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There are two kinds of people who work on climate solutions: Those who still believe in the promise of carbon markets, and those who think the whole concept is fundamentally flawed.
In the first category, you have people like McGee Young, the CEO of a company called WattCarbon. Young is aware of the ways carbon markets can be a race to the bottom — enabling companies to buy cheap certificates that say they used clean energy or reduced their carbon footprint, when in reality their purchase had little effect on the environment or the energy system.
And yet, there’s all this money out there for the taking! Companies want to green their image! Tackling climate change is expensive! There must be a way to funnel corporate sustainability budgets to where they can make a real impact!
To Young, the solution is a matter of better data and greater transparency. “We need a record-keeping system that allows us to raise the bar,” he told me.
Young launched his vision for that record-keeping system on Wednesday — the WattCarbon Energy Attribute Tracking System, or WEATS. It functions similarly to other environmental credit registries: Owners of clean energy assets can sign up to generate credits known as Environmental Attribute Certificates, or EACs, which buyers can then purchase to count toward their own clean energy or carbon goals.
WEATS has two main features that differentiate it. First, it will include credits from small-scale distributed energy resources like residential solar panels, batteries, and heat pumps — clean energy solutions that haven’t really been able to participate in carbon markets until now. Second, each EAC will include granular information about where and when the power was generated, in the case of solar, or the carbon savings incurred, in the case of heat pumps, down to the hour.
The first feature is part of what motivated Young to start WattCarbon. “The clean energy transition is more than just wind and solar, it’s more than just generation,” he told me. But it’s the second that Young said is key to improving the credibility of claims that companies are “using 100% clean energy,” or “achieving net-zero.”
Today, many companies simply buy enough clean energy credits to match their annual energy use, regardless of where or when the energy was generated. But researchers have shown that this strategy can have little to no impact on emissions. For example, if a company is only buying solar credits, but it is using energy at night, its carbon footprint from that nighttime energy could surpass any environmental benefits of the solar it bought.
To solve this, some energy buyers have embraced a concept called “24/7 carbon-free energy,” which means that “every kilowatt-hour of electricity consumption is met with carbon-free electricity sources, every hour of every day, everywhere,” in the words of a United Nations-led initiative to promote the concept. “It is both the end state of a fully decarbonized electricity system,” according to the UN, “and a transformative approach to energy procurement, supply, and policy design that is critical to accelerating its arrival.”
If you’ve followed the recent debate about the green hydrogen tax credit, you might be familiar with the idea. In December, the Treasury Department proposed that hydrogen producers will have to match their electricity consumption with the purchase of local clean electricity generation on an hourly basis to prove their hydrogen is clean enough to qualify for the full value of the tax credit. That means producers can either hook up directly to a solar farm or wind farm or geothermal power plant and operate only when it is generating power, or, it can buy renewable energy credits or EACs that correspond to the hours that it operates.
WattCarbon’s marketplace is one of the first to enable this by requiring sellers to include data about exactly where and when each EAC was produced. It also include the carbon intensity of the grid in the place and time when that unit of power was produced. For example, 1 megawatt-hour of solar power in West Virginia, where the grid is supplied by a lot of coal-fired power plants, would likely reduce emissions far more than 1 megawatt-hour of solar power in California, where the main fossil fuel burned for power is natural gas. Similarly, 1 megawatt-hour of solar generated in the afternoon in California will not do as much to reduce emissions as if that unit of power were stored in a battery and then dispatched at night. On other markets, all of these credits might simply be advertised as 1 megawatt-hour of solar power, and the buyer would be none the wiser.
So what does this new carbon trading marketplace look like in practice? There are a lot of possibilities, but here’s one scenario. WattCarbon partners with a company that helps homeowners electrify their heating or install and manage their solar and battery systems. That third party company can then say to their customers, “As an extra incentive to do this, we can help you sell the environmental benefits it provides to third parties through the WattCarbon marketplace,” and those extra payments are what convinces the homeowner to go for it.
Independent experts I spoke with were cautiously optimistic about what this new marketplace could do. “We need to deploy on the order of a billion machines, in the U.S. alone — and not over a century, but on the order of a decade,” said Kevin Kircher, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Purdue University, whose research focuses on heat pumps and other distributed energy resources. “So there’s a lot that needs to be done, and just connecting people to money to do the work is really important.”
Wilson Ricks, a PhD candidate at Princeton University whose research informed the Treasury’s proposal for the hydrogen tax credit, said that having a platform where hydrogen companies can procure clean energy from a variety of projects, and with time and location data, would be very useful. He was also intrigued by WattCarbon’s attempt to create EACs tied to batteries because energy storage systems are one of the few resources that can produce clean power when the wind isn’t blowing and the sun isn’t shining.
But both Ricks and Kircher warned there are a number of ways this system of credits could fall into the same traps that ensnare many carbon offset projects and reduce their credibility. For one, it’s really hard to get the math right. That’s especially true for a project like a heat pump, where the carbon savings are based on a counterfactual situation where the homeowner would have kept their gas heater. You have to basically estimate how often they would have run it, which opens the door to sloppiness at best and fraud at worst.
Another key criterion — a concept called additionality — is very hard to assess. Would the household that switches to a heat pump have done so regardless of whether they were getting extra revenue from selling EACs? If the answer is unequivocally yes, the credits are meaningless and serve to give corporate emitters an excuse to keep emitting.
Young acknowledged to me that this was likely going to be true in some cases, but still felt that heat pump owners deserved to be paid for the environmental benefits they were providing. “We provide environmental subsidies for large-scale wind and solar, and we don't do that for the things that we're putting into our buildings and our communities. And to me, there’s an inherent inequality in the way that we treat and value clean energy that needs to be addressed.”
That didn’t quite make sense to me — the government provides subsidies for all kinds of clean energy resources, including distributed energy resources, I countered. The Treasury will give you $2,000 for a heat pump and a 30% discount on rooftop solar.
“That’s true,” Young said. “But we don’t have enough money in all of our government programs to truly scale those.”
I couldn’t argue with that. But the real challenge is helping low-income homeowners with the upfront capital to install these devices — after-the-fact payments are not enough. Young said he had plans to create a way for companies to procure EACs in advance from groups of homeowners. The deals would be similar to the power purchase agreements that big electricity consumers like Google and Walmart make with large-scale renewable energy developers, helping to finance those projects by reducing the risk.
“This is a necessary but not sufficient step,” Young said of the version of the marketplace that launched Wednesday. “Without this, we can’t do that. But this by itself would be inadequate for the market to be able to reach its fullest potential.”
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Instead of rocket fuel, they’re using biomass.
Arbor Energy might have the flashiest origin story in cleantech.
After the company’s CEO, Brad Hartwig, left SpaceX in 2018, he attempted to craft the ideal resume for a future astronaut, his dream career. He joined the California Air National Guard, worked as a test pilot at the now-defunct electric aviation startup Kitty Hawk, and participated in volunteer search and rescue missions in the Bay Area, which gave him a front row seat to the devastating effects of wildfires in Northern California.
That experience changed everything. “I decided I actually really like planet Earth,” Hartwig told me, “and I wanted to focus my career instead on preserving it, rather than trying to leave it.” So he rallied a bunch of his former rocket engineer colleagues to repurpose technology they pioneered at SpaceX to build a biomass-fueled, carbon negative power source that’s supposedly about ten times smaller, twice as efficient, and eventually, one-third the cost of the industry standard for this type of plant.
Take that, all you founders humble-bragging about starting in a dingy garage.
“It’s not new science, per se,” Hartwig told me. The goal of this type of tech, called bioenergy with carbon capture and storage, is to combine biomass-based energy generation with carbon dioxide removal to achieve net negative emissions. Sounds like a dream, but actually producing power or heat from this process has so far proven too expensive to really make sense. There are only a few so-called BECCS facilities operating in the U.S. today, and they’re all just ethanol fuel refineries with carbon capture and storage technology tacked on.
But the advances in 3D printing and computer modeling that allowed the SpaceX team to build an increasingly simple and cheap rocket engine have allowed Arbor to move quickly into this new market, Hartwig explained. “A lot of the technology that we had really pioneered over the last decade — in reactor design, combustion devices, turbo machinery, all for rocket propulsion — all that technology has really quite immediate application in this space of biomass conversion and power generation.”
Arbor’s method is poised to be a whole lot sleeker and cheaper than the BECCS plants of today, enabling both more carbon sequestration and actual electricity production, all by utilizing what Hartwig fondly refers to as a “vegetarian rocket engine.” Because there’s no air in space, astronauts have to bring pure oxygen onboard, which the rocket engines use to burn fuel and propel themselves into the stratosphere and beyond. Arbor simply subs out the rocket fuel for biomass. When that biomass is combusted with pure oxygen, the resulting exhaust consists of just CO2 and water. As the exhaust cools, the water condenses out, and what’s left is a stream of pure carbon dioxide that’s ready to be injected deep underground for permanent storage. All of the energy required to operate Arbor’s system is generated by the biomass combustion itself.
“Arbor is the first to bring forward a technology that can provide clean baseload energy in a very compact form,” Clea Kolster, a partner and Head of Science at Lowercarbon Capital told me. Lowercarbon is an investor in Arbor, alongside other climate tech-focused venture capital firms including Gigascale Capital and Voyager Ventures, but the company has not yet disclosed how much it’s raised.
Last month, Arbor signed a deal with Microsoft to deliver 25,000 tons of permanent carbon dioxide removal to the tech giant starting in 2027, when the startup’s first commercial project is expected to come online. As a part of the deal, Arbor will also generate 5 megawatts of clean electricity per year, enough to power about 4,000 U.S. homes. And just a few days ago, the Department of Energy announced that Arbor is one of 11 projects to receive a combined total of $58.5 million to help develop the domestic carbon removal industry.
Arbor’s current plan is to source biomass from forestry waste, much of which is generated by forest thinning operations intended to prevent destructive wildfires. Hartwig told me that for every ton of organic waste, Arbor can produce about one megawatt hour of electricity, which is in line with current efficiency standards, plus about 1.8 tons of carbon removal. “We look at being as efficient, if not a little more efficient than a traditional bioenergy power plant that does not have carbon capture on it,” he explained.
The company’s carbon removal price targets are also extremely competitive —- in the $50 to $100 per ton range, Hartwig said. Compare that to something like direct air capture, which today exceeds $600 per ton, or enhanced rock weathering, which is usually upwards of $300 per ton. “The power and carbon removal they can offer comes at prices that meet nearly unlimited demand,”Mike Schroepfer, the founder of Gigascale Capital and former CTO of Meta, told me via email. Arbor benefits from the fact that the electricity it produces and sells can help offset the cost of the carbon removal, and vice versa. So if the company succeeds in hitting its cost and efficiency targets, Hartwig said, this “quickly becomes a case for, why wouldn’t you just deploy these everywhere?”
Initial customers will likely be (no surprise here) the Microsofts, Googles and Metas of the world — hyperscalers with growing data center needs and ambitious emissions targets. “What Arbor unlocks is basically the ability for hyperscalers to stop needing to sacrifice their net zero goals for AI,” Kolster told me. And instead of languishing in the interminable grid interconnection queue, Hartwig said that providing power directly to customers could ensure rapid, early deployment. “We see it as being quicker to power behind-the-meter applications, because you don’t have to go through the process of connecting to the grid,” he told me. Long-term though, he said grid connection will be vital, since Arbor can provide baseload power whereas intermittent renewables cannot.
All of this could serve as a much cheaper alternative, to say, re-opening shuttered nuclear facilities, as Microsoft also recently committed to doing at Three Mile Island. “It’s great, we should be doing that,” Kolster said of this nuclear deal, “but there’s actually a limited pool of options to do that, and unfortunately, there is still community pushback.”
Currently, Arbor is working to build out its pilot plant in San Bernardino, California, which Hartwig told me will turn on this December. And by 2030, the company plans to have its first commercial plant operating at scale, generating 100 megawatts of electricity while removing nearly 2 megatons of CO2 every year. “To put it in perspective: In 2023, the U.S. added roughly 9 gigawatts of gas power to the grid, which generates 18 to 23 megatons of CO2 a year,” Schroepfer wrote to me. So having just one Arbor facility removing 2 megatons would make a real dent. The first plant will be located in Louisiana, where Arbor will also be working with an as-yet-unnamed partner to do the carbon storage.
The company’s carbon credits will be verified with the credit certification platform Isometric, which is also backed by Lowercarbon and thought to have the most stringent standards in the industry. Hartwig told me that Arbor worked hand-in-hand with Isometric to develop the protocol for “biogenic carbon capture and storage,” as the company is the first Isometric-approved supplier to use this standard.
But Hartwig also said that government support hasn’t yet caught up to the tech’s potential. While the Inflation Reduction Act provides direct air capture companies with $180 per ton of carbon dioxide removed, technology such as Arbor’s only qualifies for $85 per ton. It’s not nothing — more than the zero dollars enhanced rock weathering companies such as Lithos or bio-oil sequestration companies such as Charm are getting. “But at the same time, we’re treated the same as if we’re sequestering CO2 emissions from a natural gas plant or a coal plant,” Hartwig told me, as opposed to getting paid for actual CO2 removal.
“I think we are definitely going to need government procurement or involvement to actually hit one, five, 10 gigatons per year of carbon removal,” Hartwig said. Globally, scientists estimate that we’ll need up to 10 gigatons of annual CO2 removal by 2050 in order to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. “Even at $100 per ton, 10 gigatons of carbon removal is still a pretty hefty price tag,” Hartwig told me. A $100 billion price tag, to be exact. “We definitely need more players than just Microsoft.”
New research out today shows a 10-fold increase in smoke mortality related to climate change from the 1960s to the 2010.
If you are one of the more than 2 billion people on Earth who have inhaled wildfire smoke, then you know firsthand that it is nasty stuff. It makes your eyes sting and your throat sore and raw; breathe in smoke for long enough, and you might get a headache or start to wheeze. Maybe you’ll have an asthma attack and end up in the emergency room. Or maybe, in the days or weeks afterward, you’ll suffer from a stroke or heart attack that you wouldn’t have had otherwise.
Researchers are increasingly convinced that the tiny, inhalable particulate matter in wildfire smoke, known as PM2.5, contributes to thousands of excess deaths annually in the United States alone. But is it fair to link those deaths directly to climate change?
A new study published Monday in Nature Climate Change suggests that for a growing number of cases, the answer should be yes. Chae Yeon Park, a climate risk modeling researcher at Japan’s National Institute for Environmental Studies, looked with her colleagues at three fire-vegetation models to understand how hazardous emissions changed from 1960 to 2019, compared to a hypothetical control model that excluded historical climate change data. They found that while fewer than 669 deaths in the 1960s could be attributed to climate change globally, that number ballooned to 12,566 in the 2010s — roughly a 20-fold increase. The proportion of all global PM2.5 deaths attributable to climate change jumped 10-fold over the same period, from 1.2% in the 1960s to 12.8% in the 2010s.
“It’s a timely and meaningful study that informs the public and the government about the dangers of wildfire smoke and how climate change is contributing to that,” Yiqun Ma, who researches the intersection of climate change, air pollution, and human health at the Yale School of Medicine, and who was not involved in the Nature study, told me.
The study found the highest climate change-attributable fire mortality values in South America, Australia, and Europe, where increases in heat and decreases in humidity were also the greatest. In the southern hemisphere of South America, for example, the authors wrote that fire mortalities attributable to climate change increased from a model average of 35% to 71% between the 1960s and 2010s, “coinciding with decreased relative humidity,” which dries out fire fuels. For the same reason, an increase in relative humidity lowered fire mortality in other regions, such as South Asia. North America exhibited a less dramatic leap in climate-related smoke mortalities, with climate change’s contribution around 3.6% in the 1960s, “with a notable rise in the 2010s” to 18.8%, Park told me in an email.
While that’s alarming all on its own, Ma told me there was a possibility that Park’s findings might actually be too conservative. “They assume PM2.5 from wildfire sources and from other sources” — like from cars or power plants — “have the same toxicity,” she explained. “But in fact, in recent studies, people have found PM2.5 from fire sources can be more toxic than those from an urban background.” Another reason Ma suspected the study’s numbers might be an underestimate was because the researchers focused on only six diseases that have known links to PM2.5 exposure: chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, lung cancer, coronary heart disease, type 2 diabetes, stroke, and lower respiratory infection. “According to our previous findings [at the Yale School of Medicine], other diseases can also be influenced by wildfire smoke, such as mental disorders, depression, and anxiety, and they did not consider that part,” she told me.
Minghao Qiu, an assistant professor at Stony Brook University and one of the country’s leading researchers on wildfire smoke exposure and climate change, generally agreed with Park’s findings, but cautioned that there is “a lot of uncertainty in the underlying numbers” in part because, intrinsically, wildfire smoke exposure is such a complicated thing to try to put firm numbers to. “It’s so difficult to model how climate influences wildfire because wildfire is such an idiosyncratic process and it’s so random, ” he told me, adding, “In general, models are not great in terms of capturing wildfire.”
Despite their few reservations, both Qiu and Ma emphasized the importance of studies like Park’s. “There are no really good solutions” to reduce wildfire PM2.5 exposure. You can’t just “put a filter on a stack” as you (sort of) can with power plant emissions, Qiu pointed out.
Even prescribed fires, often touted as an important wildfire mitigation technique, still produce smoke. Park’s team acknowledged that a whole suite of options would be needed to minimize future wildfire deaths, ranging from fire-resilient forest and urban planning to PM2.5 treatment advances in hospitals. And, of course, there is addressing the root cause of the increased mortality to begin with: our warming climate.
“To respond to these long-term changes,” Park told me, “it is crucial to gradually modify our system.”
On the COP16 biodiversity summit, Big Oil’s big plan, and sea level rise
Current conditions: Record rainfall triggered flooding in Roswell, New Mexico, that killed at least two people • Storm Ashley unleashed 80 mph winds across parts of the U.K. • A wildfire that broke out near Oakland, California, on Friday is now 85% contained.
Forecasters hadn’t expected Hurricane Oscar to develop into a hurricane at all, let alone in just 12 hours. But it did. The Category 1 storm made landfall in Cuba on Sunday, hours after passing over the Bahamas, bringing intense rain and strong winds. Up to a foot of rainfall was expected. Oscar struck while Cuba was struggling to recover from a large blackout that has left millions without power for four days. A second system, Tropical Storm Nadine, made landfall in Belize on Saturday with 60 mph winds and then quickly weakened. Both Oscar and Nadine developed in the Atlantic on the same day.
Hurricane OscarAccuWeather
The COP16 biodiversity summit starts today in Cali, Colombia. Diplomats from 190 countries will try to come up with a plan to halt global biodiversity loss, aiming to protect 30% of land and sea areas and restore 30% of degraded ecosystems by 2030. Discussions will revolve around how to monitor nature degradation, hold countries accountable for their protection pledges, and pay for biodiversity efforts. There will also be a big push to get many more countries to publish national biodiversity strategies. “This COP is a test of how serious countries are about upholding their international commitments to stop the rapid loss of biodiversity,” said Crystal Davis, Global Director of Food, Land, and Water at the World Resources Institute. “The world has no shot at doing so without richer countries providing more financial support to developing countries — which contain most of the world’s biodiversity.”
A prominent group of oil and gas producers has developed a plan to roll back environmental rules put in place by President Biden, The Washington Post reported. The paper got its hands on confidential documents from the American Exploration and Production Council (AXPC), which represents some 30 producers. The documents include draft executive orders promoting fossil fuel production for a newly-elected President Trump to sign if he takes the White House in November, as well as a roadmap for dismantling many policies aimed at getting oil and gas producers to disclose and curb emissions. AXPC’s members, including ExxonMobil, ConocoPhillips, and Hess, account for about half of the oil and gas produced in the U.S., the Post reported.
A new report from the energy think tank Ember looks at how the uptake of electric vehicles and heat pumps in the U.K. is affecting oil and gas consumption. It found that last year the country had 1.5 million EVs on the road, and 430,000 residential heat pumps in homes, and the reduction in fossil fuel use due to the growth of these technologies was equivalent to 14 million barrels of oil, or about what the U.K. imports over a two-week span. This reduction effect will be even stronger as more and more EVs and heat pumps are powered by clean energy. The report also found that even though power demand is expected to rise, efficiency gains from electrification and decarbonization will make up for this, leading to an overall decline in energy use and fossil fuel consumption.
Ember
The world’s sea levels are projected to rise by more than 6 inches on average over the next 30 years if current trends continue, according to a new study published in the journal Nature. “Such rates would represent an evolving challenge for adaptation efforts,” the authors wrote. By examining satellite data, the researchers found that sea levels have risen by about .4 inches since 1993, and that they’re rising faster now than they were then. In 1993 the seas were rising by about .08 inches per year, and last year they were rising at .17 inches per year. These are averages, of course, and some areas are seeing much more extreme changes. For example, areas around Miami, Florida, have already seen sea levels rise by 6 inches over the last 31 years.
“As the climate crisis grows more urgent, restoring faith in government will be more important than ever.” –Paul Waldman writing for Heatmap about the profound implications of America becoming a low-trust society.