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Inside season 2, episode 3 of Shift Key.
It’s time to start talking about a big year for climate politics and policy: 2025. No matter who wins this fall’s elections, next year’s executive and legislative climate policy will be huge for America’s decarbonization strategy. Congress is all but guaranteed to negotiate over key parts of the country’s tax code, and whoever controls the White House will have to finalize the Inflation Reduction Act’s last few big programs.
On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Jesse and Rob are joined by Josh Freed, who leads Third Way’s climate and energy program, to game out the most likely scenarios. If Trump wins with a Republican Congress, will they repeal the Inflation Reduction Act? What if Trump wins but Democrats take the House? And what would Kamala Harris do with a trifecta? Shift Key is hosted by Robinson Meyer, the founding executive editor of Heatmap, and Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University.
Subscribe to “Shift Key” and find this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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Here is an excerpt from our conversation:
Jesse Jenkins: Where climate policy succeeds the most, in my view, is where it sits in an intersectional role — where it is not climate policy as purely climate policy, but rather climate policy as something that is tied to a broader agenda. And one that — as you articulated, Josh — at least in rhetoric, is something that is bipartisan. It’s a prior set of priorities, shared across the political divide, to see American companies do well, and to see America play a strong role in the world stage. I think the details of that are obviously very important, and there’s a lot of different ways that could go.
Josh Freed: And Jesse, one other point I think you made that’s really important is, because of the transformative nature of the Inflation Reduction Act, and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, and even Justice40 and everything else that we’ve seen, climate policy is an underpinning of so much of whatever the next Democratic administration, a Harris administration, would do that, rhetorically, it may not even be mentioned that much. We didn’t hear Kamala Harris discuss climate change extensively last night in her remarks. However, when she talks about security, when she talks about economic opportunity, when she talks about the strength of the American economy, it is driven in by what we are seeing happen and what happens next on all of the mechanisms that the Inflation Reduction Act created, and on the potential for us to get permitting reform, whether it’s later this year or next year.
It’s this very interesting next step for us in climate and clean energy policy, where it is just implicit that it’s happening rather than something that has to be explicitly talked about as much politically. And so, you know, this isn’t something where we necessarily need to have a President Harris marching around the country, talking about it explicitly, because people are going to see and feel that it’s going to look different, and therefore it can be weaved into whatever new way forward she is describing because people will see their communities looking and feeling differently than they did four, six, eight, 10 years ago. If I think of some of the other components that we were talking about — permitting reform gets unlocked. Some of the challenges that we’re seeing because deployment takes a little while, because delivery of grants takes a little while, get unstuck even more. And she provides that broader vision.
And I think that one of the things is that, Joe Biden, when he ran in 2020, talked about himself in somewhat the context of a transitional figure. And he bridged the old economy and a different way of doing things than we do in 2022, 2024, with what the future looks like. And Kamala really is positioning herself as a new generation and next chapter of leadership. And so if you see the benefits of it — and she talks about what’s happening within some sort of broader context, which I think is going to have more of a care economy focus, a very muscular American foreign policy focus — again, it’s going to be implicit in all of that, and there will be evidence of it.
Robinson Meyer: I guess I feel like I can imagine this as a campaign line, coming out maybe later in October, as the Fed’s going to cut, inflation should hopefully moderate, the labor market hopefully won’t soften too much, and then you can start to make an affirmative case about the economy. I think one issue that Harris has had broadly here is that she has to signal that she understands that voters are not happy with the current state of the economy.
This episode of Shift Key is sponsored by …
Watershed’s climate data engine helps companies measure and reduce their emissions, turning the data they already have into an audit-ready carbon footprint backed by the latest climate science. Get the sustainability data you need in weeks, not months. Learn more at watershed.com.
As a global leader in PV and ESS solutions, Sungrow invests heavily in research and development, constantly pushing the boundaries of solar and battery inverter technology. Discover why Sungrow is the essential component of the clean energy transition by visiting sungrowpower.com.
Antenna Group helps you connect with customers, policymakers, investors, and strategic partners to influence markets and accelerate adoption. Visit antennagroup.com to learn more.
Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.
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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 Jubbaway, 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.