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The raw material of America’s energy transition is poised for another boom.
In the town of Superior, Arizona, there is a hotel. In the hotel, there is a room. And in the room, there is a ghost.
Henry Muñoz’s father owned the building in the early 1980s, back when it was still a boarding house and the “Magma” in its name, Hotel Magma, referred to the copper mine up the hill. One night, a boarder from Nogales, Mexico, awoke to a phantom trying to pin her to the wall with the mattress; naturally, she demanded a new room. When Muñoz, then in his fearless early 20s, heard this story from his father, he became curious. Following his swing shift at the mine, Muñoz posted himself to the room with a six-pack of beer and passed the hours until dawn drinking and waiting for the spirit to make itself known.
Muñoz didn’t see a ghost that night, but he has since become well acquainted with others in town. There is the Mexican bakery, which used to sell pink cookies but now opens only when the late owner’s granddaughter feels up to it. There’s the old Magma Club, its once-segregated swimming pool — available one day a week to Hispanics — long since filled in. Muñoz can still point out where all the former bars were on Main Street, the ones that drew crowds of carousing miners in the good years before copper prices plunged in 1981 and Magma boarded up and left town. Now their dusty windows are what give out-of-towners from nearby Phoenix reason to write off Superior as “dead.”
“What happens when a mine closes, the hardship that brings to people — today’s generation has never experienced that,” Muñoz told me.
Superior is home to about 2,400 people, less than half its population when the mine was booming. To tourists zipping past on U.S. 60 to visit the Wild West sites in the Superstition Mountains, it might look half a step away from becoming a ghost town, itself. As recently as 2018, pictures of Main Street were used as stock photos to illustrate things like “America’s worsening geographic inequality.”
But if you take the exit into town, it’s clear something in Superior is changing. The once-haunted boarding house has undergone a multi-million-dollar renovation into a boutique hotel, charging staycationers that make the hour drive south from Scottsdale $200 a night. Across the street, Bellas Cafe whips up terrific sandwiches in a gleaming, retro-chic kitchen. The Chamber of Commerce building, a little further down the block, has been painted an inviting shade of purple. And propped in the window of some of the storefronts with their lights on, you might even see a sign: WE SUPPORT RESOLUTION COPPER.
Resolution Copper’s offices are located in the former Magma Hospital, where Muñoz was born and where his mother died. People in hard hats and safety vests mill about the parking lot, miners without a mine, which is not an unusual sight in Superior these days — no copper has been sold out of the immediate area in over two decades. And yet just a nine-minute drive further up the hill and another 15-minute elevator ride down the deepest mine shaft in the country lies one of the world’s largest remaining copper deposits. It’s estimated to be 40 billion pounds, enough to meet a quarter of U.S. demand, according to the company’s analysis.
That’s “huge,” Adam Simon, an Earth and environmental sciences professor at the University of Michigan, told me, and not just in terms of sheer size.
“Copper is the most important metal for all technologies we think of as part of the energy transition: battery electric vehicles, grid-scale battery storage, wind turbines, solar panels,” Simon said. In May, he published a study with Lawrence Cathles, an Earth and atmospheric sciences researcher at Cornell University, which looked at 120 years of copper-mining data and found that just to meet the demands of “business as usual,” the world will need 115% more of the material between 2018 and 2050 than has been previously mined in all of human history, even with recycling rates taken into account.
Aluminum, used in high-voltage lines, is sometimes floated as a potential substitute, but it’s not as good of a conductor, and copper is almost always the preferred metal in batteries and electricity generation. Renewables are particularly copper-intensive; one offshore wind turbine can require up to 29 tons. What lies in the hills behind Superior, then, represents “millions of electric vehicles, millions of wind turbines, millions of solar panels. And it’s also lots of jobs, from top to bottom — jobs for people with bachelor’s degrees in engineering, mining, geology, and environmental science, all the way down to security officers and truck drivers,” Simon said. He added: “The world will need more copper year over year for both socioeconomic improvement in the Global South and also the energy transition, and neither of those can happen without increasing the amount of copper that we produce.”
Muñoz insisted to me that the promises of jobs and a robust local economy are a kind of Trojan horse. “Everybody’s getting drunk and having a good time: ‘Oh, look at the gift they brought us!’” he said of Superior’s support for Resolution Copper. “But at night, they’re going to sneak out of that horse, and they’re going to leave an environmental disaster.”
For now, though, the copper has just one catch: Resolution isn’t allowed to touch it.
If not for a painted sign declaring the ground HOLY LAND, there would be nothing visible to suggest the 16 oak-shaded tent sites over Resolution Copper’s ore body were anything particularly special. The Oak Flat campground is less than five miles past Superior, but at an elevation of nearly 4,000 feet, it can feel almost 10 degrees Fahrenheit cooler. On the late June day that I visited with Muñoz, Sylvia Delgado, and Orlando “Marro” Perea — the leaders of the Concerned Citizens and Retired Miners Coalition — the floor of the East Valley was 113 degrees Fahrenheit, and the altitude offered only limited relief.
Directly below us and to the east of the campground, beneath a bouldery, yucca-studded desert, lies the copper deposit. At 7,000 or so feet deep, extracting it would require an advanced mining process called block caving, in which ore is collected from below through what is essentially a controlled cave-in, like sand slipping through the neck of an hourglass.
Muñoz, a fifth-generation miner, prefers the metaphor of going to the dentist. “They drill out your tooth and refill it: that’s basically traditional cut-and-fill mining,” he told me. “Block cave, on the other hand, would be going to the dentist and having them pull out the whole molar. It just leaves a vacant hole.” In this case, the resulting cavity would be almost two miles wide and over 1,000 feet deep by the time the ore was exhausted sometime in the 2060s.
Even four decades is just a blink of an eye for Oak Flat, though, where human history goes back at least 1,500years; anthropologists say the mine’s sinkhole would swallow countless Indigenous burial locations and archeological sites, including petroglyphs depicting antlered animals that Muñoz and Perea showed me hidden deep in the rocks. Even more alarmingly, the subsidence would obliterate Chí'chil Biłdagoteel, the Western Apache’s name for the lands around Oak Flat, which are sacred to at least 10 federally recognized tribes. The members of the San Carlos Apache who are leading the opposition effort, and use the location for a four-day-long girlhood coming-of-age ceremony, say it is the only place where their prayers can reach the Creator directly.
Mining and Indigenous sovereignty have been at odds in Arizona for over a century. “The Apache is as near the lobo, or wolf of the country, as any human being can be to a beast,” The New York Times wrote in 1859, claiming the tribe was “the greatest obstacle to the operations of the mining companies” in the area. Three years later, the U.S. Army’s departmental commander ordered Apache men killed “wherever found,” the social archaeologist John Welch writes in his eye-opening historical survey of the region, in which he also advocates for using the term “genocide” to describe the government’s policies. That violence still casts a shadow in Superior: Apache Leap, an astonishing escarpment that looms over the town and backs up against Oak Flat, is named for a legend that cornered Apache warriors jumped to their deaths from its cliffs rather than surrender to the U.S. Cavalry.
As the Apache were being forced onto reservations and into residential boarding schools during the late 1890s, a treaty with the government set aside Oak Flat for protection. The land was later fortified against mining by President Dwight D. Eisenhower, with the federal protections reconfirmed by the Nixon administration in the 1960s. (The defunct Magma Mine that fueled the first copper boom in Superior is located just off this 760-acre “Oak Flat Withdrawal Area.”)
In 1995, the enormity of the Oak Flat ore body — and the billions it would be worth if it could be accessed — started to become apparent. The British and Australian mining companies Rio Tinto and BHP Billiton formed a U.S. subsidiary, Resolution Copper, which bought the old Magma mine and began to lobby Arizona politicians to sign over the neighboring parcel of Oak Flat. Between 2004 and 2013, lawmakers from the state introduced 11 different land transfer bills into Congress, none of which managed to earn broad support.
Then, in December 2014, President Barack Obama signed a must-pass defense spending bill. On page 1,103 was a midnight rider, inserted by Arizona Republican Senators John McCain and Jeff Flake, which authorized a land transfer of 2,400 acres of Tonto National Forest, including Oak Flat, to Resolution Copper in exchange for private land the company had bought in other parts of the state. (Flake previously worked as a paid lobbyist for a Rio Tinto uranium mine, and the company contributed to McCain’s 2014 Senate campaign.)
Heatmap Illustration / Esri, TomTom, Garmin, FAO, NOAA, USGS, © OpenStreetMap contributors, and the GIS User Community
The senators’ rider also included an odd little twist. While the National Environmental Policy Act requires the Forest Service to conduct an environmental impact statement for a potential mine, the bill stipulated that the land transfer to Resolution Copper had to be completed within a 60-day window of the final environmental impact statement’s release, regardless of what the FEIS found.
After six years of study, the FEIS was rushed to publication by President Donald Trump in the final five days of his term, triggering that 60-day countdown. President Biden rescinded Trump’s FEIS once he took office in 2021, pending further consultation with the tribes, but the clock will begin anew once a revised FEIS is released, potentially later this year. (The new FEIS was expected last summer, but the Forest Service has since reported there is no timeline for its release. The agency declined to comment to Heatmap for this story, citing ongoing litigation.)
A spokesperson for Resolution Copper told me that the company is “committed to being a good steward of the land, air, and water throughout the entirety of this project,” and described programs to restore the local ecology and preserve certain natural features, including Apache Leap. “At each step,” the spokesperson said, “we have taken great care to solicit and act upon the input of our Native American and other neighbors. We have made many changes to the project scope to accommodate those concerns and will continue those efforts over the life of the project.”
Meanwhile, Apache Stronghold — the San Carlos Apache-led religious nonprofit opposing the mine — filed a lawsuit to block the land transfer, arguing that the destruction of Oak Flat infringes on their First Amendment right to practice their religion. The lower courts haven’t agreed, citing a controversial 1988 decision against tribes who made a similar argument in defense of a sacred grove of trees in California. Apache Stronghold, joined by the religious liberty group Becket, is now asking the U.S. Supreme Court to hear its case, a decision that is expected any day now. Nearly everyone I spoke with for this story, however, was pessimistic that the Justices would agree to hear the battle over Oak Flat, meaning the lower court’s ruling against Apache Stronghold would stand.
If Mila Besich could have it her way, Biden would visit Superior. He’d marvel at Apache Leap and Picketpost Mountain, visit the impressive new Superior Enterprise Center — paid for partially with money from his 2021 American Rescue Plan Act — and maybe wrap up the day with a purple scoop of prickly pear ice cream from Felicia’s Ice Cream Shop. And, most importantly, he’d hear her pitch: that “Superior and the state of Arizona have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to be the leader in advancing your green energy strategy.” She says Superior — and America — needs this mine.
Superior is a blue town, and Besich, its mayor, is a Democrat, which means she has found herself in the awkward position of defending Resolution Copper against colleagues like Congressman Raúl Grijalva of Tucson and Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who have introduced unsuccessful bills in Congress to prevent the land transfer. There is something of a bitter irony, too, in seeing her party tout the economic upsides of the energy transition while standing in the way of Superior’s mine, which would employ an average of 1,434 workers per year and add over $1 billion annually to Arizona’s economy during its lifespan, according to the FEIS.
“Every mayor wants more jobs in their community,” Besich told me simply. But, she also pointed out, “Copper is critical to the green economy, so if we want the green economy, we should want to be mining American copper.”
Superior, of course, isn’t just any town. “Everybody here either worked in the mines or had family that worked in the mines,” James Schenck, a former employee of Resolution Copper who supports the mine and serves as the treasurer for Rebuild Superior, a nonprofit working to diversify the local economy, told me. “They understand the downsides, and some of them, for a while, were having a hard time understanding how this is different than what went on before.”
Though everyone seems to be on cordial terms — at one point during my visit, I was having lunch with Muñoz and Delgado when Besich walked in, and everyone smiled politely at one another — there are still clear factions. A Facebook group for locals warns against “posts concerning DRAMA, POLITICS, RELIGION, and MINING,” presumably the same topics to be avoided at family Thanksgivings.
The critical mineral experts I talked to for this story, though, said Schenck is largely right on that point. “Mining in 2024 is radically different than mining in 1954 or in 1904,” Simon told me. “It is really surgical.”
Muñoz is one of those in town who still isn’t buying it, and has converted his garage into an interpretive center for exposing the perceived infiltrators. As soft classic rock played over the speakers and a fan whirred to keep us cool, he showed me the 3D model he had commissioned of the Oak Flat sinkhole, with a miniature Eiffel Tower subsumed in its crater for scale. Laid out on a table on the other side of the room was a row of six dictionary-thick, spiral-bound sections of the FEIS, their most pertinent sections bookmarked. On the walls, Muñoz had hung pictures of comparable tailings sites in other parts of the world — cautionary tales of the hazards posed during the long lifespan of mines. (Including the water demands, no small concern in a place like Arizona, which opens a whole other can of worms).
“I use my experience to educate the people,” Muñoz said. “This isn’t what it’s made out to be. They’re going to play you.”
Muñoz was employed at the Magma Copper mine until 1982, when he was 27. “One day they said, ‘We’re shutting down.’ They folded up just like a carnival does on Monday morning,” he recalled. The abrupt departure devastated Superior: In These Timesdescribed the following years as an “economic cataclysm” for the town. By 1989, the median household income was just $16,118 compared to $36,806 in Queen Creek, the nearest Phoenix suburb just a 45-minute drive away.
“I witnessed grown men cry,” Muñoz said. “Men who’d been in the mines pretty close to 30 years — they never knew nothing else.” His father, the former boarding house owner, was among them: “He had limited writing abilities and what have you. He was 58. People lost their homes here. They lost their cars. There were divorces. Some people committed suicide. The drinking, the drugs. It was a bad time.”
Muñoz went on food stamps and unemployment. “This generation that is coming up, they’ve never experienced that,” he said. “They’ve never experienced a repossession note in the mail from the bank. They’ve never experienced a disconnection notice hanging from your front door knob. And they’ve never experienced calling up the utilities and saying, ‘Hey, can you wait until Friday when my unemployment check comes in?’”
Superior’s story isn’t unique; Arizona’s Copper Triangle is a constellation of hollowed-out company towns. Like many other out-of-work Magma miners, Muñoz eventually found a job at San Manuel, a BHP-owned block cave mine about an hour south of Superior. Then, in 1999, copper prices stuttered again, and by 2003, it shut down, too.
Muñoz had just returned from a car show in San Manuel when we met in his garage, and he reported it was still a sorry sight. “The main grocery store is closed, the Subway, all the buildings are boarded up, and the schools are shut down,” he said. The mine “just abandoned that town.”
Even as Muñoz and the Concerned Citizens and Retired Miners Coalition work with Apache Stronghold and national environmentalist groups like HECHO, the Sierra Club, and the National Wildlife Federation try to block Resolution Copper’s mine, there is a distinct feeling in Superior of its inevitability. Schenck, the treasurer for Rebuild Superior, told me he suspects just “10% or 15%” of people in town are “against the project.”
“My personal belief is this copper deposit is going to be developed at some point,” Schenck said. “It’s too important.”
Besich, the mayor, gave this impression too. “What people need to understand is, this ore body is not going anywhere,” she said. “Someone will mine it in the future.” She views Superior and the copper industry as partners in an “arranged marriage,” and her job as mayor is helping them “figure out how to get along.”
From the outside, though, Resolution Copper looks more like a sugar daddy. To date, Rio Tinto and BHP have spent more than $2 billion combined pursuing the Oak Flat mine, including pumping money into the Chamber of Commerce building, the Enterprise Center, and the fire department. When the town of Kearny, downstream of the mine’s proposed tailings site, needed a new ambulance, Resolution Copper offered to help foot the bill. Local high schoolers and tribal members can even apply for Resolution Copper scholarships.
Critics say Resolution Copper is buying political and social influence in the Copper Corridor, a modern-day iteration of the propaganda tactics that swept aside the Apache in the late 1800s. Rio Tinto and BHP “remain committed to influencing U.S. government decisions about the use of public lands and minerals, regardless of additional harms to those lands, to Native Americans, or to National Register historic sites and sacred places,” the archaeologist Welch wrote in his Oak Flat study.
Rio Tinto is infamous even in the mining industry for its poor history of handling community- and heritage-related concerns. To pick a recent example, the company drew international condemnation for its 2020 destruction of the Juukan Gorge cave in Western Australia, a sacred site to the Aboriginal people that had evidence of continuous human occupation going back to the Ice Age. Though Rio Tinto had the legal right to destroy the 45,000-year-old caves, “it is hard to believe community engagement is being taken seriously” by the company, Glynn Cochrane, a former Rio Tinto senior advisor, said in a testimony in the aftermath. Archaeologists and sympathetic politicians have warned that the cultural and spiritual loss caused by mining Oak Flat would be like a second Juukan Gorge.
The San Carlos Apache are not a monolith, however, and the community has differing beliefs about the cultural importance of Oak Flat. Tribal members who support the mine or work for Resolution Copper are often cited by non-Native supporters as proof of Apache Stronghold’s supposedly arbitrary defense of Oak Flat. (Apache Stronghold, which is on a prayer journey to petition the Supreme Court, did not return Heatmap’s request for comment.)
Muñoz and his team are specifically worried about how Superior, the town, will make out. U.S. copper smelters are already at capacity, meaning Resolution Copper would likely send much if not all of the raw copper extracted at Oak Flat to China for processing. (Rio Tinto’s largest shareholder is the Aluminum Corporation of China.) The spokesperson for Resolution Copper told me that it’s the company’s priority to process the ore domestically, and Rio Tinto does have its own facility in the U.S., the Kennecott copper smelting facility in Utah. Yet it hasn’t committed publicly to processing the Arizona ore there, and it’s far from clear that it even has the capacity to do so.
For Simon, the University of Michigan professor, that shouldn’t be a deterrent: “If we mine more copper here and it just means we have to export it — who cares?” he pushed back. “If it has to go to China and they smelt it, then you send it to China and they smelt it. Climate is the prize, and if we want to mitigate our impact, we’ve got to do it. There are no ifs, ands, or buts.”
Oak Flat is also located outside of Superior’s town limits, meaning the community would only recoup about $500,000 in tax revenue, on the high end, from the mine annually, according to the 2021 FEIS — Schenek told me the town’s budget is around $3 million, so it’s hardly insignificant, though it is peanuts compared to the $38 million the state would reap. The FEIS additionally estimated that only about a quarter of the mine’s eventual employees would actually “seek to live in or near Superior;” many would choose instead to commute the hour or so from Phoenix’s Maricopa County.
Because of technological advances in mining and robotics, the mine also won’t bring back the physical jobs locals remember from the 1970s — by Resolution Copper’s own admission. Besich, at least, isn’t bothered by this detail: “In all reality, I don’t see my children and their peers wanting to do the manual physical labor that my grandfather, my father, and certainly my great-grandfather did,” she told me. “So the change in technique is good, and I think that it’s actually better for the environment in the long term.” She added that Resolution Copper’s investment in things like local infrastructure and worker training programs will compensate for the comparably insignificant tax revenue the town will otherwise receive, ensuring Superior gets a fair cut of the bonanza.
What supporters and opponents of the mine can agree on is that Superior must avoid the devastation of the 1980s if or when the Oak Flat mine is exhausted in 40 or more years. Besich and Schenck told me their vision is for Superior to be a town with a mine, not a mining town. But is such a thing even possible? In recent years, Superior has tried to position itself as an outdoor recreation gateway to the many climbing routes and hiking trails in the area. Yet I struggle to imagine anyone would want to vacation or recreate so close to a massive mining operation.
Muñoz believes Superior should throw itself entirely into tourism, which brings in three times as much revenue as the copper industry in Arizona. He dismissed arguments that losing the mine this far into negotiations and preparations would set the town back two decades, telling me about a conversation he had with Vicky Peacey, the president of Resolution Copper. “She said, ‘How do I tell my 300-plus employees that they don’t have a job?’” he recalled. “I said, ‘The same way BHP told the 3,300 in San Manuel they didn’t have a job. Magma Copper didn’t have a problem telling us we didn’t have a job in ‘82.”
Whatever gets decided about Oak Flat will reverberate far beyond Superior, though. “We’ve got to keep our eyes on the prize,” Simon told me. “And if the prize is mitigating human impacts on climate, and that requires the energy transition, and that requires copper, and we have a potential mine in Arizona that would provide 500,000 tons of copper every year for decades — we need to do that.”
At the end of my day in Superior, I went with Muñoz and Delgado, another former miner, to visit the haunted boarding house.
The renovated interior was surprisingly beautiful, decorated with period-appropriate details like iron bed frames, clawfoot bathtubs, and lace curtains that softened the harshness of the mid-afternoon light. Though even the FEIS warns that “mining in Arizona has followed a ‘boom and bust’ cycle, which potentially leads to great economic uncertainty,” it was with a pang that I imagined the building one day falling back into disrepair. It, and the town, had survived too much.
After peeking into Room 103, where Muñoz had passed his tipsy night all those decades ago, we asked the friendly woman working the front desk if she’d had any supernatural experiences herself — surely she’d seen the mattress-flipping phantom, or swinging chandeliers, or perhaps a white-boot miner who’d come down from the hills?
To our disappointment, she shook her head. For now, whatever ghosts there once might have been in Superior had gone.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to include comment from Resolution Copper.
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Isometric is trying to become the most trusted name in the scandal-plagued carbon market.
Regulations are probably coming for the scandal-plagued voluntary carbon market. After years of mounting skepticism and reports of greenwashing, governments are now attempting to rein in the historically unchecked web of platforms, registries, protocols, and verification bodies offering ways to offset a company’s emissions that vary tremendously in price and quality. Europe has developed its own rules, the Carbon Removal Certification Framework, while the Biden administration earlier this year announced a less comprehensive set of general principles. Plus, there are already mandatory carbon credit schemes around the world, such as California’s cap-and-trade program and the E.U. Emissions Trading System.
“The idea that a voluntary credit should be a different thing than a compliance credit, obviously doesn’t make sense, right?” Ryan Orbuch, Lowercarbon Capital’s carbon removal lead, told me. “You want it to be as likely as possible that the thing you’re buying today is going to count in a compliance regime.”
That’s where the carbon credit certification platform Isometric comes into play. Founded in 2022, the startup raised $25 million in its seed round last year, co-led by Lowercarbon and Plural, a European venture capital firm. It has created a rigorous, scientifically-driven standard for carbon removal credits, with the intention of becoming the benchmark that buyers, sellers, and other stakeholders can coalesce around. So whenever federal standards or compliance regimes do kick in, there will be no doubt whether Isometric-verified credits are up to snuff.
“Isometric was basically founded to say, look, the long-term solution here is obviously government and regulation, but in the meantime, this is too important to let the market just keep doing it like this,” Lukas May, chief commercial officer at Isometric, told me. He believes that the government’s role in the carbon market should mirror the financial sector, but instead of preventing insider trading or predatory lending, federal regulators would make high-level determinations on things like what types of credits count and how long carbon must be locked away to count as “permanent removal.” Platforms like Isometric (often referred to as registries) could then focus on setting more granular, scientifically specific requirements for particular methods of carbon removal.
The startup aims to separate itself from existing registries, which include Puro.earth, Verra, and the Gold Standard, in two big ways.
First is just a focus on science. May said that 15 of Isometric’s first 25 hires were scientists. Today, the company’s chief scientist is Jennifer Wilcox, who recently left her position on the leadership team at the Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management, housed within the U.S. Department of Energy. Other registries, he told me, are “filled with NGO types” and “policy people” who lack the technical background to, say, evaluate what types rock formations are best for the geological sequestration of bio-oil or how CO2 fluxes in the soil impact enhanced rock weathering. These types of in-the-weeds analyses are integral to establishing stringent protocols to validate the amount of carbon that’s actually been removed.
Additionally, May, Orbuch, and Khaled Helioui, a partner at Plural who led the firm’s investment in Isometric, all said the company fixes a key flaw in the voluntary carbon market —- alignment of financial incentives. Traditionally, carbon removal suppliers pay registries to certify their credits, which creates an incentive for registries to overlook lax standards. But Isometric is instead paid a flat fee by the buyers for performing verification work on a per-ton basis.
This year, Isometric verified its first credits ever, from the carbon removal companies Vaulted Deep, which collects sludgy, organic waste and deposits it underground, and Charm Industrial, which injects processed biomass into abandoned oil and gas wells. Credits from these two suppliers were sold to Frontier, the carbon-removal initiative led by the payments firm Stripe. Just last week, Frontier identified Isometric as its first and only leading credit issuer.
“What makes Isometric stand out is they’re explicitly focused on durable CDR [carbon dioxide removal],” Joanna Klitzke, Frontier’s procurement and ecosystem strategy lead, told me. “Durable” refers to the fact that Isometric’s projects must sequester CO2 for 1,000 years or more. “They’re building tech products that make data and reporting particularly easy for suppliers and for credit management,” she added.
Everyone is essentially trying to avoid another scandal like the one that engulfed rainforest carbon offsets, which were found to be largely worthless. The industry has thus been shifting away from more nebulous carbon offsets, which seek to avoid future emissions by preventing deforestation or funding renewables development, and towards more concrete, but often more expensive, forms of carbon removal — think direct air capture, enhanced rock weathering, or biomass carbon removal and storage, all of which have seen a boom in investment.
“As carbon removal was emerging as a new and potentially very exciting way to do this stuff, potentially more measurable and more rigorous, we couldn’t just sit and watch the same registries do the same thing,” May told me, saying doing so would “destroy trust in the carbon removal industry before it’s even off the ground.”
In a past life, Isometric’s founder and CEO, Eamon Jubbawy, founded a digital identity verification company for the financial services industry. This gave investors confidence that he could bring his expertise in trust-building and verification services to the carbon removal space.
“It’s not a like for like, but there’s a lot of overlap in terms of actually introducing efficiency, effectiveness, and having technology really open a market,” Plural’s Helioui told me. “This is not an endeavor or an opportunity where I would have been necessarily that keen to back a first-time founder, just because of the complexity of what you need to manage,” he said. “We’re really talking about market creation.”
But May doesn’t expect Isometric to totally dominate other registries. Just like there are many private banks, May envisions an “ecosystem of high quality registries,” eventually unified around a set of federal guardrails. Until then, he believes Isometric’s role is to “set a bar that is so high that the expectation and norm in the market shifts,” thus avoiding a race to the bottom where companies are able to greenwash their image with cheap, low-quality credits.
Now, not every company can afford the highest quality credits. And because of Isometric’s 1,000-year storage requirement, many cheaper, nature-based projects, such as reforestation, are excluded from its registry, even though there’s still demand for them. Orbuch told me that Isometric will continue adding guidelines for different carbon removal pathways, as it recently did for biochar, a charcoal-like brick that locks up carbon contained within biomass.
It’s still early days, and there’s plenty of room for Isometric to grow alongside the market. After all, it’s only issued 5,350 carbon removal credits to date, while nearly two billion credits have been issued in the voluntary carbon market overall.
“The whole industry needs to be scaling up,” May told me. “So we need to, in 10 years time, be, you know, issuing and verifying hundreds of millions, if not billions, of credits annually.”
On the U.S. Postal Service’s wonderfully weird shift to electric cars
When you think of a gas-guzzler, what comes to mind is probably a gigantic pickup like the Ram 1500 TRX, which gets a combined 12 miles per gallon, or a sports car like the Ferrari Daytona, which manages a less-than-impressive 13 mpg. But you may not think about a vehicle you’ve likely seen a thousand times: the small trucks driven by most local mail carriers, known as the Grumman Long Life Vehicle. They lived up to their name, since they’ve been in service since the mid-80s; the newest of them were built 30 years ago. But they get an abysmal 9 miles per gallon, burning fuel by the tankful and spewing emissions as they go about their appointed rounds.
So after a long and winding journey to a replacement for the LLV, the first of the Postal Service’s Next Generation Delivery Vehicles — most of which will be electric — just hit the road. And they are beautiful.
Oshkosh Defense
This may not be a widely shared opinion. Indeed, some will find the NGDV downright ugly, and they won’t exactly be wrong. But the new postal truck’s weird appearance — many have remarked that it looks like a duck, or something from a Richard Scarry book — is what, I predict, will make it iconic. In addition to bringing a touch of whimsy to your neighborhood, the NGDV will advance the cause of vehicle electrification much more than you might expect.
Postal delivery vehicles were always a no-brainer for electrification: They do a lot of stopping and starting, they follow fixed routes so they can charge at a single location, and since the existing fleet uses so much gas, electrifying them will make a real dent in the nation’s emissions.
The old trucks didn’t just add to our nation’s carbon emissions, they got no love from the workers who drove them. If you’ve noticed your mail carrier sweating profusely as they bring letters to your door in the summer, it’s not just because they have to carry that heavy bag up and down the street. It’s also because their creaky, uncomfortable vehicles have no air conditioning. In 2024.
“It felt like heaven blowing in my face,” said one carrier after trying out the NGDV, which does indeed have air conditioning, along with many of the safety features, including backup cameras, antilock brakes, and airbags, that are common in modern cars but the LLVs lacked. The new truck also looks unusual because it solves many of the problems the old vehicles pose for letter carriers. The truck had to be tall enough to allow them to stand up in the back, so they won’t have to hunch over the way they do now. It had to be low to the ground so they can get in and out easily dozens of times in a shift. It had to have a big enough windshield for the shortest and tallest carriers to see out comfortably.
Oshkosh Defense
All that meant that the NGDV wound up looking like no other vehicle. Once they are fully deployed — the current plan is to put 60,000 into service over the next few years — their unique profile will become familiar to everyone. And it’s important that this strange electric vehicle will be associated with the Postal Service. Because people love the Postal Service.
That might be a surprise given familiar complaints about lines at the post office. But it turns out that when surveys are taken, the Postal Service always ranks at or near the top of public approval among federal agencies. A recent Pew Research poll put the USPS’s approval at 72%, behind only the National Park Service. Gallup polls show them at the top. A 2020 survey by the department’s Inspector General found 91% of respondents saying they had a positive view of the USPS.
Perhaps people have a sense that what the Postal Service accomplishes is nothing short of miraculous. They move over 300 million pieces of mail every day, and deliver to 167 million addresses. They’ll pick up a letter at your door, take it anywhere in the country by land or air or water, and deliver it right to your Aunt Myrtle in the space of a few days — and not for $50 or $100, but for 73 cents. It costs the same whether that letter is going to Atlanta or Alakanuk. As U.S. law states, the purpose of the Postal Service is “to bind the Nation together through the personal, educational, literary, and business correspondence of the people.” The USPS is nothing less than a national treasure.
Maybe people appreciate that, or maybe it’s just that most of us like getting mail, and our mail carriers are part of our communities (and usually friendly). In any case, the new electric vehicles will be associated with all the positive feelings people have about the USPS.
Which is why it’s fine — and maybe even better — that the NGDV is odd-looking, or even ugly (but in a charming way). One prevailing theory about EV adoption — advanced by Tesla’s Elon Musk and embodied in other vehicles like the Ford F-150 Lightning — is that the way to get people to buy EVs is to make EVs that are cool. It’s a valid perspective, but another way to think about the long-term goal of transportation electrification is that EVs ought to be in as many places and as many forms as possible. If you want to normalize them, what better way than to have a funky-looking EV rolling down your street every day, delivering mail to your door?
It may be a while before you spot an NGDV in your neighborhood; among other things, it will take time to install the charging infrastructure at all the postal facilities necessary to electrify the entire delivery fleet. After all, one of the things that makes the Postal Service such a vital part of our national life is that it touches Americans, and delivers to them, no matter how far-flung they are. At least at first, we may be more likely to see electric delivery vehicles in big cities than in remote rural areas.
But before long, the NGDV could become the most widely recognized EV in the country, and one that people associate with service, community, efficiency, and patriotism. And yes, they look weird. Which is part of what makes them great.
On strange vibrations, a White House heat summit, and asthma inhalers
Current conditions: Extreme rainfall in the Czech Republic could trigger some of the worst flooding in decades • South America has recorded more than 346,000 fire hotspots this year • A 4.7 magnitude earthquake rattled Los Angeles yesterday, followed by several aftershocks.
Back in September of last year, seismic sensors all over the world began detecting strange signals, the source of which researchers couldn’t identify. For nine days, the whole Earth appeared to vibrate at regular 90-second intervals. Now, scientists say they’ve figured out what happened: A massive landslide in Greenland, caused by a melting glacier, sent huge volumes of debris plummeting into a fjord and triggered a mega-tsunami. The energy from the wave remained trapped in the fjord for nine days, the water sloshing back and forth and sending vibrations rippling out across the entire globe. Here you can see before and after pictures of the glacier and the mountain:
Science / Danish army
In a study published yesterday in the journal Science, the researchers explicitly link the event to climate change. Warming global temperatures caused the glacier to become too thin to support the mountain, so it collapsed. And they say there will be more events like these. “As we continue to alter our planet’s climate, we must be prepared for unexpected phenomena that challenge our current understanding and demand new ways of thinking,” the researchers wrote. “The ground beneath us is shaking, both literally and figuratively. While the scientific community must adapt and pave the way for informed decisions, it’s up to decision-makers to act.”
The White House today will host its first-ever Extreme Heat Summit, where President Biden’s National Climate Advisor Ali Zaidi will issue an “Extreme Heat Call to Action,” urging leaders to step up their efforts to protect communities from the dangers of rising temperatures brought on by climate change. The summit comes on the heels of the hottest summer ever recorded in the Northern Hemisphere, and as the West Coast reels from wildfires made worse by drought and a record-breaking heat wave.
The summit will gather a variety of stakeholders – including emergency responders and health-care workers – to share takeaways and lessons from 2024’s extreme heat season, discuss how the government is helping and could help more, and identify gaps and opportunities for building extreme heat resilience ahead of next year. The White House will also announce a new “Community Heat Action Checklist” to serve as a roadmap to help leaders develop extreme heat plans.
“Climate-fueled extreme heat waves are showing up like wrecking balls in our communities, silently wreaking havoc on lives and livelihoods,” Zaidi said in a statement. “We recognize that this is climate change in action, and in response are taking a comprehensive approach to protecting both our people and infrastructure.” Investments from the Inflation Reduction Act and Bipartisan Infrastructure Law for helping states adapt to the effects of climate change, including extreme heat, total more than $50 billion.
The U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations has committed up to $500 million to help Occidental Petroleum’s carbon capture and sequestration unit 1PointFive develop its South Texas DAC Hub, Reutersreported. The hub will host Oxy’s first large-scale removal facility, which will aim to remove 500,000 metric tons of CO2 per year to start, ramping up to more than 1 million metric tons annually. “Occidental’s first large-scale DAC facility represents a pivotal economic trial for a technology that the International Energy Agency says will play a key role for global industrial decarbonization, despite its high costs in initial tests,” Reuters added.
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A new report takes stock of state efforts to ditch diesel-powered school buses for electric fleets. Both federal and state funding is available to help with this transition. The report, from the Environment America Research and Policy Center and U.S. PIRG Education Fund, finds that California has the most “committed” electric school buses – that is, buses that have been awarded, ordered, delivered, or are already operational. The state has 1,777 e-buses up and running or ready to deploy, and is still waiting on nearly 2,000 more. These buses will serve more than 63,000 students. Also in the top five are New York, Illinois, Florida, and Pennsylvania, but they each trail California by quite a lot. Wyoming and Idaho are the only states with zero electric school buses. The report has lots of recommendations and tools to help school districts upgrade their fleets. It also urges students to pressure school boards to commit to making the switch.
Pharmaceutical companies are racing to get harmful pollutants out of their asthma inhalers, according to the Financial Times. Typical inhalers rely on propellants made from hydrofluorocarbons, or HFCs, to deliver life-saving drugs to users. But HFCs are potent greenhouse gases that are more effective than carbon dioxide at trapping heat in the atmosphere. Pharma giant GSK estimates its Ventolin inhaler accounted for nearly half of the company’s global carbon footprint in 2022, releasing the equivalent of 4.6 million metric tons of CO2. It’s developing a new inhaler that could have a 90% lower carbon footprint. Similarly, AstraZeneca has a new inhaler in the works that could cut 1.3 million metric tons of CO2 equivalent emissions annually. Both companies are trying to file for regulatory approval either by the end of 2024, or early next year.
“Climate change is not a scientific or technical problem – it’s a political problem. And political problems can be solved by voting.” –Andrew Dressler, a climate scientist at Texas A&M, writing at The Climate Brink.