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Why Patagonia, REI, and just about every other gear retailer are going PFAS-free.
On sparring in the Senate, NEPA rules, and taxing first-class flyers
Rob and Jesse talk with Michael Grunwald, author of the new book We Are Eating the Earth.
Trump just quasi-nationalized U.S. Steel. That could help climate policy later.
What the Council on Foreign Relations’ new climate program gets drastically wrong.
The Science Based Targets initiative released long-awaited guidance that doesn’t exactly clarify matters.
The carbon removal industry is in a rut.
Last year, companies with climate targets purchased about 8 million tons of future carbon removal — an impressive 78% increase from the year prior, according to the sales tracking site CDR.fyi. And yet 80% of those purchases were made by the same three entities — Microsoft, Google, and Frontier — that have been more or less singlehandedly supporting the industry since its inception. The number of new buyers entering the market declined by 18%.
“Demand is the greatest existential threat for the carbon removal industry,” Giana Amador, the executive director of the Carbon Removal Alliance, an industry group, told me. “These companies are developing technologies that don’t really have a natural customer. There are corporates who are purchasing carbon removal as part of their sustainability strategies, but buyers at scale are few and far between.”
That was all set to change when the Science Based Targets initiative, a nonprofit authority on best practices for corporate sustainability, released its revised Net Zero Standard — or at least that was the hope. The influential group had not previously given companies any direction as to whether they should be buying carbon removal in the near-term, and was widely expected to get more explicit about the need to do so. But while SBTi’s new draft standard, which was finally released on Tuesday, takes a step in that direction, it may not go far enough to make a difference.
As the name implied, SBTi’s previous Net Zero Standard assumed that companies would have to purchase carbon removal eventually — “net-zero emissions” means pulling carbon out of the atmosphere to offset emissions that can’t be eliminated at the source. The standard was designed to align companies with the Paris Agreement goal of limiting global warming to as close to 1.5 degrees Celsius as possible, and it expected companies to hit net-zero by 2050. But it didn’t say anything about what companies should do with regards to carbon removal between now and then.
As a result, many companies have interpreted that as “they shouldn’t or don’t have to buy carbon removal credits until 2049,” Lukas May, the chief commercial officer and head of policy at Isometric, a carbon removal registry, told me. “And potentially it’s even a bad thing if they did it before then because it might be considered a distraction from their decarbonization. And they certainly don’t get any credit for it from SBTi.”
The problem is that it may not be possible to remove the required amount of carbon from the atmosphere in 2049 if more companies don’t start paying for it now. Startups need demand to finance first-of-a-kind projects, learn from their mistakes, discover efficiencies, and scale. While the U.S. government has some funding available, it’s not enough.
Amador said she’s had conversations with potential carbon removal buyers who have been waiting on the sidelines, in part to see what SBTi would say. They are deterred by the cost, but they also want to make sure that if they do jump in, their investment will be viewed by this third-party authority as meaningful so that they avoid accusations of greenwashing. “I think there are a lot of companies who need to know that this is a core component of what counts as their net zero strategy, and they’re holding off on buying until they have greater clarity,” Amador told me.
But SBTi is in a precarious position. Some companies are starting to back away from their climate plans. Big tech, which once led the pack on climate, is now focused on developing AI and building data centers at the expense of increased emissions. Environmental, social, and governance strategies, or ESG, are now often viewed as more of a liability by investors than a selling point — not to mention a political risk in the U.S. under the Trump administration. Top corporate supporters of the American Is All In coalition, a group committed to upholding the Paris Agreement, recently refused to sign a letter reiterating that commitment. If SBTi’s new Net Zero Standard is viewed as too onerous or expensive to comply with, it’s easy to imagine companies deciding to walk away from it altogether.
In the proposal published Tuesday, SBTi proceeded with caution. In the section on carbon removal, it described several potential approaches of varying ambition. The first was to require that companies begin procuring carbon removal in 2030, starting with enough to offset just 5% of what they expect their residual emissions will be in 2050, and ramping up over time. The second was for companies to set their own voluntary near-term carbon removal targets and receive extra “recognition” from SBTi for doing so. The third approach would give companies more flexibility either to purchase carbon removal beginning in 2030, or to get ahead of schedule on their emission reductions, or to do some combination of the two.
It’s normal in draft proposals to see options with varying levels of ambition. But in this case, it’s not clear that even the first option is an ambitious goal. That’s because it would only apply to companies’ “Scope 1” emissions, the emissions a company has direct control over. Most of the companies that have sought out SBTi’s stamp of approval in the past have very small Scope 1 emissions. Take Apple, for example: Less than 1% of its emissions are Scope 1. The vast majority of its carbon footprint comes from the third parties that produce and ship its products and customers using the products — also known as “Scope 3” emissions.
Robert Hoglund, a carbon removal advisor who co-founded CDR.fyi, published a newsletter on Tuesday, in which he argued that the companies with significant Scope 1 emissions, such as those in aviation, shipping, heavy industry, and mining, have mostly ignored SBTi so far, and regardless, are less able to pay for carbon removal than companies further downstream. By his analysis, among the top 200 companies in the world, the 25 biggest Scope 1 emitters made annual average profits of $85 for every ton of carbon they released across all Scopes. The remaining companies made an average of $32,000.
“The downstream companies, especially in high-profit, low-emission sectors like finance, insurance, and tech, are needed to fund CDR efforts,” he wrote. “If only Scope 1 emissions are required to set interim targets for, then the durable CDR sector will likely fail to scale fast enough in the coming decade. This would risk giving us a lost decade ahead, jeopardising our ability to reach net zero.”
SBTi proposed several other important updates to the Net Zero Standard. Companies buying carbon removal may have to use a “like for like” approach, for instance, purchasing removal services that are as durable as the specific greenhouse gas they release in the atmosphere. In other words, carbon emissions would have to be offset with removals that last a thousand years, while nitrous oxide emissions could be offset with shorter-term removals. The group also recommended a deadline of 2040 for companies to move to low-carbon electricity.
Feedback on the draft is due by June 1, after which the group’s technical department and expert working groups will refine it. There may be another round of public consultation before a final draft goes to SBTi’s board for approval, the group said. It expects companies to begin using the new standard to refine their targets in 2027.
On energy transition funds, disappearing butterflies, and Tesla’s stock slump
Current conditions: Australians have been told to prepare for the worst ahead of Cyclone Alfred, and 100,000 people are already without power • Argentina’s Buenos Aires province has been hit by deadly flooding • Critical fire conditions will persist across much of west Texas through Saturday.
Many foreign aid programs have reportedly received a questionnaire from the Trump administration that they must complete as part of a review, presumably to help the government decide whether or not the groups should receive any more federal funds. One of the questions on the list, according toThe New York Times, is: “Can you confirm this is not a climate or ‘environmental justice’ project or include such elements?” Another asks if the project will “directly impact efforts to strengthen U.S. supply chains or secure rare earth minerals?” President Trump issued an executive order freezing foreign aid on his first day back in office. The Supreme Court subsequently ruled that aid must be released. The Times notes that “many of the projects under scrutiny have already fired their staff and closed their doors, because they have received no federal funds since the review process ostensibly began. … Within some organizations, there are no staff members left to complete the survey.”
The United States has withdrawn from a global financing program aimed at helping poorer nations ditch fossil fuels and shift to clean energy. A spokesperson from the Treasury Department said the Just Energy Transition Partnership does not align with President Trump’s vision of American economic and environmental values. The program was launched in 2021 and has 10 donor nations, including many European countries. Its first beneficiaries were Indonesia, Senegal, South Africa, and Vietnam. The U.S. had committed more than $3 billion to Indonesia and Vietnam and nearly $2 billion to South Africa under the initiative. “The U.S. withdrawal is regrettable,” said Rachel Kyte, the U.K.’s climate envoy. “The rest of the world moves on.” In January, the Trump administration canceled $4 billion in pledges to the Green Climate Fund. “We have to plan for a world where the U.S. is not transfusing funds into the green transition,” Kyte added.
Butterfly populations in the U.S. are rapidly declining due to a combination of climate change, habitat loss, and pesticide exposure, according to a “catastrophic and saddening” new study published in the journal Science. “Butterflies are vanishing from the face of the earth,” one of the study’s co-authors told The Washington Post. The research analyzed data from 77,000 butterfly surveys and found that butterfly numbers have fallen by 22% in just 20 years across the entire country. Of the 342 butterfly species that could be analyzed for trends, 107 plummeted by more than 50% and 22 by more than 90%. Just nine species saw their numbers rise. The researchers say these numbers are likely an underestimate.
The findings underscore the crisis facing all the small, underappreciated insects that pollinate flowers and crops, control pests, maintain soil health, and play a vital role in the food chain. According to the World Wildlife Fund, up to 40% of the world’s insect species may disappear by the end of the century. The study’s lead author, ecologist Collin Edwards, said there is some hope. “Butterflies have fast life cycles,” he said. “At least one generation per year, often two or three. And each of those generations lays a ton of eggs. This means that if we make the world a more hospitable place for butterflies, butterfly species have the capacity to respond very quickly and take advantage of all our efforts.”
The Government Accountability Office yesterday said that Congress can’t review (or repeal) the Environmental Protection Agency’s waiver that lets California set its own vehicle emissions standards. The decision derails plans being spearheaded by Republicans and EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin to use the congressional review process to overturn the waiver. California’s aggressive emissions standards, which have been adopted by many other states, would effectively end the sale of fully gas-powered cars by 2035. Republicans are mulling their next move.
Tesla’s stock price has been taking a beating as resentment grows around CEO Elon Musk’s political meddling. The company’s valuation soared from around $800 billion to $1.5 trillion in December, when it became clear Musk would become the president-elect’s right hand man. Since that moment, the company’s value has fallen by more than $600 million, effectively erasing the bump in Tesla’s market cap. Shares fell by 5.6% yesterday alone, and sales are cratering abroad and in key U.S. markets like California.
As Andrew Moseman explains for Heatmap, a big drop in sales could be a double-whammy for Tesla revenue. “Recall that the company’s most reliable revenue stream is not really its sales of electric cars, but rather the carbon credits generated by those EVs under California’s auto emissions regulatory scheme, which it can sell to other automakers who’ve yet to meet their emissions targets,” Moseman says. “Tesla’s tumbling sales in the wake of Musk’s antics could reduce the amount of credits it could sell to others, since the credits are tied to sales of low-emissions vehicles.” There was more bad news for Musk today: A SpaceX Starship rocket exploded during a test flight, sending flaming debris flying across a large area and disrupting air traffic in Florida.
A new report shows that a year after London expanded its low-emissions zone, air quality in the city has improved, with nitrogen dioxide levels across 2024 down significantly: