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Why Patagonia, REI, and just about every other gear retailer are going PFAS-free.
On energy transition funds, disappearing butterflies, and Tesla’s stock slump
On congestion pricing, carbon capture progress, and Tim Kaine.
The effort to measure companies’ carbon footprints is remarkably imprecise — and suddenly more important than ever.
Money is pouring in — and deadlines are approaching fast.
There’s no quick fix for decarbonizing medium- and long-distance flights. Batteries are typically too heavy, and hydrogen fuel takes up too much space to offer a practical solution, leaving sustainable aviation fuels made from plants and other biomass, recycled carbon, or captured carbon as the primary options. Traditionally, this fuel is much more expensive — and the feedstocks for it much more scarce — than conventional petroleum-based jet fuel. But companies are now racing to overcome these barriers, as recent months have seen backers throw hundreds of millions behind a series of emergent, but promising solutions.
Today, most SAF is made of feedstocks such as used cooking oil and animal fats, from companies such as Neste and Montana Renewables. But this supply is limited by, well, the amount of cooking oil or fats restaurants and food processing facilities generate, and is thus projected to meet only about 10% of total SAF demand by 2050, according to a 2022 report by the Mission Possible Partnership. Beyond that, companies would have to start growing new crops just to make into fuel.
That creates an opportunity for developers of second-generation SAF technologies, which involve making jet fuel out of captured carbon or alternate biomass sources, such as forest waste. These methods are not yet mature enough to make a significant dent in 2030 targets, such as the EU's mandate to use 6% SAF and the U.S. government’s goal of producing 3 billion gallons of SAF per year domestically. But this tech will need to be a big part of the equation in order to meet the aviation sector’s overall goal of net zero emissions by 2050, as well as the EU’s sustainable fuels mandate, which increases to 20% by 2035 and 70% by 2050 for all flights originating in the bloc.
“That’s going to be a massive jump because currently, SAF uptake is about 0.2% of fuel,” Nicole Cerulli, a research associate for transportation and logistics at the market research firm Cleantech Group, told me. The head of the airline industry’s trade association, Willie Walsh, said in December at a media day event, "We’re not making as much progress as we’d hoped for, and we’re certainly not making as much progress as we need.” While global SAF production doubled to 1 million metric tons in 2024, that fell far below the trade group’s projection of 1.5 million metric tons, made at the end of 2023.
Producing SAF requires making hydrocarbons that mirror those used in traditional jet fuel. We know how to do that, but the processes required — electrolysis, gasification, and the series of chemical reactions known as Fischer-Tropsch synthesis — are energy intensive. So finding a way to power all of this sustainably while simultaneously scaling to meet demand is a challenging and expensive task.
Aamir Shams, a senior associate at the energy think tank RMI whose work focuses on driving demand for SAF, told me that while sustainable fuel is undeniably more expensive than traditional fuel, airlines and corporations have so far been willing to pay the premium. “We feel that the lag is happening because we just don’t have the fuel today,” Shams said. “Whatever fuel shows up, it just flies off the shelves.”
Twelve, a Washington-based SAF producer, thinks its e-fuels can help make a dent. The company is looking to produce jet fuel initially by recycling the CO2 emitted from the ethanol, pulp, and paper industries. In September, the company raised $645 million to complete the buildout of its inaugural SAF facility in Washington state, support the development of future plants, and pursue further R&D. The funding includes $400 million in project equity from the impact fund TPG Rise Climate, $200 million in Series C financing led by TPG, Capricorn Investment Group, and Pulse Fund, and $45 million in loans. The company has also previously partnered with the Air Force to explore producing fuel on demand in hard to reach areas.
Nicholas Flanders, Twelve’s CEO, told me that the company is starting with ethanol, pulp, and paper because the CO2 emissions from these facilities are relatively concentrated and thus cheaper to capture. And unlike, say, coal power plants, these industries aren’t going anywhere fast, making them a steady source of carbon. To turn the captured CO2 into sustainable fuel, the company needs just one more input — water. Renewable-powered electrolyzers then break apart the CO2 and H2O into their constituent parts, and the resulting carbon monoxide and hydrogen are combined to create a syngas. That then gets put through a chemical reaction known as “Fischer-Tropsch synthesis,” where the syngas reacts with catalysts to form hydrocarbons, which are then processed into sustainable jet fuel and ultimately blended with conventional fuel.
Twelve says its proprietary CO2 electrolyzer can break apart CO2 at much lower temperatures than would typically be required for this molecule, which simplifies the whole process, making it easier to ramp the electrolyzers up and down to match the output of intermittent renewables. (How does it do this? The company didn’t respond when I asked.) Twelve’s first plant, which sources carbon from a nearby ethanol facility, is set to come online next year, producing 50,000 gallons of SAF annually once it’s fully scaled, with electrolyzers that will run on hydropower.
While Europe may have stricter, actually enforceable SAF requirements than the U.S., Flanders told me there’s a lot of promise in domestic production. “I think the U.S. has an exciting combination of relatively low-cost green electricity, lots of biogenic CO2 sources, a lot of demand for the product we’re making, and then the inflation Reduction Act and state level incentives can further enhance the economics.” Currently, the IRA provides SAF producers with a baseline $1.25 tax credit per gallon produced, which gradually increases the greener the fuel gets. Of course, whether or not the next Congress will rescind this is anybody’s guess.
Down the line, incentives and mandates will end up mattering a whole lot. Making SAF simply costs a whole lot more than producing jet fuel the standard way, by refining crude oil. But in the meantime, Twelve is setting up cost-sharing partnerships between airlines that want to reduce their direct emissions (scope 1) and large corporations that want to reduce their indirect emissions (scope 3), which include employee business travel.
For example, Twelve has offtake agreements with Seattle-based Alaska Airlines and Microsoft for the fuel produced at its initial Washington plant. Microsoft, which aims to reduce emissions from its employees’ flights, will essentially cover the cost premium associated with Twelve’s more expensive SAF fuel, making it cost-effective for Alaska to use in its fleet. Twelve has a similar agreement with Boston Consulting Group and an unnamed airline
Eventually, Flanders told me, the company expects to source carbon via direct air capture, but doing so today would be prohibitively expensive. “If there were a customer who wanted to pay the additional amount to use DAC today, we'd be very happy to do that,” Flanders said. “But our perspective is it will maybe be another decade before that cost starts to converge.”
No sustainable fuel is even close to cost parity yet — Cerulli told me that it generally comes with a “roughly 250% to over 800%” cost premium over conventional jet fuel. So while voluntary uptake by companies such as Microsoft and BCG are helping drive the emergent market today, that won’t be near enough to decarbonize the industry. “At the simplest level, the cost of not using SAF has to be higher than using it,” Cerulli told me.
Pathway Energy thinks that by incorporating carbon sequestration into its process, it can help the world get there. The sustainable fuels company, which emerged from stealth just last month, is pursuing what CEO Steve Roberts told me is “probably the most cost-efficient long-term pathway from a decarbonization perspective.” The company is building a $2 billion SAF plant in Port Arthur, Texas designed to produce about 30 million gallons of jet fuel annually — enough to power about 5,000 carbon-neutral 10-hour flights — while also permanently sequestering more than 1.9 million tons of CO2.
Pathway, a subsidiary of the investment and advisory firm Nexus Holdings, has partnered with the UK-based renewable energy company Drax, which will supply the company with 1 million metric tons of wood pellets, to be turned into fuel using a series of well-established technologies. The first step is to gasify the biomass by heating the pellets to high temperatures in the absence of oxygen to produce a syngas. Then, just as Twelve does, it puts the syngas through the Fischer-Tropsch process to form the hydrocarbons that become SAF.
The competitive advantage here is capturing the emissions from the fuel production process itself and storing them permanently underground. Since Pathway is burying CO2 that’s already been captured by the trees from which the wood pellets come, that would make Pathway’s SAF carbon-negative, in theory, while the best Twelve and similar companies can hope for is carbon neutrality, assuming all of their captured carbon is used to produce fuel.
The choice of Drax as a feedstock partner is not without controversy, however, as the BBC revealed that the company sources much of its wood from rare old-growth forests. Though this is technically legal, it’s also ecologically disruptive. Roberts told me Drax’s sourcing methodologies have been verified by third parties, and Pathway isn’t concerned. “I don't think any of that controversy has yielded any actually significant changes to their sourcing program at all, because we believe that they're compliant,” Roberts told me. “We are 100% certain that they’re meeting all the standards and expectations.”
Pathway has big growth plans, which depend on the legitimacy of its sustainability cred. Beyond the Port Arthur facility, which Roberts told me will begin production by the end of 2029 or early 2030, the company has a pipeline of additional facilities along the Gulf Coast in the works. It also has global ambitions. “When you have a fuel that is this negative, it really opens up a global market, because you can transport fuel out of Texas, whether that be into the EU, Africa, Asia, wherever it may be,” Roberts said, explaining that even substantial transportation-related emissions would be offset by the carbon-negativity of the fuel.
But alternative feedstocks such as forestry biomass are finite resources, too. That’s why many experts think that within the SAF sector, e-fuels such as Twelve’s that could one day source carbon via direct air capture and then electrolyze it have the greatest potential for growth. “It’s extremely dependent on getting sustainable CO2 and cheap electricity prices so that you can make cheap green hydrogen,” Shams told me. “But theoretically, it is unlimited in terms of what your total cap on production would be.”
In the meantime, airlines are focused on making their planes and engines more aerodynamic and efficient so that they don’t consume as much fuel in the first place. They’re also exploring other technical pathways to decarbonization — because after all, SAF will only be a portion of the solution, as many short and medium-length flights could likely be powered by batteries or hydrogen fuel. RMI forecasts that by 2050, 45% of global emissions reduction in the aviation sector will come from improvements in fuel efficiency, 37% will be due to SAF deployment, 7% will come from hydrogen, and 3.5% will come from electrification.
If you did the mental math, you’ll notice these numbers add up to 92.5% — not 100%. “What we have done is, let's look at what we are actually doing today and for the past three, four, five years, and let's see if we get to net zero or not. And the answer is, no. We don't get to net zero by 2050,” Shams told me. And while getting to 92.5% is nothing to scoff at, that means that the aviation sector would still be emitting about 700 million metric tons of CO2 equivalent by that time.
So what’s to be done? “The financing sector needs to step up its game and take a little bit more of a risk than they are used to,” Shams told me, noting that one of RMI’s partners, the Mission Possible Partnership, estimates that getting the aviation sector to net zero will require an investment of around $170 billion per year, a total of about $4.5 trillion by 2050. These numbers take a variety of factors into account beyond strictly SAF production, such as airport infrastructure for new fuels, building out direct air capture plants, etc.
But any way you cut it, it’s a boatload of money that certainly puts Pathway’s $2 billion SAF facility and Twelve’s $645 million funding round in perspective. And it’s far from certain that we can get there. “Increasingly, that goal of the 2050 net-zero target looks really difficult to achieve,” Shams put it simply. “Commitments are always going up, but more can be done.”
Can companies do what the United Nations couldn’t?
Confidence in the United Nations’ ability to find cooperative solutions to some of humanity’s biggest threats took another walloping this weekend when negotiators left the fifth and final UN plastic pollution treaty talks in Busan, South Korea, with no deal.
A planet-wide agreement on curbing plastic pollution was always going to be a big ask. Lacking the existential drama that undergirds the annual climate change conference, the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee for Plastics (or “the INC-5,” as this fifth round of meetings was seductively named) doesn’t exactly attract the same level of media attention as its parent group. For another thing, the connection of plastics to the cascading effects of global warming is less obvious than that of burning fossil fuels, though by no means less severe: Conventional plastics are made using newly extracted fossil fuels and, as such, are a last resort profit center for oil companies facing the expiration of their social license to operate. Plastic-related emissions are expected to outpace those of coal within the decade.
And yet despite fierce resistance from petrochemical-producing industries and nations (more on that later), a curious champion has emerged for a legally binding plastic treaty. Alongside the expected environmental heavyweights in Busan last week were several business coalitions pushing in tandem for more ambitious mandatory regulations.
There are plans to hold an “INC-5.2” next year to resolve the outstanding differences, and mounting pressure from business interests on the other side of the fight could potentially neutralize at least some of the influence of the countries that normally dominate such talks. “Businesses cannot solve the crisis alone,” Julia Cohen, the co-founder and managing director of Plastic Pollution Coalition, told me in an emailed statement. But they can “play a key role in shaping national positions, driving scalable solutions, and fostering emerging markets” alongside continued efforts to secure a global treaty.
Two main business coalitions are attempting to do just that. The first is Champions of Change, which works with the Plastic Pollution Coalition, Greenpeace, and Break Free From Plastic, and counts among its 350 signatories household brands like Ben & Jerry’s, Blueland, and Lush Cosmetics. The alliance is demanding a cap on plastic pollution, the phase-out of single-use plastics, greater reuse targets, and a justice-focused approach that centers the concerns of frontline communities. “Voluntary corporate pledges are no match for an international legally binding treaty that would require companies to move away from plastic,” Sybil Bullock, the senior oceans campaigner at Greenpeace, told me in an email. “We have seen past voluntary business commitments from top polluters fail time and time again to deliver meaningful reductions in plastic pollution.”
The Business Coalition for a Global Plastics Treaty, by contrast, stops short of calling for a plastic cap, focusing instead on phasing out “avoidable plastic products” and calling for a “global criteria for circular product design.” Specifically, the group — convened by the World Wildlife Fund and the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, which advocates for a circular economy — is pushing for a “treaty based on strong global rules across the full lifecycle of plastics and with a comprehensive financing mechanism.” Its signatories includebusinesses that have historically been criticized for their reliance on plastic, including Unilever, Nestle, and PepsiCo, and its softer approach has its skeptics.
“You can only downcycle plastic and currently, how plastic is recycled, it gets contaminated by other plastics that are so toxic we cannot use them for anything that is touching or even close to touching our food,” KT Morelli, a campaign organizer for Breathe Free Detroit, which successfully campaigned to shut down a local plastic incinerator, told me. “There’s no circular answer to plastics.”
Kristen McDonald, the senior director of the plastics program at Pacific Environment, an environmental group focused on the Pacific Rim, agreed that “business actions alone — voluntary steps — have not worked so far, and so I’m very skeptical that they will work in the future.” Still, she said it’s only logical that businesses are as impatient as environmentalists when deciding on plastic regulations. If an international agreement isn’t reached, it creates a “really chaotic business environment where certain plastics are restricted in some places and not in others,” leading to trade problems and an uneven playing field at a global level as different companies face different local rules. As she added, a plastic treaty “actually stabilizes things for companies” — unless, of course, the company in question happens to be in the petrochemical industry.
Even the environmentalists working with the business groups agree that there isn’t an entirely private-sector solution to the plastic crisis. “We’re not ready to give up on the treaty process,” Erin Simon, the vice president and head of plastic waste and business at WWF, told me over email. But, she pointed out, after the U.S. pulled out of the Paris Agreement in 2017, there had been a “groundswell of support from cities, states, and other non-federal actors,” including corporations that filled in the leadership void with “commitments that would help move the needle toward reaching our global climate goals.”
And yet despite the limitations of the business coalitions, Morelli told me she thinks there is still promise in the private sector. “They have more power than the government,” she stressed, noting that “small companies and large companies can choose to refuse plastic” and push their suppliers to do the same.
This is significant because, as is the case at COP, oil-rich nations (and oil-rich lobbyists) hold outsized negotiating power at the meetings. Despite more than 100 nations favoring an agreement that would have curbed plastic production — turning off the tap at the source, as plastic-reduction advocates like to say — Russia, Saudi Arabia, and the American Chemistry Council, a trade group, pushed for a treaty last week that would have focused on plastic recycling and “mismanaged waste,” instead, an insistence that led negotiations straight into an impasse. (After flip-flopping, the United States took a noncommittal middle ground of opposing mandatory production caps but otherwise agreeing that too much plastic is probably bad.)
In the absence of a treaty and with pessimism growing around INC-5.2, business-led action might be the best shot remaining for plastic-free organizers. “Having these companies step up on their own is huge and would help us all,” Morelli said.
