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Stanford’s Rob Jackson discusses methane, the “my-ocene,” and his new book, Into the Clear Blue Sky.
Mornings are my time for thinking about Rob Jackson — specifically, when I am making coffee. Every time I reach for the knob on my gas stove to heat my water kettle, I remember something he told me during our discussion of his new book, Into the Clear Blue Sky: The Path to Restoring Our Atmosphere: “We would never willingly stand over the tailpipe of a car breathing in the exhaust, yet we willingly stand over a stove, breathing the exact same pollutants.”
Mornings, incidentally, are also my time for practicing holding my breath.
Jackson is the chair of the Global Carbon Project, a professor of Earth science and a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Woods Institute for the Environment and Precourt Institute for Energy, as well as one of the most highly-cited climate and environmental scientists in the world — all a long way of saying, he spends a lot of time thinking about kitchens and neighborhoods just like mine. But emissions aren’t the only thing that occupies Jackson’s time these days; while he stresses that reducing emissions is still the “cheapest, safest, and only sure path to a safe climate,” his book also reluctantly examines technologies that remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere after they’ve been emitted. “In truth, I’m frustrated … because we shouldn’t need them,” he explains.
Ahead of the release of Into the Clear Blue Sky on July 30, I spoke with Jackson about why it’s so difficult to make people care about atmospheric restoration in the same way they care about habitat loss or extreme weather, and the stories, people, and emerging technologies that do make him hopeful. Our conversation has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.
In the introduction to Into the Clear Blue Sky, you write that restoring the atmosphere “must invoke the same spirit and philosophy used to restore endangered species and habitats to health.” But unlike with polar bears or glaciers, we usually can’t see the damage to the atmosphere. Do you think that is part of why we’ve been so slow and halting in addressing greenhouse gas pollution?
A little bit, I do. I think the real reason we’ve been slow to address greenhouse gas pollution is because we are better at just continuing with the status quo. We aren’t making changes in our lifestyles and our industries. I’ve grown skeptical that people will respond to climate thresholds like 1.5 [degrees Celsius of warming] or 2 C. People don’t really understand why those numbers are important — they don’t understand what they mean in paleo-time, in terms of sea level rise and ice melt. I’m seeking a different motivator, a different narrative for change. And I think restoration is a more powerful narrative than some arbitrary temperature number.
There are several moments in the book where you suggest that decarbonization has benefits beyond just addressing climate change — like how feeding cows red seaweed accelerates their weight gain, or how electric motorcycles don’t have the fumes, vibrations, or noise of gas-powered motorcycles. Do you think we need to market green technologies in ways that go beyond just cleaning up the atmosphere?
Yes. Approximately half the population in the United States isn’t motivated by concerns about climate change, and we have to reach them a different way. I strongly believe that climate solutions won’t just help our grandchildren; they’ll help make us healthier today, and ultimately help us save money.
Air pollution is the best example: Our air is cleaner today than when I was a boy. So is our water. But there are 100,000 Americans who still die from coal and car pollution every year in the United States, and one in five people worldwide — that’s 10 billion people a year who die from fossil fuel pollution. Those deaths are unnecessary and senseless. We have cleaner technologies available now. So if we can help people see that clean energy and climate solutions will restore our water and air, they might be more likely to say, “Okay, let’s give it a try.”
CO2 and methane are the big villains of the book, but I noticed that you don’t tangle with nitrous oxide too much. Was there any thinking behind that decision?
The problem with nitrous oxide is there are fewer things that we can do to reduce emissions. The number one source of nitrous oxide pollution — which causes about 10% of global warming, it’s not a trivial amount — is nitrogen fertilization for our crops. It’s a very complicated discussion when you get into growing food for people around the world, especially in poor countries, and climate change caused by resource consumption in richer countries. The issues are more complicated, and the solution set is smaller.
In your chapter about hydrogen — which you express some doubts about — you say it’s not your job as a scientist to “pick winners and losers.” I’m curious about these moments of tension between your personal opinions and your position as a scientist. When do you speak up, and when do you choose to stand back?
I wish I had a perfect answer to that. I speak more often now than I did earlier in my career. I feel that we’ve run out of time. There’s more urgency today. I feel like I no longer have the luxury of just letting the data speak. I want to try to help people understand the available solutions and the things that we can do individually and systematically.
To succeed in the fight against climate change, we will, I think, need to accept solutions that are not our favorites. And that’s a difficult message. People tend to fight everything they’re not 100% happy with, but the climate is not going to be fixed by any single solution.
The part of your book that made me the most anxious was the chapter about methane leaks, where you’re driving around Boston taking air samples and having the methane sensors go off all over the place. It also reminds me of the chapter on indoor air pollution and how many of these forms of pollution are so passive — like methane quietly leaking into our homes or up from under our streets.
The city home work has been really interesting, and it’s consumed a lot of recent years of my life — much more than I expected it to. And yet the biggest surprise of our methane work in the homes was how slow but consistent leaks from appliances like stoves and the pipes in people’s walls produced more pollution than the methane that leaked when the appliances were on. And that’s because the appliance might be on for an hour a day, but for 23 hours a day, the slow bleed of methane continues to the atmosphere.
It isn’t passive, though. The pollutants we document include NOx gases that trigger asthma. Benzene, formed in flames, is a carcinogen. We would never willingly stand over the tailpipe of a car breathing in the exhaust, yet we willingly stand over a stove, breathing the exact same pollutants, day after day, meal after meal, year after year.
Your book takes readers to many places worldwide. Is there any one project or organization that stands out to you as particularly exciting or crucial?
I very much enjoyed learning about green steel manufacturing. The chapter that I enjoyed the most, though, was the trip to Finland [to see the work of the Snowchange Cooperative, a landscape restoration group]. What I liked about that project, first of all, was seeing people taking matters into their own hands and working for solutions. But what was so interesting for me was the idea of “rewilding,” in the European sense — they’re not interested in trying to recreate an exact replica of something that was present in 1900. They’re trying to restore a functioning ecosystem that will still be there in 100 years. It’s a beautiful sight and the message was very moving for me.
The book vacillates between optimism and a kind of wary realism. I think that’s kind of the conundrum of climate activists on the whole, but is it something you have thoughts about? Do you want readers to come away hopeful, or are you hoping this galvanizes action, too?
That duality, that tension, is deeply rooted in me, and perhaps many people who care about climate and environment. I study the Earth for a living; I see the changes happening not just year to year but decade to decade from now. And you can’t help but be discouraged about the lack of progress.
But on the other hand, I talk to students about how optimism and hope are muscles we can exercise. My first homework assignment in every class is for students to find things that are better today than they were 50 or 100 years ago. That list is long: life expectancy and childhood mortality; water and air quality; the decline of global poverty despite all the injustices that remain. Then there are many specific examples, like the phase-out of leaded gasoline, the Montreal Protocol, and my favorite example, the U.S. Clean Air Act, which saves hundreds of thousands of lives a year at a 30-fold return on investment, so workers are healthier and more productive. We all breathe easier and pay lower medical expenses from air pollution. So I talk to students about how it’s important to acknowledge past successes; by doing so, we make future successes, such as climate, more likely.
Are there any last thoughts about your book that you want to leave readers with?
In the book, I tend to emphasize technologies — maybe to a fault. We don’t talk enough about reducing consumption and demand. The world is deeply unequal in terms of resource use and pollution.
I’m obviously a nerdy guy, and I talk about how we’re in the “myocene” — the my-ocene — the era when the top 1% of the world’s population contributes more fossil carbon emissions than half the people on Earth. The world cannot support the global population at the levels of resource use that we have in the United States right now. Either we need to reduce our energy use and consumption somewhat, or those other people in those other countries will aspire to be like us and they’ll produce and use more.
One example is cars: if everyone in the world owned cars at the rate we do, there would be 7 billion cars instead of about 1.5 billion. And I don’t care whether those cars are EVs or hydrogen vehicles or whatever; the world would not be a more sustainable and richer place with 5 billion more cars on it. We need to talk about using less in this country, not just building new things.
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On rescissions, a nuclear deal, and a solar lawsuit
Current conditions: Thunderstorms today will span 1,000 miles from Detroit to Dallas • NOAA’s Hurricane Hunters aircrews will begin their 2025 season by gathering weather data from a disturbance off the Southeast coast of the U.S.• Romanian officials are rerouting a stream to prevent the further inundation and collapse of one of Europe’s largest salt reserves following historic floods.
The White House on Tuesday formally asked Congress to rescind $9.4 million in federal funds to make permanent some of the Department of Government Efficiency’s spending cuts. The 24-page proposal includes clawing back $1.1 billion from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which funds PBS and NPR, as well as $8.3 billion from the U.S. Agency for International Development and the African Development Foundation. Congress has 45 days to pass the measure.
Of particular note to Heatmap readers is the proposed recission of $1.7 billion of the $3.6 billion appropriated for the Economic Support Fund which, in the words of the State Department, “promotes the economic and political foreign policy interests of the United States by providing assistance to allies and countries in transition to democracy.” That has historically included working with partners to mitigate the impacts of climate change, although the White House said it aims to “refocus remaining resources on activities that align with an America First foreign policy.” Similarly, the White House asked Congress to rescind $125 million from the Clean Technology Fund, which provides financial resources for developing countries to invest in clean energy projects, arguing that it does “not reflect America’s values or put the American people first.” The White House also asked Congress to pull the full $460 million appropriated to Assistance for Europe, Eurasia, and Central Asia, which, it argued, has become a “mechanism for funding wasteful programs, including … climate programming.”
Facebook and Instagram’s parent company, Meta, has agreed to a 20-year deal with Constellation Energy to purchase the output of its Clinton Clean Energy Center, an Illinois-based nuclear plant. The deal, which begins in June 2027, includes a power purchase agreement that will entitle Meta to roughly 1.1 gigawatts of energy from the plant’s single nuclear reactor. It also allows the company to “buy the clean attributes of the nuclear-power generation to offset its less-green electricity use elsewhere” — including powering natural gas-reliant data centers in other parts of the country, The Wall Street Journal reports.
Though the financial terms weren’t disclosed, Constellation Chief Executive Joe Dominguez said, “It’s billions of dollars of capital that you’re signing up for to run a plant for 20 more years.” Meta will support the continued operation of the plant as well as upgrades and relicensing, which will prevent the facility’s premature closure, the companies said.
The California Supreme Court will hear arguments today brought by environmental groups in a lawsuit against the California Public Utility Commission for slashing the credits customers receive for selling electricity generated by rooftop solar back to the grid. The new financial structure, called NEM 3, went into effect in 2023, and in some cases cut credits by 80%. This has “stymied efforts to expand rooftop solar in the state, particularly in communities of color and low-income neighborhoods and led to huge layoffs in the solar industry,” Solar Power World explains. NEM 3 encouraged customers to use battery storage systems with their rooftop solar installations, a move viewed as friendlier to California utilities.
The Center for Biological Diversity, the Environmental Working Group, and the San Diego-based Protect Our Communities Foundation attempted to overturn NEM 3 after it went into effect, bringing their case to the California Court of Appeals, which ultimately upheld CPUC’s decision, leading to the California Supreme Court case. “It’s a fight that’s likely to continue, given that the Supreme Court appears poised to rule narrowly — and perhaps not even on the policy debate itself,” Politico’s California Climate newsletter notes.
Texas has removed BlackRock from a list of firms the state says “boycott” the fossil fuel industry, thereby allowing public agencies and pension funds to once again hire the firm, invest in its funds, and purchase shares of the asset manager, Bloomberg reports. State Comptroller Glenn Hegar specifically cited BlackRock’s retreat from climate action as influencing the decision.
BlackRock was first placed on the Texas divestment list in 2022 due to its involvement in the Climate Action 100+ initiative to reduce corporate greenhouse gas emissions, as well as Net Zero Asset Managers. Since then, BlackRock has removed itself from both programs. “We never set out to punish any of these firms, and the hope was always that any firm we included on the list would eventually take steps to ensure they were removed,” Hegar said in his remarks.
The National Weather Service is looking to hire back 125 meteorologists and specialists to its understaffed forecast offices, some of which have ceased around-the-clock monitoring and weather balloon launches due to lack of personnel, CNN reports. The move follows the NWS losing more than 560 employees this year due to the Trump administration’s efficiency cuts and early retirement offers, and functionally means lifting the federal hiring freeze for the agency so it can bolster its workforce heading into the fire, drought, extreme heat, and hurricane seasons. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is also looking to transfer 155 employees from better-staffed offices to “critical” positions at sparser offices, CNN adds.
But as I’ve reported, it is not so simple to restaff federal agencies after major layoffs. In addition to the deep staffing shortages that preceded and were exacerbated by Trump’s layoffs, the government has also damaged the appeal of working in the public sector. Most people don’t want to work for the government for the paycheck, Don Moynihan, a professor at the Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan, told me last month, but rather for the “opportunity to do meaningful work, and for job stability and security” — both of which have been damaged by the administration’s ongoing hostility toward federal workers.
The American Clean Power Association
The U.S. installed 7.4 gigawatts of utility-scale solar, wind, and energy storage in the first three months of 2025 — the second-strongest quarter on record behind only Q1 of 2024, the American Clean Power Association reports.
Rob and Jesse pick apart Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s latest opinion with University of Michigan law professor Nicholas Bagley.
Did the Supreme Court just make it easier to build things in this country — or did it give a once-in-a-lifetime gift to the fossil fuel industry? Last week, the Supreme Court ruled 8-0 against environmentalists who sought to use a key permitting law, the National Environmental Policy Act, to slow down a railroad in a remote but oil-rich part of Utah. Even the court’s liberals ruled against the green groups.
But the court’s conservative majority issued a much stronger and more expansive ruling, urging lower courts to stop interpreting the law as they have for years. That decision, written by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, may signal a new era for what has been called the “Magna Carta” of environmental law.
On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Rob and Jesse talk with Nicholas Bagley, a University of Michigan law professor and frequent writer on permitting issues. He is also Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer’s former chief legal counsel. Rob, Jesse, and Nick discuss what NEPA is, how it has helped (and perhaps hindered) the environment, and why it’s likely to change again in the near future. Shift Key is hosted by Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University, and Robinson Meyer, Heatmap’s executive editor.
Subscribe to “Shift Key” and find this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.
You can also add the show’s RSS feed to your podcast app to follow us directly.
Here is an excerpt from our conversation:
Robinson Meyer: It seems like what the court is doing here is not only basically using this to make a statement, it’s announcing a new jurisprudence on NEPA. We want you to start treating this law really, really differently than you’ve been treating it in the past. And like, we are going to come down into your room and force you to clean up this mess whenever we want to now because of how important we think this is.
Do you think that’s too strong a statement? It seems this is not only declaring what the court’s view on NEPA is, but almost declaring a new plan of action.
Nicholas Bagley: Like many Supreme Court decisions, I think it’s amenable to two competing interpretations. One is exactly as you say: It’s a new era of NEPA jurisprudence, and the basic rule of a NEPA case is now going to be that environmental groups lose. And so I think there’s no way to read the decision except as a walloping loss to environmental groups, at least as a matter of tone and, I think, intention by the Supreme Court.
But there is a narrower reading available, and one that suggests that maybe this decision won’t have as big an effect as maybe the Supreme Court justices want it to. And the reason for that is they didn’t close the door altogether on the judicial evaluation of the reasonableness of its actions. And when a court goes in and says, Hmm, has an agency acted arbitrarily? Again, that’s a multifaceted inquiry. It’s going to involve a lot of different factors. And the court says be deferential, but that’s actually always been the rule.
They use a lot of strident language here, but that strident language is not going to make a lick of difference if you get in front of a highly motivated judge who happens to dislike the project in question in a district court in New Mexico. And that happens. So if you’re an agency and you’re thinking to yourself, Can I cut back on the amount of environmental studies that I do? Can I not investigate these dopey alternatives? You might think to yourself, you know, I have like a 20% or a 30% chance, my odds are a little better than they were before — maybe even a lot better than they were before — at winning if this case is litigated. But they’re also not 100%. So maybe what I ought to do is keep doing what I’ve been doing just to be safe. And I think that’s at least a possibility. We don’t know how it’s going to play out on the ground.
The last thing I’ll say about this is, you said that the Supreme Court is going to act like your mom who’s going to come and tell you to clean up your room.
Meyer: Yeah, exactly. Yes.
Bagley: The trouble is it takes something like, what, 50 cases a year? There are hundreds of these cases brought, and there’s only so much the Supreme Court can do, and in closer cases I think it might just be inclined to let matters lie.
So, you know, I think it is reasonable to think that this is the Supreme Court’s effort to usher in a new era of unique NEPA jurisprudence. It is reasonable to think it is going to have some effects on agency behavior and some effects on lower court behavior. But it may not pretend the revolution that it looks like on its face.
Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.
On Alaskan oil, CCS, and ‘zombie plants’
Current conditions: Flights have resumed to and from Sicily after Mt. Etna’s most powerful eruption in four years on Monday • There have already been almost half as many wildfire ignitions in the U.S. in 2025 as there were in all of 2024 • More than 700 people are feared dead in central Nigeria after heavy rains and flash floods.
USGS
The Department of the Interior announced Monday that it plans to rescind President Biden’s 2024 ban on drilling in more than half of the 23 million-acre National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska. The reserve holds an estimated 8.7 billion barrels of recoverable oil, but it is also some of the “last remaining pristine wilderness in the country,” The New York Times writes.
“Congress was clear: the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska was set aside to support America’s energy security through responsible development,” Secretary Doug Burgum said in a statement announcing the proposed rule, further arguing that Biden’s ban had “ignored that mandate, prioritizing obstruction over production and undermining our ability to harness domestic resources at a time when American energy independence has never been more critical.” While the department’s announcement — which Burgum shared on Sunday at a heritage center in Utqiagvik, the largest city of the North Slope — was greeted with applause by attendees, Alaska’s senior manager for the Wilderness Society, Matt Jackson, said, “Everyone who cares about public lands and is concerned about the climate crisis should be outraged by this move to exploit America’s public lands for the benefit of corporations and the president’s wealthy donors.”
Applications for carbon capture and storage projects fell by 50% in the first quarter of the year as compared to last year, with no new permits having been approved since President Trump took office, the Financial Times reports. Industry experts blamed the uncertainty over the fate of federal grants and tax credits for the lowest application submissions since 2022 — a concern that isn’t likely to go away anytime soon, since the Energy Department canceled nearly $4 billion in clean energy grants last week, including carbon capture and sequestration projects proposed by Heidelberg Materials and Calpine, as my colleague Emily Pontecorvo has reported. By BloombergNEF’s projections, an estimated 35% of the 152 million metric tons of announced carbon capture capacity expected to come online by 2035 will be canceled before then.
The Department of Energy has ordered Constellation Energy to continue operating its Eddystone power plant through the end of the summer to prevent potential electricity shortfalls on the mid-Atlantic grid, the Associated Press reports. The oil and gas plant, located south of Philadelphia, had been scheduled to shut down its last remaining units this weekend, before Constellation received the DOE’s emergency order.
Late last month, the DOE similarly ordered a coal-fired plant in Michigan to continue operating past its planned May 31 shutdown date, although the chair of the Michigan Public Service Commission said at the time that no energy emergency existed, Bloomberg reports. By contrast, the decision to order Eddystone’s continued operation followed PJM Interconnection expressing concerns about summer grid reliability; the operator has since voiced support for the DOE’s order. But the move also has its critics: “The Department of Energy’s move to keep these zombie plants online will have significant public health impacts and increase electricity costs for people in Michigan and Pennsylvania,” argued Kit Kennedy, a managing director at the Natural Resources Defense Council.
The European Union’s climate science advisers have warned the bloc against softening its 2040 emission goals, arguing that such a move could “undermine domestic value creation by diverting resources from the necessary transformation of the EU’s economy.” The European Commission is set to propose a binding target for member nations to cut emissions by 90% by 2040 from 1990 levels, but it is also considering allowing countries to set lower targets for their domestic industries and make up the gap using carbon credits, Reuters reports. The European Scientific Advisory Board on Climate Change, which issued its warning against the carbon credit loophole on Monday, described the original 90% emission reduction goal as achievable and necessary for both the health of Europeans as well as improving security by limiting the bloc’s reliance on foreign fossil fuel sources.
Oregon-based battery energy storage system integrator Powin has filed a notice with the state warning that it could lay off 250 employees and shut down operations by the end of July. Per the notification, the layoffs would include the company’s chief executives, and “it is presently contemplated that the affected employees will be permanently terminated.”
Powin has the third most gigawatt-hours of batteries installed in the U.S. and the fourth most worldwide. Still, turbulence due to tariffs and the Inflation Reduction Act incentives has reverberated through the industry, Latitude notes. In a statement provided to the publication, Powin described “navigating a period of significant financial challenge, reflective of ongoing headwinds in the broader energy storage industry.”
The partial shading of Colorado grasslands by solar arrays could decrease water stress and increase plant growth during dry years by 20% or more, a new study in Environmental Research Letters has found.