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In aligning with fossil fuel companies, the administration is deepening skepticism of carbon removal.
For as long as people have been talking about building machines that suck carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, the concept has sparked fierce debate. Would such a tool be used the way that scientists envision — alongside aggressive emission cuts? Or would it be co-opted to prolong dependence on fossil fuels?
Suddenly these questions have become less theoretical. Last month, Carbon Engineering, one of the first companies to actually build a “direct air capture” machine, was acquired by Occidental Petroleum, a fossil fuel company that plans to use the technology to market “net-zero oil.” The Biden administration has also selected Occidental as a potential recipient of one of two major grants, worth up to $600 million each, to build a “DAC hub” in South Texas near Corpus Christi. As part of the same announcement, the Department of Energy gave funding to oil and gas companies in California, Alaska, and Alabama for the early planning stages of additional hubs.
“Cutting back on our carbon emissions alone won’t reverse the growing impacts of climate change," Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said in a press release for the DAC hub awards. "We also need to remove the CO2 that we’ve already put in the atmosphere,”
She’s right. The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says pursuing carbon removal is “unavoidable” if the world hopes to limit warming to safer temperatures — but it will only work if we stop burning so much oil and gas. In handing the reins of this new industry to fossil fuel companies, the administration has confused the message, stoking the mistrust of those already skeptical of the technology, and giving carbon removal projects with no fossil fuel connections a steeper hill to climb to earn support.
It hasn’t helped that Occidental’s CEO, Vicki Hollub, has described DAC as a “license to continue to operate.” Shortly after the Biden administration’s announcement, she told NPR that thanks to this technology, “there’s no reason not to produce oil and gas forever.” When I reached out to Occidental for clarification, a spokesperson denied that the company will use the technology to pump more oil than it otherwise would. He pointed me to another statement from Hollub in 2022 where she said producing net-zero oil was about “just meeting demand,” and that as long as there was demand for oil, it was better to meet it with a lower-carbon product.
But the aforementioned events have invited fierce blowback. On Wednesday, 17 climate and environmental justice organizations sent a letter to Secretary Granholm calling on the DOE to revoke its funding offers to fossil fuel companies. “There may be paths forward for equitable, climate-positive DAC, but they do not look like the one we’re on now,” they wrote.
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Climate advocates and community groups are not just concerned about giving fossil fuel companies a license to keep producing. Their objection is tied to where these projects are being deployed. The DAC hubs are almost all being planned in economically distressed areas that have hosted fossil fuel production for decades. The bipartisan infrastructure law, which funded the hubs, requires that at least two meet those characteristics.
This makes some economic and political sense. If you need to build pipelines to transport CO2 or drill into the ground to store it, this is where the knowhow resides. The requirement is also intended as a way to create new jobs and transition workers in places that might otherwise be devastated by the decline of the oil and gas industry. But since fossil fuel companies have a track record of polluting these areas with cancerous chemicals and fighting regulations, locals worry about the risks of putting new technology into their hands.
These fears are not unfounded. There are different types of direct air capture technology, but many require energy or heat to separate and compress the CO2 after it is collected, which could create additional pollution depending on how it is generated. The compressed carbon may then have to be transported, via pipeline, to its final destination. While CO2 pipelines have a good safety record, a highly publicized accident in Mississippi that hospitalized 45 people has fanned fears of ruptures.
Perhaps the biggest worry is around what happens next. Some companies, including Occidental, inject CO2 into depleted oil fields in an effort to squeeze the last drops out. But DOE-funded hubs will not be permitted to do this. Instead, the compressed CO2 will likely be injected into a saline aquifer, a layer of permeable rock thousands of feet underground, which is capped by an impermeable layer that prevents the CO2 from leaking out.
Some geological storage wells have been storing carbon successfully for decades, but there are only a handful of such sites operating around the world. A recent report to Congress detailing U.S. experience with CO2 injection summarized several potential risks to human health associated with it, including drinking water contamination, leaks, effects on soil health, and earthquakes. However, it also noted that CO2 injection wells have more stringent construction, testing, and monitoring regulations than other types.
In Kern County, California, where three DAC hubs have been proposed, all of this invokes deja vu. Juan Flores, an organizer for the Center on Race, Poverty and the Environment, one of the signatories to Wednesday’s letter, told me it reminds people of fracking, which brought increased risk of respiratory problems, cancer, preterm birth, and psychological stress to the area. “They experimented with our communities, they denied the new dangers for many years,” he said. “Now our community members are saying, ‘this again?’”
The DOE hubs program required companies to submit a plan for providing community benefits when they applied for funding. But in Kern County, oil and gas companies have squandered their goodwill, Dan Ress, a staff attorney at the Center told me. For example, the California Resources Corporation, an oil and gas company that won an $11 million DOE grant to do an engineering study for a hub in Kern County, recently supported a multi-million dollar campaign to repeal hard-won regulations banning oil drilling next to homes and schools. “This is the same company saying, oh yeah, we want to be good neighbors and do great community benefits? Absolutely not, get out of here,” said Ress.
The feeling of being the unwitting subjects of an experiment also came up in my conversation with Roishetta Ozane, a community organizer in Lake Charles, Louisiana. That’s where another DAC hub called Project Cypress, which could receive up to $600 million from the DOE, is under development. “We don't want to be guinea pigs for something that's never been tried and tested before on this scale,” Ozane told me.
Ozane is the director of the Vessel Project, a grassroots group supporting the needs of black, indigenous, people of color, and low income people in an industrial city where petrochemical production has dramatically expanded over the past decade. (The group was not a signatory on the letter.) She said Lakes Charles is overburdened with pollution and still recovering from a spate of destructive hurricanes in 2020. “We're saying, hey, you might be right. These DAC hubs might work. But why are you testing it in our community?”
There are no fossil fuel companies involved in Project Cypress. But that does not give Ozane any peace of mind. She worries it would “open the floodgates” for companies to keep releasing toxic emissions into the area, as long as they pay someone to pull carbon out of the air afterward.
Multiple people I spoke with in Louisiana and Texas also brought up a history of local officials giving heavy industry a free pass on pollution and major tax breaks. Why should they believe that the DAC hubs will be any better regulated or bring in much-needed revenue?
But local attitudes along the Gulf Coast are varied and complex. Prior to the hubs announcement, Data for Progress, a polling and research non-profit that spearheaded Wednesday’s letter, held a series of focus groups about DAC in Louisiana and Texas. One key finding, Celina Scott-Buechler, a senior fellow who led the research, told me, was that there was a tension between concerns like Ozane’s, and an awareness that fossil fuel companies historically have been the primary sources of good jobs in these communities.
“I think people make a calculated risk decision,” one focus group participant in Lake Charles said. “They're like, oh, so I could be around these chemicals that could have a long-term effect. I may not see them for the next 20, 30 years, but if it's going to take care of my family and give my family a nice home and a good vehicle to drive, then I'll work tirelessly to provide that for my family. But I may die at 65.”
Another stressed that there was a “big need for jobs” and that “sometimes people's need for employment overshadows whether it's good for the environment or not.”
Patrick Nye, who lives in the Corpus Christi area near where Occidental is building its South Texas hub, embodies this tension. Nye owns an energy company that produces oil and generates wind power, but he also runs an environmental group that’s fighting the local expansion of liquified natural gas export facilities and proposed seawater desalination projects. When I asked about his oil business, he said he didn’t have the heart to let his employees go and puts his profits toward his activism.
Nye is skeptical that direct air capture will work, but he thinks it’s worth trying. “If this works, this may help save the planet,” he said. He also sees a lot of potential opportunities flowing to the local university and its graduates. And he thinks the hub will be far enough away from where people live that if things go wrong, few will be impacted. Occidental is building its hub in a largely undeveloped area about 45 miles south of Corpus Christi on King Ranch, the largest private ranch in the country.
At the same time, he’s worried local officials will just rubber stamp the project without proper study. “King Ranch is really well known, they're very politically positioned,” he said. “They have a lot of clout to get this thing done, and it has to be looked at with a very fine tooth comb.”
In addition to requesting DOE withdraw grants for fossil fuel companies, the letter sent Wednesday makes a pitch for how the agency can roll out the DAC hubs program more equitably. The authors propose that projects in areas with extractive industries be co-created or co-owned by communities, actively work to reduce local pollution, have rigorous data transparency, and that locals should have the right to refuse them. They also want community benefits plans to be legally binding, with consequences if companies fail to comply.
All these requirements might sound unfair to companies who are just trying to tackle climate change and make a better world, Scott-Buechler acknowledged. “The question that I ask is, a better world for whom?”
I asked her what it would look like in practice for a community to co-own a DAC hub, considering these are first-of-a-kind projects that are incredibly expensive and financially risky. Would communities be taking on those risks?
This was something that Data for Progress and other groups were still studying, she said, looking at possibilities like having the project held in public trust, or replicating the solar cooperative model. She recognizes that not all communities will be interested in ownership, but thinks it should be an option.
When I asked the DOE how it defends the choice to support fossil fuel company-led projects, a spokesperson told me the agency is “leveraging these companies' significant expertise in managing large energy infrastructure projects and applying this experience to developing DAC projects that are cost-effective, efficient, equitable, and environmentally responsible.”
She also emphasized that Occidental and Project Cypress have only been selected for “award negotiation” and not “officially” awarded yet. “If projects are awarded, DOE and the awardee will have frequent, meaningful engagement with the impacted local community and impacted workers throughout the lifecycle of the project,” she said.
Meanwhile, the agency has also launched a public process to develop a set of safety, environmental stewardship, accountability, and community engagement guidelines for all carbon management projects that it will encourage project developers to (voluntarily) abide by.
But the Biden administration seems eager to support Occidental in its pursuit of direct air capture and encourage more oil and gas companies to follow its lead. During a carbon capture conference last year, Secretary Granholm applauded Oxy’s CEO Vicki Hollub for investing in carbon removal, saying this reflects “exactly the kind of bold thinking we need more of.” Earlier this year, she told a room of oil and gas executives, “We need the energy sector stepping up … few are better positioned to crack open cost-effective carbon management.”
The debate over whether direct air capture is a moral hazard is likely to rage on long after these projects are up and running. But the money is going out the door now. “This is something that is not just coming anymore, it's here,” said Scott Buechler. “Is there a collective vision for what might be able to come next?”
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A leaked internal memo reveals why the environmental group adopted President Trump’s new name.
The Nature Conservancy, an environmental nonprofit, was told by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration it had to rename a major conservation program as the “Gulf of America” or else lose federal funding, according to a leaked internal memo reviewed by Heatmap News.
For the last week, the Nature Conservancy has been pilloried by figures in the climate and environmentalist community for changing the name of its conservation program in the Gulf of Mexico region to being a “Gulf of America” restoration program, brandishing what President Donald Trump declared on his first day in office would be the new official U.S. term for the body of water. Trump’s new name has become a First Amendment firestorm as news organizations find themselves split on whether to adopt the term and the White House is punishing outlets — including the Associated Press — for continuing to use the Gulf of Mexico.
We can now exclusively reveal why the Nature Conservancy adopted this fresh Trump branding: They were allegedly pressured into it.
Jennifer Morris, CEO of the Nature Conservancy, sent an email to all staff at the organization this morning stating that the organization’s conservation program in the Gulf of Mexico was renamed to Gulf of America “after receiving clear directives from a federal agency.” “Please know that we did not make this decision lightly,” Morris wrote. Attached to the email was staff guidance claiming the nonprofit “received specific direction from NOAA that we must change all references to the new nomenclature in association with our NOAA funded work in the Gulf.”
“For example, all maps, reports, and other deliverables must use ‘Gulf of America,’ the memo stated. “We have at least $156 million in active federal grants in the region, including $45 million from NOAA alone.’ Federal funding makes up most of the organization’s work in the Gulf of Mexico, according to the memo.
In addition, the Nature Conservancy has “been advised that new proposals in the Gulf for US federal grants must conform” to Trump’s executive order adopting “Gulf of America” as the official U.S. name for that body of water, the memo stated. State governors in the Gulf region in charge of “disseminating” remaining BP oil spill recovery funds have “followed suit in support of these nomenclature changes” and there is fear a “failure to adjust” could also “jeopardize” state funding.
“Ultimately, this decision was made after reviewing all the facts and looking at what the organization felt was best to ensure we can continue our conservation programs and support our teams on the ground,” the memo stated.
Historically, NOAA has been more insulated than other agencies from political pressures like this, which has helped it maintain a global reputation as a world-class scientific meteorological body.
This ordeal, however, echoes the one other time Trump seemed to put his thumb on NOAA’s scales — an incident best known as Sharpiegate. In 2019 Trump incorrectly proclaimed Hurricane Dorian was going to hit Alabama. He went so far as to draw on a giant map with a Sharpie in the White House to show his guestimated pathway for the storm. After the NOAA office in Alabama publicly sought to reassure residents that, no, a hurricane wasn’t on the way, Trump officials pressured NOAA into backing the president, leading to the agency issuing an unsigned statement backing the claim. An inspector general report – which Trump officials reportedly sought to obstruct from seeing the light of day – ultimately found the NOAA statement violated its scientific integrity policy.
If the Gulf of America is the beginning of NOAA subservience, I’m nervous to see what happens when Trump’s version of the agency – which any day now is expected to undergo mass layoffs – pivots to climate change and renewable energy.
The Nature Conservancy did not immediately respond to a request for comment. “We can find no evidence of that, so far,” NOAA spokesman Scott Smullen said.
President Donald Trump is going to be talking rocks with his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelenskyy during their Friday meeting in Washington, D.C., where they will sign a “very big agreement,” Trump said Wednesday.
As the Trump administration has ramped up talks to end the war in Ukraine, shift America’s strategic priorities away from Europe, and build a new relationship with Russia, it has also become intensely interested in Ukraine’s supposed mineral wealth, with Ukrainian and American negotiators working on a deal to create an investment fund for the country’s reconstruction that would be partially funded by developing the country’s mineral resources.
But exactly what minerals are in Ukraine and if they’re economically viable to extract is a matter of contention.
So-called critical minerals and rare earths have a way of finding themselves in geopolitical hotspots. This is because they’re not particularly rare, but the immense capital required to cost effectively find them, mine them, and process them is.
“A lot of countries have natural resources. We don’t mine everything that exists underground. We look for projects that are economically competitive,” Gracelin Baskaran, director of the critical minerals security program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told me.
Baskaran pointed out, it was precisely Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine that kicked the United States’ interest in building up supplies of critical minerals and rare earths outside of China — which dominates the industry — into overdrive.
“It was a fortuitous moment in that way for Ukraine’s resources, because they weren’t necessarily being mined before,” she said.
And Ukraine has done its best to promote and take advantage of its mineral resources, even if there’s some ambiguity about what exactly they are, and if they can be profitably extracted at scale.
While often conflated, critical minerals and rare earths are distinct. The so-called “rare earths” are 17 similar elements, which the U.S. Geological Survey explicitly says are “relatively abundant,” like scandium and yttrium. Critical minerals are a more amorphous group, with the USGS listing out 50 (including the rare earths) as well as commonly known minerals like titanium, nickel, lithium, tin, and graphite, with uses in batteries, alloys, semiconductors, and other high value energy, defense, and technology applications.
When countries are desperate for outside assistance or their patrons are desperate to see some return on their “investments” in military and foreign aid,as Bloomberg’s Javier Blas has pointed out, the minerals tend to show up — just look at the “$1 trillion in untapped mineral deposits” the United States identified in Afghanistan in 2010. Ten years later when the USGS looked at Afghanistan’s mineral industries, the rare earths remained untapped and instead the country was largely exporting talc and crushed marble to its neighbors.
Ukrainians have been eager to show there are economically viable and valuable minerals in the country, including a claim by one Ukrainian official in early 2022 that “about 5% of all the world’s ‘critical raw materials’ are located in Ukraine,” while a pair of Ukrainian researchers claimed there was 500,000 tons of unmined lithium oxide resources. More recently the country has claimed to have rare earths, and that President Trump has taken a special interest in.
Many industry experts doubt there’s any significant reserves of rare earths in the country, with the exception of scandium, which is used in aluminum alloys and fuel cells. Ukraine does have a significant mining industry and has produced substantial amounts of iron ore and manganese, along with reserves of graphite, titanium, cobalt, and uranium, many of which are those so-called “critical minerals” with uses for energy and defense.
“There do not appear to be hardly any economically viable rare earths in the country – that was largely a misuse of a term someone heard,” Morgan Bazillian, director of the Payne Institute and a public policy professor at the Colorado School of Mines, told me in an email.
Blas has documented a game of telephone whereby rare earths and critical minerals are conflated to make it seem like the former exists in abundance underneath Ukraine. Despite the doubts, President Trump said on Wednesday during his cabinet meeting “we’ll be really partnering with Ukraine, [in] terms of rare earth. We very much need rare earth. They have great rare earth.”
While there’s disagreement about exactly what Ukraine has to offer in terms of minerals, the interest in building up supplies of minerals is part and parcel of what is now a bipartisan priority to build up supplies and the ability to process and refine minerals used for a variety of defense, industrial, and energy applications.
To the extent the United States is able to jumpstart any new mineral operations in postwar Ukraine, it would require first repairing the country’s greatly damaged infrastructure, which has been wrecked by the very conflict that has spiked interest in the country’s mineral sector.
“Their infrastructure is decimated. Rebuilding it will be the priority, getting industry moving again will take time – including from basic services like electricity,” Bazillian told me.
And after that, much basic work needs to be done before any mining can happen, like an updated geological survey of the country, which hasn’t been done since the country was part of the Soviet Union. And all that’s before starting the process for opening a mine, something that on average takes 18 years to do.
“You need to have a geological mapping. You need to identify investors who want to go in. You need to build infrastructure,” Baskaran said.
“Ukraine has undeveloped or untapped potential that could be utilized. And the question is whether that untapped potential is economically viable, and we don’t know yet.”
Current conditions: Firefighters contained a blaze in South Africa’s Table Mountain National Park that was creeping towards Cape Town • Moroccans are being asked not to slaughter sheep during Eid al-Adha this year because ongoing drought has caused a drop in herd numbers • Most of the U.S. will see “well above-average” temperatures through the end of this week.
The House voted yesterday to repeal a Biden-era fee on methane emissions generated by oil and gas operations. The Senate is likely to follow suit with a vote as soon as today. The rule, which was only finalized in November, charges producers per metric ton of excess methane released, and provides grants for infrastructure improvements to prevent leaks. Methane is a potent greenhouse gas responsible for roughly one third of the global temperature rise since the pre-industrial era. The EPA estimated the policy would prevent 1.2 million metric tons of methane from entering the atmosphere, which is roughly equivalent to taking nearly 8 million gas-powered cars off the road for a year. Congress will also vote this week on a measure repealing another recently implemented rule regarding efficiency standards for tankless gas water heaters.
President Trump said yesterday that EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin is aiming to cut 65% of the agency’s workforce. The EPA currently has about 15,000 employees, and E&E News reported that such a cut “would put the agency close to the numbers it had when it was created by President Richard Nixon.” According toReuters, the news came as a surprise to EPA union leaders. “Mr. Zeldin stated during his confirmation testimony that he pledged to enthusiastically uphold the EPA’s mission,” said Joyce Howell, executive vice president of AFGE Council 238 representing EPA employees. “So which is it? Upholding the EPA mission or imposing a reduction in force that makes upholding the EPA mission an impossibility?”
BP confirmed it will cut its investments in renewables and shift its strategy back to ramping up fossil fuel production. The radical shift represents “a major break from five years in which BP was the oil industry’s most ardent pursuer of net zero emissions and the transition to clean energy,” reportedBloomberg. BP had planned to have 50 gigawatts of renewable generation capacity by 2030 and cut oil and gas production by 40%, but CEO Murray Auchincloss said the company’s “optimism for a fast transition was misplaced.” Here is some early reaction and analysis:
New research suggests the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) is not likely to fully collapse any time soon, but it could weaken significantly. As Heatmap’s Jeva Lange explained recently, AMOC is a current system sometimes described as the oceanic conveyor belt responsible for influencing the climate of the Northern Hemisphere. Its full collapse, triggered by rising temperatures and Arctic meltwater – would cause dramatic cooling across Europe, and scientists have been debating the likelihood of such an event for years. A recent paper predicted it could happen even within the next three decades. This new analysis from the UK’s Met Office used 34 climate models to test future warming scenarios and concluded that AMOC would still keep moving through 2100. But it also showed the current could slow down significantly, which would still have serious side effects like changing rain patterns, disrupting ocean ecosystems, and rising sea levels.
A study out this week finds that exposure to extreme heat makes older people age faster. Researchers from USC examined blood samples from 3,600 individuals aged 56 or older, looking specifically at markers indicating biological age, which is “a measure of how well the body functions at the molecular, cellular, and system levels.” The team compared this information to six years of climate data and found evidence that people exposed to repeated heat waves age more quickly. “Participants living in areas where heat days, as defined as Extreme Caution or higher levels (≥90°F), occur half the year, such as Phoenix, Arizona, experienced up to 14 months of additional biological aging compared to those living in areas with fewer than 10 heat days per year,” said USC’s Eunyoung Choi, a co-author on the study. “Even after controlling for several factors, we found this association. Just because you live in an area with more heat days, you’re aging faster biologically.”
The company behind the UK’s first new nuclear plant to be built in 20 years is considering installing 288 underwater speakers in a nearby river to deter fish from entering the plant’s water intake system. This “fish disco” would generate sounds that are louder than a jumbo jet 24 hours a day for 60 years.