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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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The agency provided a list to the Sierra Club, which in turn provided the list to Heatmap.
Officials at the Environmental Protection Agency remain closed-lipped about which grants they’ve canceled. Earlier this week, however, the office provided a written list to the Sierra Club in response to a Freedom of Information Act request, which begins to shed light on some of the agency’s actions.
The document shows 49 individual grants that were either “canceled” or prevented from being awarded from January 20 through March 7, which is the day the public information office conducted its search in response to the FOIA request. The grants’ total cumulative value is more than $230 million, although some $30 million appears to have already been paid out to recipients.
The numbers don’t quite line up with what the agency has said publicly. The EPA published three press releases between Trump’s inauguration and March 7, announcing that it had canceled a total of 42 grants and “saved” Americans roughly $227 million. In its first such announcement on February 14, the agency said it was canceling a $50 million grant to the Climate Justice Alliance, but the only grant to that organization on the FOIA spreadsheet is listed at $12 million. To make matters more confusing, there are only $185 million worth of EPA grant cuts listed on the Department of Government Efficiency’s website from the same time period. (Zeldin later announced more than 400 additional grant terminations on March 10.)
Nonetheless, the document gives a clearer picture of which grants Administrator Lee Zeldin has targeted. Nearly half of the canceled grants are related to environmental justice initiatives, which is not surprising, given the Trump administration’s directives to root out these types of programs. But nearly as many were funding research into lower-carbon construction materials and better product labeling to prevent greenwashing.
Here’s the full list of grants, by program:
A few more details and observations from this list:
In the original FOIA request, Sierra Club had asked for a lot more information, including communications between EPA and the grant recipients, and explanations for why the grants — which in many cases involved binding contracts between the government and recipients — were being terminated. In its response, EPA said it was still working on the rest of the request and expected to issue a complete response by April 12.
Defenders of the Inflation Reduction Act have hit on what they hope will be a persuasive argument for why it should stay.
With the fate of the Inflation Reduction Act and its tax credits for building and producing clean energy hanging in the balance, the law’s supporters have increasingly turned to dollars-and-cents arguments in favor of its preservation. Since the election, industry and research groups have put out a handful of reports making the broad argument that in addition to higher greenhouse gas emissions, taking away these tax credits would mean higher electricity bills.
The American Clean Power Association put out a report in December, authored by the consulting firm ICF, arguing that “energy tax credits will drive $1.9 trillion in growth, creating 13.7 million jobs and delivering 4x return on investment.”
The Solar Energy Industries Association followed that up last month with a letter citing an analysis by Aurora Energy Research, which found that undoing the tax credits for wind, solar, and storage would reduce clean energy deployment by 237 gigawatts through 2040 and cost nearly 100,000 jobs, all while raising bills by hundreds of dollars in Texas and New York. (Other groups, including the conservative environmental group ConservAmerica and the Clean Energy Buyers Association have commissioned similar research and come up with similar results.)
And just this week, Energy Innovation, a clean energy research group that had previously published widely cited research arguing that clean energy deployment was not linked to the run-up in retail electricity prices, published a report that found repealing the Inflation Reduction Act would “increase cumulative household energy costs by $32 billion” over the next decade, among other economic impacts.
The tax credits “make clean energy even more economic than it already is, particularly for developers,” explained Energy Innovation senior director Robbie Orvis. “When you add more of those technologies, you bring down the electricity cost significantly,” he said.
Historically, the price of fossil fuels like natural gas and coal have set the wholesale price for electricity. With renewables, however, the operating costs associated with procuring those fuels go away. The fewer of those you have, “the lower the price drops,” Orvis said. Without the tax credits to support the growth and deployment of renewables, the analysis found that annual energy costs per U.S. household would go up some $48 annually by 2030, and $68 by 2035.
These arguments come at a time when retail electricity prices in much of the country have grown substantially. Since December 2019, average retail electricity prices have risen from about $0.13 per kilowatt-hour to almost $0.18, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In Massachusetts and California, rates are over $0.30 a kilowatt-hour, according to the Energy Information Administration. As Energy Innovation researchers have pointed out, states with higher renewable penetration sometimes have higher rates, including California, but often do not, as in South Dakota, where 77% of its electricity comes from renewables.
Retail electricity prices are not solely determined by fuel costs Distribution costs for maintaining the whole electrical system are also a factor. In California, for example,it’s these costs that have driven a spike in rates, as utilities have had to harden their grids against wildfires. Across the whole country, utilities have had to ramp up capital investment in grid equipment as it’s aged, driving up distribution costs, a 2024 Energy Innovation report argued.
A similar analysis by Aurora Energy Research (the one cited by SEIA) that just looked at investment and production tax credits for wind, solar, and batteries found that if they were removed, electricity bills would increase hundreds of dollars per year on average, and by as much as $40 per month in New York and $29 per month in Texas.
One reason the bill impact could be so high, Aurora’s Martin Anderson told me, is that states with aggressive goals for decarbonizing the electricity sector would still have to procure clean energy in a world where its deployment would have gotten more expensive. New York is targetinga target for getting 70% of its electricity from renewable sources by 2030, while Minnesota has a goal for its utilities to sell 55% clean electricity by 2035 and could see its average cost increase by $22 a month. Some of these states may have to resort to purchasing renewable energy certificates to make up the difference as new generation projects in the state become less attractive.
Bills in Texas, on the other hand, would likely go up because wind and solar investment would slow down, meaning that Texans’ large-scale energy consumption would be increasingly met with fossil fuels (Texas has a Renewable Portfolio Standard that it has long since surpassed).
This emphasis from industry and advocacy groups on the dollars and cents of clean energy policy is hardly new — when the House of Representatives passed the (doomed) Waxman-Markey cap and trade bill in 2009, then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi told the House, “Remember these four words for what this legislation means: jobs, jobs, jobs, and jobs.”
More recently, when Democratic Senators Martin Heinrich and Tim Kaine hosted a press conference to press their case for preserving the Inflation Reduction Act, the email that landed in reporters’ inboxes read “Heinrich, Kaine Host Press Conference on Trump’s War on Affordable, American-Made Energy.”
“Trump’s war on the Inflation Reduction Act will kill American jobs, raise costs on families, weaken our economic competitiveness, and erode American global energy dominance,” Heinrich told me in an emailed statement. “Trump should end his destructive crusade on affordable energy and start putting the interests of working people first.”
That the impacts and benefits of the IRA are spread between blue and red states speaks to the political calculation of clean energy proponents, hoping that a bill that subsidized solar panels in Texas, battery factories in Georgia, and battery storage in Southern California could bring about a bipartisan alliance to keep it alive. While Congressional Republicans will be scouring the budget for every last dollar to help fund an extension of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, a group of House Republicans have gone on the record in defense of the IRA’s tax credits.
“There's been so much research on the emissions impact of the IRA over the past few years, but there's been comparatively less research on the economic benefits and the household energy benefits,” Orvis said. “And I think that one thing that's become evident in the last year or so is that household energy costs — inflation, fossil fuel prices — those do seem to be more top of mind for Americans.”
Opinion modeling from Heatmap Pro shows that lower utility bills is the number one perceived benefit of renewables in much of the country. The only counties where it isn’t the number one perceived benefit are known for being extremely wealthy, extremely crunchy, or both: Boulder and Denver in Colorado; Multnomah (a.k.a. Portland) in Oregon; Arlington in Virginia; and Chittenden in Vermont.
On environmental justice grants, melting glaciers, and Amazon’s carbon credits
Current conditions: Severe thunderstorms are expected across the Mississippi Valley this weekend • Storm Martinho pushed Portugal’s wind power generation to “historic maximums” • It’s 62 degrees Fahrenheit, cloudy, and very quiet at Heathrow Airport outside London, where a large fire at an electricity substation forced the international travel hub to close.
President Trump invoked emergency powers Thursday to expand production of critical minerals and reduce the nation’s reliance on other countries. The executive order relies on the Defense Production Act, which “grants the president powers to ensure the nation’s defense by expanding and expediting the supply of materials and services from the domestic industrial base.”
Former President Biden invoked the act several times during his term, once to accelerate domestic clean energy production, and another time to boost mining and critical minerals for the nation’s large-capacity battery supply chain. Trump’s order calls for identifying “priority projects” for which permits can be expedited, and directs the Department of the Interior to prioritize mineral production and mining as the “primary land uses” of federal lands that are known to contain minerals.
Critical minerals are used in all kinds of clean tech, including solar panels, EV batteries, and wind turbines. Trump’s executive order doesn’t mention these technologies, but says “transportation, infrastructure, defense capabilities, and the next generation of technology rely upon a secure, predictable, and affordable supply of minerals.”
Anonymous current and former staffers at the Environmental Protection Agency have penned an open letter to the American people, slamming the Trump administration’s attacks on climate grants awarded to nonprofits under the Inflation Reduction Act’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund. The letter, published in Environmental Health News, focuses mostly on the grants that were supposed to go toward environmental justice programs, but have since been frozen under the current administration. For example, Climate United was awarded nearly $7 billion to finance clean energy projects in rural, Tribal, and low-income communities.
“It is a waste of taxpayer dollars for the U.S. government to cancel its agreements with grantees and contractors,” the letter states. “It is fraud for the U.S. government to delay payments for services already received. And it is an abuse of power for the Trump administration to block the IRA laws that were mandated by Congress.”
The lives of 2 billion people, or about a quarter of the human population, are threatened by melting glaciers due to climate change. That’s according to UNESCO’s new World Water Development Report, released to correspond with the UN’s first World Day for Glaciers. “As the world warms, glaciers are melting faster than ever, making the water cycle more unpredictable and extreme,” the report says. “And because of glacial retreat, floods, droughts, landslides, and sea-level rise are intensifying, with devastating consequences for people and nature.” Some key stats about the state of the world’s glaciers:
In case you missed it: Amazon has started selling “high-integrity science-based carbon credits” to its suppliers and business customers, as well as companies that have committed to being net-zero by 2040 in line with Amazon’s Climate Pledge, to help them offset their greenhouse gas emissions.
“The voluntary carbon market has been challenged with issues of transparency, credibility, and the availability of high-quality carbon credits, which has led to skepticism about nature and technological carbon removal as an effective tool to combat climate change,” said Kara Hurst, chief sustainability officer at Amazon. “However, the science is clear: We must halt and reverse deforestation and restore millions of miles of forests to slow the worst effects of climate change. We’re using our size and high vetting standards to help promote additional investments in nature, and we are excited to share this new opportunity with companies who are also committed to the difficult work of decarbonizing their operations.”
The Bureau of Land Management is close to approving the environmental review for a transmission line that would connect to BluEarth Renewables’ Lucky Star wind project, Heatmap’s Jael Holzman reports in The Fight. “This is a huge deal,” she says. “For the last two months it has seemed like nothing wind-related could be approved by the Trump administration. But that may be about to change.”
BLM sent local officials an email March 6 with a draft environmental assessment for the transmission line, which is required for the federal government to approve its right-of-way under the National Environmental Policy Act. According to the draft, the entirety of the wind project is sited on private property and “no longer will require access to BLM-administered land.”
The email suggests this draft environmental assessment may soon be available for public comment. BLM’s web page for the transmission line now states an approval granting right-of-way may come as soon as May. BLM last week did something similar with a transmission line that would go to a solar project proposed entirely on private lands. Holzman wonders: “Could private lands become the workaround du jour under Trump?”
Saudi Aramco, the world’s largest oil producer, this week launched a pilot direct air capture unit capable of removing 12 tons of carbon dioxide per year. In 2023 alone, the company’s Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions totalled 72.6 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent.