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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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The agency provided a list to the Sierra Club, which in turn provided the list to Heatmap.
Officials at the Environmental Protection Agency remain closed-lipped about which grants they’ve canceled. Earlier this week, however, the office provided a written list to the Sierra Club in response to a Freedom of Information Act request, which begins to shed light on some of the agency’s actions.
The document shows 49 individual grants that were either “canceled” or prevented from being awarded from January 20 through March 7, which is the day the public information office conducted its search in response to the FOIA request. The grants’ total cumulative value is more than $230 million, although some $30 million appears to have already been paid out to recipients.
The numbers don’t quite line up with what the agency has said publicly. The EPA published three press releases between Trump’s inauguration and March 7, announcing that it had canceled a total of 42 grants and “saved” Americans roughly $227 million. In its first such announcement on February 14, the agency said it was canceling a $50 million grant to the Climate Justice Alliance, but the only grant to that organization on the FOIA spreadsheet is listed at $12 million. To make matters more confusing, there are only $185 million worth of EPA grant cuts listed on the Department of Government Efficiency’s website from the same time period. (Zeldin later announced more than 400 additional grant terminations on March 10.)
Nonetheless, the document gives a clearer picture of which grants Administrator Lee Zeldin has targeted. Nearly half of the canceled grants are related to environmental justice initiatives, which is not surprising, given the Trump administration’s directives to root out these types of programs. But nearly as many were funding research into lower-carbon construction materials and better product labeling to prevent greenwashing.
Here’s the full list of grants, by program:
A few more details and observations from this list:
In the original FOIA request, Sierra Club had asked for a lot more information, including communications between EPA and the grant recipients, and explanations for why the grants — which in many cases involved binding contracts between the government and recipients — were being terminated. In its response, EPA said it was still working on the rest of the request and expected to issue a complete response by April 12.
Defenders of the Inflation Reduction Act have hit on what they hope will be a persuasive argument for why it should stay.
With the fate of the Inflation Reduction Act and its tax credits for building and producing clean energy hanging in the balance, the law’s supporters have increasingly turned to dollars-and-cents arguments in favor of its preservation. Since the election, industry and research groups have put out a handful of reports making the broad argument that in addition to higher greenhouse gas emissions, taking away these tax credits would mean higher electricity bills.
The American Clean Power Association put out a report in December, authored by the consulting firm ICF, arguing that “energy tax credits will drive $1.9 trillion in growth, creating 13.7 million jobs and delivering 4x return on investment.”
The Solar Energy Industries Association followed that up last month with a letter citing an analysis by Aurora Energy Research, which found that undoing the tax credits for wind, solar, and storage would reduce clean energy deployment by 237 gigawatts through 2040 and cost nearly 100,000 jobs, all while raising bills by hundreds of dollars in Texas and New York. (Other groups, including the conservative environmental group ConservAmerica and the Clean Energy Buyers Association have commissioned similar research and come up with similar results.)
And just this week, Energy Innovation, a clean energy research group that had previously published widely cited research arguing that clean energy deployment was not linked to the run-up in retail electricity prices, published a report that found repealing the Inflation Reduction Act would “increase cumulative household energy costs by $32 billion” over the next decade, among other economic impacts.
The tax credits “make clean energy even more economic than it already is, particularly for developers,” explained Energy Innovation senior director Robbie Orvis. “When you add more of those technologies, you bring down the electricity cost significantly,” he said.
Historically, the price of fossil fuels like natural gas and coal have set the wholesale price for electricity. With renewables, however, the operating costs associated with procuring those fuels go away. The fewer of those you have, “the lower the price drops,” Orvis said. Without the tax credits to support the growth and deployment of renewables, the analysis found that annual energy costs per U.S. household would go up some $48 annually by 2030, and $68 by 2035.
These arguments come at a time when retail electricity prices in much of the country have grown substantially. Since December 2019, average retail electricity prices have risen from about $0.13 per kilowatt-hour to almost $0.18, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In Massachusetts and California, rates are over $0.30 a kilowatt-hour, according to the Energy Information Administration. As Energy Innovation researchers have pointed out, states with higher renewable penetration sometimes have higher rates, including California, but often do not, as in South Dakota, where 77% of its electricity comes from renewables.
Retail electricity prices are not solely determined by fuel costs Distribution costs for maintaining the whole electrical system are also a factor. In California, for example,it’s these costs that have driven a spike in rates, as utilities have had to harden their grids against wildfires. Across the whole country, utilities have had to ramp up capital investment in grid equipment as it’s aged, driving up distribution costs, a 2024 Energy Innovation report argued.
A similar analysis by Aurora Energy Research (the one cited by SEIA) that just looked at investment and production tax credits for wind, solar, and batteries found that if they were removed, electricity bills would increase hundreds of dollars per year on average, and by as much as $40 per month in New York and $29 per month in Texas.
One reason the bill impact could be so high, Aurora’s Martin Anderson told me, is that states with aggressive goals for decarbonizing the electricity sector would still have to procure clean energy in a world where its deployment would have gotten more expensive. New York is targetinga target for getting 70% of its electricity from renewable sources by 2030, while Minnesota has a goal for its utilities to sell 55% clean electricity by 2035 and could see its average cost increase by $22 a month. Some of these states may have to resort to purchasing renewable energy certificates to make up the difference as new generation projects in the state become less attractive.
Bills in Texas, on the other hand, would likely go up because wind and solar investment would slow down, meaning that Texans’ large-scale energy consumption would be increasingly met with fossil fuels (Texas has a Renewable Portfolio Standard that it has long since surpassed).
This emphasis from industry and advocacy groups on the dollars and cents of clean energy policy is hardly new — when the House of Representatives passed the (doomed) Waxman-Markey cap and trade bill in 2009, then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi told the House, “Remember these four words for what this legislation means: jobs, jobs, jobs, and jobs.”
More recently, when Democratic Senators Martin Heinrich and Tim Kaine hosted a press conference to press their case for preserving the Inflation Reduction Act, the email that landed in reporters’ inboxes read “Heinrich, Kaine Host Press Conference on Trump’s War on Affordable, American-Made Energy.”
“Trump’s war on the Inflation Reduction Act will kill American jobs, raise costs on families, weaken our economic competitiveness, and erode American global energy dominance,” Heinrich told me in an emailed statement. “Trump should end his destructive crusade on affordable energy and start putting the interests of working people first.”
That the impacts and benefits of the IRA are spread between blue and red states speaks to the political calculation of clean energy proponents, hoping that a bill that subsidized solar panels in Texas, battery factories in Georgia, and battery storage in Southern California could bring about a bipartisan alliance to keep it alive. While Congressional Republicans will be scouring the budget for every last dollar to help fund an extension of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, a group of House Republicans have gone on the record in defense of the IRA’s tax credits.
“There's been so much research on the emissions impact of the IRA over the past few years, but there's been comparatively less research on the economic benefits and the household energy benefits,” Orvis said. “And I think that one thing that's become evident in the last year or so is that household energy costs — inflation, fossil fuel prices — those do seem to be more top of mind for Americans.”
Opinion modeling from Heatmap Pro shows that lower utility bills is the number one perceived benefit of renewables in much of the country. The only counties where it isn’t the number one perceived benefit are known for being extremely wealthy, extremely crunchy, or both: Boulder and Denver in Colorado; Multnomah (a.k.a. Portland) in Oregon; Arlington in Virginia; and Chittenden in Vermont.
On environmental justice grants, melting glaciers, and Amazon’s carbon credits
Current conditions: Severe thunderstorms are expected across the Mississippi Valley this weekend • Storm Martinho pushed Portugal’s wind power generation to “historic maximums” • It’s 62 degrees Fahrenheit, cloudy, and very quiet at Heathrow Airport outside London, where a large fire at an electricity substation forced the international travel hub to close.
President Trump invoked emergency powers Thursday to expand production of critical minerals and reduce the nation’s reliance on other countries. The executive order relies on the Defense Production Act, which “grants the president powers to ensure the nation’s defense by expanding and expediting the supply of materials and services from the domestic industrial base.”
Former President Biden invoked the act several times during his term, once to accelerate domestic clean energy production, and another time to boost mining and critical minerals for the nation’s large-capacity battery supply chain. Trump’s order calls for identifying “priority projects” for which permits can be expedited, and directs the Department of the Interior to prioritize mineral production and mining as the “primary land uses” of federal lands that are known to contain minerals.
Critical minerals are used in all kinds of clean tech, including solar panels, EV batteries, and wind turbines. Trump’s executive order doesn’t mention these technologies, but says “transportation, infrastructure, defense capabilities, and the next generation of technology rely upon a secure, predictable, and affordable supply of minerals.”
Anonymous current and former staffers at the Environmental Protection Agency have penned an open letter to the American people, slamming the Trump administration’s attacks on climate grants awarded to nonprofits under the Inflation Reduction Act’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund. The letter, published in Environmental Health News, focuses mostly on the grants that were supposed to go toward environmental justice programs, but have since been frozen under the current administration. For example, Climate United was awarded nearly $7 billion to finance clean energy projects in rural, Tribal, and low-income communities.
“It is a waste of taxpayer dollars for the U.S. government to cancel its agreements with grantees and contractors,” the letter states. “It is fraud for the U.S. government to delay payments for services already received. And it is an abuse of power for the Trump administration to block the IRA laws that were mandated by Congress.”
The lives of 2 billion people, or about a quarter of the human population, are threatened by melting glaciers due to climate change. That’s according to UNESCO’s new World Water Development Report, released to correspond with the UN’s first World Day for Glaciers. “As the world warms, glaciers are melting faster than ever, making the water cycle more unpredictable and extreme,” the report says. “And because of glacial retreat, floods, droughts, landslides, and sea-level rise are intensifying, with devastating consequences for people and nature.” Some key stats about the state of the world’s glaciers:
In case you missed it: Amazon has started selling “high-integrity science-based carbon credits” to its suppliers and business customers, as well as companies that have committed to being net-zero by 2040 in line with Amazon’s Climate Pledge, to help them offset their greenhouse gas emissions.
“The voluntary carbon market has been challenged with issues of transparency, credibility, and the availability of high-quality carbon credits, which has led to skepticism about nature and technological carbon removal as an effective tool to combat climate change,” said Kara Hurst, chief sustainability officer at Amazon. “However, the science is clear: We must halt and reverse deforestation and restore millions of miles of forests to slow the worst effects of climate change. We’re using our size and high vetting standards to help promote additional investments in nature, and we are excited to share this new opportunity with companies who are also committed to the difficult work of decarbonizing their operations.”
The Bureau of Land Management is close to approving the environmental review for a transmission line that would connect to BluEarth Renewables’ Lucky Star wind project, Heatmap’s Jael Holzman reports in The Fight. “This is a huge deal,” she says. “For the last two months it has seemed like nothing wind-related could be approved by the Trump administration. But that may be about to change.”
BLM sent local officials an email March 6 with a draft environmental assessment for the transmission line, which is required for the federal government to approve its right-of-way under the National Environmental Policy Act. According to the draft, the entirety of the wind project is sited on private property and “no longer will require access to BLM-administered land.”
The email suggests this draft environmental assessment may soon be available for public comment. BLM’s web page for the transmission line now states an approval granting right-of-way may come as soon as May. BLM last week did something similar with a transmission line that would go to a solar project proposed entirely on private lands. Holzman wonders: “Could private lands become the workaround du jour under Trump?”
Saudi Aramco, the world’s largest oil producer, this week launched a pilot direct air capture unit capable of removing 12 tons of carbon dioxide per year. In 2023 alone, the company’s Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions totalled 72.6 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent.