to count the emissions from the energy it took to capture and liquify and inject the carbon, but not from anything else that happened before that. So far, Puro has issued just over 157,000 carbon removal credits for Red Trail to sell.
This is, essentially, industry consensus. Other carbon market registries including Gold Standard, Verra, and Isometric more or less take the same approach for any projects involving biomass, though they haven’t certified any ethanol projects yet. (Isometric’s current rules disqualify ethanol plants because they only allow projects that use waste biomass.)
But the nonprofit CarbonPlan, a watchdog for the carbon removal industry, argues that it’s a mistake to call this carbon removal. In a blog post published in December, program lead Freya Chay wrote that because the carbon storage is “contingent upon the continued production of ethanol,” it’s wrong to separate the two processes. The project reduces the facility’s overall emissions, Chay argued, but it’s not “carbon removal.”
This debate may sound semantic, and to some extent, it is. As long as an action results in less pollution warming the planet, does it matter whether we label it “carbon removal” or “emission reduction”?
The point of carbon credits is that they are paying for an intervention that wouldn’t have happened otherwise. “You have to look at, what part of the project is being built because they receive carbon removal credits?” Marianne Tikkanen, the co-founder and head of standard at Puro told me. “In this case, it was the capture part.” Previously, the emissions from the fermentation tank were considered to be zero, since the carbon started in the atmosphere and ended up back in the atmosphere. If you just look at the change that the sale of credits supported, those emissions are now negative.
But the logic of carbon credits may not be totally aligned with the point of carbon removal. Scientists generally see three roles for technologies that remove carbon from the atmosphere. The first is to reduce net emissions in the near term — Red Trail’s project checks that box. In the medium term, carbon removal can counteract any remaining emissions that we don’t know how to eliminate. That’s how we’ll “achieve net-zero” and stop the planet from warming.
But those who say these labels really matter are thinking of the third role. In the distant future, if we achieve net-zero emissions, but global average temperatures have reached dangerous heights, doing additional carbon removal — and lowering the total concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere — will be our only hope of cooling the planet. If this is the long term goal, there is a “clear conceptual problem” with calling a holistic process that emits more than it removes “carbon removal,” Chay told me.
“I think the point of definitions is to help us navigate the world,” she said. “It will be kind of a miracle if we get there, but that is the lighthouse.”
Red Trail may have been the first ethanol company to get certified to sell carbon removal credits, but others are looking to follow in its footsteps. Chay’s blog post, written in December, was responding to news of another project: Summit Carbon Solutions, a company trying to build a major pipeline through the midwest that will transport CO2 captured from ethanol refineries and deliver it to an underground well in North Dakota, announced a deal to pre-sell $30 million worth of carbon removal credits from the project; it plans to certify the credits through Gold Standard. In May, Summit announced it planned to sell more than 160 million tons of carbon removal credits over the next decade.
Decarbonization experts often refer to the emissions from ethanol plants as low-hanging fruit. Out of all the polluting industries that we could be capturing carbon from, ethanol is one of the easiest. The CO2 released when corn sugar is fermented is nearly 100% pure, whereas the CO2 that comes from fossil fuel combustion is filled with all kinds of chemicals that need to be scrubbed out first.
Even if it’s relatively easy, though, it’s not free, and the ethanol industry has historically ignored the opportunity. But in the past few years, federal tax credits and carbon markets have made the idea more attractive.
Red Trail’s CCS project has been a long time in the making. The company began looking into CCS in 2016, partnering with the Energy and Environmental Research Center, the North Dakota Industrial Commission Renewable Energy Council, and the U.S. Department of Energy on a five-year feasibility study. Jodi Johnson, Red Trail’s CEO, answered questions about the project by email. “Building a first-of-its-kind CCS project involved significant financial, technical, and regulatory risks,” she told me. “The technology, while promising, required substantial upfront investment and a commitment to navigating uncharted regulatory frameworks.”
The primary motivation for the project was the company’s “commitment to environmental stewardship and sustainability,” Johnson said, but low-carbon fuel markets in California and Oregon were also a “strategic incentive.” Ethanol companies that sell into those states earn carbon credits based on how much cleaner their fuel is than gasoline. They can sell those credits to dirtier-fuel makers who need to comply with state laws. The carbon capture project would enable Red Trail to earn more credits — a revenue stream that at first, looked good enough to justify the cost. A 2017 economic assessment of the project found that it “may be economically viable,” depending on the specific requirements in the two states.
But today, two years after Red Trail began capturing carbon, the company’s application to participate in California’s low-carbon fuel market is still pending. Though the company does sell some ethanol into the Oregon market, it decided to try and sell carbon removal credits through Puro to support “broader decarbonization and sequestration efforts while awaiting regulatory approvals,” Johnson said. Red Trail had already built its carbon capture system prior to working with Puro, but it may not have operated the equipment unless it had an incentive to do so.
Puro didn’t just take Red Trail’s word for it. The project underwent a “financial additionality test” including an evaluation of other incentives for Red Trail to sequester carbon. For example, the company can earn up to $50 in tax credits for each ton of CO2 it puts underground. (The Inflation Reduction Act increased this subsidy to $85 per ton, but Red Trail is not eligible for the higher amount because it started building the project before the law went into effect.) In theory, this tax credit alone could be enough to finance the project. A recent report from the Energy Futures Initiative concluded that a first-of-a-kind CCS project at an ethanol plant should cost between $36 and $41 per ton of CO2 captured and stored.
Johnson told me Red Trail does not pay income tax at the corporate level, however — it is taxed as a partnership. That means individual investors can take advantage of the credit, but it’s not a big enough benefit to secure project finance. The project “requires significant capital expenditure, operating expense, regulatory, and long-term monitoring for compliance,” she said. “Access to the carbon market was the needed incentive to secure the investment and the continuous project operation.”
Ultimately, after an independent audit of Red Trail’s claims, Puro concluded that the company did, in fact, need to sell carbon removal credits to justify operating the CCS project. (Red Trail is currently also earning carbon credits for fuel sold in Oregon, but Puro is accounting for these and deducting credits from its registry accordingly.)
All this helps make the case that it’s reasonable to support projects like Red Trail’s through the sale of carbon credits. But it doesn’t explain why we should call it carbon removal.
When I put the question to Tikkanen, she said that the project interrupts the “short cycle” of carbon: The CO2 is captured during photosynthesis, it’s transferred into food or fuel, and then it’s released back into the air in a continuous loop — all in a matter of months. Red Trail is turning that loop into a one-way street from the atmosphere to the ground, taking more and more carbon out of the air over time. That’s different from capturing carbon at a fossil fuel plant, where the carbon in question had previously been trapped underground for millennia.
Robert Hoglund, a carbon removal advisor who co-founded the database CDR.fyi, had a similar explanation. He told me that it didn’t make sense to categorize this project as “reducing emissions” from the plant because the fossil fuel-burning trucks that deliver the corn and the natural gas boilers cooking it are still releasing the same amount of carbon into the atmosphere. “If we say only processes that, if they're scaled up, lead to lower emissions in the atmosphere are carbon removal, that's looking at it from a system perspective,” he said. “I can understand where they come from, but I think it does add some confusion.”
Red Trail Energy and Summit Carbon Solutions defended the label, noting that this is the way carbon market registries have decided to treat biomass-based carbon sequestration projects. “The fact that emissions remain from the lifecycle of the corn itself is not the focus of the removal activity,” Johnson told me. “The biogenic CO2 is clearly removed from the atmosphere permanently.”
Sanchez, the Berkeley professor, argued that Puro’s rules are adequate because there’s a path for ethanol plants to eventually achieve net-negative emissions. They will have to capture emissions from the boiler, in addition to the fermentation process, and make a few other tweaks, like using renewable natural gas, according to a recent peer-reviewed study Sanchez authored. “That's not what's happening here,” he told me, “but I view that as indicative that this is part of the basket of technologies that we use to reach net-zero and to suck CO2 out of the air.”
(Red Trail is working on reducing its emissions even more, Johnson told me. The company is finishing engineering on a new combined heat and power system that will improve efficiency at the plant.)
In addition to teaching at Berkeley, Sanchez is a principal scientist for the firm Carbon Direct, which helps corporate buyers find “high quality” carbon removal credits. He added that he felt the project was “worthy" of the dollars companies are designating for carbon removal because of the risk it involved, and the fact that it would blaze a trail for others to follow. Ethanol CCS projects will help build up carbon storage infrastructure and expertise, enabling other carbon removal projects in the future.
Though there is seeming consensus among carbon market participants that this is carbon removal, scientists outside the industry are more skeptical. Katherine Maher, an Earth systems scientist who studies the carbon cycle at Stanford University, said she understood the argument for calling ethanol with CCS carbon removal, but she also couldn’t ignore the fact that capturing the carbon requires energy to grow the corn, transport it, and so on. “You really need to be conscious about, what are the other emissions in the project, and are those being accounted for in the calculation of the CO2 removed?”
Carbon180, a nonprofit that advocates for carbon removal policy, shares that perspective. “When it comes to ethanol with CCS, we want to see the actual net negativity,” Sifang Chen, the group’s managing science and innovation advisor, told me.
In the U.S. Department of Energy’s Road to Removals report, a 221-page document that highlights all of the opportunities for carbon removal in the United States, the agency specifically chose not to analyze ethanol with CCS “due largely to its inability to achieve a negative [carbon intensity] without substantial retrofitting of existing corn-ethanol facilities.”
It’s possible to say that both views are correct. Each follows a clear logic — one more rooted in creating practical rules for a market in order to drive innovation, the other in the uncompromising math of atmospheric science.
At times throughout writing this, I wondered if I was making something out of nothing. But the debate has significance beyond ethanol. Sanchez pointed out to me that you could ask the same question about any so-called carbon removal process that’s tied to an existing industry. Take enhanced rock weathering, for example, which involves crushing up special kinds of rocks that are especially good at absorbing carbon from the air. A lot of the companies trying to do this get their rocks from mining waste, but they don’t include all the emissions from mining in their carbon removal calculation.
Similarly, Summit Carbon Solutions noted that CarbonPlan supports claims of carbon removal by Charm Industrial, a company that takes the biomass left behind in corn fields, turns it into oil, and sequesters the oil underground. In that case, the company is not counting emissions from corn production or the downstream uses of corn.
Chay admitted that she didn’t have a great answer for why she drew the boundaries differently for one versus the other. “We don’t claim to have all the answers, and this back-and-forth illustrates just how much ambiguity there is and why it’s important to work through these issues,” she told me in an email. But she suggested that one point of comparison is to look at how dependent the carbon removal activity is on “the ongoing operation of a net emitting industry, and how one thinks about the role of that emitting industry in a net-zero world.” There is no apparent version of the future where we no longer have mining as an industry, or no longer grow corn for food. But there is a path to eliminating the use of ethanol by electrifying transportation.
It’s worth mentioning that this niche debate about carbon removal is taking place within a much larger and longer controversy about whether ethanol belongs in a low-carbon future at all.
Red Trail told me the company sees the adoption of electric vehicles as an opportunity to diversify into making fuels for aviation and heavy-duty transportation, which are more difficult to electrify. But some environmental groups, like the World Resources Institute, argue that a more sustainable approach would be to develop synthetic fuels from captured carbon and hydrogen. I should note that experts from both sides of this debate told me that carbon credit sales should not justify keeping an ethanol plant open or building a new one if the economics of the fuel don’t work on their own.
In Chay’s blog post, she presented real stakes for this rhetorical debate. If we call net-emitting processes carbon removal, we could develop an inflated sense of how much progress we’ve made toward our overall capacity to remove carbon from the atmosphere, which in turn could warp perceptions of how quickly we need to reduce emissions.
Peter Minor, the former director of science and innovation at Carbon180 who is starting a company focused on measurement and verification, raised the same concern. “When the definition of what it means to remove a ton of CO2 from the air is subjective, what happens is you get a bunch of projects that might have quite different climate impacts,” he told me. “And you may or may not realize it until after the fact.”
There’s also a risk of diverting funding that could go toward scaling up more challenging, more expensive, but truly net-negative solutions such as direct air capture. This risk is compounded by the growing pressure on carbon market players like Puro and Carbon Direct to identify new, more affordable carbon removal projects. Over the past several years, influential groups like the Science Based Targets initiative and corporate sustainability thought leaders like Stripe and Microsoft have decided that old-school carbon credits — the cheaper so-called “offsets” that represent emissions reductions — are not good enough. Now companies are expected to buy carbon removal credits to fulfill their climate promises to customers, lest they be accused of greenwashing.
As a result, the industry has backed itself into a corner, Minor told me. “We have come out as a society and said, the only thing that is worth it, the only thing that is allowed to be used is carbon removal,” he said. “So if that's the only thing with economics behind it, then yeah, like, magic! Everything is now all of a sudden carbon removal! Who would have predicted that this could have happened?”
The success of carbon removal depends, ultimately, on integrity — the industry’s favorite word these days. From the companies trying to remove carbon, to the carbon credit registries validating those efforts, to the nonprofits, brokers, and buyers that want to see the market scale, everyone is talking about developing transparent and trustworthy processes for measuring how much carbon is removed from the atmosphere by a given intervention. But how good is good measurement if experts don’t agree on what should be measured?
“There hasn't been a way to standardize the climate impacts that are being promised,” said Minor. “And so I think unless we solve that problem, I just don't see how we're going to build the trust we need, to create the economics that we need and justify an industry that can’t really exist outside of the millions or billions of tons scale.”
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When the Senate returns from recess next week, it will have Trump’s “One Big, Beautiful Bill” to contend with. There’s no doubt the chamber will try to make changes to the omnibus plan to extend and expand Trump’s tax cuts that passed the House last week. The president even told reporters over the weekend that senators should “make the changes they want to make,” and that some of the changes “maybe are something I’d agree with, to be honest.”
Whether those changes include salvaging the nation’s clean energy tax credits will likely depend on a small group of Republican senators who have criticized the House’s near-total gutting of the subsidies and how much they are willing to fight to undo it.
The bill that passed the House would outright eliminate consumer tax credits for electric vehicles, rooftop solar, and both energy efficiency renovations and new energy-efficient homes. It would also kill the clean hydrogen tax credit at the end of this year and give most zero-carbon power plants, including wind, solar, and geothermal, an end-of-year deadline to start construction, among many other damaging provisions.
To date, at least eight Senate Republicans have spoken out against at least some of these changes, but none of them have tied their vote to the issue. The pressure to stick with your party is “enormous” when your vote is the difference between a bill’s success or failure, Josh Freed, the senior vice president for climate and energy at Third Way, told me. “As we saw in the House, the biggest question is whether any Republican Senator, when push comes to shove, has any willingness to try to stop this bill in order to defend energy tax credits.”
Pay attention to what they say over the next few weeks — and when they say it. It’s one thing to speak out when everything’s still up in the air. It’s quite another to keep talking when votes are on the line.
When the budget fight was first heating up in April, four senators led by Lisa Murkowski of Alaska sent a letter to Majority Leader John Thune warning that repealing the tax credits “would create uncertainty, jeopardizing capital allocation, long-term project planning, and job creation in the energy sector and across our broader economy.” The three co-authors were Thom Tillis of North Carolina, Susan Collins of Maine, and Jerry Moran of Kansas.
Last week, after the House modified its proposal to phase out the tax credits more aggressively, Murkowski told Politico the Senate was “obviously going to be looking at” the provisions “as well as the final product, and kind of seeing where we start our conversation.” The moderate Republican has a history of supporting environmental policy, and has already broken with her party on at least one vote this year. In February, she was the only Republican who voted in favor of a Democrat-led effort to reinstate 5,500 federal public lands employees that had been fired by the Department of Government Efficiency. (The legislation failed.) Murkowski has also gone her own way to support more efficient energy codes, loans for electric vehicle manufacturers, and the impeachment of President Trump over the January 6 insurrection. But she did not vote for the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022, and if you look at her overall voting record, these occasions of deviating from the party line have been rare.
Tillis, who is a member of the Finance Committee and will therefore be directly involved in writing the tax credit portion of the bill, has made more specific comments. He said he would push to wind down the tax credits more slowly to give businesses more time to prepare. “We have a lot of work that we need to do on the timeline and scope of the production and investment tax credits,” he told Politico in the same article.
While Tillis does not have the same kind of track record as Murkowski, he’s up for re-election next year, and his state has a lot to lose. Some 34 clean energy projects worth $20 billion in investment and tied to more than 17,000 jobs came to North Carolina because of the tax credits, according to the advocacy group Climate Power. Toyota invested in an EV battery manufacturing plant and just started production last month. Several EV charger manufacturers are setting up shop in the state. Siemens Energy is building a factory to make large power transformers, equipment that is essential to expanding the grid and is currently in very tight supply.
Susan Collins is also running again next year. While the Inflation Reduction Act hasn’t spurred much manufacturing in Maine, it has driven a clean energy boom. The Maine Climate Labor Council, a coalition of unions, estimates there are 145 utility-scale clean energy projects that are either operating or in development that could be eligible for the tax credits. The state has also made a big energy efficiency push in recent years, with the tax credits supporting the expansion of efficiency jobs.
Although Collins did not ultimately vote for the Inflation Reduction Act, she was the only Republican to vote against an amendment proposed by Senator Mike Lee of Utah that would have cut funding for the law’s energy efficiency rebate programs.
When it became clear that the House was considering changes that would effectively repeal the clean energy tax credits in the IRA, Senators Kevin Cramer and John Hoeven of North Dakota, and Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia chimed in to voice their concerns. Cramer criticized new deadlines the House proposed for ending the tax credits, telling Politico that “it’s too short for truly new technologies. We’ll have to change that. I don’t think it’s fair to treat an emerging technology the same as a 30-year-old technology.”
After the bill passed the House, Jon Husted of Ohio decided it was time to speak up. “You have companies that have already made investments, made commitments,” he told the outlet NOTUS. “Supply chains have been built around them, and we need to phase that out more slowly. I think that they deserve to have at least five years of that credit.” Like Tillis, Husted has an election coming up — and 35 clean energy projects in his state to protect.
The D.C. insiders I spoke to mentioned a few other powerful senators who could play a role in the debate who’ve been mum on the IRA so far. Thune, of South Dakota, has a history of being friendly toward tax credits for wind energy, and was honored by the American Council on Renewable Energy for his support for renewable energy in 2019. Lindsey Graham, chair of the Budget Committee, has also long been a sometimes-ally for climate action in the Senate. His home state of South Carolina has been one of the biggest beneficiaries of the tax credits, with some 43 projects and 22,000 jobs at risk.
Then there are the potential spoilers. Republicans can only afford to lose three votes on the bill in order to send it back to the House and ultimately to the President’s desk, and the party has already split into a number of factions looking for various tweaks. Some, like Josh Hawley of Missouri, oppose the legislation’s deep cuts to Medicaid. Meanwhile, fiscal conservatives like Ron Johnson of Wisconsin have said they will push to reduce spending even more.
In the House, defenders of the tax credits ultimately cared more about raising the limit on the state and local tax deduction than fighting for clean energy subsidies. We could see a similar dynamic play out in the Senate, where Murkowski and Collins have also expressed concern about cuts to Medicaid. The Senate also can’t afford to change the bill so much that it will lose support in the House, so any changes will have to be surgical. The calculation will be, “What is the smallest thing that the authors of the bill can give these folks to fall back into line so that it is relatively easy to both pass the Senate and then get back through the House?” Freed explained.
Cramer, for his part, is not coming to the rescue for wind and solar, but he may be able to revive support for other forms of clean energy. The North Dakota Senator wrote a letter to Republican leaders in early May railing against the “indefinite entitlement” given to energy sources that depend on the wind and sun, and arguing that the tax credits should prioritize electricity generators on the basis of “reliability,” so as to encourage “geothermal, hydropower, coal and natural gas with carbon capture, and nuclear without excluding wind and solar.”
Capito has barely made a fuss about the energy credits, but she and Cramer will be the ones to watch to see how the Senate deals with the bill’s provision to repeal the Environmental Protection Agency’s greenhouse gas limits for vehicles, as both sit on the Environment and Public Works Committee, of which Capito is the chair. The repeal may not be allowed under the Senate’s rules for budget reconciliation, as it doesn’t have a direct effect on the federal budget. The Senate Parliamentarian hasn’t yet weighed in, but a negative ruling did not stop the two Republicans from leading the fight to revoke waivers granted to California that allowed it to set pollution limits on cars and trucks.
In the end, if any of these Senators wants to take a stand for big changes to the tax credits, they are going to need at least three colleagues to stick it out with them. A more likely outcome, Freed told me, is for them to attempt some smaller adjustments.
“Hopefully they can make it better, but they’re also under enormous pressure to not deviate too significantly from what the House wrote,” he said. “We just need to go in clear-eyed that it's going to be difficult.”
Current conditions: Southern Spain will endure multiple days over 100 degrees Fahrenheit this week • Nearly 4 inches of rain could fall in parts of southwestern China on Tuesday • It will be almost 90 degrees in New Orleans again today after high temperatures triggered widespread brownouts in the region over the weekend.
President Trump signed four executive orders Friday designed to accelerate the build-out of nuclear power in the U.S. The orders specifically call on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to speed up its approval of new reactors; relax radiation exposure limits; explore using federal lands and military bases as potential reactor sites; and grow the nation’s nuclear energy capacity from approximately 100 gigawatts in 2024 to 400 gigawatts by 2050. The orders also describe putting 10 new large reactors into construction no later than 2030 with the support of the Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office — including having at least one operational reactor at a domestic military base no later than September 2028. “Mark this day on your calendar,” Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said at the signing on Friday, per The New York Times. “This is going to turn the clock back on over 50 years of overregulation.”
At the same time, the administration’s ambitious goals come against a backdrop of reduced “personnel and funding for the NRC and the Department of Energy, along with weakening the NRC’s independence and global credibility,” Jennifer T. Gordon, the director of the Nuclear Energy Policy Initiative at the Atlantic Council’s Global Energy Center, writes — all of which will “make it challenging to realize the full potential of the U.S. nuclear energy industry.”
EPA
The Environmental Protection Agency is poised to propose that greenhouse gases emitted from fossil fuel-burning power plants “do not contribute significantly to dangerous pollution” or climate change, The New York Times reported Saturday, based on a review of an internal draft of the document. The EPA’s rationale in the proposal is that the emissions from the sector are small enough that their elimination would have no impact on public health — although according to the agency’s own accounting in 2022, the power sector is the second biggest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the country, behind only transportation.
The move by the EPA, while in keeping with the Trump administration’s deregulatory ambitions, also serves to justify its pending proposal to “repeal all greenhouse gas emissions standards for fossil fuel-fired power plants,” including coal-powered units. Previously, the agency had argued that Biden-era restrictions on coal- and gas-fired plants could prevent up to 1,200 deaths and 1,900 cases of asthma per year.
BYD
BYD announced steep discounts on 22 of its electric and plug-in hybrid models between now and the end of June, with some price cuts as big as 34%, Bloomberg reports. The company’s cheapest car, the Seagull hatchback, is down to just $7,780, while the Seal hybrid sedan saw the steepest discount of more than $7,000, to a mere $14,270. Shares of BYD closed down 8.6% after the announcement.
BYD’s cuts aim to boost customer demand, with Citi analysts anticipating the discounts could increase dealership foot traffic by 30% to 40% week on week. But the analysts also appeared skeptical that the move by BYD would be hugely beneficial to the company in its price war with rival EV automaker, noting “competition remains relatively mild.”
South Africa has proposed a liquified natural gas trade package with the United States, following a contentious meeting between President Cyril Ramaphosa and President Trump last week, Reuters reports. The deal would see South Africa import 75 to 100 petajoules of LNG annually from the U.S. over a 10-year period. Though South Africa currently does not have an LNG import terminal, the government plans to build one at the Port of Richards Bay, with the first phase going online by 2027, in order to lessen its reliance on the dwindling supply via pipeline from Mozambique. The U.S. will reportedly also help South Africa explore fracking opportunities within South Africa; the Karoo region of the country is believed to hold shale reserves, though drilling has been held off due to concerns about contaminating the water supply.
The trade package additionally includes an agreement for South Africa to avoid paying a duty on imports of cars, steel, and aluminum. According to Minister in the Presidency Khumbudzo Ntshavheni, who shared details of the deal, it will amount to $900 million to $1.2 billion in trade per year.
President Trump on Friday urged the United Kingdom to “stop with the costly and unsightly windmills and incentivize modernized drilling in the North Sea, where large amounts of oil lay waiting to be taken,” the Associated Press reports. Trump specifically cited Aberdeen as a potential hub for the “century of drilling left” — the same Scottish city where his Trump International Golf Links golf course is located, and where he unsuccessfully opposed the building of 11 offshore turbines before he became president. Despite Trump’s frequent complaints that turbines are eyesores, the BBC reported this weekend that wind farms have become an “unusual” and “surprisingly popular” tourist attraction in the UK.
Four former Volkswagen executives were found guilty of fraud in Germany on Monday for their role in the 2015 “dieselgate” emissions test cheating scandal.
The founder of Galvanize Climate Solutions and a 2020 presidential candidate does some math on how smart climate policy could help the U.S. in a trade war.
We’re now four months into a worldwide trade war, and the economic data confirms it’s Americans who are paying the price. A growing body of surveys and forecasts indicate that inflation will be a persistent, wallet-draining reality for U.S. households. Voters now expect inflation to hit 7.3% next year, and as of March, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development projects that tariffs and trade tensions could help drive U.S. inflation up by 0.3 percentage points in 2025.
But there are solutions for whipping inflation. One is unleashing an abundance of clean energy.
Clean energy can have a powerful deflationary ripple effect, lowering prices across the economy. Solar has for years been the cheapest form of new energy around the world, and recent research from Goldman Sachs shows that prices of clean technologies like large-scale solar power and battery storage are falling. These lower costs are helping to keep electricity prices more stable, even as demand rises due to the growing number of data centers, the return of U.S. manufacturing, and the electrification of transport and heating.
As a thought experiment, my team gathered data on the U.S. energy market to estimate the potential deflationary effect that accelerating clean energy development could have on the American economy. At the end of our analysis, we found that accelerating renewable energy development nationwide could reduce inflation by 0.58 percentage points — meaning that if inflation were running at 4%, widespread clean energy would bring it down to 3.42%. This would save the average American family approximately $441 each year, or nearly three months’ worth of electricity bills.
While our model doesn’t completely capture all of America’s regional complexities regarding energy policy or resource availability, it shows what’s possible. Call it the “Clean Energy Dividend” — a measurable financial return Americans receive when renewable deployment expands.
These numbers are based on something that’s already happening in Texas, where building new clean energy projects is relatively easy. Since 2019, Texas has expanded its solar capacity by 729% and wind power by 49%, faster than any other state in the nation. These developments have added approximately 39,000 gigawatt-hours of solar, 41,000 gigawatt-hours of wind to the Texas grid. In that same time, Texas has also added 9,300 megawatts of battery capacity — a 8,941% increase.
To match Texas’ success, the rest of America would need to significantly ramp up its clean energy production. According to our analysis, the other 49 states combined would need to produce nearly 73% more renewable electricity than currently planned for 2025. That means that instead of adding 66,300 gigawatt-hours of clean power to the grid this year as projected, they’d need to add 114,700 gigawatt-hours. It’s an ambitious target, but one that would help keep costs down for consumers and businesses.
The deflationary impact would hit in two ways: from direct reductions in electricity bills and from lower costs for goods and services.
First, on direct reductions: The Electric Reliability Council of Texas market, otherwise known as ERCOT, is projected to experience a 12% decrease in wholesale electricity prices from 2024 to 2025; the rest of the United States, meanwhile, is expected to see a 3% increase in retail electricity prices during the same period. This creates a 15% gap between Texas and the national average.
The average American household uses about 10,791 kilowatt-hours of electricity annually, which currently costs approximately $1,779 per year. With a projected 3% national increase, this would rise to $1,828 in 2025. If prices fell by 12% as in Texas, however, the cost would decrease to $1,571, resulting in a direct savings of about $258 per household.
Second, beyond direct savings: Our analysis found that electricity costs constitute about 2.4% of all business expenses in the economy. When businesses pay less for electricity, they typically pass about 70% of those savings to consumers through lower prices. This translates to an additional $183 in annual savings per household on everyday goods and services.
Combining these figures, the total benefit per household would be $441 annually. In terms of inflation, the direct effect on electricity bills contributes 0.34%, and the indirect effect through price decreases on other goods contributes 0.24%. Together, they account for a 0.58% reduction in inflation.
Far more than the U.S. would like to admit, its economy remains highly susceptible to oil shocks. Nearly every economic recession in the U.S. since the 1940s has been preceded by a large increase in the price of fossil fuels. Similarly, all but three oil shocks have been followed by a recession. And while the price of oil is low now, this doesn’t guarantee it will be in the future. When energy costs rise sharply — whether from conflicts, production cuts, or supply chain disruptions — the effects cascade through every sector of our economy.
Renewable energy serves as a powerful buffer against these inflationary pressures. That said, expanding renewable energy faces challenges. Some communities oppose projects such as wind and solar farms due to concerns about land use, aesthetics, and environmental impacts, leading to delays or cancellations. At the national level, the Trump administration is doing everything it can to hinder investment and slow the growth of renewable energy infrastructure. These obstacles can impede progress toward a more stable and affordable energy future — even in Texas.
There, Republican lawmakers have introduced a wave of legislation aimed at imposing new fees and regulatory hurdles on renewable energy projects, restricting further development, and mandating costly backup power requirements. These measures could raise wholesale electricity prices by 14%, according to an analysis by Aurora Energy Research. Just as the rest of America should be emulating Texas’ success, Texas is busy unraveling it to resemble the rest of America.
Still, there are several factors that can speed renewable deployment nationwide: streamlining permitting processes, developing competitive electricity markets, ensuring sufficient transmission infrastructure, and passing supportive regulatory frameworks. While geography will always affect which resources are viable, every region has significant untapped potential — from geothermal in the West to solar in the South.
No matter where you stand on decarbonization and the fight against climate change, we should pay attention to any idea that can fight inflation, put money back in Americans pockets, create jobs, make our energy more secure, and help the environment all at once. The Clean Energy Dividend may not solve everything—but it’s about as close to a win-win-win as we’re going to find.