You’re out of free articles.
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
Sign In or Create an Account.
By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy
Welcome to Heatmap
Thank you for registering with Heatmap. Climate change is one of the greatest challenges of our lives, a force reshaping our economy, our politics, and our culture. We hope to be your trusted, friendly, and insightful guide to that transformation. Please enjoy your free articles. You can check your profile here .
subscribe to get Unlimited access
Offer for a Heatmap News Unlimited Access subscription; please note that your subscription will renew automatically unless you cancel prior to renewal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period. We will let you know in advance of any price changes. Taxes may apply. Offer terms are subject to change.
Subscribe to get unlimited Access
Hey, you are out of free articles but you are only a few clicks away from full access. Subscribe below and take advantage of our introductory offer.
subscribe to get Unlimited access
Offer for a Heatmap News Unlimited Access subscription; please note that your subscription will renew automatically unless you cancel prior to renewal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period. We will let you know in advance of any price changes. Taxes may apply. Offer terms are subject to change.
Create Your Account
Please Enter Your Password
Forgot your password?
Please enter the email address you use for your account so we can send you a link to reset your password:

This transcript has been automatically generated.
Subscribe to “Shift Key” and find this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.
You can also add the show’s RSS feed to your podcast app to follow us directly.
Robinson Meyer:
Hello, it is Wednesday, June 17, and one of the most interesting experiments in carbon removal announced a big new project this morning. Frontier is a coalition of tech, finance, and fashion companies that provides what’s called an Advanced Market Commitment, or AMC, for carbon removal. It is a very interesting format. It commits to buy carbon removal credits from companies that are still building out their infrastructure, working on their technology, in order to make sure that carbon removal will exist in the future. It’s like a private version of Operation Warp Speed just for carbon removal. Its members include a lot of firms you’ve heard of, Stripe, Google, McKinsey, H&M, JPMorgan Chase, Salesforce, and others. Well, as of this morning, Frontier has raised a new round of more than $900 million to go into the market and keep supporting carbon removal that effectively doubles the amount of money it has on hand. It calls this new round a growth advanced market commitment or growth AMC, but it’s an invented term, but it says it will focus its next stage of buying on just a handful of companies who it thinks have the potential to remove billions of tons of carbon from the atmosphere. And there’s other news too. The AI lab Anthropic, who we haven’t seen a lot of climate commitments from, has now joined Frontier as well, joining Google and Shopify and all those other firms I just listed.
Robinson Meyer:
Now, Frontier, some of you may remember, launched back in 2022. I wrote about them at the time for The Atlantic. At the time, there weren’t a lot of sources of demand for carbon removal. And so when they committed about a billion dollars to do it, it was a big deal. They’ve since used that money to buy just under 2 million tons of carbon removal credits. Since then, as we’ve also covered at Heatmap, a whale in the market has come and gone. I reported earlier this year that Microsoft, which is the world’s largest historic buyer of carbon removal, they bought about 70 million tons of it, paused its purchases. Which is a big deal for the industry. It cuts off the primary source of demand, the primary customer for future carbon removal. So Frontier re-upping at this moment is a really big deal. To discuss that news and more, I’m excited to welcome the head of Frontier, Hannah Bebbington Valori. She was on Frontier’s founding team and joins us from the United Kingdom. We talk about this announcement, the future of carbon removal technology, and how to interpret Anthropic’s membership in the coalition, always a company people want to hear about. I’m Robinson Meyer, the founding executive editor of Heatmap News, and it’s all coming up on Shift Key. Hannah Bebbington Valori, welcome to Shift Key.
Hannah Bebbington Valori:
Ah, thanks for having me.
Robinson Meyer:
So... Today, this morning, Frontier announced a new $900 million raise. Can you just start off by telling us what you’re going to do with it?
Hannah Bebbington Valori:
Yeah. So today we launched what we’re calling the Frontier Growth AMC, which is an additional $900 million committed to bicarbon removal between now and 2040. So the buyers in this AMC are Stripe, Google, Shopify, Salesforce, H&M, and Anthropic. And this funding takes us to about $1.8 billion total committed across both of our AMCs. And I think what is important to note about this is really the question on everyone’s mind in carbon removal today is, is demand going to keep pace with the technology development? And even more than that, is demand going to scale to what the market needs to stabilize global temperatures or sort of gigaton scale, hundreds of billions of dollars a year?
Hannah Bebbington Valori:
So this growth AMC is really designed to, in part, answer that question and bring corporate buyers to market to keep buying carbon removal at scale and at pace. We’re going to, on the supply side, focus on a narrower set of portfolio companies, those who are highest potential, most promising, and sort of ideally get them to commercial scale. And then perhaps even more unique is really on the demand side, we’re thinking about prioritizing projects that have line of sight to robust long-term government-driven demand. So thinking about how do we as corporate buyers use what is still sort of a relatively small amount of money to really catalyze this space and pull forward that policy that is required to get the market to gigaton scale.
Robinson Meyer:
It sounds like as you go through these projects and technologies that you have some candidates already in mind. Are like the companies that will benefit from this purchase already kind of lined up and in the system? Or is this still open to other carbon removal companies?
Hannah Bebbington Valori:
The short answer to that is we’re still totally open. And what we want to do is spend this money most effectively. So on the best ideas, on the best projects, on the best teams. I think, though, the Frontier team has diligenced over 500 carbon removal companies. We have a portfolio of 60 companies today. And so we do know this space relatively well. As we think about the deployment strategy for this growth AMC, it’s really going to be likely a combination of, really high-performing, existing portfolio companies and new companies, larger, longer bets, and sort of across a diversity of pathways. And I should perhaps say that $900 million is at once a small and large number. So it is both a great step forward, meaningful for the carbon removal market, especially in this moment. And there will likely be projects that we cannot buy from who are also great and very high potential. So over the next couple of years.
Robinson Meyer:
Can you give us a sense of the technology landscape as you see it at the moment? Because I think one thing that’s notable about this announcement is that you kind of go through the technologies that you think are going to be able to deliver gigatonscale. And I do think this is something that’s changed from like the beginning of Frontier, and it was more of a wide open space. It seems like you have narrowed in on some of the technological options that will actually be able to remove carbon on the scale that will be necessary to actually meet our alleged global temperature targets. What are those technological options as you see them?
Hannah Bebbington Valori:
I mean, I think what has been really remarkable is the pace of technology development and carbon removal. So when we launched Frontier back in 2022, fewer than 10,000 tons of permanent carbon removal had been done to date. Most of carbon removal was really like an idea in someone’s head or in an academic paper. And we now have hundreds of companies building. We have real world data across most major pathways. And so, yeah, we are so much more opinionated today. We have so much more information about what that gigaton scale portfolio will look like. And at the same time, there are still so, so many questions about realistically how big and how cheap can these technologies get. But sort of with those caveats, we think of this market as having about five pathways that are on a spectrum and the spectrum being of sort of how relatively well understood and sort of well-bounded is this technology. And when I say relatively, everything in carbon removal is still pretty nascent compared to some other climate tech industries, but sort of within carbon removal. So on the one hand, we have things like biomass-based approaches, or often abbreviated to something like bikers, so BECCS and other biomass-based technologies.
Hannah Bebbington Valori:
You know, these are technologies that today are delivering tens of thousands of tons of removal. They’re relatively well understood. We have facilities that are building capacity on the hundreds of thousands of tons. They enjoy a lot of existing policy support. We have many different biomass-based approaches in our portfolio, Vaulted, Charm, Exergi, Hafslund Celsio.
Robinson Meyer:
This kind of ranges from like burning biomass, capturing the carbon, injecting the carbon below the ground, to the Charm approach where you create this bio oil from biological material that’s photosynthesized. And then you would just inject that deep below the ground. Lots of injection of biomaterial, but it kind of ranges from traditional bioenergy to...
Hannah Bebbington Valori:
More experimental like charm. Yeah, bioenergy with carbon capture obviously generating a stream of CO2, and then other biomass approaches, Charm and Vaulted, injecting some form of either bio oil or biomass flurry. This pathway is constrained by the amount of sustainable waste biomass that the world has and can aggregate and access in an economical way. And so we think, while very compelling, so likely to be cheap, likely to have a lot of political support, is going to deliver part of our gigaton scale portfolio. And sort of on this end of the spectrum, I would also put enhanced rock weathering and direct air capture, technologies that are relatively well understood being deployed in the field, but are capped in some way. Enhanced rock weathering, relatively capped in scale at the single digit gigatons, direct air capture likely capped by its total potential cost. So all three potential to be part of the gigaton portfolio, but not a winner takes all technology.
Hannah Bebbington Valori:
On the other hand of the spectrum, we have things like surficial mineralization, ocean alkalinity enhancement. These are technologies that we are super bullish about, have enormous potential, enormous scale potential, could deliver more than 10 gigatons a year at relatively affordable prices, less than $100 a ton, but have relatively less real world data. So these are still more in the conceptual phases. And a lot of the work that we are doing at Frontier is how do we get more startups working on these ideas, testing and refining these ideas in the field so that we can better understand what the true potential is here. So superficial mineralization, taking reactive rock either from waste rock piles at mines or mining it where you find a deposit, exposing that to air, likely piling it on a heat bleach pad. This is something that we think very, very high potential and yet we don’t know enough yet.
Robinson Meyer:
It seems like Frontier is approaching this round a little differently than the first round. I mean, I think when Frontier launched, it was like a classic advanced market commitment. I think the term I used in, I was working at The Atlantic at the time, but it was like buyer of first resort. You were going out into the market. You were supporting a lot of being the first customer for a lot of interesting technologies. What’s interesting over those intervening years is that Frontier has been in the market for a long time. I think you guys have bought, what, 1.8 million tons, maybe around there. Since 2022, an enormous buyer entered the market in the form of Microsoft. It bought 70 million tons, give or take like 5 million on each side. And now, as we recently reported here at Heatmap, it has paused its buying for the moment. And so it kind of was this enormous anchor buyer in the market, but now it’s gone. And so it’s a market that’s gone through a lot of convulsions. There’s a lot of good companies sitting out there that maybe were planning on a customer that has gone away. How is that shaping this round? And how are you thinking about Frontier’s role given that kind of, in some ways, we’re in this weird moment where it’s like we don’t need an advanced market commitment anymore. The market existed, but then the market kind of went away. And so how are you thinking about structuring Frontier’s market activity to support demand through the next several years.
Hannah Bebbington Valori:
Yeah, I think we think a lot about what is the role of the corporate buyer in carbon removal, especially the corporate buyer sort of at the Frontier scale, so buying millions of tons of removal today. And really the way that we answer that question is we think, okay, where does the carbon removal market need to be? Or what is the end goal for carbon removal? And how do we get there? And what needs to happen next to be on the right trajectory to scale. So when we think of carbon removal at gigaton scale, we are really looking at hundreds of billions of dollars of annual procurement spend. And that scale of market is unlikely to be delivered by the voluntary carbon market. That has actually always been true. The voluntary carbon market is sort of unlikely to get to that point. And so then you imagine that this market at gigaton scale is going to have to be government driven. Now, government driven can take a lot of different flavors and form factors. So it doesn’t necessarily mean government pays. What it means is ...
Robinson Meyer:
And this is true of all waste markets. I mean, if you think of carbon removal as a type of waste market, what happens is the government, I mean, we as taxpayers or the public in some kind of broad sense pays to remove the waste, but like the government comes and picks up our trash. For instance, the government does remove the waste from the water. You know, like if you think about this as a form of waste management, then it would be very natural for the government to take it over. Of course, it is different from other forms of waste management. Management, let’s say, in that it’s maybe thermodynamically and scientifically a little more ambitious than trash pickup.
Hannah Bebbington Valori:
Yeah. There’s a stat actually that we love that the world spends $1.4 trillion on waste management. And so as we think about hundreds of billions spent on carbon removal, it’s not unprecedented. It’s large, but we can see a path.
Hannah Bebbington Valori:
If we’re moving to government-driven demand, what that looks like to us is sort of likely one of three things. One is we have compliance markets or emissions trading schemes of some form. So really, corporates are paying for carbon removal to neutralize their residual emissions, but they are mandated to do so.
Hannah Bebbington Valori:
We can write carbon removal into existing industrial regs. So, for example, we could mandate that wastewater treatment plants use limestone to manage their pH, which actually might be better and easier and cheaper than existing chemicals that are used today. Or you could imagine direct funding of removal activity, and that could be direct procurement, direct buying of tons, and it could be things like tax credits and subsidies and so on. But the government can’t use taxpayer dollars to pay for stuff that is unproven or very risky. And similarly, it can’t mandate the use of technology that’s super expensive. And so before we get to that government-driven future, we really need to de-risk the technology. We need to pull it to commercial scale. And we need to make sure that it’s affordable and predictable and reliable. And that is the role of corporate buyers. So this is a long-winded way of answering your question. But really, we think of this growth AMC as saying, OK, what can we as corporate buyers do to pull that future into being? So to ensure that we are de-risking the most promising technologies, we are helping those technologies go to scale, and we are actively partnering with governments around the world to make sure that we are setting up this baton pass or even a public-private partnership whereby there is sustained and robust long-term demand for these projects once our off-take agreements expire.
Robinson Meyer:
And so what does that mean from a project buyer standpoint? How does that actually change how you’ll relate to companies or work with companies during this new phase?
Hannah Bebbington Valori:
Yeah, there’s a few different ways that this can look like. In short, it looks like we’re prioritizing projects that have line of sight to government driven demand or who we think that in buying from that project, we make it more likely that a jurisdiction gets excited about policy and carbon removal. So to give you a couple of examples, a great example of a project we’ve already done where we would love to do more like this is like the Stockholm Exergi facilities. Stockholm Exergi has a bioenergy facility in downtown Stockholm. It delivers most of the district heat to the city. They are installing a carbon capture retrofit to capture the carbon emissions off of that facility and injecting in the North Sea. Frontier and Microsoft were some of the original offtakers of this project. And in being an offtaker, we also allowed Exergi to qualify and then to win, an award from the Swedish state aid auction, which is filling out the rest of their offtake stack and sort of ensuring that this project is viable and can get built. A perfect example of a public-private partnership making a carbon removal project happen and paving the way for more of those types of projects to get built in places like Sweden and around that area.
Hannah Bebbington Valori:
If we could find more projects like that, so more projects where we either have a direct link to policy, where we can buy from a project, get that project FID, and in doing so get the local jurisdiction really excited about bringing more of that economic activity to their jurisdiction. Those are the types of things that we really want to see.
Robinson Meyer:
Does that mean basically not prioritizing projects in the United States because the U.S. is not a primary supporter of carbon removal technology at the moment?
Hannah Bebbington Valori:
This is everyone’s favorite question. In short, no, I think. So A, there are existing carbon removal policies that persist today in the U.S. Carbon removal has fortunately enjoyed quite a bit of bipartisan support. So things like 45Q is another great example of government-driven demand. 45Q pays for the injection of CO2 underground. So already not disqualifying. And I think for sure, if we could imagine a world of either expanding 45Q or having a more tech neutral tax credit, which has been considered in the past, that is like the type of direction of travel we would love to see for U.S. policy. And then I think more broadly, if you work in carbon removal, you are like inherently an optimistic and long-term thinking person. Otherwise, you would go crazy. And I think we really believe that sort of in the long arc of the future, the U.S. will be a meaningful player in building a carbon removal market.
Robinson Meyer:
I hope so too. And so one of the other big pieces of news that came out of this round is that Anthropic is joining Frontier. It’s quite interesting because I think this is really the first big climate program that Anthropic has joined. Unlike, say, Apple or Microsoft, they don’t have really notable public corporate climate. Can you give us any detail about the size of their contribution to Frontier or kind of what they mean as a coalition member?
Hannah Bebbington Valori:
Yeah, I mean, we’re just thrilled to have Anthropic in the group. It represents a couple of different things to us. So one is carbon removal is a really important part of any corporate climate program. And really like any national climate program. The reason why we care about carbon removal is because IPCC experts talk about how the world is going to stabilize global temperatures and the need to both radically reduce the emissions we emit and proactively scale a portfolio of permanent carbon removal technologies, because otherwise we’re not going to get to zero without both of those efforts. And so to us, someone like Anthropic signing up to Frontier is indicative of how organizations are thinking about building their overall climate programs, which is that carbon removal should be a pillar of the work that you do. I also think part of this and part of what is true of anyone who joins Frontier is like a love of sort of lowercase-f frontier technology and an optimism about the way that technology can help advance the world. And folks who join Frontier and who buy from these, really nascent emerging technology companies are really making a bet on human ingenuity and our ability to sort of create the world that we want to see in the future. And so we’re stoked. We’re stoked to have Anthropic on board.
Robinson Meyer:
But you can’t give us dollar amount.
Hannah Bebbington Valori:
I can’t give you dollar amounts. And actually, we, as a rule, don’t give anyone’s dollar amount. So this is not specific to Anthropic. But yeah, we keep it kosher with a top line number.
Robinson Meyer:
Well, can I can I just push a little further and say, I do think there are people who are going to see Anthropic join and say, Anthropic, complicated company, because on the one hand, I think it’s been the most If there’s any company, I think, that’s kind of pledged most among the frontier AI labs to uphold, let’s say, liberal democratic values, I think Anthropic obviously has to be top of the list. At the same time, they’ve partnered with xAI. They seem to be using a lot of compute at this Colossus Data Center, which is particularly carbon intensive in Tennessee. I think there are people who say carbon removal is kind of a delayist technology. It allows companies to keep emitting fossil fuels, to keep burning carbon and kind of promising to clean it up later, but not doing anything to reduce emissions in the near term. And Anthropic would be a great maybe example of this. What would be your response to that? Yeah.
Hannah Bebbington Valori:
Well, I think my response to that would be a couple of things. One is the moral hazard around carbon removal has really not come to fruition. This concept that companies buy carbon removal as kind of a way to get out of corporate climate commitments or other climate activity is like really not borne out in the data for a couple of reasons. One, the people who care about carbon removal are the people who care about the climate. And so those folks are often building broader programs that include carbon removal and other things. Two, these are all voluntary activities today. And I think they’re very, very expensive ones at that. So buying carbon removal today costs hundreds of dollars a ton. Like it is not, if you wanted a sort of get out of jail free card, Frontier and carbon removal is not that. There are many other ways to have a climate program or maybe have a broader sort of civic responsibility program that are much cheaper than what we do.
Hannah Bebbington Valori:
And I think this is borne out sort of generally in the data, like how much money we spend on carbon removal versus how much money we spend on decarbonization efforts. Rightly so is a fraction. And so the world as it stands is not replacing carbon removal with other decarbonization activities. Rather, buying carbon removal today is recognizing that this market will not turn on like a light switch in 2050 when we want it if we don’t invest today. And so folks who buy carbon removal now are really sort of playing that long game thinking into the future about what we want to exist and investing today to make that happen.
Hannah Bebbington Valori:
And then, you know, the other way to answer this question is like we should hold folks’ feet to the fire on this. So people who buy carbon removal, honestly, people who don’t buy carbon removal should be thinking about decarbonizing their emissions.
Robinson Meyer:
Where is OpenAI? They should be a Frontier …
Hannah Bebbington Valori:
Totally. You can call them and tell them that. We should be banging on the doors of these companies and many other companies to be asking them, what are you doing to decarbonize? And that is not just Anthropic. That is everyone.
Robinson Meyer:
You have this particular purge at Frontier into carbon removal. And as we’ve kind of been dancing about in this conversation, it’s been a tough year for carbon removal. I think the removal of Microsoft as a major corporate buyer is really devastating for some companies. And we were already expecting, I think, some kind of retraction or carbon removal recession. To some degree, climate tech’s been in a broader recession, I think, for the past two years. But this is really going to deepen and continue it for carbon removal. But you have a particular view of the industry at Frontier because lots of people come to you for money and they are pretty open book when they come to you for money and you learn a lot about their projects so what do you see in carbon removal that you feel like people haven’t realized yet or that nobody else sees about the industry like when you see other discussions of carbon removal. What do you think people are missing at the moment?
Hannah Bebbington Valori:
So, it’s true that the demand question keeps me up at night. It’s why we set out to raise this growth AMC, was to make sure that we are doing all that we can to put this market on track to scale. So, I do not, like, I do think that is a headline that you mentioned, and it is a headline that is so real. And so, I don’t want anything I’m about to say to sort of contradict that. I think the thing that people miss or perhaps undersell or under-celebrate is the technology progress is insane.
Hannah Bebbington Valori:
That we have gone from a space that really had a handful of companies, no deliveries, no third-party registry, no protocols, very little demand-side legislation in basically only one country, to so much more than that. So, you know, we have tens of thousands of tons being delivered. We have large scale facilities being built. We’ve like crossed approaches off the list, which in and of itself is amazing. And such as what an efficient way to spend money is in a very short period of time to be able to say there are a few things that we don’t want to concentrate our efforts on anymore and start to narrow our focus. I think the 2020s are really about technology development and shaking the trees to say, if we’re going to get to gigaton scale by 2050, we need to as quickly as possible learn what works and what doesn’t work and double down and make those decisions quickly and decisively. And I think we under-celebrate how far we’ve come along that journey in a relatively short period of time, honestly, with a relatively small amount of money.
Hannah Bebbington Valori:
Especially for some of the projects that don’t have a Microsoft offtake, we’re looking at quite an efficient use of capital.
Robinson Meyer:
Well, can you give an example of how the technology has come along in a way that people may not understand?
Hannah Bebbington Valori:
Yeah. So when we did, Frontier buyers were the first buyers to do a commercial scale purchase of enhanced rock weathering. And our first deal was Lithos. It was our biggest offtake agreement at the time, 60 million. When we did that deal, there was no protocol to measure the amount of weathering that was happening and the amount of carbon removal that was being generated by the practice. And so when we did that deal, it was like a big risk to write an offtake agreement with a fixed price and a fixed volume and a fixed delivery schedule for something that didn’t have a well-studied weathering curve and didn’t have a protocol for measurement. Today, we have multiple enhanced rock weathering companies who are delivering on isometric, on a third-party registry with an approved protocol. We have a much more robust data set for what those weathering curves look like. We have a much greater understanding of what the uncertainties are in the carbon removal drawdown process and how to quantify the enhanced rock weathering. And I think we’re getting on the order of tens of thousands of tons delivered this year from those contracts. And so it’s an example of a field that was really like an idea in 2022 and is now reaching a commercial scale technology. That’s like a five-year lifetime.
Robinson Meyer:
We previously touched on this, but of course, at the moment, the U.S. has been trying to spin up a carbon removal purchasing program for a little while. Congress has authorized it. The Trump administration has seemingly sat on it at the Energy Department. We do have a tax credit called 45Q that subsidizes the direct air capture of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and its injection underground, but it doesn’t subsidize any other form of carbon removal. So it doesn’t, for instance, help enhance rock weathering or ocean alkalinity enhancement or any other alternative form of carbon removal technology, but look, there’s midterms later this year. There’s a presidential election in two years. Money’s, I think, going to be a little harder to come by than it was in 2021 during the first year of the Biden administration. Is there a policy that you think would be most important for the U.S. to adopt to support carbon removal technology going forward? Like what’s number one on your wish list?
Hannah Bebbington Valori:
Well, number one is actually a policy that has already been proposed and sort of since been shelved. But I believe it was Senator Bennet and Senator Murkowski put up a tech neutral tax credit. So basically taking the concept of 45Q, paying some portion of the costs of carbon removal from one technology and expanding that to cover a much, much wider swath of technologies. Something like that which has already been conceived of and sort of rolled around in the administration would be amazing for guaranteeing a price for carbon removal in the U.S. And for doing that across a variety of technologies and the other benefit of guaranteeing a floor price here is that you can really incentivize many different technologies to start to race to that price. What you can do then is you can sort of build a competition or sort of an arena of innovation, right, where folks are really saying, we want to get down to this price, both so that we can be competitive in the market, but also, you know, perhaps so that we can win or take all in the U.S., if you will. It’s not the only policy that would work in the U.S. And I think one thing that’s really important to stress about carbon removal policy is I think some people get fixated on certain ideas, a carbon tax, a compliance market, contracts for difference, an auction, a tax credit,
Hannah Bebbington Valori:
capex subsidies. Honestly, all of it is great. All of it works. And we’re probably going to see different form factors in different jurisdictions, kind of based on like what the ideological preferences in those countries.
Robinson Meyer:
Fantastic. Well, I think there’s so much more to talk about, but we’re going to have to leave it there. Hannah Bebbington Valori, thanks so much for joining us on Shift Key.
Hannah Bebbington Valori:
Yeah, thanks for having me.
Robinson Meyer:
And that will do it for this episode and this week of Shift Key. We’ll be back next week with at least one new episode. We have a run of amazing guests coming up, I have to say. Before you go, though, I just want to say, I don’t know if you subscribe to Heatmap Daily, which is Heatmap’s afternoon newsletter. It comes out every weekday. But if you don’t, you really, really should. I have taken over writing that newsletter. It’s really just me. I write it every afternoon. And it’s a place where I can share my analysis or observation or thoughts or reporting on the energy and climate and decarbonization news of the day. I’m having a lot of fun writing it. Honestly, a lot more fun than I thought I would. It’s become just a really cool space. And if you don’t follow it, I really recommend you should. Because if you listen to this show and you’ve made it this far in the podcast, you should be following this newsletter. You should subscribe. So we’ll stick a link in the show notes. You can find the link really easily too if you just go to heatmap.news. But we’ll take a look in the show notes, subscribe, Just go do it now. You’ll enjoy the newsletter. You’ll have fun. It’s free. I write it. That should be self-recommending if you’ve made it this far in the podcast. And thank you for doing that. Shift Key is a production of Heatmap News. Our editors are Jillian Goodman and Nico Lauricella. Multimedia editing and audio engineering is by Jacob Lambert and by Nick Woodbury. Our music is by Adam Kromelow. Thanks so much for listening. Enjoy the long weekend of you here in the U.S. And see you next week.
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
Wildfires in France and Spain — and a dire El Niño forecast — point to another era of public attention on disaster.
Wildfires and the Return of Climate Politics
Enormous wildfires are still burning in France and Spain. “We're facing a completely unprecedented fire,” French President Emmanuel Macron said on Monday, comparing the situation to World War II. The main fire in Gironde, a southwestern department along the Atlantic coast, have consumed more than 100,000 acres and forced roughly 200,000 people to evacuate.
There’s little sign the fires are under control in either country. In France, the blazes created a pyrocumulonimbus cloud — a towering, thundering “fire storm” that sometimes forms in the western United States but is not often observed in western Europe. Some fires have come within several miles of Bordeaux, the country’s sixth-largest metropolitan area and a longtime center of the wine industry. In Spain, enormous wildfires near Madrid, Ávila, and Toledo have killed one and displaced roughly another 79,000 people.
Firefighters are working fast, in part because a heatwave is forecast for the continent later this week. But of course it is hot — it is high summer in the Northern Hemisphere, and we are having a particularly hot year. 2026 now looks likely to be the world’s second-warmest year ever, and it has a better than one-third chance of being the warmest.
In the near term, expect more climate-addled disasters. The Pacific Ocean has slipped into its El Niño phase, which will likely spin off more extreme storms, droughts, heat waves, and wildfires. Recent modeling suggests it could be the most intense El Niño ever measured. Writing for his newsletter “The Climate Brink,” the climate researcher (and Heatmap contributor) Zeke Hausfather recently warned: “It looks like this year’s El Niño is not only very likely to be the strongest event since reliable records began — it may end up the strongest by a truly mind-blowing margin.”
How do we know this next El Niño will be bad? The most intense El Niño on record occurred from late 2015 to 2016, when sea surface temperatures in a benchmark region of the Pacific Ocean were 2.75 degrees Celsius warmer than normal. (That’s nearly 5 degrees Fahrenheit.) Those searing sea temperatures released huge amounts of heat into the atmosphere and eventually made 2016 the warmest year ever recorded. Today, a decade later, 2016 remains the fourth warmest year on record, coming in only under 2024, 2023, and 2025, per NOAA data.
But as Zeke writes, the middle 80% of modeled outcomes for this year’s El Niño are already projected to match or exceed that 2016 anomaly. The median forecast for this year’s event, in other words, would shatter the previous record. “The models are forecasting something outside the envelope of anything we have ever observed,” he writes. The National Weather Service agrees that there is an 81% chance of an event forming “that would rank among the largest El Niño events in the historical record going back to 1950,” and it says odds are better than 97% that the anomaly will stick around through spring 2027.
Scientists and activists once hoped that when global warming’s effects became unignorable, the public would take action. But disasters haven’t produced durable climate concern, and public attention has dissipated with every news cycle — and become ever more pessimistic. There are moments, however, when successive extremes can keep climate change more prominently in the public conversation. The years that followed the last mega-El Niño in 2016 made up one such period. If we are headed for another now, then experts should be ready with ideas not only for slowing and reversing the growth of heat-trapping emissions, but also for adapting our societies and infrastructure for our warming world. It’s clear we are going to need them.
This will be a big week for understanding the U.S. energy economy’s most important trend. A handful of tech companies driving the artificial intelligence boom — namely, Microsoft, Meta and Amazon — will report their quarterly earnings on Wednesday and Thursday. These companies are behind some of the country’s largest AI data center projects and therefore some of its most sizable planned power plants — clean and otherwise.
Last week, when Alphabet boosted its capital expenditure for this year by another $15 billion, the market rebelled and sent its shares tumbling. If investors’ interest in financing mega-scale data center projects is waning, then it could affect the electricity economy for years to come. In any case, we’ll know more soon. Rivian will also report its earnings this week.
Can AI help emergency managers make faster decisions when every second counts?
Meteorologists had nothing polite to say about Tropical Storm Bertha. The “weak, disorganized, and lopsided” system made initial landfall in Louisiana last week as a “hot, sheared mess,” one that forecasters doubted would reach Texas with much oomph at all. Still, the Galveston County Consolidated Drainage District — the local flood mitigation and drainage management entity for the state’s most flood-prone county — had stood at the ready, posting updates on the storm’s progress to its Facebook feed in the lead-up.
There had been action behind the scenes, too. Since this spring, the county has relied on a new “AI-powered flood warning solution” pilot program to help local administrators identify the gaps in their understanding of the county’s flood risk and monitor rising water levels in real time. In a crisis, a chatbot could even advise them on when to issue an evacuation order.
“Imagine you’re an operator and you have to tell people to leave their homes because of floods coming in,” Todd Barr, the CEO of Axonis Decision Intelligence, which has partnered with the smart water-level sensor company Simplicity Integration in Texas’ Galveston County, told me. Axonis provides AI-assisted decision-making tools to clients in a number of time-sensitive industries, and in every case, “You want a paper trail of the data you used to make the decision — the reasoning and the model you used — and our platform does all of that,” Barr went on.
Issuing evacuation notices is a famously thorny business, and one that has resulted in high-profile and high-casualty failures, including in the Paradise, California, and Maui wildfires. Particularly noteworthy were the 2025 Kerr County floods that killed more than 100 people in Texas’ Hill Country after local officials took 90 minutes to send phone alerts once they became aware of the rising river.
In many cases, particularly in more rural counties, the teams making the evacuation decisions are small and lack sufficient training not only on when to make such a call, but even on how to word it. “The people who are put in the position of issuing the messages are doing 20 other things at the same time,” Jeannette Sutton, a researcher at the University at Albany’s Emergency and Risk Communication Message Testing Lab, told me when I reported on evacuation notices after the Los Angeles fires.
As for Galveston, “100%” of the buildings on the densely populated island are at flood risk, with modeling suggesting a worst-case-scenario hurricane could produce 26 feet of storm surge. Much of the city’s stormwater infrastructure additionally predates modern climate-change-intensified rainfall probabilities, with the district in the midst of a $54 million drainage project aimed at mitigating future flooding by building a pump station and enlarging sewer lines.
As part of the region’s ongoing resiliency work, the Galveston County Consolidated Drainage District installed seven of Simplicity’s water-level sensors —the county’s first — at locations on the mainland. (There are no sensors currently on Galveston Island proper.) Simplicity’s Axonis-powered system, SI-Ai, also pulls in data from NOAA, the U.S. Geological Survey, and Houston’s Harris County to present residents of the entire region with a live flood-risk dashboard, complete with intuitive green-yellow-red indicators to evaluate their neighborhood hazard level in real time. Operators also have their own proprietary dashboard where they can monitor sensors and are prompted to ask questions to interpret readings and open “investigations” if something appears amiss.

“If I’m the municipality, I can say, ‘Okay, here’s what the forecast is looking like and what is potentially going to happen,” Alison Reese, the COO and co-founder of Simplicity, explained to me. “Then I could ask a question like, ‘Hey, what other locations in this watershed are at high risk for flash flooding?’”
That’s where Axonis, the artificial intelligence company, comes in. “Today you would have to be like, ‘Alright! Get the weather report, quick! What’s happening? What are the sensors saying? Okay Bill, now what’s the upstream sensor saying?’” Barr said, acting out the frantic scenario of trying to source data from multiple streams at once. “All of that is what we’re automating.” (Galveston’s Office of Emergency Management is “not the POC for the flood sensor operations,” a representative told me; the drainage district oversees the Axonis-Simplicity partnership, and did not return a request for an interview. The mayor of League City, a city 35-minutes north of Galveston that is also managed by the district, has publicly criticized the SI-Ai program as a separate sensor network that duplicates the work of the Harris County Flood Control District.)
Working from the assumption that emergency managers have to parse reams of data in short periods of time — flash floods can rise as much as 10 feet in an hour — Axonis provides what is essentially a chatbot for authorities to query potential decisions ranging from road closures to evacuation notices, based on feedback from the sensors. It stops short, however, of having a dialogue box that pops up to tell operators, EVACUATE THIS NEIGHBORHOOD NOW.
When Barr demoed the program to me, he had the tool configured to create a credit risk review memo for a would-be banking client. (Axonis also has customers in the banking and defense sectors.) The dashboard essentially functioned the same as it would for Galveston County, though, and his investigation returned the kind of simplified, emoji-studded one-sheet that users of large language model-powered AI interfaces would immediately recognize. In this case, the tool identified a “🔴Risk Alert CANDIDATE” — Barr said that would be a particular sensor, in the case of Galveston — and followed it with a summary and bullet-pointed sections breaking down “⚠️Credit Risk Indicators” and “💧Liquidity Position.” (In a screenshot of an example flood report for Simplicity, shared with me, those sections were replaced by “📍Site Location” and “💧Water Level — Last 72 Hours.” I wondered what else was possible: “🌊Historic hydraulic risk”? “💀Vulnerable Populations”? )

The system then takes operators through a four-step decision-making model based on the OODA Loop, a common workflow in military contexts that involves justifying actions through evidence-based observations. “We always keep a human in the loop on these things, at least today in 2026 — though who knows in two or three years,” Barr said. He clarified in a later conversation with me, though, that “Axonis and [AI] tools should never tell you to evacuate now. It should tell you the information you need to make that decision.”
That was a point Barr stressed numerous times during our conversation: That Axonis’ chatbot is intended as a brainstorming tool or sounding board, and one that keeps a careful paper trail, “cryptographically sealing” any eventual decisions for review and attestation later. I likened it to a police body camera, and Barr didn’t dispute the similarities. “It’s an accountability tool,” he told me.
Of course, that means the burden of decision-making still falls on potentially fallible humans. I worried in particular that by sharing the responsibility with AI, human operators might get lazy or fail to properly question a decision the program might be leading them toward, particularly in an instance of hallucinated data. To the latter point, Barr told me that this is part of what Axonis is designed to address. “You can’t just take the sensor data and throw it into Claude and be like, ‘Alright, go make a decision for me.’ You need to set guard rails,” he said.
As to the former point, Barr told me the chat includes a disclaimer reminding its users that AI can make mistakes, and that the company trains its customers on how LLM technology works. “At the end of the day, it’s a tool, not a decider,” he said, although he allowed that it might be used to automatically trigger warning lights, sirens, or barriers, such as closing a flooded roadway.
I also posed the concern about complacency to Ali Mostafavi, a professor who supervises the UrbanResilience.AL Lab at Texas A&M, which researches, among other things, how artificial intelligence might be utilized in emergency contexts. Mostafavi agreed that there is always a risk in cognitive outsourcing, but that there is a “counter-argument that is also valid — that without these technologies, we have seen what can happen. We had the catastrophic floods last year in Kerr County, and if a similar technology had existed back then, an automated system could have identified the flash flood, and many young children would be alive today.”
Still, Barr told me he isn’t aware of Axonis advising in an actual evacuation order yet. While it is operational, the predictive model remains untested against its highest-stakes use case: the extremes of a climate-changed world, where formerly unthinkable outcomes may be one storm away.
“The more we can stress-test these technologies in real operational settings and use that feedback loop to improve the technologies, the better,” Mostafavi said. “But that’s easier said than done, because to have a technology implemented in an operational setting it should already be stress-tested, right?”
Bertha, though, was not that reckoning; the gusty squalls blew through Galveston last week without even disturbing the dinner reservations at the marina. But although it was already back to 90 and sunny by Monday morning on the Texas Gulf, the drainage in Galveston County, as in many places around the country, remains outdated and easily overwhelmed. One day, inevitably, the water will come. Hopefully when it does, someone or something will be watching.
The large renewables developer changes tack “in response to federal energy objectives.”
Trump’s solar freeze is now so tough that at least one renewable energy developer has asked his administration to turn their permitting application into a data center and gas-fired power plant instead.
Renew Development HoldCo – an LLC created by Clearway Energy Group – wrote the Bureau of Land Management in April asking if they could amend their 2021 application to build the Amber solar project, a 500-megawatt solar project in the Nevada desert that would require building on federal land. Their requested change? “[T]o formally remove the proposed solar facility and replace it with the development of a proposed data center and natural gas facility,” according to a copy of the letter I obtained.
“This amendment is the result of a shift in our internal development priorities and an updated assessment of project timing, in order to better align with the goals of our Administration,” reads the letter, which is dated April 3 and signed by Clearway’s chief development officer John Woody. “The data center concept is in exploratory early stages and as such has a longer and more flexible development horizon, and we believe its schedule will better align with the Bureau’s current workload and staffing plans.”
Now, this swap is somewhat shocking but shouldn’t exactly be a surprise. Companies with federal energy leases are struggling to get their renewable projects permitted by a hostile Trump administration. We’ve already seen some offshore wind developers ditch their leases in favor of payouts and commitments to build more fossil infrastructure. Clearway Energy Group is owned by Global Infrastructure Partners and TotalEnergies, the latter of which struck such a deal in March.
But this does appear to represent an aberration for Clearway, one of the nation’s largest operators of renewable energy projects and whose marketing materials primarily focus on “clean energy.” Nearly all of the company’s portfolio is carbon-free power or energy storage generation sans a handful of “flexible generation” energy projects in California, according to an online map of their project pipeline. The company did not disclose in the documents I reviewed if the gas plant itself would power the data center, provide power to the wider grid, or both.
Candidly, I’ve been watching like a hawk to see if Trump’s chokehold on solar and wind permits would lead to more gas infrastructure and data centers on federal property instead. And companies are getting data center permits when they ask to swap out their solar farm for AI infrastructure. On Friday, I reported that a joint venture involving renewables developer Arevon and energy trader Bill Perkins got permission from BLM to switch an environmental permit tied to a solar farm for one allowing a new data center. Environmentalists plan to legally challenge BLM’s determination as they say it’s a test case for the future of federal land policy.
It’s unclear if Clearway would be the one to build and construct this hypothetical data center and power plant. I for one can’t find any evidence of Clearway developing data centers before. My best guess is that if they do move forward with this, it would look like the joint venture I covered on Friday, where Arevon distanced itself from the actual day-to-day operations of the development and a new firm specializing in data centers came in. But that’s just a hunch and there’s a saying about assumptions.
Nevertheless, Clearway is clearly handling the permitting side. Attached to the Clearway letter was an application also sent to BLM for constructing utility and telecommunications facilities on federal lands, a document technically known as an SF299. The application states Clearway considered using solar energy for the data center as well as using private land, but their alternative designs weren’t selected because they had “higher environmental and stakeholder conflicts.”
Also, in a section of the document requesting Clearway provide a “statement of need for the project,” the developer said it was submitting this proposal “in response to federal energy objectives” and specifically cited Trump’s Day 1 executive order which the company said “encourage[d] development of reliable energy projects on federal lands.”
I reached out to Clearway asking for more information on the letter and application. In response, the company claimed the solar project wasn’t being killed – it simply was moved to private land. They also declined to comment on the data center and gas project. Instead, I was provided a statement attributable to an unnamed spokesperson that “while we do not comment on any individual application while it moves through federal approval processes, we are pleased to be advancing more than 4 GW of solar and battery resources in Nevada on private and public lands and expect those projects to deliver tremendous economic benefits to the communities where they’re built.”
“Clearway values its strong working partnership with the BLM, its Southern Nevada office, and also with state and local interests in Nevada. Across all of these relationships, we continuously assess how best to develop and deliver infrastructure that meets needs and aligns with local and national policies and goals.”