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A longtime climate messaging strategist is tired of seeing the industry punch below its weight.
Two former Department of Energy staffers argue from experience that severe foreign entity restrictions aren’t the way to reshore America’s clean energy supply chain.
In defense of “everything bagel” policymaking.
The U.S. is too enmeshed in the global financial system for the rest of the world to solve climate change without us.
And coal communities and fracking villages and all the rest.
The founder of Galvanize Climate Solutions and a 2020 presidential candidate does some math on how smart climate policy could help the U.S. in a trade war.
Direct air capture isn’t doing everything its advocates promised — yet. That doesn’t make it a scam.
Two events last week thrust direct air capture carbon removal into the spotlight — one promising, though controversial for some, the other mendacious and ill-informed.
On Friday, Occidental announced a potential $500 million joint venture investment from Adnoc’s XRG, the lower-carbon investment wing for the United Arab Emirates state-run oil company in Oxy’s South Texas DAC Hub project. The facility is part of the $3.5 billion federal DAC hubs program created through the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. Although the DAC hubs program has strong bipartisan support, it has faced relative uncertainty under the new administration, calling into question American leadership on the future of the industry.
Earlier in the week, Climeworks, another major DAC hubs award winner, announced a reduction in force, due in part to “pending clarity for our next plant in the U.S.” Coupled with this news, a sensationalized exposé by Icelandic news outlet Heimildin detailed challenges with the first two Climeworks facilities, including commentary that called both the company and the technology a “scam” and the “Theranos of the energy industry.”
DAC has never been entirely welcome among climate advocates. To a certain extent, its critics are right: The process of pulling carbon directly out of the ambient air and storing it permanently underground is both energy- and capital-intensive, and it has obvious utility for the oil and gas industry, which has seized on DAC’s potential to erase past emissions as a way to argue that the transition away from fossil energy isn’t actually necessary.
But these critics start to lose the thread when they call the technology a “fig leaf” for oil and gas or an “expensive, dangerous distraction,” and most egregiously when they point to the lack of actual carbon dioxide removed using the technology as an argument against future deployments.
There is a scientific consensus behind the need for carbon dioxide removal that these critiques dance around. As the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change lays out in its most recent scientific report, “CDR is required to limit warming to 1.5 [degrees Celsius],” and is “part of all modeled scenarios that limit warming to 2 [degrees] by 2100.” Even when critics recognize the need for permanent CDR, they frequently fail to provide any plausible pathway to gigaton scale. The fact is that DAC doesn’t have an established, liquid market, like electricity, steel, cement, or any other commodity. That any one DAC business is struggling as it attempts to scale is not an indictment of the company, but rather an illustration of the challenge it is taking on to commercialize a first-of-a-kind technologies that naturally has first-of-a-kind issues while also building a brand new market for the crucial climate service it provides. Don’t hate the player, hate the game.
The commercial model for the nascent CDR industry is largely the sale of carbon removal credits for delivery in future years. This isn’t unique to CDR — it’s even analogous to the power purchase agreements that scaled renewable energy. Futures contracts are standard practice, and certainly not indicative of a “scam.”
DAC’s high energy needs are frequently cited as a reason for concern among skeptics. As the Princeton Net Zero America study notes, however, the total energy needed to reduce emissions in a net-zero system without DAC increases because we would need more power to produce e-fuels. (Jesse Jenkins, one of the leaders of the Net Zero America study, is also a co-host of Heatmap’s Shift Key podcast.) This criticism also fails to take into account the reduction in energy intensity that companies are already achieving by various means. That group includes Climeworks, which has introduced more efficient sorbents; Heirloom, which is working on deploying passive mineralization; and Holocene, which was recently acquired by Oxy and employs the low regeneration temperature solvents.
The costs and efficiency of DAC today, just like the cost and efficiency of solar 20 years ago, are likely to improve significantly in the future as the technology and market become more efficient and reliable. Early DAC deployments may have a relatively high cost now, but even today, DAC is cost-competitive with emissions mitigation in aviation.
The industry currently stands at a precipice. Will DAC cross the chasm from pilot facilities to meaningful deployment? Or fall off the hype wagon into the dustbin of cool ideas that were always 10 years away? Beneath the innuendo and false claims, the reporting from Reykjavik shows what everyone in DAC knew — that it has a messy, non-linear path to scale. That does not disprove the argument that it is also a necessary technology that is not only valuable to remove emissions, but also is drawing billions in investment, and driving local economic development.
And there is plenty of good news. The XRG joint venture with Adnoc shows that a sophisticated strategic investor views American DAC as promising. (The local South Texas community is excited, too.) The Oxy Stratos facility in West Texas has already brought thousands of new construction jobs, and will bring hundreds of more permanent jobs to the heart of oil country — a new industry to make use of their unique and valuable skill sets. Project Bantam, a multi-modal operation that was the largest in the U.S. when it launched last summer, is operating in Oklahoma.
The Heimildin story was written to be a salacious takedown, and DAC opponents wasted no time in saying, “We told you so.” The issue with that reaction is the story isn’t unique to Climeworks, or even to DAC. The same story could have been written 20 years ago about solar and batteries. It could be written tomorrow about advanced geothermal or long-duration energy storage. It is the boring, mundane outcome of trying to build a difficult technology with the policy and business hand we are dealt.
The road to DAC at scale will be scattered with bumps, failed projects, and folded companies. We should be cheering these folks on, not taking shots from the cheap, increasingly warm seats.
What the Council on Foreign Relations’ new climate program gets drastically wrong.
Let’s start with two basic facts.
First, the climate crisis is here now, killing people, devastating communities, and destroying infrastructure in Los Angeles and Asheville and Spain and Pakistan and China. And it will get worse.
Second, Donald Trump is the President of the United States. He began the process to withdraw the United States from the Paris Agreement on January 20, 2025, his first day in office in his second term. (He, of course, did this in his first term as well.) He illegally froze funding for climate programs that had passed and became law during the Biden administration, and his administration continues to ignore court orders to unfreeze these monies. He has signed numerous executive orders, including on reinvigorating clean [sic] coal, reversing state-level climate policies, “Zero-based regulatory budgeting to unleash American energy,” and “unleashing” American energy, the last of which revoked more than a dozen Biden era executive orders.
How do we address a world that is increasingly shaped by these two facts?
One attempt can be seen in the Council on Foreign Relations’s new “Climate Realism Initiative.” Its statement of purpose attempts to make climate action palatable to MAGA world by securitizing it, framing climate change as a foreign threat to Fortress America. It calls for investing in next-generation technologies and geoengineering in the hopes of leapfrogging the Chinese-led clean energy revolution that is beginning to decarbonize the world today is the best realistic way forward.
This attempt is doomed to failure. Real climate realism for the United States is to stop the destruction of American state capacity, and then to reflect and build on areas of core strength including finance and software.
CRI’s launch document does not call for the U.S. to reduce its own emissions. I’ll say that again: There is no call for the U.S. to reduce its own emissions in the essay establishing the mission and objectives of the Climate Realism Initiative. Written by Varun Sivaram, formerly chief strategy and innovation officer at wind energy developer Orsted and now the leader of the initiative, the essay proposes that four dug-in “fallacies” are getting in the way of effective policy-making: that climate change “poses a manageable risk” to the U.S.; that “the world’s climate targets are achievable;” that the clean energy transition is a “win-in for U.S. interests and climate action;” and that “reducing U.S. domestic greenhouse gas emissions can make a meaningful difference.” For Sivaram, the problem is always other places and their emissions.
He then goes on to propose three “pillars” of climate realism: the need for America to prepare for a world “blowing through climate targets;” to “invest in globally competitive clean technology industries;” and to “lead international efforts to avert truly catastrophic climate change.” How an America that does not commit to reduce its own emissions will have any credibility or standing to lead international efforts is left unstated.
Sivaram attempts to trick the reader into overlooking America’s emissions by ignoring the facts of the past and focusing instead on guesses about the future. It’s true that in 2023, China produced more than a quarter of new global carbon pollution — more than the United States, Europe, and India combined. But no country has contributed more to the blanket of pollution that traps additional heat in our atmosphere than the United States, which has emitted over 430 billion tons of CO2, or 23% of the world’s total historical emissions. Even in 2023, the U.S. remained the world’s number two carbon polluter.
Sivaram goes further than merely minimizing the U.S. role in creating our current climate problems. Indeed, he sets up climate change as a problem that foreign countries are imposing on Americans. “Foreign emissions,” he writes, “are endangering the American homeland,” and the effects of climate disasters “resemble those if China or Indonesia were to launch missiles at the United States.” There is something to this rhetoric that is powerful — we should think about climate-induced disasters as serious threats and respond to them with the kind of resources that we lavish on the military industrial complex. But the idea that it is foreign emissions that are the primary source of this danger is almost Trumpian.
The initiatives proposed in the Climate Realism launch are the initiatives of giving up. Investing in resilience and adaptation is needed in any scenario, but tying this spending on adaptation to Trumpian notions of protecting our borders reeks of discredited lifeboat ethics, which only cares to save ourselves and leaves others to suffer for our sins. And while supporting next-generation technologies is an appropriate piece of the policy puzzle, they should be like the broccoli at a steakhouse: off to the side and mostly superfluous compared with the meat and potatoes of deployment and mitigation to decarbonize today.
Sivaram may argue that there’s no point in trying to compete against China in the technologies of today when Chinese firms are so dominant and apparently willing to make these products while earning minimal profits. And from a parochial profit-maximizing perspective, there is a business case that firms should not be building lots of new solar cell manufacturing facilities given global manufacturing capacity.
But if American automotive firms simply ignore the coming EV wave and hope against hope that some breakthrough in solid state batteries will allow them to leapfrog over the firms vying today, they are fooling themselves. Electric vehicle giant BYD and world-leading battery manufacturer CATL have both announced batteries that can charge a car in five minutes. Both are also moving in the solid state space, and CATL is pushing into sodium ion batteries.
The notion that U.S. firms ought to sit out this fight for strategic reasons also ignores how China has come to dominate these sectors — by investing in today’s state of the art and pushing it forward through incremental process improvements at scale. The Thielian notion that “competition is for losers” leads to an immense amount of waste as wannabe founders search for unbreakable technological advantages. If venture capitalists want to fund such bets, I’m not going to stop them. But as a policy prescription for climate realism, it fails.
The final gambit of the essay is to advocate for America-controlled geoengineering. This, too, is an area where research may be needed. But regardless, it is the kind of emergency backup plan that you hope that you never need to use, rather than something that should be central to anyone’s policy strategy. Trump is currently decimating American capacity to research hard problems, whether they be cancer or vaccines or social science or anything else, so it is difficult to imagine that this administration is likely to spend real resources to investigate geoengineering.
The Climate Realism Initiative pitches itself as “bipartisan.” But where is the MAGA coalition that supports this? Even simple spending on adaptation and resilience seems unlikely to find much of a political home given the Trump administration’s drastic cuts in weather and disaster forecasting. Sivaram even mentions the need to balance the budget as part of climate realism, which must be a sick joke. For all of the fanfare over cuts to the federal government under Trump, the budget deficit is the last thing that they care about. Tax cuts remain the coin of the realm, with the House budgetary guidelines expanding the deficit by $2.8 trillion. Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, similarly, has a distorted notion of government efficiency, ignoring the returns to government investments and gutting the tax collection capacity of the IRS.
The Biden administration had plans — “all of the above” energy among them — that were coherent, if not necessarily the most appealing to the world. They were based on the idea that a resilient climate coalition in the U.S. required more than just deploying Chinese-made products.
CRI seems to want to engage instead in a fantasy conversation where anti-Chinese nationalism can unite Americans to fight climate change — an all-form, no-content negative sum realpolitik that does little to address the real, compelling, and deeply political questions that the climate crisis poses.
Alternative visions are possible. The American economy is services based. Americans and American firms will inevitably make some of the hardware components of the energy transition, but the opportunities that play to our strengths are mostly on the software side.
It is critical to remember that the clean technologies that power the energy transition are categorically different from the fossil fuels that the world burned (and still burns) for energy. We do not require a constant stream of these technologies to operate our economy. The solar panels on your roof or in the field outside of town still generate electricity even if you can’t buy new ones because of a trade war. Same with wind turbines. In fact, renewables are a source of energy security because the generation happens from domestic natural resources — the sun and wind. Yet smart thinkers like Jake Sullivan fall into the trap of treating “dependence” on Chinese renewable technologies as analogous to European dependence on Russian natural gas.
Even China’s ban on U.S.-bound rare earth exports won’t make much of a dent. Despite the name, rare earths aren’t that rare, and while China does dominate their processing, it’s a tiny industry; in making fun of the “critical” nature of rare earths, Bloomberg opinion writer Javier Blas noted that the total imports of rare earths from China to the U.S. in 2024 was $170 million, or about 0.03% of U.S.-China trade. That being said, the major concern is if supplies fall to zero then major processes that require tiny amounts of rare earths (like Yttria and turbine construction) could be completely halted with serious fallout.
The American government should carefully choose what industries it would like to support. Commodity factories that have little-to-no profits, like solar cells, seem unattractive. There are many more jobs in installing solar than there are in manufacturing it, after all.
On the other hand, sectors with a much larger existing domestic industry, such as wind turbines and especially automobiles, should not be left to wither. But rather than a tariff wall to protect them, the U.S. auto firms should be encouraged to partner with the leading firms — even if those firms are Chinese — to build joint ventures in the American heartland, so that they and the American people can participate in the EV shift.
But the core of real climate realism for the United States is not about new factories. It’s about playing to our strengths. The United States has the best finance and technology sectors in the world, and these should be used to help decarbonize at home and around the world. This climate realism agenda can come in left- and right-wing flavors. A leftist vision is likely state-led with designs, guides, and plans, while the right-wing vision relies on markets.
Take Texas. On May 7, 2020, the Texas grid set a record with 21.4 gigawatts of renewable electricity generation. Just five years later, that figure hit 41.9 gigawatts. Solar and batteries have exploded on the grid, with capacity hitting 30 gigawatts and 10 gigawatts respectively. They have grown so rapidly because of the state’s market-based system, with its low barriers to interconnection and competitive dynamics.
Of course, not every location is blessed with as much wind, sun, and open space as Texas. But there’s no reason why its market systems can’t be a template for other states and countries. This, too, is industrial policy — not just the factory workers building the technologies or even the installers deploying them. There is lots of work for the lawyers and power systems engineers and advertisers and policy analysts and bankers and consultants, as well.
Yet instead of seizing these real chances to push climate action forward at home and abroad, the Trump administration is eviscerating American state capacity, the rule of law, and global trust in the government. The whipsawing of Trump’s tariffs generates uncertainty that undercuts investment. The destruction of government support for scientific exploration hits at the next-generation moonshots that Sivaram is so enamored of, as well as the institutions that educate our citizens and train our workforce. Trump’s blatant disregard for court orders and his regime’s cronyism undercut belief in the rule of law, and that investments will rise and fall based on their economics rather than how close they are to the President.
But it’s not just Trump. Texas legislators are on the verge of destroying the golden goose of cheap electricity through rapid renewables deployment out of a desire to own the libs. Despite the huge economic returns to rural communities that have seen so much utility-scale expansion in the state, some Republican legislators are pushing bills that would stick their fingers into the electricity market pie, undercutting the renewable expansion and mandating expensive gas expansion.
The Trump business coalition, which was mostly vibes in the first place, is fracturing. There are conflicting interests between those who want to fight inflation and those who see low oil prices as a problem. Pushing down oil prices by pressuring OPEC+ to pump more crude and depressing global economic outlooks with the trade war (Degrowth Donald!) has hurt the frackers in Texas. Ironically, one way to lower their costs is to electrify operations, so they don’t have to rely on expensive diesel.
Climate change is here, but so is Donald Trump. Ignoring either one is a recipe for disaster as they both create destructive whirlwinds and traffic in uncertainty. The real solution to both is mitigation — doing everything possible today to stop as much of the damage as possible before it happens.
