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Carbon Mapper’s ultra-precise Tanager-1 is headed to space.
Yet another methane satellite is launching into orbit Friday, as early as 11:19 a.m. Pacific time, on a SpaceX rocket. Developed by a coalition of public and private partners and led by the nonprofit Carbon Mapper, its precision imaging helps fill a gap in the methane detection universe and complements the abilities of MethaneSAT, the Environmental Defense Fund-developed, Google-backed satellite launched back in March.
Riley Duren, CEO of Carbon Mapper, likens his company’s satellite to a telephoto lens, saying it “has a resolution that's about 10 times higher than the MethaneSAT instrument” — although the tradeoff is that the field of view is about 10 times smaller. The ultimate goal is to identify “super-emitters” of methane and carbon dioxide at the facility level. So while MethaneSAT can detect the total emissions emanating from a particular basin, state, or country, Carbon Mapper can zoom in to figure out what’s going on within 50 meters of accuracy so that operators and regulators can be notified.
Both companies use an imaging technology known as spectroscopy, which involves splitting the light reflected by Earth’s surface into its constituent wavelengths. Methane and carbon dioxide each have their own spectroscopic signature. “It's not unlike being able to perceive the distinction in human fingerprints,” Duren told me.
The Carbon Mapper Coalition satellite, called Tanager-1, came from a partnership between Planet Labs, which developed the satellite, and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which developed the particular spectrometer used onboard. Duren helped create the tech during his nearly 28-year career at JPL, where his research revealed the outsized importance of super-emitters. That helped inspire Duren to found Carbon Mapper in 2020, though until now the organization has mostly done suborbital aerial surveys to track methane and carbon dioxide emissions.
Promisingly, he’s found that distributing his team’s findings often leads to a rapid response. “When we've shared our data with oil and gas companies, landfill operators, and regulators, what they tell us is nearly half of the emissions that we're reporting were previously unknown,” Duren told me. “And in many cases, they can quickly repair them.”
The data from these surveys is publicly accessible on the Carbon Mapper data portal, and the data from Tanager-1 will be published there as well. In addition to Planet Labs and JPL, other coalition partners include the California Air Resources Board, University of Arizona, Arizona State University, and RMI. To date, Carbon Mapper has raised over $130 million in philanthropic funding, from donors including the High Tide Foundation, Bloomberg Philanthropies, and the Grantham Foundation for the Protection of the Environment.
Ultimately, Carbon Mapper aims to launch a constellation of more than 10 satellites, which together will detect and track up to 90% of high-emitting methane sources with near-daily frequency. But this will require funding beyond what the philanthropic sector is likely to pony up.
“Scaling up this to the full constellation and sustaining it will hinge on the ability of governments and the private sector to pay for data,” Duren told me. (MethaneSAT is also philanthropically supported.) “We're hopeful that as these programs scale up and we demonstrate their utility and the regulators depend on them, that we'll see governments begin to match what philanthropy has started,” Durian said.
If you want to watch the launch live, you can do so here.
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“We had enough assurance that the president was going to deal with them.”
A member of the House Freedom Caucus said Wednesday that he voted to advance President Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” after receiving assurances that Trump would “deal” with the Inflation Reduction Act’s clean energy tax credits – raising the specter that Trump could try to go further than the megabill to stop usage of the credits.
Representative Ralph Norman, a Republican of North Carolina, said that while IRA tax credits were once a sticking point for him, after meeting with Trump “we had enough assurance that the president was going to deal with them in his own way,” he told Eric Garcia, the Washington bureau chief of The Independent. Norman specifically cited tax credits for wind and solar energy projects, which the Senate version would phase out more slowly than House Republicans had wanted.
It’s not entirely clear what the president could do to unilaterally “deal with” tax credits already codified into law. Norman declined to answer direct questions from reporters about whether GOP holdouts like himself were seeking an executive order on the matter. But another Republican holdout on the bill, Representative Chip Roy of Texas, told reporters Wednesday that his vote was also conditional on blocking IRA “subsidies.”
“If the subsidies will flow, we’re not gonna be able to get there. If the subsidies are not gonna flow, then there might be a path," he said, according to Jake Sherman of Punchbowl News.
As of publication, Roy has still not voted on the rule that would allow the bill to proceed to the floor — one of only eight Republicans yet to formally weigh in. House Speaker Mike Johnson says he’ll, “keep the vote open for as long as it takes,” as President Trump aims to sign the giant tax package by the July 4th holiday. Norman voted to let the bill proceed to debate, and will reportedly now vote yes on it too.
Earlier Wednesday, Norman said he was “getting a handle on” whether his various misgivings could be handled by Trump via executive orders or through promises of future legislation. According to CNN, the congressman later said, “We got clarification on what’s going to be enforced. We got clarification on how the IRAs were going to be dealt with. We got clarification on the tax cuts — and still we’ll be meeting tomorrow on the specifics of it.”
Neither Norman nor Roy’s press offices responded to a request for comment.
The state’s senior senator, Thom Tillis, has been vocal about the need to maintain clean energy tax credits.
The majority of voters in North Carolina want Congress to leave the Inflation Reduction Act well enough alone, a new poll from Data for Progress finds.
The survey, which asked North Carolina voters specifically about the clean energy and climate provisions in the bill, presented respondents with a choice between two statements: “The IRA should be repealed by Congress” and “The IRA should be kept in place by Congress.” (“Don’t know” was also an option.)
The responses from voters broke down predictably along party lines, with 71% of Democrats preferring to keep the IRA in place compared to just 31% of Republicans, with half of independent voters in favor of keeping the climate law. Overall, half of North Carolina voters surveyed wanted the IRA to stick around, compared to 37% who’d rather see it go — a significant spread for a state that, prior to the passage of the climate law, was home to little in the way of clean energy development.
But North Carolina now has a lot to lose with the potential repeal of the Inflation Reduction Act, as my colleague Emily Pontecorvo has pointed out. The IRA brought more than 17,000 jobs to the state, per Climate Power, along with $20 billion in investment spread out over 34 clean energy projects. Electric vehicle and charging manufacturers in particular have flocked to the state, with Toyota investing $13.9 billion in its Liberty EV battery manufacturing facility, which opened this past April.
North Carolina Senator Thom Tillis was one of the four co-authors of a letter sent to Majority Leader John Thune in April advocating for the preservation of the law. Together, they wrote that gutting the IRA’s tax credits “would create uncertainty, jeopardizing capital allocation, long-term project planning, and job creation in the energy sector and across our broader economy.” It seems that the majority of North Carolina voters are aligned with their senator — which is lucky for him, as he’s up for reelection in 2026.
SpaceX has also now been dragged into the fight.
The value of Tesla shares went into freefall Thursday as its chief executive Elon Musk traded insults with President Donald Trump. The war of tweets (and Truths) began with Musk’s criticism of the budget reconciliation bill passed by the House of Representatives and has escalated to Musk accusing Trump of being “in the Epstein files,” a reference to the well-connected financier Jeffrey Epstein, who died in federal detention in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges.
The conflict had been escalating steadily in the week since Musk formally departed the Trump administration with what was essentially a goodbye party in the Oval Office, during which Musk was given a “key” to the White House.
Musk has since criticized the reconciliation bill for not cutting spending enough, and for slashing credits for electric vehicles and renewable energy while not touching subsidies for oil and gas. “Keep the EV/solar incentive cuts in the bill, even though no oil & gas subsidies are touched (very unfair!!), but ditch the MOUNTAIN of DISGUSTING PORK in the bill,” Musk wrote on X Thursday afternoon. He later posted a poll asking “Is it time to create a new political party in America that actually represents the 80% in the middle?”
Tesla shares were down around 5% early in the day but recovered somewhat by noon, only to nosedive again when Trump criticized Musk during a media availability. The shares had fallen a total of 14% from the previous day’s close by the end of trading on Thursday, evaporating some $150 billion worth of Tesla’s market capitalization.
As Musk has criticized Trump’s bill, Trump and his allies have accused him of being sore over the removal of tax credits for the purchase of electric vehicles. On Tuesday, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson described Musk’s criticism of the bill as “very disappointing,” and said the electric vehicle policies were “very important to him.”
“I know that has an effect on his business, and I lament that,” Johnson said.
Trump echoed that criticism Thursday afternoon on Truth Social, writing, “Elon was ‘wearing thin,’ I asked him to leave, I took away his EV Mandate that forced everyone to buy Electric Cars that nobody else wanted (that he knew for months I was going to do!), and he just went CRAZY!” He added, “The easiest way to save money in our Budget, Billions and Billions of Dollars, is to terminate Elon’s Governmental Subsidies and Contracts. I was always surprised that Biden didn’t do it!”
“In light of the President’s statement about cancellation of my government contracts, @SpaceX will begin decommissioning its Dragon spacecraft immediately,” Musk replied, referring to the vehicles NASA uses to ferry personnel and supplies to and from the International Space Station.