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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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Voters don’t hate clean energy, but they also don’t want to work for it.
The re-election of Donald Trump all but assures that the next four years of climate policy will have to unfold at the local level. With a climate change denier who previously wreaked havoc on longstanding environmental regulations, opened wildlife refuges to drilling, and put the U.S. at odds with its international partners now set to return to the White House in January, the country will almost certainly fall far short of its 2030 emission reduction targets. But state and local policies can still achieve meaningful progress on their own: On Wednesday morning, green organizers like Climate Cabinet were already stressing that “it will now be up to state leaders to hold the line against Trump and to ensure continued progress toward clean energy.”
Will Americans defend and advance that progress, though? The results of several climate-related ballot measures that were put to vote Tuesday night are giving mixed signals.
On the one hand, there were a number of victories worth celebrating. Most significantly, Washington voters confirmed their state’s cap-and-invest carbon trading program, which pumps millions of dollars into local transit, environmental, and decarbonization projects. Voters across the country also signed off on creating climate- and conservation-related bonds and funds, including in Honolulu, Louisiana, Jefferson County, Iowa, Minnesota, and (likely) the state of California. Local transit-related measures also, on the whole, had a good night.
But there were some concerning rejections, too. Two counties on the southern Oregon coast expressed overwhelming (though non-binding) opposition to offshore wind development in their region, with some 80% of voters in Curry County signaling their objection. Two-thirds of voters in Berkeley, California — one of the most liberal cities in the country — also rejected what would have been a first-in-the-nation tax on natural gas in large buildings. In Washington, early results on an initiative that is still too close to call show voters on track to approve a measure that would bar cities, towns, and the state from “prohibiting, penalizing, or discouraging” gas appliances in buildings — “discouraging” being the operative, ill-defined, and all-encompassing word — threatening Seattle’s 2050 net-zero emissions target.
South Dakotans also rejected a bill that would have smoothed the permitting process for a carbon dioxide pipeline that would carry CO2 from ethanol plants to an injection well in North Dakota as a means of dealing with planet-warming emissions. Though CO2 pipelines are controversial and have “strange politics,” as Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo has written, the citizen-led backlash was often couched in the language of opposing out-of-state interests who were “going to make a buck from the future energy transition.”
My read of the night’s referenda and ballot measures is that voters largely seem willing to do the passive work of supporting climate and environmental policy (for instance by directing the use of property taxes or reconfirming a law already in place) and less willing to voluntarily take on some of the burden themselves, in the form of hosting new development in their communities or opting into transitions away from climate-polluting fuels. This isn’t terribly surprising — local battles over the energy transition are common and frequent enough that we have a whole weekly newsletter here at Heatmap addressing them — but it also suggests that there isn’t nearly enough momentum to prevent potentially catastrophic backsliding under four more years of Trump.
There is good news, though. Local policy is often nimbler and more responsive than state- or federal-level policy. It’s also something anyone can get involved in, and there is presently a wide-open opportunity to convince Americans to embrace a clean energy economy and build things. The seemingly total failure of the current administration to capitalize on the benefits of the Inflation Reduction Act, however, does mean that climate, transit, environmental justice, decarbonization, and conservation organizers and activists will have their work cut out for them in the next years to come.
But it isn’t impossible, even if it is uphill sledding. As Climate Cabinet’s Caroline Spears put it in her Wednesday morning note, “It’s time to go back to our roots, dig deep, and rebuild our democracy and climate progress from the local level up.”
South Dakotans successfully fought back against a law that would have made it easier to permit and build.
South Dakota voters have rejected a ballot measure that would have eased the permitting process for a highly contentious carbon dioxide pipeline. The planned $8 billion project, developed by Summit Carbon Solutions, would carry CO2 captured from ethanol plants to sequestration wells in neighboring North Dakota. But if the company had been banking on legislative relief for its siting challenges, it will have to figure out a new plan to move forward.
Referred Law 21, as the measure was called, was a citizen-led veto referendum on a bill that passed the South Dakota legislature and was signed by the governor in March. The bill would have preempted all local land use regulations and ordinances related to the siting of carbon dioxide pipelines and other transmission infrastructure, including power lines. Full authority to permit these projects would have been handed to the state’s utility commission, an elected three-member body that regulates utilities.
Summit Carbon Solutions is trying to build what would be the largest pipeline designed to carry carbon dioxide in the United States. From a climate perspective, putting debates on land use and local control aside, the calculus of the project is complicated.
Ethanol refineries are ripe for carbon capture — they emit a very pure stream of CO2 that is technologically easy to capture, and it’s better that it be buried underground than dumped in the atmosphere. But the long term prospects for ethanol in a low-carbon future are murky at best, and investing $8 billion in carbon capture and pipeline infrastructure could help justify its continued use over other, potentially better solutions. Though it’s clear electric cars will eventually crowd out ethanol from the passenger vehicle fuel market, some advocate for the industry to pivot to aviation fuel.
The pipeline faces opposition throughout the Midwest from a diverse coalition of stakeholders, including landowners in the pipeline’s path, environmental groups like the Sierra Club that oppose carbon capture in general, and Republican legislators who question the project’s merits on the grounds that climate change is merely a “hypothesis.” Though CO2 pipelines generally have a good track record for safety, a high-profile rupture in Mississippi in 2020, which sent 45 people to the hospital, has also amplified concerns.
At least five municipalities in South Dakota have passed rules governing the siting of the pipeline, Chase Jensen, a senior organizer for the environmental nonprofit Dakota Rural Action told me on a call last week. For example, Minnehaha County, the home of Sioux Falls, adopted setback rules last year that require pipelines to be laid 330 feet away from residential areas, businesses, and churches. An ordinance in Lincoln County requires 1,855 feet, and prohibits construction on sites of historical or archeological significance.
“Everybody who's going to make a buck from the future energy transition is licking their chops at this,” Jensen said of Referred Law 21, which would have preempted these ordinances. “It's a lot easier to just make campaign donations to three public utility commissioners than the 300-plus county commissioners across the state.”
The bill signed into law in March was painted as a compromise. Though it weakened local control, it gave counties the ability to charge pipeline companies a tax of $1 per linear foot of pipe installed. It also included a so-called “Landowner Bill of Rights” that enshrined certain protections like ensuring the pipeline’s developer is liable for damages caused by the project, and designating a minimum depth at which the pipeline must be buried.
But Jensen and others who opposed argued it didn’t offer landowners anything new — some of its provisions are already afforded by South Dakota law, and others had already been negotiated with Summit Carbon Solutions. Jensen pointed out that the utility commission already has the ability to override local ordinances if it finds them to be overly restrictive.
Now, with control over pipeline siting back squarely in the hands of local authorities, the future of the Summit project in South Dakota is unclear. The utility commission already rejected the company’s initial application for construction permits last year; Summit has since altered its route and reapplied.
Martin Lockman, a climate law fellow at Columbia Law School, told me it was difficult to take away a clear message from the fight, in part because CO2 pipelines have strange politics. Coalitions for and against them don’t break down over party lines or traditional groups like environmentalists versus fossil fuel companies. Some climate advocates, as well as experts in the U.S. Department of Energy, say we’ll need to build many thousands of miles of new carbon pipelines in order to help us sequester carbon captured from industrial facilities and from the atmosphere.
The specific arguments over the Summit project may not apply to projects proposed elsewhere, Lockman told me, but its fate could still have ripple effects. “Any kind of high profile failure might make investors a little bit more leery to participate in this kind of project,” he said.
As the election odds swung sharply towards Republican Donald Trump as Tuesday evening slid into Wednesday morning, climate-conscious investors, academics, strategists, and other internet personalities were mostly mute. It was a night to stare blankly at the TV, watch the needle slowly tilt to the right, and vaguely wonder about the future of the climate.
That is, unless you were Elon Musk, Trump’s latest, closest campaign confidant, in which case fist-pumping posts abounded. Well before any polls had closed, Musk posted on X about supposedly “record numbers” of men turning out to vote for Trump. While we can’t confirm that’s true, it set a vibe for the evening to come.
For Musk, no display of patriotism is complete without a plug for one of his companies. Exhibit A:
Exhibit B:
He spent the rest of the day casting doubt on election security in Pennsylvania and imploring his followers to vote because no less than “the future of the world” was at stake.
Of course, that’s similar to the rhetoric those in climate world use to describe the prospect of a second Trump presidency. As the final polls were closing, University of California, Santa Barbara climate historian Leah Stokes no doubt summed up the feelings of many when she tweeted,
But there was also room for humor. As the electoral map filled in, The Atlantic CEO Nicholas Thompson had some theories on what caused the pro-MAGA, pro-Mars Tesla CEO to lean so hard into Trump’s campaign.
Duncan Campbell, the vice president of Scale Microgrid Solutions and host of the energy podcast DER Task Force, entered the chat with an even more niche joke.
But no one could beat Musk for sheer weirdness. With results beginning to stack up, he shared a tribute to the “Dark MAGA” facet of the Trump coalition set to that Europe classic, “The Final Countdown.”
And as the night’s endgame began to come into focus, he shared a snap from Trump’s watch party at Mar-a-Lago.
Around 2:30 a.m. ET, Trump took the stage at the convention in West Palm Beach where his supporters had gathered and declared victory in the race. By then some, though certainly not all networks had called the election in Trump’s favor. He devoted a verse of his rambling, genial speech to Musk. “A star is born: Elon,” Trump said in his victory speech, praising Musk’s efforts on the campaign trail, his “beautiful” rockets, and Starlink, which Trump apparently hadn’t heard of before Hurricane Helene.
Musk, for his part, seems psyched about the prospect of playing a role in the Trump administration. “The future is gonna be fantastic,” he said, as the electoral votes crept closer to 270. Though climate tech investor Kristin Ellis of Lowercarbon Capital did have one extra bit of perspective to add: