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Technology

Microsoft’s Major Carbon Removal Deal

On curbing AI emissions, flood resilience, and offshore wind

Microsoft’s Major Carbon Removal Deal
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

Current conditions: Extreme heat in Southern California is causing cars to break down on the highway • Flooding in northeastern India killed nine rare one-horned rhinos • Residents in Mount Vernon, Indiana, are waking up to debris and devastation from a violent tornado spawned by the remnants of Hurricane Beryl.

THE TOP FIVE

1. Microsoft and Oxy agree to largest-ever DAC credits deal

Tech giant Microsoft has agreed to the “single largest purchase” of direct air capture carbon credits, buying 500,000 metric tons of credits from Occidental Petroleum’s (aka Oxy) 1PointFive DAC subsidiary. The deal is worth hundreds of millions of dollars and will help Microsoft confront its growing emissions problem as demand for energy-intensive artificial intelligence grows. Microsoft’s emissions grew by 30% in 2023 compared to 2020. Google’s emissions are also rising, up 13% last year compared to the year before. Both companies pin the blame on the growth of AI. As Bloomberg noted, DAC “is expensive, energy-intensive and not yet proven at industrial scale.” Occidental clinched a similar (but smaller) deal with Amazon last year.

2. New FEMA rule will improve infrastructure flood resilience

The Biden administration yesterday finalized a rule aimed at protecting federal infrastructure from flooding exacerbated by climate change. The federal flood risk management standard, first proposed in 2015, will require public structures funded by FEMA be built above the projected flood level for their location, or be moved to a different location entirely. The hope is to “put a stop to the cycle of response and recovery, and rinse and repeat,” said Deanne Criswell, the FEMA administrator. FEMA will cover the cost of implementing the changes. The rule will come into effect on September 9.

3. Texas power outages persist as temperatures rise

Frustration is growing in Texas, where nearly 2 million people are still without power after Hurricane Beryl tore through the state Monday as a category 1 storm. The power outages mean many residents are without access to air conditioning as a heat wave pushes temperatures into the 90s. At least 16 hospitals were relying on generators to keep the lights on yesterday, according toThe Associated Press. Making matters worse, flooding from the storm caused a “domestic wastewater” spill in downtown Houston, where residents were told to boil water before consuming it. A report published in April found that power outages from extreme weather events are rising in the U.S., with Texas being the worst-affected state.

Climate Central

4. Report: Offshore wind capacity won’t meet Biden’s goal

New analysis from the American Clean Power Association found that U.S. offshore wind capacity will fall short of President Biden’s goal of 30 gigawatts by 2030. There are currently 56 GW of capacity under development across 37 leases, the report finds, but just 14 GW will be deployed by 2030. However, things will speed up quickly, and it’ll take just three years for capacity to hit 30 GW in 2033, and another two to hit 40 GW in 2035.

5. Climate change-denying senator James Inhofe dies

Former Republican senator James Inhofe, “the capital’s most vociferous denier of climate change,” died Tuesday at age 89. Inhofe served five terms in the Senate starting in the 1990s before retiring in January last year. He began vocally downplaying scientific evidence of climate change in 2003. His campaigns received generous donations from fossil fuel interests. In 2012, Inhofe authored a book called The Greatest Hoax: How the Global Warming Conspiracy Threatens Your Future. In a 2015 stunt, he brought a snowball into the Senate in an attempt to prove that man-made global warming was not real. He opposed efforts to cap greenhouse gas emissions and once called the Environmental Protection Agency a “Gestapo bureaucracy.” He later went on to play a key role in transforming the EPA under former President Trump.

The late Sen. Inhofe during his 2015 snowball stunt.YouTube/C-SPAN

THE KICKER

Global temperatures seem to be falling slightly now, after more than a year of unrelenting new record monthly highs.

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Economy

AM Briefing: Liberation Day

On trade turbulence, special election results, and HHS cuts

Trump’s ‘Liberation Day’ Tariffs Loom
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

Current conditions: A rare wildfire alert has been issued for London this week due to strong winds and unseasonably high temperatures • Schools are closed on the Greek islands of Mykonos and Paros after a storm caused intense flooding • Nearly 50 million people in the central U.S. are at risk of tornadoes, hail, and historic levels of rain today as a severe weather system barrels across the country.

THE TOP FIVE

1. Trump to roll out broad new tariffs

President Trump today will outline sweeping new tariffs on foreign imports during a “Liberation Day” speech in the White House Rose Garden scheduled for 4 p.m. EST. Details on the levies remain scarce. Trump has floated the idea that they will be “reciprocal” against countries that impose fees on U.S. goods, though the predominant rumor is that he could impose an across-the-board 20% tariff. The tariffs will be in addition to those already announced on Chinese goods, steel and aluminum, energy imports from Canada, and a 25% fee on imported vehicles, the latter of which comes into effect Thursday. “The tariffs are expected to disrupt the global trade in clean technologies, from electric cars to the materials used to build wind turbines,” explained Josh Gabbatiss at Carbon Brief. “And as clean technology becomes more expensive to manufacture in the U.S., other nations – particularly China – are likely to step up to fill in any gaps.” The trade turbulence will also disrupt the U.S. natural gas market, with domestic supply expected to tighten, and utility prices to rise. This could “accelerate the uptake of coal instead of gas, and result in a swell in U.S. power emissions that could accelerate climate change,” Reutersreported.

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Podcast

The Least-Noticed Climate Scandal of the Trump Administration

Rob and Jesse catch up on the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund with former White House official Kristina Costa.

Lee Zeldin.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

The Inflation Reduction Act dedicated $27 billion to build a new kind of climate institution in America — a network of national green banks that could lend money to companies, states, schools, churches, and housing developers to build more clean energy and deploy more next-generation energy technology around the country.

It was an innovative and untested program. And the Trump administration is desperately trying to block it. Since February, Trump’s criminal justice appointees — led by Ed Martin, the interim U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia — have tried to use criminal law to undo the program. After failing to get the FBI and Justice Department to block the flow of funds, Trump officials have successfully gotten the program’s bank partner to freeze relevant money. The new green banks have sued to gain access to the money.

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Adaptation

Funding Cuts Are Killing Small Farmers’ Trust in Climate Policy

That trust was hard won — and it won’t be easily regained.

A barn.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

Spring — as even children know — is the season for planting. But across the country, tens of thousands of farmers who bought seeds with the help of Department of Agriculture grants are hesitating over whether or not to put them in the ground. Their contractually owed payments, processed through programs created under the Biden administration, have been put on pause by the Trump administration, leaving the farmers anxious about how to proceed.

Also anxious are staff at the sustainability and conservation-focused nonprofits that provided technical support and enrollment assistance for these grants, many of whom worry that the USDA grant pause could undermine the trust they’ve carefully built with farmers over years of outreach. Though enrollment in the programs was voluntary, the grants were formulated to serve the Biden administration’s Justice40 priority of investing in underserved and minority communities. Those same communities tend to be wary of collaborating with the USDA due to its history of overlooking small and family farms, which make up 90% of the farms in the U.S. and are more likely to be women- or minority-owned, in favor of large operations, as well as its pattern of disproportionately denying loans to Black farmers. The Biden administration had counted on nonprofits to leverage their relationships with farmers in order to bring them onto the projects.

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Green