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Somebody is going to do it sooner or later. It’s critical to prepare now.
The businessman, philanthropist, and YouTube personality Hank Green recently caused a minor controversy with a video about geoengineering. Discussing the evidence that international regulations on cargo ship fuel, and the resulting huge decline in oceanic aerosol pollution, are partly behind the record-shattering heat this summer, he argued that this was a golden opportunity to study the idea. By putting aerosols — sulfur dioxide or ocean water, possibly — into the atmosphere on purpose (also called solar radiation management), we could cut down on global temperatures.
So many people reacted with fury that the Radiolab podcast invited Green on to discuss the backlash. Many climate scientists also objected. Some argue that even studying geoengineering is unethical, but others raised a more nuanced objection.
“In order to do it intentionally, everyone needs to be on board. Geoengineering has global implications, therefore ethically, morally, it should be a global decision,” said climate scientist Miriam Nielsen in a response video. “I don’t want the use of geoengineering to stop us from making the next Paris Agreement, and I really think that it would,” she added in an interesting and informative conversation with Green and Adam Levy. “It already breaks a bunch of international laws … I would rather focus on — how do we bring the world together on mitigative efforts on reducing our emissions rather than combating future emissions.”
I have a lot of sympathy for this view, but ultimately I don’t accept it. It seems to me almost beyond question at this point that some country or group of countries will opt for geoengineering. The ethical qualms of scientists or climate activists will not stop it. And if the extant international frameworks for climate diplomacy get in the way, they will be torn up. It’s critical both to start research on the question, and to start building an international diplomatic framework to consider and regulate geoengineering.
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Here’s why. Many countries are extremely vulnerable to climate change, and some of them have more than enough economic might and international heft to carry out a unilateral geoengineering scheme. Such a scheme will be cheap compared to the damages inflicted by, say, 2-3 degrees of warming, which is what a recent UN report estimates we are likely to hit by 2100 along the current policy trajectory.
Importantly, that projection is actually a huge improvement relative to the business-as-usual projections from 10 or 20 years ago, when 6 degrees of warming was the status quo track. The world is now moving fairly aggressively on climate policy, thanks to the Inflation Reduction Act, Europe’s crash decarbonization campaign resulting from Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine, and massive investment in China. Renewable energy is now cheaper than any form of energy in history, and only getting cheaper. That fact alone will eventually stamp out the use of fossil fuels over time.
In short, the world has made substantial strides towards tackling climate change — but they just aren’t happening fast enough. National grids are clogged; offshore wind is running into financing issues; countries are struggling to assemble electric vehicle supply chains; sources of zero-carbon steel, concrete, and industrial heat are still in their early stages, and so on. Though it’s not yet impossible to keep warming under 1.5 degrees, given political realities around the globe, it is quite hard to imagine.
So consider what, say, China is facing. In 2022, it saw severe drought and heat waves that nearly broke the power grid, with only about 1 degree Celsius of warming. Climate science tells us that droughts and heat waves will be dramatically worse at 2-3 degrees of warming — and if a really severe heat wave coincides with (or causes) a major power outage in an urban center, the death toll could easily reach into the millions.
Then there is sea level rise. According to a 2019 study, along the current sea level rise trajectory, something like 93 million Chinese people will be at risk of annual flooding by 2050 — just 26 years away. A Financial Times analysis estimated that many trillions of dollars of Chinese investment will be threatened by sea level rise by 2100, including capital producing nearly $1 trillion in GDP annually in Shanghai alone.
The communist dictatorship in China is not exactly known for a kindly regard for international norms or environmental protection. On the contrary, it brutally crushed a pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong, it is committing cultural genocide against its Uyghur population, and it has wreaked environmental devastation across the country and the world in pursuit of ultra-rapid economic growth. Indeed, as of 2021 it emitted over 60 percent more carbon dioxide than the U.S. and the European Union put together.
Does this sound like a country likely to respect international agreements — or laws of any kind — if they stand in the way of what it sees as a cheap and easy way to protect the lives of literally tens of millions of its citizens along with its most valuable economic complexes? Even the most responsible liberal democracy would surely be tempted — and to be fair, a democracy might easily be the first to try, including the U.S.
Even if countries could somehow be coerced into halting their geoengineering — a ludicrous prospect with a country as powerful as China — that raises an even worse possibility. The most dangerous scenario here is for solar dimming programs to be started or stopped abruptly. One of the biggest reason climate change is a problem is that it is causing rapid and chaotic changes to weather patterns — severe drought followed by flooding, unseasonable heat followed by a cold snap, and so on, which damages ecosystems and drives species to extinction. Rapid, unplanned geoengineering schemes being switched on and off could cause the same problems even faster than greenhouse gas emissions have done.
Suppose some country suffers a seven-figure casualty event from a climate disaster, decides it is facing an existential threat, and attempts a half-baked solar dimming program in a panic. Then that causes unforeseen disruptions in precipitation patterns in a neighboring country, which responds by launching missile strikes on the solar dimming installations. The climate could be yanked back and forth by a half-degree Celsius or more in the space of years or months.
I can understand why climate scientists would want to preserve the nascent climate diplomacy system. But any international agreement is no match for raw power politics in a pinch. International law is already routinely ignored all over the world, and the frankly quite toothless diplomatic climate framework certainly won’t prevent a powerful nation that feels backed into a corner from exerting every effort to protect itself.
The way forward is to produce the strongest possible body of evidence on the question, so that the best solar dimming agents can be determined, along with the least harmful way they could be used, and to start international discussions to manage any future geoengineering program. That way it could be carried out with wide support, hopefully with some compensation funds available to nations that are negatively affected, with the overarching idea that it will only buy time before carbon removal technologies can be spun up.
It will no doubt be very difficult to assemble any kind of international consensus around this question. But the alternative is it happening anyway without enough planning or study.
Read more about geoengineering:
‘Oppenheimer’ Is a Window Into One of the Greatest Climate Debates
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It’s not perfect, but pretty soon, it’ll be available for under $30,000.
Here’s what you need to know about the rejuvenated Chevrolet Bolt: It’s back, it’s better, and it starts at under $30,000.
Although the revived 2027 Bolt doesn’t officially hit the market until January 2026, GM revealed the new version of the iconic affordable EV at a Wednesday evening event at the Universal Studios backlot in Los Angeles. The assembled Bolt owners and media members drove the new cars past Amity Island from Jaws and around the Old West and New York sets that have served as the backdrops of so many television shows and movies. It was star treatment for a car that, like its predecessor, isn’t the fanciest EV around. But given the giveaway patches that read “Chevy Bolt: Back by popular demand,” it’s clear that GM heard the cries of people who missed having the plucky electric hatchback on the market.
The Bolt died at the height of its powers. The original Bolt EV and Bolt EUV sold in big numbers in the late 2010s and early 2020s, powered by a surprisingly affordable price compared to competitor EVs and an interior that didn’t feel cramped despite its size as a smallish hatchback. In 2023, the year Chevy stopped selling it, the Bolt was the third-best-selling EV in America after Tesla’s top two models.
Yet the original had a few major deficiencies that reflected the previous era of EVs. The most egregious of which was its charging speed that topped out at around 50 kilowatts. Given that today’s high-speed chargers can reach 250 to 350 kilowatts — and an even faster future could be on the way — the Bolt’s pit stops on a road trip were a slog that didn’t live up to its peppy name.
Thankfully, Chevy fixed it. Charging speed now reaches 150 kilowatts. While that figure isn’t anywhere near the 350 kilowatts that’s possible in something like the Hyundai Ioniq 9, it’s a threefold improvement for the Bolt that lets it go from 10% to 80% charged in a respectable 26 minutes. The engineers said they drove a quartet of the new cars down old Route 66 from the Kansas City area, where the Bolt is made, to Los Angeles to demonstrate that the EV was finally ready for such an adventure.
From the outside, the 2027 Bolt is virtually indistinguishable from the old car, but what’s inside is a welcome leap forward. New Bolt has a lithium-ion-phosphate, or LFP battery that holds 65 kilowatt-hours of energy, but still delivers 255 miles of max range because of the EV’s relatively light weight. Whereas older EVs encourage drivers to stop refueling at around 80%, the LFP battery can be charged to 100% regularly without the worry of long-term damage to the battery.
The Bolt is GM’s first EV with the NACS charging standard, the former Tesla proprietary plug, which would allow the little Chevy to visit Tesla Superchargers without an adapter (though its port placement on the front of the driver’s side is backwards from the way older Supercharger stations are built). Now built on GM’s Ultium platform, the Bolt shares its 210-horsepower electric motor with the Chevy Equinox EV and gets vehicle-to-load capability, meaning you’ll be able to tap into its battery energy for other uses such as powering your home.
But it’s the price that’s the real wow factor. Bolt will launch with an RS version that gets the fancier visual accents and starts at $32,000. The Bolt LT that will be available a little later will eventually start as low as $28,995, a figure that includes the destination charge that’s typically slapped on top of a car’s price, to the tune of an extra $1,000 to $2,000 on delivery. Perhaps it’s no surprise that GM revealed this car just a week after the end of the $7,500 federal tax credit for EV purchases (and just a day after Tesla announced its budget versions of the Model Y and Model 3). Bringing in a pretty decent EV at under $30,000 without the help of a big tax break is a pretty big deal.
The car is not without compromises. Plenty of Bolt fans are aghast that Chevy abandoned the Apple CarPlay and Android Auto integrations that worked with the first Bolt in favor of GM’s own built-in infotainment system as the only option. Although the new Bolt was based on the longer, “EUV” version of the original, this is still a pretty compact car without a ton of storage space behind the back seats. Still, for those who truly need a bigger vehicle, there’s the Chevy Equinox EV.
For as much time as I’ve spent clamoring for truly affordable EVs that could compete with entry-level gas cars on prices, the Bolt’s faults are minor. At $29,000 for an electric vehicle in the U.S., there is practically zero competition until the new Nissan Leaf arrives. The biggest threats to the Bolt are America’s aversion to small cars and the rapid rates of depreciation that could allow someone to buy a much larger, gently used EV for the price of the new Chevy. But the original Bolt found a steady footing among drivers who wanted that somewhat counter-cultural car — and this one is a lot better.
“Old economy” companies like Caterpillar and Williams are cashing in by selling smaller, less-efficient turbines to impatient developers.
From the perspective of the stock market, you’re either in the AI business or you’re not. If you build the large language models pushing out the frontiers of artificial intelligence, investors love it. If you rent out the chips the large language models train on, investors love it. If you supply the servers that go in the data centers that power the large language models, investors love it. And, of course, if you design the chips themselves, investors love it.
But companies far from the software and semiconductor industry are profiting from this boom as well. One example that’s caught the market’s fancy is Caterpillar, better known for its scale-defying mining and construction equipment, which has become a “secular winner” in the AI boom, writes Bloomberg’s Joe Weisenthal.
Typically construction businesses do well when the overall economy is doing well — that is, they don’t typically take off with a major technological shift like AI. Now, however, Caterpillar has joined the ranks of the “picks and shovels” businesses capitalizing on the AI boom thanks to its gas turbine business, which is helping power OpenAI’s Stargate data center project in Abilene, Texas.
Just one link up the chain is another classic “old economy” business: Williams Companies, the natural gas infrastructure company that controls or has an interest in over 33,000 miles of pipeline and has been around in some form or another since the early 20th century.
Gas pipeline companies are not supposed to be particularly exciting, either. They build large-scale infrastructure. Their ratemaking is overseen by federal regulators. They pay dividends. The last gas pipeline company that got really into digital technology, well, uh, it was Enron.
But Williams’ shares are up around 28% in the past year — more than Caterpillar. That’s in part, due to its investing billions in powering data centers with behind the meter natural gas.
Last week, Williams announced that it would funnel over $3 billion into two data center projects, bringing its total investments in powering AI to $5 billion. This latest bet, the company said, is “to continue to deliver speed-to-market solutions in grid-constrained markets.”
If we stipulate that the turbines made by Caterpillar are powering the AI boom in a way analogous to the chips designed by Nvidia or AMD and fabricated by TSMC, then Williams, by developing behind the meter gas-fired power plants, is something more like a cloud computing provider or data center developer like CoreWeave, except that its facilities house gas turbines, not semiconductors.
The company has “seen the rapid emergence of the need for speed with respect to energy,” Williams Chief Executive Chad Zamarin said on an August earnings call.
And while Williams is not a traditional power plant developer or utility, it knows its way around natural gas. “We understand pipeline capacity,” Zamarin said on a May earnings call. “We obviously build a lot of pipeline and turbine facilities. And so, bringing all the different pieces together into a solution that is ready-made for a customer, I think, has been truly a differentiator.”
Williams is already behind the Socrates project for Meta in Ohio, described in a securities filing as a $1.6 billion project that will provide 400 megawatts of gas-fired power. That project has been “upsized” to $2 billion and 750 megawatts, according to Morgan Stanley analysts.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said that “energy constraints” are a more pressing issue for artificial intelligence development than whether the marginal dollar invested is worth it. In other words, Zuckerberg expects to run out of energy before he runs out of projects that are worth pursuing.
That’s great news for anyone in the business of providing power to data centers quickly. The fact that developers seem to have found their answer in the Williamses and Caterpillars of the world, however, calls into question a key pillar of the renewable industry’s case for itself in a time of energy scarcity — that the fastest and cheapest way to get power for data centers is a mix of solar and batteries.
Just about every renewable developer or clean energy expert I’ve spoken to in the past year has pointed to renewables’ fast timeline and low cost to deploy compared to building new gas-fired, grid-scale generation as a reason why utilities and data centers should prefer them, even absent any concerns around greenhouse gas emissions.
“Renewables and battery storage are the lowest-cost form of power generation and capacity,” Next Era chief executive John Ketchum said on an April earnings call. “We can build these projects and get new electrons on the grid in 12 to 18 months.” Ketchum also said that the price of a gas-fired power plant had tripled, meanwhile lead times for turbines are stretching to the early 2030s.
The gas turbine shortage, however, is most severe for large turbines that are built into combined cycle systems for new power plants that serve the grid.
GE Vernova is discussing delivering turbines in 2029 and 2030. While one manufacturer of gas turbines, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, has announced that it plans to expand its capacity, the industry overall remains capacity constrained.
But according to Morgan Stanley, Williams can set up behind the meter power plants in 18 months. xAI’s Colossus data center in Memphis, which was initially powered by on-site gas turbines, went from signing a lease to training a large language model in about six months.
These behind the meter plants often rely on cheaper, smaller, simple cycle turbines, which generate electricity just from the burning of natural gas, compared to combined cycle systems, which use the waste heat from the gas turbines to run steam turbines and generate more energy. The GE Vernova 7HA combined cycle turbines that utility Duke Energy buys, for instance, range in output from 290 to 430 megawatts. The simple cycle turbines being placed in Ohio for the Meta data center range in output from about 14 megawatts to 23 megawatts.
Simple cycle turbines also tend to be less efficient than the large combined cycle system used for grid-scale natural gas, according to energy analysts at BloombergNEF. The BNEF analysts put the emissions difference at almost 1,400 pounds of carbon per megawatt-hour for the single turbines, compared to just over 800 pounds for combined cycle.
Overall, Williams is under contract to install 6 gigawatts of behind-the-meter power, to be completed by the first half of 2027, Morgan Stanley analysts write. By comparison, a joint venture between GE Vernova, the independent power producer NRG, and the construction company Kiewit to develop combined cycle gas-fired power plants has a timeline that could stretch into 2032.
The Williams projects will pencil out on their own, the company says, but they have an obvious auxiliary benefit: more demand for natural gas.
Williams’ former chief executive, Alan Armstrong, told investors in a May earnings call that he was “encouraged” by the “indirect business we are seeing on our gas transmission systems,” i.e. how increased natural gas consumption benefits the company’s traditional pipeline business.
Wall Street has duly rewarded Williams for its aggressive moves.
Morgan Stanley analysts boosted their price target for the stock from $70 to $83 after last week’s $3 billion announcement, saying in a note to clients that the company has “shifted from an underappreciated value (impaired terminal value of existing assets) to underappreciated growth (accelerating project pipeline) story.” Mizuho Securities also boosted its price target from $67 to $72, with analyst Gabriel Moreen telling clients that Williams “continues to raise the bar on the scope and potential benefits.”
But at the same time, Moreen notes, “the announcement also likely enhances some investor skepticism around WMB pushing further into direct power generation and, to a lesser extent, prioritizing growth (and growth capex) at the expense of near-term free cash flow and balance sheet.”
In other words, the pipeline business is just like everyone else — torn between prudence in a time of vertiginous economic shifts and wanting to go all-in on the AI boom.
Williams seems to have decided on the latter. “We will be a big beneficiary of the fast rising data center power load,” Armstrong said.
On billions for clean energy, Orsted layoffs, and public housing heat pumps
Current conditions: A tropical rainstorm is forming in the Atlantic that’s forecast to barrel along the East Coast through early next week, threatening major coastal flooding and power outages • Hurricane Priscilla is weakening as it tracks northward toward California • The Caucasus region is sweltering in summer-like heat, with the nation of Georgia enduring temperatures of up to 93 degrees Fahrenheit in October.
Base Power, the Texas power company that leases batteries to homeowners and taps the energy for the grid, on Tuesday announced a $1 billion financing round. The Series C funding is set to supercharge the Austin-based company’s meteoric growth. Since starting just two years ago, Base has deployed more than 100 megawatts of residential battery capacity, making it one of the fastest growing distributed energy companies in the nation. The company now plans to build a factory in the old headquarters of the Austin American-Statesman, the leading daily newspaper in the Texan capital. The funding round included major investors who are increasing their stakes, including Valor Equity Partners, Thrive Capital, and Andreessen Horowitz, and at least nine new venture capital investors, including Lowercarbon, Avenir, and Positive Sum. “The chance to reinvent our power system comes once in a generation,” Zach Dell, chief executive and co-founder of Base Power, said in a statement. “The challenge ahead requires the best engineers and operators to solve it and we’re scaling the team to make our abundant energy future a reality.”
The deal came a day after Brookfield Asset Management, the Canadian-American private equity giant, raised a record $23.5 billion for its clean energy fund. At least $5 billion has already been spent on investments such as the renewable power operator Neoen, the energy developer Geronimo Power, and the Indian wind and solar giant Evren. “Energy demand is growing fast, driven by the growth of artificial intelligence as well as electrification in industry and transportation,” Connor Teskey, Brookfield’s president and renewable power chief, said in a press release. “Against this backdrop we need an ‘any and all’ approach to energy investment that will continue to favor low carbon resources.”
Orsted has been facing down headwinds for months. The Danish offshore wind giant has absorbed the Trump administration’s wrath as the White House deployed multiple federal agencies to thwart progress on building seaward turbines in the Northeastern U.S. Then lower-than-forecast winds this year dinged Orsted’s projected earnings for 2025. When the company issued new stock to fund its efforts to fight back against Trump, the energy giant was forced to sell the shares at a steep discount, as I wrote in this newsletter last month. Despite all that, the company has managed to raise the money it needed. On Wednesday, The Wall Street Journal reported that Orsted had raised $9.4 billion. Existing shareholders subscribed for 99.3% of the new shares on offer, but demand for the remaining shares was “extraordinarily high,” the company said.
That wasn’t enough to stave off job cuts. Early Thursday morning, the company announced plans to lay off 2,000 employees between now and 2027. The cuts represented roughly one-quarter of the company’s 8,000-person global workforce. “This is a necessary consequence of our decision to focus our business and the fact that we'll be finalizing our large construction portfolio in the coming years — which is why we'll need fewer employees,” Rasmus Errboe, Orsted’s chief executive, said in a statement published on CNBC. "At the same time, we want to create a more efficient and flexible organization and a more competitive Orsted, ready to bid on new value-accretive offshore wind projects.”
California Governor Gavin Newsom. Mario Tama/Getty Images
California operates the world’s largest geothermal power station, The Geysers, and generates up to 5% of its power from the Earth’s heat. But the state is far behind its neighbors on developing new plants based on next-generation technology. Most of the startups racing to commercialize novel methods are headquartered or building pilot plants in states such as Utah, Nevada, and Texas. A pair of bills to make doing business in California easier for geothermal companies was supposed to change that. Yet while Governor Gavin Newsom signed one statute into law that makes it easier for state regulators to certify geothermal plants, he vetoed a permitting reform bill to which the industry had pegged its hopes. “Every geothermal developer and energy org I talked to was excited about this bill,” Thomas Hochman, who heads the energy program at the right-leaning Foundation for American Innovation, wrote in a post on X. “The legislature did everything right, passing it unanimously. They even reworked it to accommodate certain classic California concerns, such as prevailing wage requirements.”
In a letter announcing his veto, the governor claimed that the law would have added new fees for geothermal projects. But an executive at Zanskar — the startup that, as Heatmap’s Katie Brigham reported last month, is using new technology to locate and tap into conventional geothermal resources — called the governor’s argument “weak sauce.” Far from burdening the industry, Zanskar co-founder Joel Edwards said on X, “this was a clean shot to accelerate geothermal today, and he whiffed it.”
Last month, Generate Capital trumpeted the appointment of its first new chief executive in its 11-year history as the leading infrastructure investment firm sought to realign its approach to survive a tumultuous time in clean-energy financing. Less publicly, as Katie wrote in a scoop last night, it also kicked off company-wide job cuts. In an interview with Katie, Jonah Goldman, the firm’s head of external affairs, said the company “grew quickly and made some mistakes,” and now planned to lay off 50 people.
Generate once invested in “leading-edge technologies,” according to co-founder Jigar Shah, who left the firm to serve as the head of the Biden-era DOE Loan Programs Office. That included investments in projects involving fuel cells, anaerobic digesters, and battery storage. But from the outside, he said on the Open Circuits podcast he now co-hosts, the firm appears to have moved away from taking these riskier but potentially more lucrative bets. “They ended up with 38 people in their capital markets team, and their capital markets team went out to the marketplace and said, Hey, we have all this stuff to sell. And the people that they went to said, Well, that’s interesting, but what we really would love is boring community solar.”
Three of New England’s largest public housing agencies signed deals with the heat pump manufacturer Gradient to replace aging electric heaters and air conditioners with the company’s 120-volt, two-way units that provide both heating and cooling. The Boston Housing Authority, New England’s largest public housing agency, will kick off the deal by installing 100 all-weather, two-way units that both heat and cool at the Hassan Apartments, a complex for seniors and adults with disabilities in Boston’s Mattapan neighborhood. The housing authorities in neighboring Chelsea and Lynn — two formerly industrial, working-class cities just outside Boston — will follow the same approach.
Public housing agencies have long served a vital role in helping to popularize new, more efficient appliances. The New York City Housing Authority, for example, is credited with creating the market for efficient mini fridges in the 1990s. Last year, NYCHA — the nation’s largest public housing system — signed a similar deal with Gradient for heat pumps. Months later, as Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo exclusively reported at the time, NYCHA picked a winner in its $32 million contest for an efficient new induction stove for its apartments.
Three chemists — Susumu Kitagawa, Richard Robson, and Omar Yaghi — won the Nobel Prize for “groundbreaking discoveries” that "may contribute to solving some of humankind’s greatest challenges, from pollution to water scarcity.” Just a few grams of the so-called molecular organic frameworks the scientists pioneered could have as much surface area as a soccer field, which can be used to lock gas molecules in place in carbon capture or harvest freshwater from the atmosphere.