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The most interesting things I haven’t written about yet.
My inbox and calendar have been filled all year with press releases and requests to chat about new carbon removal technologies, artificial intelligence and its attendant energy demand, novel battery designs, advances in fission and fusion, and investors’ ever-present concerns about how to get all of this to market in time to make a real dent in the climate crisis (and also, you know, a profit).
I wrote about a lot of it — but not all of it, and much of the stuff that got left out is no less worthy of your attention than the stuff that made it. So here I present a roundup of the climate technologies that you might not have read about in Heatmap this year, but that have investors, academics, and the climate world at large buzzing as we look toward 2025.
This fall when I spoke with Amy Duffuor, a co-founder and partner at the venture capital firm Azolla Ventures, she told me that her firm, which is focused on “overlooked and neglected” climate solutions, has been fascinated by the shipping industry. Because while aviation and shipping each account for about 3% of global emissions, decarbonizing flight seems to get the bulk of the attention. “Sometimes it’s hard for people to imagine what they don’t see or what they’re not interacting with on a day to day basis,” Duffuor told me.
This fall, the firm co-led a $4.5 million seed round of investment in clean fuels producer Oxylus Energy, which converts carbon dioxide into green methanol for use in shipping and other transportation fuels. The tech relies on renewable-powered electrolyzers similar to those used to make green hydrogen, but the company’s secret sauce is a special catalyst that can convert carbon dioxide into methanol at low temperature and pressure, makingthe whole process more efficient and more economical than ever before.
Duffuor told me that green methanol has a leg up on other clean fuels such as green hydrogen, which has a low energy density, or green ammonia, which is highly toxic and corrosive. While supply of all of these is still limited and costly, Duffuor said that retrofitting an engine to run on green methanol is much simpler than adapting to other alternative fuels, which is why it’s already being done on a small scale today. Indeed, shipping giant Maersk has a number of green methanol boats in its fleet, one of which completed the world’s first green methanol-powered voyage last fall.
Long considered “one of climate science’s biggest taboos,” according to Heatmap’s own Robinson Meyer, geoengineering had a big 2024, and it looks poised to be taken increasingly seriously. In fact, one investor I spoke with this month, Lee Larson of Piva Capital, which focuses on decarbonizing heavy industry, told me he foresees a splashy but undeniably controversial funding announcement coming in the near future. “I don’t think it’s going to be Piva, but someone is going to take a bet on this, and there’s going to be a big funding round for a startup in this space,” he predicted. “Because there’s enough interested people with deep pockets that have been thinking about this space for someone to raise money off of it.”
But if nothing else, this year proved that the backlash would be swift. In June, the city council in the small town of Alameda, California, shut down testing of a solar geoengineering device that could one day be used for “marine cloud brightening” — that is, spraying aerosols into the sky to enable clouds to reflect more sunlight away from Earth — and Harvard University abandoned another solar geoengineering project, which aimed to study how aerosol plumes behave in the stratosphere. At the same time, though, the nonprofit Environmental Defense Fund announced that it would fund research into solar geoengineering to help inform policymakers should it one day become regulated, and the UK also committed to supporting research into various solar geoengineering pathways, including conducting outdoor experiments.
“There’s a growing understanding that, on a per unit of warming avoidance basis, this is just way cheaper than carbon dioxide removal solutions,” Larson told me. From his perspective, the world needs to support this type of research lest a layperson, a billionaire, or a small nation choose to go rogue. “Just given how cheap it is, given how little we know about it, that’s a poor combination — because the chance of someone doing something with a lot of unintended consequences goes up and up.”
The idea is pretty straightforward — install solar panels that can float on the surface of reservoirs, canals, lakes, and the like — but this year it really began to pick up steam. There are myriad benefits to this solution: eliminating land use controversies, built-in temperature regulation (water keeps the panels cool, thus increasing their efficiency), and reducing evaporation from the water bodies. A paper published in Nature this June found that floating solar could meet, on average, 16% of countries’ total energy needs.
And countries big and small are taking note. While there aren’t a lot of specialized floating solar startups seeking VC funding, governments as well as traditional solar manufacturers and project developers are stepping up. The U.S. Department of the Interior announced in April that it’s investing $19 million to install panels over irrigation canals in California, Oregon, and Utah. Zimbabwe recently secured $250 million from the African Export-Import Bank to install floating solar on the world’s largest man-made lake, while China turned on the largest offshore solar farm in the world in November. Taiwan and India have also already deployed large installations, and have plans for more.
I spoke with the lead author of the Nature paper, Dr. Iestyn Woolway of the UK-based Bangor University, way back in June about floating solar’s decarbonization potential. Even he was “quite surprised with the number of countries that could meet a sizable fraction of the energy demands by [floating photovoltaics],” he told me.His modeling shows that Bolivia, for example, could meet about 80% of its energy demand with floating solar, while Ethiopia could meet 100% of its demand, with extra energy to spare.
The next step, he said, is gaining a deeper understanding of the ecological impacts of this technology. “Even if you do cover a water body by something small, like 10%, we don’t know what knock-on effect that would have,” he said.
Soils are some of the world’s most effective carbon sinks, and sustainable farming techniques can enhance soil’s natural carbon sequestration potential. Thus, soil carbon sequestration plays at the intersection of the fuzzy and buzzy regenerative agriculture space and the increasingly scientifically rigorous carbon dioxide removal sector, with its carbon crediting schemes and verification requirements. One investor I spoke with, Amy Francetic of Buoyant Ventures, is eager to find and back a company that can merge these two worlds. “If you could figure out how to sink carbon in a farm and do that in a way that is easy to measure and validate, we don’t have a good solution for that today,” she told me.
As of now, Francetic said, startups are going about this problem by doing labor intensive and expensive soil sampling and “marrying that with geospatial data to try to measure what climate benefits there are of changing certain agricultural practices, doing different row crops, changing the crop rotation, the amount of inputs you put into the crops.” Many have pitched Buoyant on their methodologies for bridging satellite data with soil sampling data, but thus far she’s passed. “None of them have, I think, met the standard of reliability that the financial industry would back from a carbon credit standpoint,” she explained. “That might be one of these holy grail things. If somebody could really do that, it could be very impactful.”
I’ll be honest, before this year I didn’t know what parametric insurance was. But since it came up time and again in conversations with investors about extreme weather and the necessity of climate resilience and adaptation measures, I decided to dig in. Here’s what parametric insurance is: an insurance product that automatically provides rapid payouts to customers in the case of natural disasters or weather events, assuming these events exceed a predefined limit. For example, a policyholder might be paid if the rainfall, wind speed, or temperature of a particular weather event is above or below a certain threshold, with the amount tied to how much the measurement deviates from the limit, not the damages incurred.
With extreme weather events getting more frequent and more intense due to climate change, this has given rise to a crop of startups that can leverage sensors, satellites, and artificial intelligence to quickly and accurately measure the extent of these events, thus enabling parametric insurance for a host of new customers. To name a few companies that have taken advantage: There’s Floodbase and FloodFlash (both focusing on flood insurance, naturally), which have each raised over $10 million in Series A financing; FloodFlash made a series of rapid payouts this year following storms in the UK, getting policyholders their money in as little as 10 hours after the water level exceeded its threshold. There’s Arbol, which protects against a host of weather events from drought to heat waves and cold snaps, and raised a $40 million Series B round this year. And there’s Pula, which helps provide parametric insurance to small-holder farmers in emerging markets, and raised a $20 million Series B round this year.
“This is affecting everybody,” Clea Kolster of Lowercarbon Capital, which led Floodbase’s Series A round, told me when we met at this year’s San Francisco Climate Week. “So how do you actually make sure that people have coverage for it and can continue to have as close to livable lives as possible, even when they’re subject to more frequent extreme weather events?” Investors know the storms are going to keep coming, so this category of adaptation tech is only set to grow.
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On the fallout from the LA fires, Trump’s tariffs, and Tesla’s sales slump
Current conditions: A record-breaking 4 feet of snow fell on the Japanese island of Hokkaido • Nearly 6.5 feet of rain has inundated northern Queensland in Australia since Saturday • Cold Arctic air will collide with warm air over central states today, creating dangerous thunderstorm conditions.
President Trump yesterday agreed to a month-long pause on across-the-board 25% tariffs on Canada and Mexico, but went ahead with an additional 10% tariff on Chinese imports. China retaliated with new levies on U.S. products including fuel – 15% for coal and liquefied natural gas, and 10% for crude oil – starting February 10. “Chinese firms are unlikely to sign new long-term contracts with proposed U.S. projects as long as trade tensions remain high,” notedBloomberg. “This is bad news for those American exporters that need to lock in buyers before securing necessary financing to begin construction.” Trump recently ended the Biden administration’s pause on LNG export permits. A December report from the Department of Energy found that China was likely to be the largest importer of U.S. LNG through 2050, and many entities in China had already signed contracts with U.S. export projects. Trump is expected to speak with Chinese President Xi Jinping this week.
Insurance firm State Farm is looking to hike insurance rates for homeowners in California by 22% after the devastating wildfires that tore through Los Angeles last month. The company, which is the largest insurer in California, sent a letter to the state’s insurance commissioner, asking for its immediate approval to increase home insurance by 22% for homeowners, 15% for tenants and renters, and 38% for “rental dwelling” in order to “help protect California’s fragile insurance market.” So far, the firm has received more than 8,700 claims and paid out more than $1 billion, but it expects to pay more. “Insurance will cost more for customers in California going forward because the risk is greater in California,” the company said yesterday. “Higher risks should pay more for insurance than lower risks.” A report out this week found that climate change is expected to shave $1.5 trillion off of U.S. home values by 2055 as insurance rates rise to account for the growing risk of extreme weather disasters.
A new report outlines pathways to decarbonizing the buildings sector, which produces about one-third of global emissions. The analysis, from the Energy Transitions Commission, proposes three main priorities that need to be tackled:
“This will require collaboration right across sector, between governments, industry bodies, and private companies,” said Stephen Hill, a sustainability and building performance expert at building design firm Arup. “We need to be ambitious, but if we get it right we can cut carbon, generate value for our economy, and improve people’s quality of life through action like improving living conditions and reducing fuel poverty.”
Energy Transitions Commission
Fracking executive Chris Wright was confirmed yesterday as the new Energy Secretary. Wright is the CEO of the oilfield services firm Liberty Energy (though he has said he plans to step down) and a major Republican donor. He has a history of climate denialism. “There is no climate crisis, and we’re not in the midst of an energy transition,” Wright said in a video posted to LinkedIn last year. Although during his confirmation hearings, he struck a different tone, avowing that climate change is happening and is caused by the combustion of hydrocarbons. He expressed enthusiasm for certain clean energy technologies, including next-generation geothermal and nuclear. Wright will be tasked with executing President Trump’s planned overhaul of U.S. energy policy, and expansion of domestic energy production. The Department of Energy has a $50 billion budget and is also in charge of maintaining the nation’s nuclear weapons stockpile.
A few new reports find Tesla is seeing sales drops in some key markets, possibly due to CEO Elon Musk’s push into politics. In California, Tesla registrations fell by about 12% last year, according to the California New Car Dealers Association, and the company’s EV market share in the state fell by 7.6%, while Kia, Hyundai, and Honda all made decent gains. “While high interest rates, tough competition, and the introduction of a restyled Model 3 sedan hurt the EV maker’s sales in California, the loss of business was likely exacerbated by Elon Musk’s involvement in the U.S. election,” Reutersreported. Tesla is also running into trouble across the pond, where Musk has been meddling in European politics, throwing his weight behind far-right parties. In the European Union, Tesla registrations fell 13% last year, but dropped 41% in Germany, the bloc’s biggest BEV market. Last month, Tesla registrations dropped by about 63% in France, 44% in Sweden, and 38% in Norway.
Researchers have developed a new variety of rice that has a higher crop yield than other varieties, but emits 70% less methane.
Artificial intelligence may extend coal’s useful life, but there’s no saving it.
Appearing by video connection to the global plutocrats assembled recently at Davos, Donald Trump interrupted a rambling answer to a question about liquefied natural gas to proclaim that he had come up with a solution to the energy demand of artificial intelligence (“I think it was largely my idea, because nobody thought this was possible”), which is to build power plants near data centers to power them. And a key part of the equation should be coal. “Nothing can destroy coal — not the weather, not a bomb — nothing,” he said. “But coal is very strong as a backup. It’s a great backup to have that facility, and it wouldn’t cost much more — more money. And we have more coal than anybody.”
There is some truth there — the United States does in fact have the largest coal reserves in the world — and AI may be offering something of a lifeline to the declining industry. But with Trump now talking about coal as a “backup,” it’s a reminder that he brings up the subject much less often than he used to. Even if coal will not be phased out as an electricity source quite as quickly as many had hoped or anticipated, Trump’s first-term promise to coal country will remain a broken one.
Yet in an unusual turn of events, the anticipated explosion of demand for electricity on its way over the next few years has led some utilities to scale back their existing plans to shutter coal-fired power plants, foreseeing that they’ll need every electron they can generate. Ironically, especially in Georgia, that need is driven by a boom in green manufacturing.
Nevertheless, coal’s decline is still remarkable. At the start of the 21st century, coal was the primary source of electricity generation in 32 states; now that number is down to 10 and dropping. As recently as 2007, coal accounted for half the country’s electricity; the figure is now 16%. Worldwide coal demand keeps increasing, mostly because of China and India. But here in the United States, the trajectory is only going in one direction.
Confronted with those facts, a politician could take one of two basic paths. The first is to make impossible promises to voters in coal country, telling them that the jobs that have disappeared will be brought back, their communities will be revitalized, and the dignity they feel they have lost will be returned.
That was the path Donald Trump took. He talked a lot about coal in 2016, making grand promises about the coal revival he would bring if elected. At a rally in West Virginia, he donned a hardhat, pretended to shovel some coal, and said, “For those miners, get ready, because you’re going to be working your asses off.” And in Trumpian style, if he couldn’t keep the promise, he’d just say he did. “The coal industry is back,” he said in 2018, a year which saw the second-most coal capacity retired in the country’s history to that point. “We’re putting our great coal miners back to work,” he said on the campaign trail in 2020, when the number of coal-producing mines in the U.S. declined by 18%.
When Trump took office in January 2017, there were just over 50,000 coal jobs left in the country after decades of decline. When he left office in 2021, the number was down to 38,000. The number is slightly higher today at around 43,000, but it’s still infinitesimal as a portion of the economy.
Trump’s failure to bring back coal jobs wasn’t because his affection for the fuel source was insincere. He certainly had as coal-friendly an administration as one could imagine; his second pick to run the Environmental Protection Agency was a coal lobbyist. But the triumvirate of forces that drove those job reductions — automation, emissions-limiting regulations, and competition from fracked natural gas — were irresistible.
The second path for a politician confronting the structural decline of coal is to take concrete steps to create new opportunities in coal country that offer people a better economic future. That was what the Biden administration tried to do. As part of its clean energy push, Biden put a particular focus on siting new projects in underserved communities, including in areas where coal still defines the culture even though the jobs are long gone. The administration also directed hundreds of millions of dollars in funding “to ensure former coal communities can take full advantage of the clean energy transition and continue their leading role in powering our nation,” in the words of then-Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm. Or as the Treasury Department put it, the administration was working “to strengthen the economies of coal communities and other areas that have experienced underinvestment in past decades.” These were real commitments, backed up by real dollars.
Today, the new Trump administration is committed to freezing, reversing, and clawing back as much of Biden’s clean energy agenda as it can. Whether that includes these investments in coal country remains to be seen.
There’s good reason to believe it will, however, both because of the antipathy Trump and his team hold for anything that has Biden’s fingerprints on it, and because Trump understands the fundamental truth of his political relationship to coal country: Its support for him is unshakeable, no matter the policy outcome.
Take just one example: Harlan County, Kentucky, site of the extraordinary 1976 documentary Harlan County, USA, which chronicled a strike by miners demanding fair wages and working conditions. Coal is still being mined in Harlan County, but as of 2023, only 577 people there were employed in the industry, or about one in every 19 working-age people in the county. It remains overwhelmingly white and overwhelmingly poor — and the voters there love Trump. He got 84.9% of the vote in 2016, 85.4% in 2020, and 87.7% in 2024.
It might be fair to ask what people in Harlan County and across coal country have to show for their support for the president. The absolute best he can offer them is that while coal will continue to decline under his presidency, it might decline a bit slower than it otherwise would have. Even if escalating electricity demand offers an opportunity for the coal industry, there’s little reason to believe it will reverse coal’s decline in America. At most it could flatten the curve, allowing some coal plants to remain in operation a few years longer than planned.
A future where coal is at most a miniscule part of America’s energy mix with a tiny labor force producing it seems inevitable. Most people in coal country understand that, as much as they might like it to be otherwise. If only their favorite politician would admit it to them — and commit to offering them more than fables — they could start building something better.
Companies, states, cities, and other entities with Energy Department contracts that had community benefit plans embedded in them have been ordered to stop all work.
Amidst the chaos surrounding President Trump’s pause on infrastructure and climate spending, another federal funding freeze is going very much under the radar, undermining energy and resilience projects across the U.S. and its territories.
Days after Trump took office, acting Energy Secretary Ingrid Kolb reportedly told DOE in a memo to suspend any work “requiring, using, or enforcing Community Benefit Plans, and requiring, using, or enforcing Justice40 requirements, conditions, or principles” in any loan or loan guarantee, any grant, any cost-sharing agreement or any “contracts, contract awards, or any other source of financial assistance.” The memo stipulated this would apply to “existing” awards, grants, contracts and other financial assistance, according to E&E News’ Hannah Northey, who first reported the document’s existence.
Justice40 was Biden’s signature environmental justice initiative. Community benefit plans were often used by Biden’s DOE to strengthen the potential benefits that projects could have on surrounding local economies and were seen as a vehicle for environmental justice. When we say often, we mean it: some high profile examples of these plans include those used for the Holtec Palisades nuclear plant restart in Michigan and the agency’s battery materials processing and recycling awards.
After Kolb’s edict went out, companies, states, cities, and other entities with DOE contracts that had community benefit plans embedded in them were ordered to stop all work, according to multiple letters to contract recipients reviewed by Heatmap News. “Recipients and subrecipients must cease any activities, including contracted activities, and stop incurring costs associated with DEI and CBP activities effective as of the date of this letter,” one letter reads, adding: “Costs incurred after the date of this letter will not be reimbursed.”
One such letter was posted by the University of Michigan research department in an advisory notice. The department’s website summarizes the letter as “directing the suspension” of all work tied to “any source of DOE funding” if it in any way involved “diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs,” as well as Justice40 requirements and community benefits plans.
These letters state companies and other entities with community benefit plans in their contracts or otherwise involved in their funding awards would be contacted by DOE to make “modifications” to their contracts. They only cite President Trump’s executive orders that purportedly address Diversity, Equity and Inclusion practices; they do not cite a much-debated Office of Management and Budget memo freezing all infrastructure law and Inflation Reduction Act spending, which has been challenged in federal court. It is altogether unclear if any outcome of the OMB memo litigation is even relevant to this other freeze.
We reached out to the Energy Department about these letters for comment on how many entities may be impacted and why they targeted community benefit plans. We will update this story if we hear back.
A lot is still murky about this situation. It is unclear how many entities have been impacted and the totality of the impacts may be unknown for a while, because a lot of these entities supposed to get money may want to keep fighting privately to, well, still get their money. It’s also hazy if all entities that received these letters are continuing to do any construction or preparatory work or other labor connected to their funding not tied to the community benefit planning, or just halting the funded labor altogether.
The blast radius from this freeze is hard to parse, said Matthew Tejada, a former EPA staffer who most recently served as the agency’s deputy assistant administrator for environmental justice under the Biden administration. Tejada, who now works for the advocacy group NRDC and remains connected to advocates in the environmental justice space, said he was very much aware of this separate freeze when he was first reached by Heatmap. But “unless you’re able to really have a network of information bottom up from the recipients, it’s a bit of a black box we’re operating around because we’re not going to get transparency and information from the administration.“
“Part of their obvious strategy here is to create enough confusion as possible to make defending as difficult as possible. But I’m fairly certain the community and various others here -- local governments, tribes -- will have plenty to say about cutting through that chaos to make sure the will of Congress and the outcomes of these programs and projects are delivered upon.” He believes that any attempts to modify these contract awards “on the pretext of canceling the contract[s] will in all likelihood meet a legal challenge.”
But the ripple effects of this other freeze are starting to surface in local news accounts.
According to the Erie Times-News, the city of Erie, Pennsylvania currently cannot access funding for a city-wide audit for home energy efficiency. And a big road improvement project in the Mariana Islands – a U.S. territory – was nearly derailed by the freeze, according to the news outlet Mariana’s Variety, which reported project developers are just going to try and move forward without the remaining money provided under contract.
We’ll have to wait and see the breadth of the impacts here and whether this freeze will produce its own legal or regulatory rollercoaster. Hang on tight.