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There is no dearth of advice on the internet about how to lower your personal carbon emissions, but if we had found any of it completely satisfying, we wouldn’t have embarked on this project in the first place.
Our goal with Decarbonize Your Life is to draw your attention to two things — the relative emissions benefits of different actions, as well as the relative structural benefits. (You’ll find everything you need to know about the project here.) For the first, we needed some help. So we shared our vision with WattTime, a nonprofit that builds data-driven tools to help people, companies, and policymakers figure out how to reduce emissions, and lucky for us, they were excited to support the project.
“So many people out there feel helpless when it comes to addressing the climate crisis, but we believe that anyone, anywhere should have the tools and information they need to make a difference,” Henry Richardson, a senior analyst at WattTime, told me as we were wrapping up this project. “So we love the idea of helping average consumers understand which actions actually available to them can meaningfully contribute to reducing climate pollution. We want to help people prioritize those higher-impact activities that can mitigate climate change faster.”
WattTime’s claim to fame is building an API that calculates the emissions impact of using the grid at a given time and place. Users can then shift their energy consumption to times when the grid is cleaner or to build renewables in places where they will reduce emissions the most.
In an ideal world, we would have taken a similar time- and place-based approach in calculating the emissions savings of each energy-related action on our list. Switching to an EV if you live somewhere with very clean power will reduce emissions more than if you live somewhere with lots of coal plants, and likewise, getting rooftop solar if you live somewhere with coal-fired electricity is more effective than in areas with a cleaner grid. But when we started to game it out, we realized that level of exactitude would be, if not exactly impossible, certainly insanity-inducing.
Instead, WattTime helped us calculate the effect of each action if it was undertaken by an “average American household” — that is, one that consumes an average amount of electricity per year, drives an average number of miles in an average car per year, uses an average amount of energy for space heating, et cetera. WattTime also pulled data from publicly available sources like the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Energy, and the Energy Information Administration, to estimate the baseline emissions and savings of a given action. We ultimately made two calculations for each action to account for two different ways of estimating the emissions from using the electric grid:
While the first method gives us a picture of how much good each action can do in an immediate sense, the second gives us a picture of how much good it can do over time. For example, using the first method, buying clean power came out on top, with rooftop solar offering the potential to cut CO2 by about 5.7 metric tons per year, while switching to an electric vehicle would cut about 3 metric tons per year. But using the second method, car-related actions won out, showing EVs cutting CO2 by 4.6 metric tons per year, and rooftop solar cutting 1.4 metric tons per year. The truth is probably somewhere in the middle.
To calculate the emissions savings from dietary changes and food waste management, we turned to two more partners: HowGood, a data platform for food system lifecycle analysis, and ReFED, which collects similar data for food waste. As with energy, we used federal data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to estimate the average American diet and ReFED’s estimates for the average American food waste mix (though note that those are for an individual, not for a household). From there, WattTime helped us determine that, for instance, just by replacing the beef in your diet with chicken, you could save nearly 2.5 metric tons of emissions each year — almost as much as you could save by going vegan.
Because we used averages and sought to simplify our list with actions like “electrify your space heating system,” rather than estimating the impact of every permutation like “switch from a propane furnace in Colorado with X efficiency to a cold climate heat pump with Y efficiency,” our estimates of emissions reductions are rough approximations and not reflective of real-world scenarios.
You’ll see that while these calculations certainly informed our ranking, they were not the sole metric we used to arrange this list. A quantitative analysis alone could not answer our question about the most “high-leverage” actions, so we used our reporting and expertise as climate journalists to fill in that last, crucial gap. Car-related actions and rooftop solar were neck-and-neck by the numbers, but we are confident that getting an EV (if you need to have a car) is more unambiguously necessary for the energy transition than getting rooftop solar. Similarly, while eating less meat can hugely reduce the carbon tied to an individual’s diet, the ripple effect it has on agricultural carbon emissions is less direct and harder to parse than the effect you can have by electrifying all your appliances and shutting down your natural gas account.
Getting an EV:
WattTime — 2.9 mtCO2/yr
Cambium — 4.5 mtCO2/yr
Structural benefits: Destroying demand for oil; increasing demand for charging stations; improving local air quality and chipping away at the social license for operating an internal combustion engine.
Getting rooftop solar:
WattTime — 5.7 mtCO2/yr
Cambium — 1.4 mtCO2/yr
Structural benefits: Get clean energy on the grid faster than utility-scale projects; influence neighbors; reduce electric demand in your neighborhood; reduce strain on grid if paired with a battery and part of a “virtual power plant”
Air-sealing and insulation:
WattTime — 1.2 mtCO2/yr
Structural benefits: Reduce strain on grid and need for grid investment; level out electricity demand to avoid the need to activate dirty “peaker” gas plants; prepare your home for cheaper, more even, and efficient heating and cooling
Switching to a heat pump for space heating:
WattTime — 1.4 mtCO2/yr
Cambium — 1.6 mtCO2/yr
Switching from a gas stove to an induction stove:
WattTime — Roughly even
Cambium — 0.1 mtCO/yr
Switching to a heat pump for water heating:
WattTime — 0.8 mtCO2/yr
Cambium — 1.6 mtCO2/yr
Switching from a natural gas-powered dryer to a heat pump dryer:
WattTime — Roughly even
Cambium — 0.1 mtCO/yr
Structural benefits: Increase demand for and reduce price of electric and efficient appliances; build a case for policies that wind down fossil fuel use; if fully electrifying, sends signal to downsize gas system.
Getting rid of your car:
WattTime — 5.17 mtCO/yr
Structural benefits: Supporting public transit and bike lanes, enabling others to use their cars less, too.
Switching from an omnivorous to a vegetarian diet:
WattTime and HowGood — 2.8 mtCO2/yr
Switching from an omnivorous to a vegan diet:
WattTime and HowGood — 2.9 mtCO2/yr
Replacing the beef in an omnivorous diet with chicken:
WattTime and HowGood — 2.5 mtCO2/yr
Structural benefits: Reduce demand for high-emitting food products, which has the double-pump benefit of reducing the amount of land required to cultivate high-emitting products; if replacing beef with chicken, increase demand for more carbon-efficient proteins; add to the business case for developing efficient plant-based proteins.
Cutting food waste in half:
WattTime and ReFED — more than 0.1 mtCO2/yr
Structural benefits: Reduce demand across the food system; send less food waste to landfill, which helps reduce methane emissions.
Composting all food waste:
WattTime and ReFED — 0.03 mtCO2/yr
Structural benefits: Encourages the build-out of municipal composting programs; encourages responsible farming practices by lowering the cost of compost; reduces demand for nitrogen-based fertilizer.
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Rob and Jesse break down China’s electricity generation with UC San Diego’s Michael Davidson.
China announced a new climate commitment under the Paris Agreement at last month’s United Nations General Assembly meeting, pledging to cut its emissions by 7% to 10% by 2035. Many observers were disappointed by the promise, which may not go far enough to forestall 2 degrees Celsius of warming. But the pledge’s conservatism reveals the delicate and shifting politics of China’s grid — and how the country’s central government and its provinces fight over keeping the lights on.
On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Rob and Jesse talk to Michael Davidson, an expert on Chinese electricity and climate policy. He is a professor at the University of California, San Diego, where he holds a joint faculty appointment at the School of Global Policy and Strategy and the Jacobs School of Engineering. He is also a senior associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and he was previously the U.S.-China policy coordinator for the Natural Resources Defense Council.
Shift Key is hosted by Robinson Meyer, the founding executive editor of Heatmap, and Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University.
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Here is an excerpt from our conversation:
Robinson Meyer: Your research and other people’s research has revealed that basically, when China started making capacity payments to coal plants, in some cases, it didn’t have the effect on the bottom line of these plants that was hoped for, and also we didn’t really see coal generation go down or change in the year that it happened. It wasn’t like they were paying these plants to stick around and not run. They were basically paying these plants, it seems like, to do the exact same thing they did the year before, but now they also got paid. And maybe that was needed for their economics, we can talk about it.
Why did coal get those payments and not, say, batteries or other sources of spare capacity, like pumped hydro storage, like nuclear? Why did coal, specifically, get payments for capacity? And does it have to do with spinning reserve? Or does it have to do with the political economy of coal in China?
Michael Davidson: When it came out, we said exactly the same thing. We said, okay, this should be a technology neutral payment scheme, and it should be a market, not a payment, right? But China’s building these things up little by little. Over time we’ve seen, historically, actually, a number of systems internationally started with payments before they move to markets because they realize that you could get a lot more competitive pressure with markets.
The capacity payment scheme for coal is extremely simple, right? It says, okay, for each province, we’re going to say what percentage of our benchmark coal investment costs are we going to subsidize. It’s extremely simple. It does not account for how much you’re using it at a plant by plant level. It does not account for other factors, renewables, etc. It’s a very coarse metric. But I wouldn’t say that it had had some, you know, perverse negative effect on the outcome of what coal generation is. Probably more likely is that these payments were seen, for some, as extra support. But then for some that are really hurting, they’re saying, okay, well then we will maybe put up less obstacles to market reforms.
But then on top of that, you have to put in the hourly energy demand growth story and say, okay, well you have all these renewables, but you don’t have enough storage to shift to evening peaks. You are going to rely on coal to meet that given the current rigid dispatch system. And so you’re dispatching them kind of regardless of whether or not you have the payment schemes.
I will say that I was a skeptic, right? Because when people told me that China should put in place a capacity market, I said, China has overcapacity. So if you have an overcapacity situation, you put in place a market, the prices should be zero. So what’s the point? But actually, when you’re looking out ahead with all of this surplus coal capacity that you’re trying to push down, you’re trying to push those capacity factors of those coal plans from 50%, 60%, down to 20% or even lower, they need to have other revenue schemes if you’re not going to dramatically open up your spot markets, which China is very hesitant to do — very risk averse when it comes to the openness of spot markets, in terms of price gaps. So that’s a necessary part of this transition. But it can be done more efficiently, and it should done technology neutral.
And by the way that is happening in certain places. That’s a national scheme, but we actually see that the implementation — for example, Shaanxi province, we have a technology neutral scheme that would include other resources, not just coal.
Mentioned:
China’s new pledge to cut its emissions by 2035
What an ‘ambitious’ 2035 electricity target looks like for China
China’s Clean Energy Pledge is Clouded by Coal, The Wire China
Jesse’s upshift; Rob’s upshift.
This episode of Shift Key is sponsored by …
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A warmer world is here. Now what? Listen to Shocked, from the University of Chicago’s Institute for Climate and Sustainable Growth, and hear journalist Amy Harder and economist Michael Greenstone share new ways of thinking about climate change and cutting-edge solutions. Find it here.
Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.
A new list of Department of Energy grants slated for termination will hit clean energy and oil majors alike, including Exxon and Chevron.
A new list of Department of Energy grants slated for termination obtained by Heatmap reveals an additional 338 awards for clean energy projects that the agency intends to cancel. Combined with the 321 grants the agency said it was terminating last week, the total value is nearly $24 billion.
While last week’s announcement mostly targeted companies and institutions located in Democratic states, the new list appears to be indiscriminate. Conrad Schneider, the senior U.S. director at Clean Air Task Force, told me in a statement that the move “will have far-reaching consequences — with virtually no region unscathed.”
“The federal government plays an essential role in addressing gaps that stall the commercialization of energy breakthroughs by providing grants and loans to accelerate innovative projects,” he said. “By abruptly canceling funding for several hundred energy projects, the U.S. risks ceding American energy leadership and signals that U.S. innovation is not a priority.”
Some of the most significant new terminations on the list include:
While two of the seven hydrogen hubs — those in California and the Pacific Northwest — were on last week’s cancellations list, all seven have their status listed as “terminate” on this new list. That includes hubs that planned to make hydrogen from natural gas based in Appalachia, the Gulf Coast, Texas, and the Midwest.
Those awards came out of $8 billion allocated by Congress in the IIJA in 2021 to develop hubs where companies and states would work together to produce and test the use of cleaner hydrogen fuel in new industries. The move would hit oil majors in addition to green energy companies. Exxon and Chevron were partners on the Hyvelocity hydrogen hub on the Gulf Coast.
“If the program is dismantled, it could undermine the development of the domestic hydrogen industry,” Rachel Starr, the senior U.S. policy manager for hydrogen and transportation at Clean Air Task Force told me. “The U.S. will risk its leadership position on the global stage, both in terms of exporting a variety of transportation fuels that rely on hydrogen as a feedstock and in terms of technological development as other countries continue to fund and make progress on a variety of hydrogen production pathways and end uses."
The Inflation Reduction Act’s Domestic Manufacturing Conversion Grants, which were meant to support the conversion of shuttered or at-risk auto plants to be able to manufacture electric vehicles and their supply chains, would be fully obliterated based on the new list. All 13 grants that were awarded under the program are there, including $80 million for Blue Bird’s new electric school bus plant in Fort Valley, Georgia, $500 million for General Motors’ Grant River Assembly Plant in Lansing, Michigan, and $285 million for Mercedes-Benz’s next-generation electric van plant in Ladson, South Carolina.
Some of the other projects slated for termination raise questions about other projects from the same grant program that are not on the list. For example, a $45 million grant for the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association to deploy microgrids in seven communities shows up as terminated, along with several other awards made as part of the IIJA’s Energy Improvements in Rural or Remote Areas program. Grants for indigenous tribes in Alaska, Wisconsin, and throughout the Southwest from that program appear to be preserved, however.
A $9.8 million grant to Sparkz to build a first-of-its-kind battery-grade iron phosphate plant in West Virginia also makes an appearance. The award was made as part of a nearly $430 million funding round from the IIJA to accelerate domestic clean energy manufacturing in 15 former coal communities. Similar awards made to Anthro Energy in Louisville, Kentucky, Infinitum in Rockdale, Texas, Mainspring Energy in Coraopolis, Pennsylvania, and a company called MetOx International developing an advanced superconductor manufacturing facility in the Southeast appear to be safe.
When asked about the new list, DOE spokesperson Ben Dietderich told me by email that he couldn’t attest to its validity. He added that “no further determinations have been made at this time other than those previously announced,” referring to the earlier 321 cancellations.
A new list of grant cancellations obtained by Heatmap includes Climeworks and Heirloom projects funded by 2021 infrastructure law.
Trump’s Department of Energy is planning to terminate awards for the two major Direct Air Capture Hubs funded by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law in Louisiana and Texas, Heatmap has learned.
An internal agency project list shared with Heatmap names nearly $24 billion worth of grants with their status designated as “terminated,” including the Occidental Petroleum’s South Texas DAC Hub as well as Project Cypress, a joint venture between DAC startups Heirloom and Climeworks.
Christoph Gebald, the CEO of Climeworks, acknowledged “market rumors” in an email, but said that the company is “prepared for all scenarios.”
“Demand for removals is increasing significantly, with momentum set to build as governments set their long-term targets,” he said. “The need for DAC is growing as the world falls short of its climate goals and we’re working to achieve the gigaton capacity that will be needed.”
Heirloom’s head of global policy, Vikrum Aiyer, said that the company was not aware of any decision from the DOE and continued “to productively engage with the administration in a project review.” He added that Heirloom remains “incredibly proud to stand shoulder to shoulder with Louisiana energy majors, workforce groups, non-profits, state leaders, the governor and economic development organizations who have strongly advocated for this project.”
Much of the rest of the list overlaps with the project terminations the agency announced last week as part of a spate of retributive actions against Democrats during the government shutdown. “Nearly $8 billion in Green New Scam funding to fuel the Left’s climate agenda is being canceled,” White House Budget Director Russ Vought wrote on social media ahead of the announcement.
DOE spokesperson Ben Dietderich told me by email that the department was “unable to verify” the new list of canceled grants, and that “no further determinations have been made at this time other than those previously announced.”
“As [Secretary of Energy Chris Wright] made clear last week, the Department continues to conduct an individualized and thorough review of financial awards made by the previous administration,” Dietderich said.
Direct air capture is a nascent technology that sucks carbon, as the name suggests, directly from the air, and is one of several carbon removal solutions with potential to slow global warming in the near term, and even reverse it in the long run. The $3.5 billion DAC Hubs program, created by Congress in the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, promised to “establish a new sector of the American economy and remake another one, while providing the world with an important tool to fight climate change,” as my colleague Robinson Meyer put it.
After a competitive application process, the Biden administration selected two projects that would receive up to $600 million each to build DAC projects capable of removing more than 1 million tons of carbon from the atmosphere per year and storing it permanently underground. Occidental, which first partnered with and later acquired a Canadian DAC startup called Carbon Engineering, would build its hub in South Texas, near Corpus Christi. Two other leading DAC startups, the California-based Heirloom Carbon and Swiss company Climeworks, would work together to build a hub in Louisiana. After the selections were announced, both projects received an initial $50 million award for their next phase of development, which was set to be matched by private investment.
"These hubs were selected through a rigorous and competitive process designed to identify projects capable of advancing U.S. leadership in carbon removal and industrial decarbonization,” Jennifer Wilcox, the former principal deputy assistant secretary for the DOE’s Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management, told me in an email. “The burden should be on DOE to clearly demonstrate why that process is being overturned.”
All three companies already have demonstration plants that are either operating or under construction. Climeworks began operating the world’s first commercial DAC plant in Iceland in 2021, designed to capture about 4,000 tons per year, and has since scaled up to a larger plant more than eight times that size. Heirloom opened the first DAC plant in the U.S. in November 2023, in Tracy, California, capable of capturing 1,000 tons per year. Occidental’s first DAC project, Stratos, in West Texas, will be the largest of the bunch, designed to capture 500,000 tons per year. It is set to be completed in the next few months.
Removing carbon from the air with one of these facilities is currently extremely expensive and energy-intensive. Today, companies pre-sell carbon credits to airlines and tech companies to raise money for the projects, but will likely require government support to continue to innovate and bring the cost down. While both Climeworks and Heirloom announced the sale of credits that would support their DAC hub projects, it’s not clear whether those credits were meant to be fulfilled by the projects themselves.
The DOE grants would have helped prove the viability of the technology at a scale that will make a measurable difference for the climate, while also demonstrating a potential off-ramp for oil companies and the economies they support. Both projects said they expected to create more than 2,000 local jobs in construction, operations, and maintenance.
“The United States, up to this point, was the direct air capture leader and the place where top innovators in the field were choosing to build facilities as well as manufacture the actual components of the units themselves,” Jack Andreasen Cavanaugh, a global fellow at the Columbia University’s Carbon Management Research Initiative, told me. “The cancellation of these grants to high-quality projects ensures that these American jobs will be shipped overseas and cede our broader economic advantage.”
That’s already happening. On the same day last week that the DOE announced it was terminating an award for CarbonCapture Inc., another California-based DAC company, the startup said it would move its first commercial pilot from Arizona to Alberta, Canada. Gebald, of Climeworks, said the company has “a pipeline of other DAC projects around the world,” including opportunities in Canada, the U.K., and Saudi Arabia.
Cavanaugh also pointed out there was a disconnect between the terminations, Congress’ recent actions, and even actions under the first Trump administration. Trump’s DOE revised the 45Q tax credit for carbon capture in 2018 to allow direct air capture projects to qualify. In July, the reconciliation bill preserved that credit and strengthened it. “These were bipartisan-supported projects, and it goes expressly against congressional intent.”
As the DAC hubs program was congressionally mandated and the awards were under contract, the companies may have legal recourse to fight the terminations. The press release from the DOE announcing last week’s terminations said that award recipients had 30 days to appeal the decision. “That process must be meaningful and transparent,” Wilcox said. “If DOE is invoking financial-viability criteria, companies and communities deserve to see the underlying metrics, thresholds, and justification — and to understand whether those criteria are being applied consistently across projects.”
While this isn’t a death knell for DAC in general, it will be a “massive setback for American climate and industrial policy”, Erin Burns, executive director of the carbon removal advocacy group Carbon 180, told me. “The need for carbon removal hasn’t changed. The science hasn’t changed. What’s changed is our political will, and we’ll feel the consequences for years to come.”
Editor’s note: This piece has been updated to add comment from the Department of Energy and to correct the total value of canceled grants.