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Economy

Sparks

Venezuela Essentially Approves a Petrowar

The country votes to annex their oil-rich neighbor, Guyana.

New ‘SAF’ Just Dropped

A natural gas refinery is being converted into a plant for jet fuel made from carbon dioxide and green hydrogen.

Blue

What Do Rich Countries Owe Their Old Colonies? More Than Once Thought.

A new report from Carbon Brief shows how accounting for empires tips the historic emissions balance.

Yellow
Sparks

American Airlines Is Buying Carbon Removal on the Cheap

The most notable part of the airline’s deal with Graphyte is the price.

<p>Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images</p>

American Airlines will purchase carbon credits from a biomass-based carbon-removal startup in a deal that could reshape how corporate emitters offset their emissions, The Wall Street Journal reports . The startup, Graphyte, collects carbon dioxide-absorbent agricultural byproducts such as rice hulls, tree bark, and sawdust, compresses it into bricks, then seals and buries it. Its first project, in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, plans to begin manufacturing and burying the bricks by July.

What’s particularly notable about Graphyte’s deal with American Airlines is the price. American will pay Graphyte $100 per metric ton — as opposed to the $675 charged on average by Graphyte’s competitors in direct air capture, a process that typically involves massive fans that suck carbon from the atmosphere. Industry experts and analysts consider the $100 mark the threshold at which carbon removal could become a scalable, economically viable tool in the fight against climate change. As Heatmap ’s Emily Pontecorvo recently noted , the direct air capture firm Climeworks hopes to get its price down to $100 to $300 per ton by 2050 at the earliest.

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Climate

Boston’s Big Dig Was Secretly Great

A podcast by GBH News reporter Ian Coss gives this notorious project a long-overdue reappraisal. Bonus: The show comes with lessons for climate infrastructure projects of the future.

<p>Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images</p>

If you’ve lived in Massachusetts at any point in the last 50 years, you’ve heard of the Big Dig. It’s infamous — a tunnel project that was supposed to bury an elevated highway in Boston to the tune of $2 billion that eventually ballooned in cost to $15 billion and took a quarter of a century to finish.

The Big Dig was more than just a highway project, though. It was a monumental effort that Ian Coss, a reporter at GBH News, calls a “renovation of downtown Boston.” The project built tunnels and bridges, yes, but it also created parks, public spaces, and mass transit options that transformed the city. In a nine-episode podcast series appropriately called The Big Dig , Coss dives into the long, complicated history of the project, making a case for why the Big Dig was so much more than the boondoggle people think it was.

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