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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.
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The odds of BAAJA passing likely grew a few degrees worse.
In the lead-up to the midterm elections, the outlook for passing the Senate’s bipartisan permitting reform deal during the lame-duck session was already highly uncertain. While environmental and clean energy advocates praised the transmission sections of the deal, a growing chorus warned of negative consequences from its provisions to fend off politically motivated attacks on energy projects, as well as its changes to tribal consultation in the federal permitting process. Prominent clean energy Democrats John Podesta and Representative Sean Casten of Illinois also piled on. President Trump, meanwhile, was not holding up his end of the bargain to release proposed wind projects held captive by Department of Defense reviews.
Post-election, the odds of the Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act’s passage are likely a few degrees worse. Jared Huffman, the Democratic Representative from California who is next in line to lead the House Natural Resources Committee, reiterated his view that the Senate should hold off on a vote and take another pass at the bill in the next Congress, when Democrats have more leverage. Other Democrats who were sitting on the sidelines of the debate may also now feel emboldened by the party’s overwhelming win and agree that a better deal could be had by waiting.
Proponents of the bill view the election results as a clear endorsement of BAAJA. Energy bills were on the ballot, and “to reduce energy prices is to pass permitting reform,” Jason Grumet, the CEO of the American Clean Power Association, said during a call with reporters on Wednesday.
Jane Flegal, a senior fellow at the Searchlight Institute, argued on X that “most of the things” Democrats can do to address energy affordability at the federal level are in BAAJA, such as reforms to speed up the buildout of transmission lines, utility oversight, greater certainty for clean energy developers, and provisions to force data centers to cover their costs. “Dems shouldn’t wait on permitting. BAAJA is a good bill, and the filibuster and veto don’t go away in January,” she wrote. But the real reason not to wait, she added, is that if Democrats win the White House in 2028, they will need to “hit the ground running, especially on energy affordability,” and reform “takes years to implement.”
Joe Brazauskas, a partner at the government relations firm Bracewell, said during a post-election webinar on Wednesday that he’ll be watching for four indicators of how the permitting reform deal will fare in the coming days and weeks. First, will the senators who negotiated the deal come back with a major push for the bill?
So far, they don’t seem to be backing down from plans to put the package to a vote next Monday, November 9. “We don’t have more years to lose as clean energy projects sit on the sidelines, and there’s no guarantee Congress would ever find another compromise that would be able to pass the Senate,” Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, one of the bill’s authors, told me in a statement. “Democrats ran and won on affordability, and this bill lowers costs for families and will allow us to start delivering on our election promises. It’s a bird in the hand. We’d be fools not to take it.”
Senator Martin Heinrich of New Mexico, the bill’s other Democrat author, provided similar comments to Politico. “We’ve been trying to pass permitting reform for the better part of a decade,” he said. “It doesn't necessarily get easier just because of who the chair is. This is the closest we have come to actually finding something that can get signed into law. I’m not going to wait.”
The second indicator is what Trump does next. Will he make any substantive wind farm approvals? Grumet said he doesn’t think the legislation will move forward unless a “significant number of those projects” being held up in the Department of Defense review process are released. With the Senate vote scheduled for Monday, the clock is ticking. Grumet was bullish that Trump would play ball, noting that “every interaction we’ve had with the administration affirms that they want to close this deal.”
There’s also the question of how hard the president will gun for the deal more generally. As I’ll explain, the bill could face steep hurdles with key Republicans in the House that may require the president’s cajoling to overcome. Several speakers in the Bracewell webinar suggested that Trump may want some legislative wins to cement his legacy. Whether that translates into a push in the lame duck, or a potential deal in the next Congress, remains to be seen.
The third indicator is whether and how the bill’s authors address the issues raised around tribal consultation and “project certainty” in an amendment before the vote. There are signs that these can be resolved. Before the election, Punchbowl News reported that the Coalition of Large Tribes, whose members control a large portion of tribal lands in the country, was negotiating to improve the bill with technical fixes rather than fighting it altogether. Several bill proponents also told me that fixes for project certainty were underway.
It’s still unclear, however, whether small technical fixes will be enough to rally more support for the bill in the House, or alternatively, if those changes turn out to be more substantive, whether they threaten the bill’s delicate bipartisan balance.
The last indicator is, will Democratic leadership support the bill? Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has not yet shared his views. “The Democrats’ performance was so overwhelming last night that the outside groups that talk to Democrats, the ENGOs, have to be emboldened,” Brazauskas said. “They have very strong views on the Clean Water Act provisions, the Endangered Species Act provisions, Judicial Review, and I really think that that will impact how that’s viewed by Democrats on the Hill.”
If the bill does pass the Senate next week, it faces an uncertain road in the House, and not just because of opponents like Huffman. Republican leadership will have to make a strategic choice about where to send it.
The typical first step would be to refer it to the House Energy and Commerce Committee. At least as of a few weeks ago, however, the committee chair, Representative Brett Guthrie of Kentucky, was looking for changes to the transmission section of the bill, which would have costly consequences for Southeast electric utilities, as it would support the construction of new interregional transmission lines that compete with their business models.
If House leadership wants to avoid Guthrie’s committee, they could send the bill to the House Rules Committee, which could tee it up for a simple majority vote. The Rules Committee is also controlled mostly by southern Republicans, however, who may have some of the same sympathies as Guthrie. This is where Trump’s commitment to getting the deal done would likely be crucial.
Another option is to move the bill through “suspension of the rules,” a procedural tactic that allows the House to consider legislation without a rule from the Rules Committee — although this would mean the bill would require a two-thirds majority to pass. It is typically reserved for bills with broad consensus, such as when Congress renames post offices.
One final potential pathway is to attach a Senate-passed version of the bill to must-pass legislation, such as a government funding package or the annual military authorization bill. Congress successfully enacted the Energy Act of 2020 by attaching it to a consolidated appropriations measure after Donald Trump lost the presidential election to Joe Biden. That bill was not as controversial as BAAJA, however, and so the approach may be too risky.
Hanging over all of this, and affecting how the numbers stack up for a vote, is another question the Democratic landslide has now raised. How many House Republicans will even show up for work in the lame duck?
Democrats finally trounced Trumpism at the ballot box. But it required liberals and progressives alike to articulate more moderate views on energy and climate policy.
I’ll admit that when the polling first came in, I didn’t believe it.
A few months ago, my editor showed me the newest result from the Heatmap Pro poll that we run with Embold Research. For more than a year, we had been asking Americans whether they would support a data center planned near their home; since then, we had been watching the “support” number steadily tick down.
But the newest result beggared belief: 75% of Americans now said they would oppose a data center in their town. Most would strongly oppose it. When was the last time, I thought, that 75% of Americans agreed about anything? Was this real?
Sure looks like it. As Michigan’s newest senator-elect Abdul El-Sayed said earlier this year: People really effing hate data centers. And they apparently really hate Donald Trump, too, and the Iran War, and higher gas prices.
On Tuesday night, Democrats … well, pick your synonym. They routed Republicans. Annihilated them. Crushed them, broke them, and heard the lamentations of their donors. Democrats captured at least 54 seats in the Senate and could take more than 260 seats in the House. The national House vote snapped more than 15 points in their favor, and key demographic groups whose preferences have defined the Trump era — such as Hispanics, young men, and white voters without a college degree — all swung in the double digits to Democrats.
For millennials like me, the wave elections par excellence have been 2006, when liberals took back Congress from a desperately unpopular George W. Bush, and 2010, when the Tea Party caroused against Barack Obama. This election was bigger than either, on par with the anti-Watergate tsunami of 1974 that shaped the Democratic Party for a generation and put a new class of professional-minded reformers at its helm. Unlike in 1974, though, the new Democratic majority will not rely on an old guard of state’s rights conservatives. The South turned indigo on Tuesday night, it’s true, but that was thanks to the normal politics of booming American cities and suburbs, not century-old polarization left over from the Civil War. This is a new kind of Democratic mega-majority.
It will usher in a new kind of energy and climate politics. From the moment he rode down the escalator 11 years ago, Donald Trump has defined himself by his climate change denial. His antipathy for decarbonization and clean energy reached new heights in his second term, as his administration waged a war on renewables and dismantled the government’s already-weak ability to regulate greenhouse gas pollution. At the same time, it embraced the artificial intelligence boom and gave some of the world’s wealthiest companies a blank check to pollute.
Now that is all over. Although Trump still has two years left in the White House, he will limp to 2029 without a pliant Congress, a supportive public, or an aura of invincibility. We should, to be sure, expect at least a few Cabinet resignations in the next few weeks, so the expiring GOP Senate can confirm their replacements; and federal agencies will still roll their regulatory agendas uphill in case the GOP wins the White House in 2028. Some Trump policies — like his nuclear plan — may even meet with Democratic approval. But the administration’s fossil fuel revolution is over. And everything that Trump has done on climate and energy since taking office, especially his family’s penetration of favored mining firms, will soon face scrutiny in the new year.
That will all be good for the fight against climate change. And yet it would be wrong to presume that this new era will look like the last one — or that these new congressional Democrats will be Green New Dealers or even ardent environmentalists. “We cannot change anything unless we accept it,” Jung wrote, and Democrats have finally overturned Trumpism in part by accepting its real force in American politics. I don’t mean their willingness to accept Trump’s conduct, to be clear: The No Kings rallies and the Minneapolis rebellion saw to that. But since Kamala Harris lost, Democrats have for the first time treated Trump as a normal Republican opponent — and their fight against him not as a “battle for the soul of the nation,” as President Biden liked to put it, but as a simple verdict on a powerful establishment politician.
That has meant learning from Trump, and from his energy and affordability politics in particular. Chief among those lessons: Voters really, really care about low prices; they especially really, really care about cheap energy; and they will reward politicians who share their concerns. Zohran Mamdani, Mikie Sherill, and Abigail Spanberger pioneered these appeals last year, playing down their respective climate goals and (in Sherill’s case) running on cheaper power bills. State and congressional Democrats in 2026 picked up that strategy and ran with it.
They had help. Inexplicably, Trump undercut his promises to start no new foreign wars and cut energy bills in half by launching a new Iran war that nearly doubled some energy prices. By one estimate, Americans have paid more than $100 billion in higher fuel costs since March. Trump’s compact with voters broke in that moment. Tuesday is the result.
Democrats know it. Look at Annie Andrews, for instance, the new Democratic senator from South Carolina (!). She wants to “suspend the gas tax, unleash American energy, and get gas prices down” — in other words, she seeks to cut taxes on fossil fuels. But Andrews also wants to restore the solar and wind tax credits and increase public transit spending. And she devotes an entire paragraph of her policy brochure to the need for bipartisan permitting reform.
What distinguishes Andrews isn’t her toughness on fossil fuels, but her opposition to data centers. She wants a two-year nationwide moratorium on the facilities, to end their tax breaks, and force them to stop passing on higher electricity costs to ratepayers. Almost every single Senate Democrat who won on Tuesday, in fact, promised to make data centers pay for their full cost of electricity service — it might be the caucus’s most unifying policy. (The bipartisan permitting bill, whose fate remains uncertain as of writing, would mandate it.)
Much like Andrews, this new class of congressional Democrats sought to embrace every kind of energy source except for coal. Senator-elect James Talarico, a Democrat of Texas — get used to saying that — promised voters that “we can add to our hundreds of thousands of oil, gas, wind, solar, and battery jobs by creating new jobs” in geothermal and hydrogen. Mary Peltola, who seems likely to clinch her Alaska Senate race, argued for oil and gas’s ongoing importance, too. Adam Hamilton of Kansas, Scott Colom of Mississippi, and Andrews of South Carolina all spoke of their “all of the above” energy policy. None of these candidates are climate deniers — they all want to restore the wind and solar tax credits, and many spoke of increasing climate resilience funding — but they all have vowed to grow the energy system, not revolutionize it. Even Abdul El-Sayed, who wrote a 2019 Guardian op-ed advocating for the Green New Deal, disavowed that policy and opposed a government EV mandate.
The new state-level Democrats will push the party even further in this direction. Had Talarico alone won in Texas, he might have been able to walk a careful line on fossil fuels, recognizing oil and gas as the status quo without seeking to expand their reach. But Gina Hinojosa will also be the state’s next governor, with a much more direct role in managing the Permian Basin. To keep her job, she will have to accept that Texans' livelihoods depend on oil and gas, in the same way that Mamdani has had to recognize the reality of Wall Street's centrality to the economy of New York City. Democrats will face tough trade-offs.
They also won’t be any more radical about the 10% of U.S. emissions that come from American agriculture. If the Democrat Scott Colom holds out and wins Mississippi’s senate seat, it will be in no small part thanks to a viral commercial chiding the Republican incumbent for telling voters to choose a cheaper protein than beef. “Pick another protein?” an everyman griller asked the camera. “I’d rather pick another senator instead.”
This is one reason why Tuesday’s victory might feel a smidge bittersweet for some climate defenders. Democrats have finally trounced Trumpism at the ballot box. Progressives like El-Sayed have shown they can win in battleground states, provided a favorable national environment, and moderates have stormed the heart of MAGA America.
But doing so required everyone, liberals and progressives alike, to articulate more moderate views on energy and climate policy. As recently as 2020, belief in the climate crisis unified the Biden coalition. Now, Democrats have tacitly accepted — as a price of winning big majorities — some cognitive dissonance between what they think the science says (that climate change is an urgent and worsening problem) and what domestic politics demands (that voters still care more about cheap energy).
In other words, more than just the Trump era ended on Tuesday. The old Obama dream finally died too. In the wake of the 2012 election, Democrats imagined a permanent progressive majority shorn of right-leaning white voters. That fantasy never materialized, and chasing it may have even led the party astray. Now they have built a new congressional coalition with energy moderates at its core.
Which is not to say that Democrats will give up on decarbonizing the economy. We can expect this new congressional class to expand clean energy, push for more transmission lines, and revive electric vehicle subsidies as a solution to high gas prices. Senator Jon Ossoff of Georgia, who won one of the night’s most convincing victories, repeatedly mentioned microplastics and “forever chemicals” in his speeches, linking the contamination of human bodies to the corruption of the body politic. The fight against conventional air and water pollution, I suspect, will come back big.
The next era of American climate politics, in other words, will look different from the last one. Fossil fuel companies have long been climate advocates’ primary foil. At the national level, data centers and Big Tech could eclipse them. At least one former climate activist won on Tuesday by running against data centers and large-scale solar. Artificial intelligence, after all, is the country’s fastest growing form of industrial energy use, and it creates far fewer jobs than a chip fab or steel mill. For these reasons, you can imagine a kind of reformed normie environmentalism with anti-AI characteristics taking root in the next administration. Perhaps it already has.
Decarbonizing the economy is steady and long-term work, “a slow boring of hard boards,” to quote the political thinker Max Weber, and the politicians who next turn the screws hardest may not sit on Capitol Hill. The historic size of Tuesday’s swell means Democrats won key state offices that they haven’t held in a generation — on public utility commissions, fossil fuel regulators, and in state legislatures. They will be eager to wield their powers. With its new Democratic trifecta, for instance, Pennsylvania could allow community solar, mandate battery storage, and restrict utility profits. Decades of low-hanging climate policy will soon be plucked.
Amid all of this excitement, Democrats should keep failure in mind — the president’s and their own. Since 2020, Democrats have tried to revolutionize the energy system, reindustrialize the country, and overhaul the economy without recognizing the existence of any trade-offs between those goals. They failed, and voters hated it. President Trump and Republicans tried to reinthrone fossil fuels, give birth to a “superior intelligence,” and otherwise bring back a gloomy spoof of the midcentury American economy — without accepting any trade-offs. They failed too, and as we learned last night, voters hated them even more than they hated Biden.
The United States really does need to get better at commercializing batteries and making electric vehicles; it really must cut pollution, lower energy prices, and significantly boost its electricity generation. Both parties have failed to make progress on those goals so far. Democrats have shown they can learn from Donald Trump’s mistakes. Now we’ll see if they can learn from their own, too.
Clean energy stocks are up, unless they’re firm.
The market has rendered its provisional judgment on the midterm elections, seeing threats to the AI datacenter complex and Elon Musk. Here are the winners and losers of the big blue wave.
Elon Musk’s companies
Tesla shares fell over 3% on Wednesday while SpaceX shares fell 3.8%.
Before the election, several Congressional Democrats who will now be serving in the majority made it clear that their oversight powers across a number of domains would be turned on the Trump-supporting sometimes-trillionaire.
“We think the market fears Democrats will look to target Tesla, as Tesla CEO Elon Musk heavily campaigned for the Republican Party leading up to the election,” Morningstar analyst Seth Goldstein wrote in a note to clients.
AI-related companies
But of course Elon Musk isn’t just a Trump-connected electric car and battery chief executive, he also runs an artificial intelligence model developer and “neocloud” (i.e. a builder and renter out of data centers for artificial intelligence) by the name of SpaceX (it also launches rockets).
Several other companies who rent out compute to AI developers saw their shares decline, including CoreWeave (down 10%) and Nebius (down over 6.5%), as Democrats who criticized data center developers won up and down the ballot, including at the state level in data-center-heavy states like Georgia, Texas, and Ohio.
The results imply “incrementally negative AI sentiment on greater expectations for data center restrictions,” Morgan Stanley equity strategists wrote in a note to clients.
“Any investors adding 10 or more GW of compute to SpaceX's SI business in 2027 may want to revise down. State pushback on terrestrial/atmospheric datacenters has a head of steam,” Morgan Stanley analyst Adam Jonas wrote in a note to clients.
Semiconductor companies Nvidia and Broadcom were also down around 3% and 2% respectively.
Firm power companies (including clean ones)
Of course those data centers are largely consumers of power, so as the data center industry got sick, the power industry caught a cold.
Companies that own fossil fuel and nuclear power plants were hit hard today. Shares of Vistra (which has a 44,000-megawatt power plant portfolio) were down almost 14%, Constellation (which owns and operates 21 nuclear reactors) was down 6% and Talen (which owns 14 power plants largely in the PJM region) fell 8.5%. GE Vernova, which has been riding the AI boom by selling gas turbines to power plant developers, was down over 9%.
“Laggards include anything that touches data centers,” Jefferies analyst Julien Dumoulin-Smith wrote in a note to clients. “Expect a difficult unwind day given the scale of the upset in the single biggest state for data center activity,” he wrote, referring to Texas.
And Fervo, the enhanced geothermal developer, really is being treated like a "normal" energy company: its shares were down 4.5%. X-Energy, the advanced nuclear developer, was also down almost 8.5%.
Utilities, especially one specific utility
The vertically integrated utility Southern Company was essentially on the ballot by way of its subsidiary Georgia Power in the Georgia Public Service Commission race and lost. Georgia Power represents about 60% of Southern’s earnings. “Southern Company remains the clearest commission-control risk after Democrats sweep Georgia’s two PSC seats,” Dumoulin Smith wrote.
Across the whole sector, newly elected governors and public utility commissioners could put pressure on the return on equity that utilities are allowed to earn on their investments.
“ROEs are one of the only things utility regulators have to reduce rates,” Rains told me.
Clean Energy
In the energy sector, the big winners were renewables. The S&P Global Clean Energy Transition Index was up over 3% today, while the Danish wind manufacturer Vestas was up almost 3%, while shares in Orsted, the Danish wind developer, were up around 5%. Domestic solar First Solar was up 5% while Sunrun, the solar installer, was up almost 1.5%.
“The blue wave improves the federal outlook for renewables, with Democratic leaders pledging to restore wind and solar tax credits if they regain congressional control,” Dumoulin-Smith wrote.
But the Democratic victory does not necessarily mean the end of the war on offshore wind, although it puts the industry’s defenders in a stronger position.
“While a positive development, we believe it is premature to call a renaissance in US offshore wind,” Morningstar analyst Tancrede Fulop wrote in a note to clients.
EV makers not named Tesla
Shares in Rivian were up almost 6%, while Lucid shares were up almost 12%, indicating bullishness for the larger EV sector as Democrats may be able to push for a return to subsidies for electric vehicles or harsher mileage standards while also putting pressure on Elon Musk personally.
The stock market as a whole
The market is up over 1.5%, likely thanks to oil prices dropping.