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Just a few years ago, the subject was basically taboo.
Katherine Ricke, a University of California at San Diego sustainability professor, turned to face the roomful of attentive scientists at the American Geophysical Union a few weeks ago. In any other year, she would have been about to break one of climate science’s biggest taboos.
“Geoscientists know very well at this point that solar geoengineering is not a very good substitute for emissions reductions,” she said. “The question that comes next, then, is, Is solar geoengineering a complement to mitigation?”
The answer, she then argued, was yes. While cutting greenhouse gas emissions might bring down the planet’s temperature in the long term, she said, it would not do so immediately. But spraying sulfate aerosols into the stratosphere was pretty cheap, and it could quickly help relieve the planet’s fever. “Solar geoengineering has a rapid but temporary effect on global temperatures, while the effect of emissions reduction is deferred but persistent,” she said.
Ricke went on to ask whether the economics of solar geoengineering made sense — and about its risks. Would it deprive other important efforts of research funding? Probably not. Could it encourage the public to procrastinate on cutting emissions? Maybe yes.
Yet perhaps the presentation’s biggest surprise — for people who have long thought about the issue — was that nobody in the audience of normal climate scientists gasped. Nobody shooed Ricke out of the room or told her that her talk didn’t belong in a session devoted to achieving net zero — that is, to climate mitigation, to reducing carbon pollution, not blotting out its effects.
To get a sense of what American climate scientists are talking about, you can do a lot worse than attending the annual fall meeting of the AGU, where more than 20,000 scientists come to network, present new research, and gossip about their superiors. This year, AGU was held in the cavernous Moscone Center in San Francisco. The arrival of tens of thousands of people immediately broke the city’s post-pandemic downtown; Starbucks ran out of breakfast sandwiches and every restaurant within a quarter mile of the conference site was jammed before the 8:30 a.m. sessions.
AGU is almost always held, for some nonsensical reason, at roughly the same time as the annual United Nations climate conference, and the two events have a lot in common: They are bazaars, free-for-alls, half salon and half trade show, and each way too big for any one person to see. Yet by keen attention to sounds and signals, one can detect a vibe at both events. The vibe of this year’s AGU was clear: Geoengineering is here to stay.
This sincere interest in geoengineering and climate modification represents a broader shift in climate science from observation to intervention. It also represents a huge change for a field that used to regard any interference with the climate system — short of cutting greenhouse gas emissions — as verboten. “There is a growing realization that [solar radiation management] is not a taboo anymore,” Dan Visioni, a Cornell climate professor, told me. “There was a growing interest from NASA, NOAA, the national labs, that wasn’t there a year ago.”
At the highest level, this acceptance of geoengineering shows that scientists have seriously begun to imagine what will happen if humanity blows its goal of cutting greenhouse gas emissions.
Why the sudden embrace of geoengineering? Part of it is that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has become increasingly insistent that carbon removal is crucial — and opened the door to other once-taboo ideas.
But another part is that climate disasters seem to get bigger and bigger every year, and humanity seems to be growing more and more alarmed about them, yet no country plans to cut emissions fast enough to relieve global warming’s near-term dangers. 2023 was the warmest year in modern human history, but the Paris Agreement’s temperature goals remain far off. “It was always pretty clear that the kind of emissions reduction to stay below 1.5 [degrees Celsius] was never going to happen in any realistic scenario, but there was always a conviction that just by saying it was physically possible, it was going to inspire people into some kind of action,” Visioni said. “2023 has shown this to not be the case.”
Perhaps one more reason is that, for better or worse, geoengineering is already happening. Economists have long argued that stratospheric aerosol injection is so cheap that someone will eventually try to do it. Then, last year, Luke Iseman, a 39-year-old former employee of the startup incubator Y Combinator, claimed to have conducted rogue experiments in western Mexico delivering reflective sulfur molecules to the atmosphere using weather balloons. It’s unclear whether this “move fast and break things”-styled effort actually reflected any meaningful sunlight back into space. What it did do was awaken the Mexican government to a regulatory arbitrage. It responded by banning solar geoengineering.
Yet more serious attempts have been made at bringing geoengineering into the mainstream. In September, the Overshoot Commission, a panel of current and former world leaders — including an influential Chinese adviser and a former Canadian prime minister — recommended that the world begin to seriously study solar geoengineering. And Congress recently mandated that the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy study the technique — although the office’s resulting report also suggested that scientists are still treading carefully around it. Its hilariously curt title: “Congressionally-Mandated Report on Solar Radiation Modification.”
“The way that broader climate intervention has started to move into the mainstream has been kind of astounding,” said Shuchi Talati, a University of Pennsylvania scholar and former Energy Department official. “If you look at AGU of four or five years ago, if there was one [solar radiation management] panel, that was novel,” she told me. But this year, there were more panels and side conversations than ever. “You can feel it in the air that there was more interest.”
Ricke’s was far from the only geoengineering presentation in San Francisco this year. In a packed lunchtime session, Lisa Graumlich, AGU’s president, led a town hall about the organization’s draft proposal on how to research climate intervention ethically. “Are we attempting to play God? Do we have the right to do this? What risks are we willing to accept? Or … do we have the right not to?” Cynthia Scharf, a former UN adviser who helped lead a Carnegie Foundation project on how the world could possibly govern geoengineering, told the room by video conference. The crowd wasn’t exactly rewarded for attending: After every panelist had finished going through their introductions, the audience only had time to ask two questions.
Across the hall, more than 60 people were talking about a different kind of climate intervention. For years, scientists have known that the stability of a few glaciers in West Antarctica could mean the difference between quasi-manageable amounts of sea-level rise this century and a rapid, catastrophic surge. So small groups of glaciologists have now started to ask whether those specific glaciers — such as Thwaites, which holds a quadrillion gallons of water and is larger than Florida — could be engineered or modified somehow to slow their collapse.
Perhaps a berm could be built on the seafloor, in front of each of the glaciers, in order to prevent warm water from eroding them. Or maybe holes could be drilled into the glaciers, allowing the warmth of their subsurface to be vented to the surface. Glacial scientists have already met twice this year — at the University of Chicago and later Stanford — to begin hashing out the idea.
Another approach — using ships to spray ocean water into the atmosphere, thereby brightening clouds and reflecting more sunlight into space — was also the subject of several events. One scholar, Chih-Chieh Jack Chen, showed research suggesting that brightening the clouds over just 5% of the ocean surface could cool the planet enough to meet the world’s temperature targets — but that the climatic ripple effects of doing so might simultaneously raise temperatures in Southeast Asia by even more than what global warming would do alone. Others presented work showing that cloud brightening might accidentally shut down the planet’s westerly trade winds — or even silence the Pacific Ocean’s El Niño oscillation.
Then there were the carbon removal people, who arrived by the tens and who seemed to have graduated to a less controversial (and possibly more remunerative) plane than geoengineering. Most scientists seem to have accepted that carbon dioxide removal, or CDR, will need to happen to at least some degree. “CDR is a given. People don’t even consider it to be geoengineering any more, which is what the CDR people have always wanted,” Visioni told me. A new Department of Energy report, released during the conference, argues that by 2050, the United States might be able to suck 1 billion tons of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere for a mere $130 billion a year, creating 440,000 jobs. In other scenarios — and not only those sponsored by the federal government — America seems likely to become the keystone of the global carbon removal industry, its vast geological capacity and fossil-fuel expertise giving it a competitive advantage.
In anticipation, venture capital and public-sector cash has surged into carbon removal, creating a corps of CDR startups with one foot in the geosciences and the other in Silicon Valley. Their employees were at AGU too, mingling in full force. “It was interesting how much industry was there — researchers at companies, even heads of companies,” Talati told me. “I’ve never really experienced that at AGU.” Employees from Lithos, Heirloom, Carbon Direct, Stripe, and Additional Ventures all registered for the conference; in what might be an AGU first, scientists and technologists sipped cappuccinos and nibbled pastries during an early-morning confab at the Salesforce Tower, a few blocks from the official conference site. “AGU is not the place where you would have expected to find these kinds of people, even just for CDR, so it’s interesting that they’re there,” Visioni said.
The whole thing presented both a stark contrast and an inescapable mirror to COP28, where oil lobbyists roamed the grounds. Some environmental old-timers grumble that the UN climate conference has transformed from a diplomatic meeting into a trade show. But maybe there is now so much money and interest and public attention directed at the climate problem that any major gathering about it will take on shades of the commercial. There are lots of rich people with huge amounts of money who want to help do something about climate change. At the same time, the United States government is looking like less and less of a long-term reliable partner on climate research. Sooner or later, someone is going to try to do more serious geoengineering than releasing a few balloons in Mexico. Scientists have started preparing for that day. Is that smart? I don’t know. But it seems like a better strategy than feigned ignorance about where we’re headed.
Editor’s note: This story originally misidentified the name of the person who conducted geoengineering experiments in Mexico. We regret the error.
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More than a quarter say they’re being hit hard, according to a Heatmap Pro poll.
Most Americans say that rising electricity bills are having at least “a decent amount” of impact on their household finances, according to a new Heatmap Pro poll.
The poll, which surveyed more than 3,700 registered voters last month, gives context to how electricity prices have come to dominate national headlines in recent months — and why they’ve become an urgent issue at the state and local level in a few key regions.
On the 2024 campaign trail, President Donald Trump promised to cut voters’ power bills in half within a year of getting elected. So far, that hasn’t happened: Electricity prices have risen more than twice as fast as inflation over the past 12 months and are still rising, according to government data.
Voters are beginning to feel the squeeze from that inflation. In our poll, 26% of American registered voters said that rising electricity prices were having “a lot” of impact on their personal finances. Another 31% said that rising prices were having a “decent amount” of impact.
Still, for about 40% of the country, those high prices are more a pinch than a pain. Thirty percent of registered voters said that rising prices only had “a little bit” of impact on their personal finances, while 9% said they were having “none at all.” There wasn’t a significant partisan division in sensitivity to the high prices.
The survey did show some regional distinctions, however. In the Northeast, 63% of registered voters reported that rising power prices were causing them “a lot” or “a decent amount” of trouble. In the Midwest, only 52% of voters told the poll the same thing. The South, with 56%, and the West, with 61%, landed somewhere in between.
As might be expected, lower-income voters described more trouble. More than 70% of voters with household income below $50,000 a year said that rising power bills were having “a lot” of impact on their finances. Some 62% of voters earning less than $100,000 also described issues. So did 59% of white voters without a college degree.
The rising cost of power has become a major question in New Jersey’s political race, where it has haunted ads and led Representative Mikie Sherrill, the Democratic candidate, to promise to freeze power rates for a year if she is elected.
Energy Secretary Chris Wright has said that rising electricity costs are his No. 1 concern as energy secretary, although he has conceded the Trump administration is “going to get blamed” for surging power rates. The Trump administration has revoked permits for new offshore projects along the East Coast, and congressional Republicans have ended tax credits for solar and wind energy.
Wright told Politico in August that he blames “momentum of the Obama-Biden policies” for the surging power rates. Donald Trump was president from 2017 to 2021, after Obama and before Biden.
On Trump’s coal push, PJM’s progress, and PG&E’s spending plan
Current conditions: Tropical Storm Imelda is gaining wind intensity this week, bringing flooding rain and storm surge to the southeastern U.S. • Hurricane Humberto, now a Category 4 storm, is passing west of Bermuda, bringing marine hazards to the U.S. East Coast • Typhoon Bualoi is pummeling the Philippines and Vietnam, where it’s already killed a dozen people.
If you were planning to cash in on the $7,500 federal tax credit for buying an electric vehicle, you’d better make moves. Today’s the last day to claim the so-called 30D tax credit. Congress moved the expiration date for the writeoff to September 30 as part of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
That doesn’t mean all government incentives for EVs are going away. New York still offers a $2,000 “Drive Clean Rebate” for some vehicles, and California offers up to $7,000 in rebates. Prices for new electric cars are still higher than those for comparable internal combustion vehicles, a frustratingly persistent condition the federal tax credit was meant to help address. Owning an EV has its own rewards, however, including lower fuel and maintenance costs over time. For more on how to go about choosing an EV, here’s Andrew Moseman’s guide from our Decarbonize Your Life series.
Stacks at the Hugh L. Spurlock Generating Station in Maysville, Kentucky. Jeff Swensen/Getty Images
The Trump administration is opening more than 13 million acres of federal land to leasing for new coal mines. And it’s providing funding to keep demand for coal roaring. The Department of Energy announced Monday it will offer $625 million to upgrade, reopen, and “modernize” coal-fired power plants across the country.
It’s a sign of the trend Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin clocked in July: “Global coal demand is rising,” he wrote, “and America wants in.” Indeed, in a press release, Secretary of Energy Chris Wright boasted that the new funding would “keep our nation’s coal plants operating” and would ultimately help lower rising electricity prices. “Beautiful, clean coal will be essential to powering America’s reindustrialization and winning the AI race,” Wright said. “Coal built the greatest industrial engine the world has ever known, and with President Trump’s leadership, it will help do so again.”
The Trump administration is shutting down or shrinking roughly one third of the federal offices that track bird populations after hurricanes, map megafire risks in the Midwest, figure out new ways to fight invasive plants, and prepare communities’ stormwater drains against intense flooding. The U.S. Geological Survey’s Climate Adaptation Science Centers “are expected to drastically wind down and possibly close after Tuesday because of a lack of funds,” The Washington Post reported Monday. The centers in the South Central, Northeast, and Pacific Islands regions, which “collectively cover about one-third of the U.S. population and are funded under the Interior Department,” are potentially facing permanent closure.
The shuttering isn’t linked to a potential government shutdown, and appears planned as part of the Trump administration’s broader cuts to federal research. “We’re not willing to just drop everything and walk away,” Bethany Bradley, the co-director of the Northeast Climate Adaptation Science Center and a University of Massachusetts professor, told the newspaper. “But the reality is we can’t do this for free.”
Amazon, Google, Microsoft, utility giant Constellation, and power company Talen came together to propose a way to meet electricity needs in the nation’s largest power grid. Under their plan, the PJM Interconnection would allow large power users to volunteer for time-limited periods of reducing electricity demand when the grid is stressed. The proposal also outlines plans for time-limited use of backup generation. If making the load more flexible doesn’t work, PJM would increase the supply of firm power through procurement.
The pitch comes in response to an earlier mandatory curtailment proposal from PJM, which drew fierce blowback from many of the companies that wrote up this alternative. (“Everyone hates it,” Matthew wrote.) As analyst Aniruddh Mohan noted, PJM ultimately withdrew its initial load flexibility proposal.
Pacific Gas & Electric announced plans to spend $73 billion on upgrades to the electrical grid in California to meet the surge in demand from data centers. PG&E, as it’s known, has been deemed responsible for multiple large-scale wildfires in recent years, incurring billions in damages. As the utility told investors on a call Monday, the new investment plan “comes on the heels” of new liability reforms in the state. Under Senate Bill 254, the state expanded its wildfire fund by $18 billion and “acknowledged that the utilities and their customers cannot continue to carry the full burden of climate-driven catastrophic wildfires, especially when the utility has acted prudently,” PG&E CEO Patricia Poppe said, according to Power magazine. The utility had filed a proposal in March to build 700 miles of underground power lines between 2026 and 2028 and complete 500 miles of additional wildfire safety system upgrades by next year.
Fervo Energy, the company using fracking technology to harness the planet’s molten energy, is undeniably leading the race to commercialize next-generation geothermal. But a clear second-place contender emerged Tuesday when XGS Energy released the results from its first commercial test, the company told Heatmap exclusively. The startup’s system outperformed the executives’ expectations, setting the stage for full-scale development. While Fervo’s technology represents what’s known as “enhanced” geothermal system, XGS’ approach is what’s known as “advanced” geothermal systems that rely on closed-loop infrastructure, as Matthew previously explained.
The company is vying to challenge Fervo for leadership in the next-generation geothermal market.
The geothermal startup XGS Energy has now completed four months of tests to see whether its technology can maintain steady production of heat at temperatures above what’s needed to generate energy. Over 3,000 hours, the company monitored the drilling process and checked how heat flowed from its wells, the status of their temperature, and how precisely XGS’ mathematical predictions matched the outcome of the testing.
The results, which the company shared exclusively with Heatmap, were “almost too good,” XGS CEO Josh Prueher told me.
“Had we been within 10% of predictive performance, we would have been pretty happy with the outcome,” Prueher said. “Turns out we were within 2% under a variety of different parameters.”
“It worked like a charm,” he said.
To understand what makes XGS Energy stand out among the geothermal startups racing to commercialize next-generation technology, it helps to compare the company to its fellow Houston-based rival that’s currently leading the sector, Fervo Energy. Unlike Fervo, XGS doesn’t use fracking technology to drill horizontal wells in pursuit of hot, dry rocks from which to harvest energy.
Instead, XGS drills vertical wells and inserts a closed steel pipe with water and fills the gap between the metal and the rock with a patented slurry that conducts heat. Technology like Fervo’s requires pumping cold water over the fractured hot rocks to harvest heat. But with its method, XGS claims, it avoids losing any water.
The testing took place off the US-395 highway in a volcanic field in California’s Mojave desert, sandwiched between the eastern edge of the Sequoia National Park and western border of Death Valley National Park. The geothermal field XGS tapped is already actively producing energy for the Coso Operating Company, which runs a 270-megawatt geothermal power plant on the land. The results, the company said, showed the “unprecedented predictability and active control of field performance” of XGS’ technology “versus other geothermal systems, which are subject to complex and continuously changing subsurface reservoir conditions.”
At least one outside observer agreed. “This is impressive, and something to be proud of,” Advait Arun, an energy analyst and senior associate at the think tank Center for Energy Enterprise who co-authored a recent report on next-generation geothermal, told me.
While the 3,000 hours of testing still falls short of the year’s worth of data Fervo has produced at one of its sites, it’s the longest any other competitor in the space has successfully demonstrated its approach so far, Arun said.
“These guys would be second to Fervo in terms of their ability to prove a commercial-scale performance test,” he added.
XGS is now poised to build a 150-megawatt power plant for Meta’s New Mexico data centers. Even after that’s complete, however, Prueher said the surrounding area has nearly 3 gigawatts of untapped heat. In California, where the company is headquartered and carried out its demonstration project, there’s a growing need for clean power sources that don’t further tax the depleted water table.
“A lot of the historical sensitivities around developing in California — a state where, like many others, water usage for industrial development is kind of a no-no — because we don’t need water, we have some real advantages,” Prueher said.
At a moment when surging demand from data centers is supercharging dealmaking in the electricity sector, Prueher said XGS is looking beyond the boom from the artificial intelligence buildout.
“It’s not about data centers,” he said. “It really is just the fundamental power needs of California. With the restrictions around water usage, we line up really, really well for California.”
For now, the company remains focused on the U.S. But Prueher said XGS is well suited to export its technology to East Asia, as well, where countries along the Pacific Rim have vast geothermal potential and growing electricity demand but limited development. XGS already has ties to the Philippines and “may actually be subsurface” — i.e. digging wells — there by the end of 2026, Prueher told me.
The “big enchilada,” he said, would be establishing a foothold in Japan, where the onsen hotspring industry has long protested geothermal development they say could diminish the resource that makes the ancient bathhouse tradition possible. Prueher told me his technology mitigates concerns over fracking-induced earthquakes, as well.
For now, he said, his main market is in the fast-growing Southwest. The executive compared this moment to 2021, when he worked at a battery company. That February, Winter Storm Uri collapsed the Texas grid as natural gas pipes froze and demand for electricity to heat homes designed to stay cool in a typically arid climate skyrocketed. Back then, he said, batteries were “still a pretty new asset class.”
“People were still uncertain about how it would perform,” Prueher said. But his company was “able to keep our batteries up and operating 100% of the time, no one minute of downtime during that entire episode.”
“From a market perspective, the storm showed that, if you can bring this new type of technology into the market, it can really deliver remarkable value,” he added. “We made 10 years of revenue in six days.”
In a lot of ways, he went on, “this is the same thing.”
“We’ve proven a technology is reliable,” Prueher said. “It works at commercial scale over a period of time. We would regard this as a real pivot point in the industry.”