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On getting rid of legacy emissions, groundwater, and geoengineering
Current conditions: A large wildfire is burning out of control in northwestern Turkey • Intense storms killed at least 11 people in South Africa • It will be 109 degrees Fahrenheit in Phoenix today, and tomorrow will be hotter.
A team of international researchers this week published a new report on the state of carbon dioxide removal (CDR) as it relates to global climate goals. The top-line takeaway is that CDR must quadruple if we want to stay in line with the goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. While stopping new greenhouse gas emissions is the top priority in curbing global warming, experts agree CDR will be needed to address legacy emissions, which can remain in the atmosphere for decades.
Current CDR efforts – from reforestation to direct air capture technology – remove about 2 billion metric tons of CO2 from the atmosphere every year. That’s far short of the 7-9 billion metric tons that will need to be removed annually by 2050. But the report’s authors say there are signs that CDR development is slowing down. They call for more investment to support the “high ambitions” of CDR companies, and want countries to weave CDR policies into their national climate action plans to spark demand and help CDR scale. Currently just 1.1% of investment in climate-tech startups goes toward CDR. In April, a report found that the U.S. will need to spend $100 billion per year by 2050 to make CDR a viable climate solution.
One really interesting insight from the report is that grant money is flowing steadily toward CDR research and development, especially in the U.S. and Canada: There were fewer than 50 third-party research grants for CDR in the year 2000, compared to 1,160 in 2022.
Somewhat relatedly, Swiss carbon removal company Climeworks yesterday unveiled new “generation 3” technology that it said can suck up twice as much carbon from the atmosphere using half the amount of energy as its previous designs.
A new study published in the journal Nature Geoscience finds that the Earth’s groundwater is warming up due to climate change. For the study, researchers created a model to estimate changes in groundwater temperatures in varying global warming scenarios. Their model shows that by the end of the century, groundwater could be between 2.1 and 3.5 degrees Celsius (or between 3.8 and 6.3 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer on average than it is today. This would be bad news for ecosystems that rely on groundwater, as well as for humans: “As groundwater warms, there is increased risk of pathogen growth which impacts drinking water quality – potentially affecting the lives of many people,” said co-author Dr. Gabriel Rau of the University of Newcastle. The warming will vary by region, but parts of North America will see some of the most intense warming rates.
The world’s largest solar farm just came online. The 5-gigawatt, 200,000-acre farm is located in China’s Xinjiang region, and was officially connected to China’s grid on Monday. It’s one piece of China’s larger “megabase” initiative to install 455 GW of wind and solar. The new farm will generate about 6 billion kilowatt hours of electricity each year, making it “powerful enough to meet the electricity demands of a country the size of Luxembourg or Papua New Guinea,” as Anthony Cuthbertson at the Independent put it. The second- and third-largest solar farms (by capacity) are also located in China. A recent report from the International Energy Agency called China the world’s “renewable powerhouse” because it accounts for nearly 60% of the world’s new renewable capacity that will become operational by 2028.
Southern Germany has been absolutely hammered by torrential rain in recent days, resulting in overflowing rivers and deadly floods. Five people have died in the disaster. To give you a sense of how bad the situation is, more than a month’s worth of rain fell in the region between Friday and Monday, and water levels in the city of Passau rose by 32 feet. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz reminded everyone that this kind of weather is not normal, saying that “we must not neglect the task of halting man-made climate change.”
Cleanup begins in a flooded town in Germany.Thomas Niedermueller/Getty Images
The rain is easing up now and some towns are starting their cleanup efforts, but all that water has to go somewhere, and BBC reports it’s headed down the Danube River into Austria, Hungary, and possibly Slovakia. Already the river burst its banks in the Austrian city of Linz, and Austria has halted all shipping activity in the river.
A first-of-its-kind geoengineering research project in California has been officially canceled. The research, conducted by a team from the University of Washington, involved spraying sea salt aerosol particles into the air using an instrument situated on a decommissioned aircraft carrier in Alameda, California. This process has been pitched as a way to brighten clouds and reflect the sun’s rays to cool the planet. Because studies on manipulating the climate are so controversial, the researchers kept the project on the downlow until it was up and running, and this lack of transparency – rather than any safety concerns – seems to have really rubbed city officials the wrong way. The Alameda City Council voted this morning to reject the experiment. “You didn’t start out on the right foot,” Alameda Mayor Marilyn Ezzy Ashcraft told the researchers.
The dispute may be a little preview of things to come. “There’s a fair number of people who think there shouldn’t be research [on geoengineering], and these early experiments have become a proxy battleground for this larger question about how to think about the development of these technologies,” David Keith, director of the Climate Systems Engineering Initiative at the University of Chicago, told The Washington Post.
The Thomas Edison Birthplace Museum in Ohio is now powered by rooftop solar.
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Jesse and Rob go back to basics on the steam engine.
Just two types of machines have produced the overwhelming majority of electricity generated since 1890. This week, we look at the history of those devices, how they work — and how they have contributed to global warming.
This is our second episode of Shift Key Summer School, a series of “lecture conversations” about the basics of energy, electricity, and the power grid for listeners of all backgrounds. This week, we dive into the invention and engineering of the world’s most common types of fossil- and nuclear-fueled power plants. What’s a Rankine cycle power station, and how does it use steam to produce electricity? How did the invention of the jet engine enable the rise of natural gas-generated electricity? And why can natural gas power plants achieve much higher efficiency gains than coal plants?
Shift Key is hosted by Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University, and Robinson Meyer, Heatmap’s executive editor.
Subscribe to “Shift Key” and find this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.
You can also add the show’s RSS feed to your podcast app to follow us directly.
Here is an excerpt from our conversation:
Robinson Meyer: It’s interesting thinking about the deployment of steam and these Rankine cycle generators in the late 19th century for us as people who care about the power grid. These are interesting techniques as they’re deploying electricity for the first time. But the use of coal to convert water into steam and the use of steam power actually comes way earlier than any of this, right? Like, it’s steam. That is actually the 19th century — the core 19th century and late 19th century, especially — energy medium. And actually, the history of the 19th century energy is switching from wood and hydropower to coal-powered steam.
And already by the time that the Pearl Street station is built in New York, the United States is crisscrossed with steam engines. Our economy already runs on steam. It’s actually the application of steam and coal — which at that point are kind of old and fundamental technologies to economic function — to power generation. They didn’t have to make any huge discoveries around steam and coal. They were already using steam and coal in factories, they just weren’t intermediating it through the electricity grid.
Jesse Jenkins: That’s right. And in all these cases, you’re just trying to convert that steam, the expansion of that steam, into motion, whether that’s the pistons of a steam engine or the pistons of a reciprocating generator attached to a dynamo in Pearl Street, or, in a lot of factories, just a bunch of belts, right? That would then move equipment throughout the facility. It’s just a lot easier to move energy around, and more precise to do that as electricity. And so over time, the devices in industrial facilities all converted over to using electricity directly, and then you could generate your energy somewhere far away.
And this is the other, second advantage of steam turbines. What made Westinghouse so successful is that they have large economies of scale, so it’s a lot cheaper to generate power from a big steam turbine than the equivalent amount of power from a lot of little steam engines. And that wasn’t … I mean, that’s true for reciprocating engines, but they kind of top out, given their complexity.
The Pearl Strait station generators were in the 100-kilowatt scale. I think there were six of them, originally, so 600 kilowatts, and they only powered a few hundred lights, which is remarkable. These lights, the original lights, were incredibly inefficient, so it took something like 1,000 watts or more per light bulb. Whereas again, now we’re down to like, 10 to 15 watts in an efficient LED bulb. But anyway, they were in that kind of hundreds of watts scale, and that kind of maxed out the scale of the reciprocating engines. Steam turbines you could increase and increase and increase into the megawatt scale, and by doing that utilities or generators were able to lower the cost of energy while expanding customer bases.
Mentioned:
Powering the Dream: The History and Promise of Green Technology, by Alexis Madrigal
This episode of Shift Key is sponsored by …
The Yale Center for Business and the Environment’s online clean energy programs equip you with tangible skills and powerful networks—and you can continue working while learning. In just five hours a week, propel your career and make a difference.
Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.
The Senate told renewables developers they’d have a year to start construction and still claim a tax break. Then came an executive order.
Renewable energy advocates breathed a sigh of relief after a last-minute change to the One Big Beautiful Bill Act stipulated that wind and solar projects would be eligible for tax credits as long as they began construction within the next 12 months.
But the new law left an opening for the Trump administration to cut that window short, and now Trump is moving to do just that. The president signed an executive order on Monday directing the Treasury Department to issue new guidance for the clean electricity tax credits “restricting the use of broad safe harbors unless a substantial portion of a subject facility has been built.”
The broad safe harbors in question have to do with the way the government defines the “beginning of construction,” which, in the realm of federal tax credits, is a term of art. Under the current Treasury guidance, developers must either complete “physical work of a significant nature” on a given project or spend at least 5% of its total cost to prove they have started construction during a given year, and are therefore protected from any subsequent tax law changes.
As my colleague Matthew Zeitlin previously reported, oftentimes something as simple as placing an order for certain pieces of equipment, like transformers or solar trackers, will check the box. Still, companies can’t just buy a bunch of equipment to qualify for the tax credits and then sit on it indefinitely. Their projects must be up and operating within four years, or else they must demonstrate “continuous progress” each year to continue to qualify.
As such, under existing rules and Trump’s new law, wind and solar developers would have 12 months to claim eligibility for the investment or production tax credit, and then at least four years to build the project and connect it to the grid. While a year is a much shorter runway than the open-ended extension to the tax credits granted by the Inflation Reduction Act, it’s a much better deal than the House’s original version of the OBBBA, which would have required projects to start construction within two months and be operating by the end of 2028 to qualify.
Or so it seemed.
The tax credits became a key bargaining chip during the final negotiations on the bill. Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska fought to retain the 12-month runway for wind and solar, while members of the House Freedom Caucus sought to kill it. Ultimately, the latter group agreed to vote yes after winning assurances from the president that he would “deal” with the subsidies later.
Last week, as all of this was unfolding, I started to hear rumors that the Treasury guidance regarding “beginning of construction” could be a key tool at the president’s disposal to make good on his promise. Industry groups had urged Congress to codify the existing guidance in the bill, but it was ultimately left out.
When I reached out to David Burton, a partner at Norton Rose Fulbright who specializes in energy tax credits, on Thursday, he was already contemplating Trump’s options to exploit that omission.
Burton told me that Trump’s Treasury department could redefine “beginning of construction” in a number of ways, such as by removing the 5% spending safe harbor or requiring companies to get certain permits in order to demonstrate “significant” physical work. It could also shorten the four-year grace period to bring a project to completion.
But Burton was skeptical that the Treasury Department had the staff or expertise to do the work of rewriting the guidance, let alone that Trump would make this a priority. “Does Treasury really want to spend the next couple of months dealing with this?” he said. “Or would it rather deal with implementing bonus depreciation and other taxpayer-favorable rules in the One Big Beautiful Bill instead of being stuck on this tangent, which will be quite a heavy lift and take some time?”
Just days after signing the bill into law, Trump chose the tangent, directing the Treasury to produce new guidance within 45 days. “It’s going to need every one of those days to come out with thoughtful guidance that can actually be applied by taxpayers,” Burton told me when I called him back on Monday night.
The executive order cites “energy dominance, national security, economic growth, and the fiscal health of the Nation” as reasons to end subsidies for wind and solar. The climate advocacy group Evergreen Action said it would help none of these objectives. “Trump is once again abusing his power in a blatant end-run around Congress — and even his own party,” Lena Moffit, the group’s executive director said in a statement. “He’s directing the government to sabotage the very industries that are lowering utility bills, creating jobs, and securing our energy independence.”
Industry groups were still assessing the implications of the executive order, and the ones I reached out to declined to comment for this story. “Now we’re circling the wagons back up to dig into the details,” one industry representative told me, adding that it was “shocking” that Trump would “seemingly double cross Senate leadership and Thune in particular.”
As everyone waits to see what Treasury officials come up with, developers will be racing to “start construction” as defined by the current rules, Burton said. It would be “quite unusual” if the new guidance were retroactive, he added. Although given Trump’s history, he said, “I guess anything is possible.”
“I believe the tariff on copper — we’re going to make it 50%.”
President Trump announced Tuesday during a cabinet meeting that he plans to impose a hefty tax on U.S. copper imports.
“I believe the tariff on copper — we’re going to make it 50%,” he told reporters.
Copper traders and producers have anticipated tariffs on copper since Trump announced in February that his administration would investigate the national security implications of copper imports, calling the metal an “essential material for national security, economic strength, and industrial resilience.”
Trump has already imposed tariffs for similarly strategically and economically important metals such as steel and aluminum. The process for imposing these tariffs under section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962 involves a finding by the Secretary of Commerce that the product being tariffed is essential to national security, and thus that the United States should be able to supply it on its own.
Copper has been referred to as the “metal of electrification” because of its centrality to a broad array of electrical technologies, including transmission lines, batteries, and electric motors. Electric vehicles contain around 180 pounds of copper on average. “Copper, scrap copper, and copper’s derivative products play a vital role in defense applications, infrastructure, and emerging technologies, including clean energy, electric vehicles, and advanced electronics,” the White House said in February.
Copper prices had risen around 25% this year through Monday. Prices for copper futures jumped by as much as 17% after the tariff announcement and are currently trading at around $5.50 a pound.
The tariffs, when implemented, could provide renewed impetus to expand copper mining in the United States. But tariffs can happen in a matter of months. A copper mine takes years to open — and that’s if investors decide to put the money toward the project in the first place. Congress took a swipe at the electric vehicle market in the U.S. last week, extinguishing subsidies for both consumers and manufacturers as part of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. That will undoubtedly shrink domestic demand for EV inputs like copper, which could make investors nervous about sinking years and dollars into new or expanded copper mines.
Even if the Trump administration succeeds in its efforts to accelerate permitting for and construction of new copper mines, the copper will need to be smelted and refined before it can be used, and China dominates the copper smelting and refining industry.
The U.S. produced just over 1.1 million tons of copper in 2023, with 850,000 tons being mined from ore and the balance recycled from scrap, according to United States Geological Survey data. It imported almost 900,000 tons.
With the prospect of tariffs driving up prices for domestically mined ore, the immediate beneficiaries are those who already have mines. Shares in Freeport-McMoRan, which operates seven copper mines in Arizona and New Mexico, were up over 4.5% in afternoon trading Tuesday.