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Two former defense officials argue that Rivian may be as important to America’s national security as SpaceX.
A longtime energy analyst argues that there are no solutions to the hyperscale problem, only tradeoffs.
A climate scientist goes back to the numbers to argue that we’re overestimating the cost of the energy transition.
A group of energy researchers have a three-part prescription for Washington, D.C.’s exploding energy costs.
The founder of one-time sustainable apparel company Zady argues that policy is the only that can push the industry toward more responsible practices.
Invest in Our Future’s Peter Colavito on why funders and advocates should pay more attention to the solar farm down the road.
The CEO of Climeworks argues that the buildout of technology to suck greenhouse gas from the air should be considered part of the cost of artificial intelligence.
Somewhere in Virginia, Texas, or Arizona, a data center is being commissioned this month that will draw more power than a small city. The server racks inside will train and run artificial intelligence models for years to come. And the electrons feeding it will, in all likelihood, come partly from natural gas — because that is what can be built fast enough to meet the demand.
AI is driving a major new wave of data center construction, and with it, a surge in demand for power and infrastructure. The International Energy Agency projects that the electricity consumption of global data centers could more than double to around 945 terawatt-hours by 2030, comparable to Japan’s entire electricity demand today.
That matters because much of the new electricity demand from data centers is still likely to be met by power sources where natural gas plays a central role. The backlog for new combined-cycle gas turbines — the more efficient type of gas plant, which generates electricity from both a gas turbine and the heat it produces — already stretches to five years. As a result, some data centers are turning instead to single-cycle gas turbines, which can be deployed more quickly but are even more carbon-intensive. In any case, that means fossil-fuel use for this generation of digital infrastructure is already largely locked in. Some of the emissions that follow can be reduced through efficiency and grid decarbonization, but a significant share will persist for years to come. I believe that closing this gap must be the job of carbon removal.
Carbon removal is the process of physically taking carbon dioxide back out of the atmosphere. At Climeworks, we have spent the past 17 years developing and deploying direct air capture technology that removes CO2 from the air and stores it in the ground for thousands of years. More recently, we launched our Climeworks Solutions business that works with third-party providers of other technology and nature-based carbon removal methods, such as reforestation, to help customers access a broader range of approaches and price points.
According to the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, carbon removal will be necessary if the world is to come close to meeting its climate goals, even alongside deep emissions cuts. For companies building and using digital infrastructure, the question this raises is simple: What do they do about the emissions they cannot yet eliminate?
The strongest near-term answer is to treat carbon removal as part of the cost of digital infrastructure — not as a substitute for clean energy, but as a complement to it. Trying to pair every data center directly with a direct air capture plant may sound attractive, especially because data centers have power, land and waste heat. But in practice, that kind of integration is still highly site-specific and not yet an easy model to repeat at scale. A more realistic solution is to treat carbon removal as part of the cost of cloud and AI products, where it can be built into existing pricing and contracts. In other words, carbon removal should be built into the cost of the digital product itself, rather than physically attached to every data center site.
The incentive is simple: As companies come under growing pressure to account for the emissions linked to the digital infrastructure they rely on, data center providers that offer a credible lower-emissions product will have an advantage.
One criticism of using carbon removal in this context is that it could prolong the use of fossil fuels. That concern deserves to be taken seriously, but it also needs a nuanced answer. There is an important difference between using carbon removal to justify new fossil infrastructure, and using it to address residual emissions that cannot yet be avoided. The latter is the role that serious climate frameworks assign to carbon removal.
Data center operators are not turning to natural gas because carbon removal exists. They are doing so because natural gas can provide the speed required by the current pace of compute growth. Carbon removal should therefore not be seen as a substitute for decarbonization, but as a way to manage a real constraint in an energy system that cannot decarbonize instantly.
The relevant comparison is not carbon removal versus renewables. It is unabated fossil-powered data center expansion versus expansion in which some of the resulting emissions are credibly and durably addressed. In that sense, the growth of AI infrastructure also creates an opportunity for carbon removal: It can bring larger volumes into the market, support scale-up, and help drive down costs over time.
The economics of integrating carbon removal into AI infrastructure are more feasible than one might assume. In December, Julio Friedmann, one of the best-known experts on carbon management and carbon removal, wrote in a Substack article that a gigawatt of advanced data center capacity can generate around $10 billion to $12 billion in annual revenues. Against that scale of value creation, the cost of addressing residual emissions through carbon removal becomes more manageable.
The emissions associated with that computing power depend heavily on how it is supplied. Based on our own calculations, assuming the current U.S. grid mix and utilization rates of around 85% to 100%, a gigawatt of data center capacity would emit approximately 3 million to 4 million tons of CO2 per year. Behind-the-meter natural gas generation would produce a similar level of emissions. Renewable power can reduce those emissions significantly, while nuclear power could reduce them further.
In practice, not every gigawatt of data center compute will be powered in the same way. But assuming roughly half is supplied by renewable or nuclear power, average residual emissions would still be around 2 million tons of CO2 per year for each gigawatt of compute. That is a substantial volume — and exactly the kind of residual emissions gap that carbon removal can help address.
A portfolio of carbon removal solutions, which can directly mitigate these emissions, only costs a few hundred dollars per ton. While that is a meaningful cost, it is manageable given the economics of AI products. It is affordable enough to make a start, especially for companies that want to offer a credible lower-emissions digital product.
So, who pays? In the near term, the most likely model is that cloud and AI service providers procure carbon removal and build the cost into their products, while customers create the commercial pressure and ultimately support that cost through procurement. Even if companies are speaking more cautiously about net zero than they were a few years ago, the underlying need for credible value-chain emissions data has not disappeared. Organizations still face growing pressure to account for scope 3 emissions through disclosure rules, investor-facing reporting frameworks and supplier requirements. As their use of cloud and AI grows, they will increasingly ask providers a simple question: What emissions come with this compute, and what are you doing about them? Once buyers start routinely asking that question, carbon removal moves from being a climate nice-to-have to a product feature.
Climeworks has reduced the cost of direct air capture significantly since our first plant came online, and that trajectory will continue as the market grows. But cost curves do not come down on their own. They come down when buyers decide that a cleaner product is worth paying for. The cost of solar electricity fell around 90% between 2010 and 2023, driven not just by technology but also by early procurement commitments from the likes of Google, Microsoft, and Amazon that gave manufacturers the confidence to invest at scale.
Carbon removal is approaching a similar inflection point. In April, Climeworks signed an agreement with NTT Data — one of the world’s largest digital and IT service providers — to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, as part of its commitment to net zero.
The business case, then, is simple. The AI boom is creating enormous economic value. But it is also creating residual carbon emissions that cannot be avoided only by clean power and increased efficiency. The solution is not to wait for a perfect zero-carbon grid, and it is not to force a bespoke carbon removal engineering solution onto every data center site. I believe the solution is to integrate carbon removal into the digital infrastructure offer now, and let customers choose it. That’s how lower-emissions compute becomes real and scalable. And that is why carbon removal needs to become an essential part of responsible AI growth.
Party orthodoxy is no longer serving the energy transition, the Breakthrough Institute’s Seaver Wang and Peter Cook write.
President Trump has announced a dizzying array of executive branch led critical mineral policies since taking office again last year. While bombastically branded as new achievements, many elements from critical mineral tariffs to strategic stockpiling to Defense Production Act financing trace back to bipartisan recommendations and programs spanning the past several administrations.
Many Democrats in Congress, however, are stuck on the defensive. During a recent House Natural Resources hearing, for instance, Washington Representative Yassamin Ansari singled out the SECURE Minerals Act, a bipartisan proposal for a strategic minerals reserve, as “a framework ripe for fraud, corruption, and abuse.” Yet the draft bill actually contains strong safeguards: Senate confirmation of board members, annual independent audits, public tracking and annual reporting to Congress, conflict-of-interest prohibitions, and more.
In another House oversight hearing considering the reauthorization of the Export-Import Bank, California’s Maxine Waters expressed concern over President Trump’s mere contact with mineral producing countries in Africa, asking simply, “What is he doing?” The President of EXIM responded by reminding Waters of the bank’s charter to engage in sub-Saharan Africa.
In both cases, distrust of the administration and Republican lawmakers seems to have blinded Democrats to a larger strategic goal: building a secure critical mineral supply chain. Democrats who want to strengthen U.S. economic competitiveness and cultivate domestic clean technology sectors cannot afford to engage in partisan posturing at the expense of real policymaking. Nor can they afford to waste time — America’s vulnerabilities loom too large to wait until Trump leaves the White House.
Doing so will require Democrats to embrace certain positions that are at odds with recent party orthodoxy. First, they must accept the basic math that both the U.S. and the world will need new mine production and support incentives and regulatory reform for new critical minerals projects, not just recycling, re-mining, and substitution. And second, they must admit that mining projects in the U.S. and in democratically-governed partner countries offer a far better foundation for achieving high environmental and social standards than the currently dominant production routes for many raw materials today.
A recent hearing question from Texas Representative Christian Menefee hints at the risks of overly narrow minerals policy: “Should byproduct recovery be the first priority before we open up a single new mine?" While advocacy organizations and academic researchers have lately argued that operating mines dig up enough minerals to meet U.S. needs yet are currently neglecting to recover them, such analyses only consider the theoretical potential of extracting every element present in mined rock, not technical feasibility. Feasible recovery will be the exception, not the rule. Efforts to produce lithium as a byproduct from a copper-gold deposit might confront concentrations of under 20 parts per million, relative to concentrations at U.S. lithium mines currently under development that range from around 850 to 2,000 parts per million. Compared to cobalt concentrations of 2,400 parts per million at the Jervois Idaho Cobalt mine, Alaska’s large Red Dog zinc mine might boast 39 to 149 parts per million. For many elements, recovery would require new, first-of-a-kind extraction equipment consuming added water, energy, and chemical reagents — akin to burning a barn to fry an egg.
Recycling, too, is a meaningful category of solutions but ultimately limited. For instance, improved batteries and solar panels with longer service lives delay the point at which significant flows of materials become available for recycling. An increasing number of batteries and solar modules may also be redirected towards second-life use markets — electric vehicle batteries repurposed as electric grid storage assets, for example — diverting even more materials from recycling facilities.
To put such constraints into numbers, growing grid storage battery cell manufacturing capacity in the U.S. may surpass 96 gigawatt-hours by the end of this year, requiring over 17,000 tons of lithium content — alone equivalent to half of all worldwide lithium consumption in 2015. China’s tightening of rare earth export restrictions last year forced one of Ford’s auto plants to pause operations, and the shift to electric vehicles will only drive U.S. rare earths demand higher. The U.S. alone produced around 1 million EVs last year, relative to total auto manufacturing of 12 million to 14 million vehicles per year.
Even modest domestic manufacturing goals of 10 gigawatts of wind turbines and 2 million electric vehicles per year would require at least 100 tons of dysprosium and praseodymium, heavy rare earth elements that the U.S. is only just beginning to produce from recycling efforts and its sole operating mine. Globally, the International Energy Agency estimates that successful recycling expansion could avert around 5% to 30% of new mining activity, depending on the commodity.
The math is unforgiving. We need more minerals, and we need them soon.
For years, progressives have critiqued current U.S. mining regulations as antiquated and inadequate, insisting that standards governing existing mines expose marginalized communities to unacceptable impacts. While understandably reflecting past harms inflicted by mining prior to the enactment of stronger laws and regulations in the 1970s and 1980s, such a position exposes lawmakers to an uncomfortable contradiction: If modern mining and refining are structurally problematic industries, then not only must U.S. lawmakers advocate for improved industry standards domestically, logic dictates that they also use trade policies and international frameworks to penalize the unjust economic advantages benefiting irresponsible producers globally. The sum total of such actions might well slow the country’s transition to clean energy as opposed to speeding it.
Activist narratives that U.S. mining regulations offer the mining industry a smash-and-grab free-for-all obviously conflict with the reality that domestic mining has long been viewed as borderline uninvestible, with the U.S. seeing a 70% decrease in the number of active metal mines over the last 40 years. Insisting that more public engagement, extracting higher royalties to fund community projects, and quartering off certain areas with mineral potential for conservation will speed U.S. mining projects by neutralizing community opposition must consider how such high-cost projects can survive in a global market. China produces 10 times more graphite, rare earths, and polysilicon than the next largest producing country — and not by excelling at public engagement and community benefits-sharing. Continuing to indulge such domestic-only remonstrations will solve none of the nation’s supply challenges.
Meanwhile, efforts by both the Trump and Biden administrations are already driving progress towards improved recycling and utilization of unconventional wastes and resources. Biden’s Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act funded numerous programs to produce new critical minerals without new mining, including Department of Energy grants to equip operating facilities with byproduct recovery systems, new mapping programs from the United States Geological Survey to locate historic mines with viable levels of critical minerals in abandoned wastes, and a Rare Earth Elements Demonstration Facility program at the Department of Energy to prioritize the use of waste as a feedstock. The Trump administration has continued to issue notices for IIJA-funded, waste resource, and recycling-focused opportunities into 2026. In short, maximization of byproduct potential, recycling, and remining is already established bipartisan policy.
Above all, Democrats must capitalize on the chance to start alleviating national critical mineral constraints now, in the middle of a Trump presidency, to position the U.S. industrial base to produce impressive economic and technological results in 2028 and beyond. Trump will depart the Oval Office in less than three years, whereas U.S. critical minerals strategy must play out over the next five to 10. Passing up promising opportunities today in the name of scoring short-term political points serves neither the nation’s best interests nor those of the Democratic Party.
Over the next two years, critical minerals policy offers rare bipartisan opportunities to supercharge innovation and build projects that will not only produce strategic materials but also solutions for cleaner industrial processes. In most cases, new U.S. production will already be less carbon-intensive than the global average. Meanwhile, federal policy support will foster U.S. process engineering know-how that might ultimately drive long-term breakthroughs in transformative cleaner solutions.
All of that said, policymakers must also balance environmental and innovation ambitions against realistic expectations and resist the temptation to chase only fully clean projects. For now, truly zero-carbon metals produced using green hydrogen or other novel techniques remain dramatically more expensive than metals produced with the most cost-efficient mix of energy inputs and feedstocks. Depending on the sector, domestic industries that have first achieved scale and rebuilt domestic expertise may position America better for catalyzing such shifts.
Cost competitive industries, after all, are also key for advancing Democratic priorities. More favorable costs for U.S.-produced critical materials and increasingly secure upstream secure supply chains will help make U.S.-manufactured technologies such as electric vehicles, solar modules, and electrolyzers more competitive. Responsible production capacity that is operating at scale will increase bargaining power for pressuring irresponsible producers overseas to reform, while creating new markets for American raw materials among principled partners and corporate offtakers.
Miners and metallurgists deserve an equal place of honor in the energy transition economy alongside rooftop solar installers and electricians, and such heavy industry workers can help rebuild a stronger U.S. labor movement.
But the risk of squandering such long-term opportunities is real. During the Biden administration, progressives reflexively fielded proposals that would add regulatory burdens and make mining more difficult — proposals which largely went nowhere. Meanwhile, the bipartisan Mining Regulatory Clarity Act — one of the few specific regulatory reforms proposed for the mining sector to date — still has not passed since its introduction in 2023. The current version is stalled over the inclusion of provisions that would redirect mining administrative fees to cleaning up abandoned mines. Remediating legacy sites is an important federal government obligation, but the quid pro quo calculus of extracting concessions for simple regulatory reforms both complicates their passage while also procrastinating standalone measures to address abandoned mines.
Certainly, the current political moment could not be more charged. Another recent House Natural Resources hearing on oversight ended abruptly after Oregon Representative Maxine Dexter moved to subpoena Donald Trump, Jr. over concerns that administration financial support favored mineral companies in which he was invested. This episode highlights the challenge for Democrats — holding the federal government accountable to the U.S. public while simultaneously working to address the country’s critical mineral priorities.
This is less complicated than it sounds. Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle can agree on strong oversight provisions to ensure that programs prioritize the nation’s interests and achieve political longevity. Democrats should therefore lean in to their desired guardrails, be they mandatory public transparency, reviews of company history and project feasibility, or conflict-of-interest restrictions. Stronger congressional oversight and robust environmental and human rights safeguards are worthy Democratic goals, but advancing them requires that Congress do its job and legislate.
