You’re out of free articles.
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
Sign In or Create an Account.
By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy
Welcome to Heatmap
Thank you for registering with Heatmap. Climate change is one of the greatest challenges of our lives, a force reshaping our economy, our politics, and our culture. We hope to be your trusted, friendly, and insightful guide to that transformation. Please enjoy your free articles. You can check your profile here .
subscribe to get Unlimited access
Offer for a Heatmap News Unlimited Access subscription; please note that your subscription will renew automatically unless you cancel prior to renewal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period. We will let you know in advance of any price changes. Taxes may apply. Offer terms are subject to change.
Subscribe to get unlimited Access
Hey, you are out of free articles but you are only a few clicks away from full access. Subscribe below and take advantage of our introductory offer.
subscribe to get Unlimited access
Offer for a Heatmap News Unlimited Access subscription; please note that your subscription will renew automatically unless you cancel prior to renewal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period. We will let you know in advance of any price changes. Taxes may apply. Offer terms are subject to change.
Create Your Account
Please Enter Your Password
Forgot your password?
Please enter the email address you use for your account so we can send you a link to reset your password:
And it involves dumping 9,000 tons of fancy sand off the North Carolina coast.
When visitors flock to the beach this summer in Duck, North Carolina, a small, 6-mile long town on the Outer Banks, they may catch a glimpse of a climate experiment happening among the waves.
About 1,500 feet offshore, a company called Vesta will be pouring 9,000 tons of sand into the sea and watching carefully to see what happens next. This finely crushed rock will not be of the typical Outer Banks variety. Instead, it will consist of a mineral called olivine, which should enhance the ocean’s ability to absorb carbon from the atmosphere — and lock it away for thousands of years.
That the experiment can go ahead at all marks a milestone for ocean-based carbon removal, a category of climate solutions that prod the ocean into sucking up more CO2. A big obstacle for the field has been the lack of a legal framework for permitting real-world trials — U.S. laws governing the ocean weren’t written with the prospect of intentionally altering its chemistry to address an existential environmental crisis in mind. But after an 18-month interagency review process, Vesta is now the first company with a federal permit from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to deploy a stand-alone carbon removal test in U.S. waters.
Though 9,000 tons may sound like a lot, this is still a relatively small-scale pilot designed to assess how effective the olivine is in driving carbon removal, as well as observe any other changes in the environment and develop methods for tracking the movement of the sand in the water. These kinds of field trials are essential to establishing which marine carbon removal methods have potential and which don’t.
“We want to measure everything very carefully at this stage and make sure that we are fully understanding the safety profile and the carbon removal data from this project,” Tom Green, Vesta’s CEO, told me. But the company has big aspirations. If things go well, he said, maybe olivine could be used for beach nourishment projects all over the country, where sand is deposited along the shore to address erosion. “Imagine the carbon removal possibilities if we did that with olivine sand,” he said. “We could quickly become the largest technique for permanent carbon removal that's out there.”
Scientists generally agree that stopping global warming this century will require both reducing emissions and taking carbon out of the atmosphere. The sheer size of the ocean and its natural ability to store vast amounts of carbon make it an enticing place to look for solutions.
Dumping thousands of tons of non-native sand into the ocean may not sound like the most convincing option — especially since the ocean is already “experiencing unprecedented destabilizing changes through massive warming, acidification, deoxygenation, and a host of resulting effects,” according to an open letter published last year and signed by hundreds of scientists. However, despite this — or perhaps because of it — the letter called for accelerating research to find out whether any of the proposed ocean-based carbon removal methods, including releasing large quantities of ground olivine, are viable.
Olivine is an abundant mineral with special properties. When it comes into contact with seawater, it drives a chemical reaction that converts CO2 gas into more stable forms of carbon that can’t readily return to the atmosphere. This in turn creates a deficit of CO2 in the surface waters, which triggers the ocean to take up more from the atmosphere in order to maintain equilibrium.
Reactions like this are happening constantly in the ocean already, but on very slow timescales. Vesta’s innovation is to speed up the process by crushing and deploying olivine strategically where the wind and waves can most efficiently weather it away.
The site of an earlier Vesta test project in the Hamptons.Courtesy of Vesta
Olivine could address the harms of CO2 pollution in more ways than one. The ocean already absorbs about 30% of the carbon released into the atmosphere each year, which has made the water more acidic and less hospitable to many of its inhabitants. But when olivine triggers these reactions, it can act as a sort of antacid. This approach to carbon removal is also known as enhancing the ocean’s alkalinity and olivine is just one of a number of different ways to do it. Another company called Planetary is experimenting with adding a different mineral, magnesium hydroxide, to the ocean. Ebb Carbon, on the other hand, is sucking up seawater and running it through a membrane to increase its alkalinity, before returning it to the tides.
Both already have field trials up and running, but instead of trying to conduct stand-alone experiments in the open ocean they’ve hitched onto existing ocean dumping permits. Ebb, for example, has set up at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory’s facility in Sequim, Washington, where it is releasing treated seawater into wastewater that flows into the bay. Similarly, Planetary is conducting pilot projects at the wastewater outflows of a water treatment facility and power plant in Canada. Other ocean carbon removal companies, such as Los Angeles-based Captura, have opted to move abroad for their early projects and avoid the U.S. permitting puzzle altogether.
Vesta went to Duck because it is among the most studied stretches of coastline in the country. The town is home to an Army Corps coastal field research center known for its long-term data set on the surrounding waters. “Few locations on the globe provide a better archive of wave, water, bathymetry and other forces that shape nearshore conditions,” according to the Army Corps’ website. (“Bathymetry” is the topography of the seafloor.) That means Vesta will be able to get a more accurate picture of any changes the olivine is responsible for.
When Drew Havens, the town manager in Duck, first heard about Vesta’s plans, he was skeptical. “You're dumping something into the ocean, people automatically go to, well, is it going to harm humans? Is it going to be harmful to wildlife or other living organisms?” he told me.
Though some in the town are still nervous, Havens said he has become more comfortable with the idea as the project has been rigorously reviewed by environmental protection regulators at the federal and state level. Vesta’s scientists also engaged with the town council, did an open house for members of the public, and have generally invited questions and open dialogue.
Just because regulators have determined that the risks of this pilot project are low, however, doesn’t mean using olivine for carbon removal is risk-free. For one, the rock has to be mined — in this case, from a quarry in Norway, although it is also found in the U.S. — and transported to the project site. That’s likely to produce some environmental impacts, though the company estimates that the project will ultimately remove about 10 times more CO2 from the atmosphere than the emissions associated with running the experiment, including the mining and shipping of olivine.
But the biggest risk with mined olivine is that it contains nickel, said Jaime Palter, an associate professor of oceanography at the University of Rhode Island who has no affiliation with Vesta. Nickel can act as both a nutrient and a toxin for phytoplankton, she told me, so it's important to study whether putting olivine in the ocean will result in adverse effects.
Vesta has been closely examining that possibility. In fact, the project in Duck will be the company’s second U.S. field trial. In the summer of 2022, Vesta got permission from the town of Southampton in Long Island to spread olivine on the beach as part of a larger sand replenishment project that was already in the works. Vesta’s scientists worked with local academic partners at Cornell, SUNY Stony Brook, and Hamilton College to do extensive monitoring both before and after the sand was placed, collecting data on more than 20 indicators of the effects on the water, sediment, and ecology.
The company has since published two annual reports on the project. It is still awaiting analysis of many of the samples, but so far, the results have been promising, Green said. There has been no sign of trace metal accumulation in Eastern Oysters, a species known to accumulate pollutants from their environment, for instance. There was also no significant difference in water quality between control areas and the sites with olivine, and trace metal concentrations were below the relevant EPA water quality guidelines. The area’s benthic macrofauna — critters like clams and small crustaceans that live on or near the seafloor — were as abundant and various as before.
Notably, the tests also showed evidence of an increase in alkalinity in the waters of the olivine-treated area, which is the key reaction that leads to carbon removal. But Green said there’s more work to be done in terms of calculating where and when removal may have happened.
There’s also more work to be done to understand the effects of olivine in different environments, which brings us back to Duck. There, it will be deposited in 25-foot deep water instead of on the beach, helping Vesta to further refine its data and measurement methods. The plan is to continue testing and collecting data at the site for at least two years. The company declined to comment on the budget for the project. Vesta is funded primarily by venture capital investors but also raises money for research through an affiliated nonprofit.
Vesta may have been the first to get a federal permit to run a marine carbon removal test, but it definitely won’t be the last. Nikhil Neelakantan, a senior project manager at Ocean Visions, which is a nonprofit that advocates for ocean-based climate solutions, told me there are a number of other domestic projects in the pipeline, including more than a dozen government-funded research projects. The White House also recently set up a marine carbon removal fast track action committee with the mandate to create recommendations for policy, permitting, and regulatory standards for both research and implementation.
Neelakantan said there is work to do on clarifying the role of different agencies in regulating ocean carbon removal, and which laws apply to each method.
“This is an early first step, and it's exciting to see that it's finally going to come to fruition,” he said, of Vesta’s project in Duck. “I think there's momentum with this federal task force. It's going to be the first of many others that will happen soon.”
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
“You can’t just divest from the eco-right after the election,” contends Johannes Ackva of Founder Pledge.
Johannes Ackva likes a contrarian bet. Back in 2020, when he launched the climate program at Founders Pledge, a nonprofit that connects entrepreneurs to philanthropic causes, he sought out “surgical interventions” to support technologies that didn’t already enjoy the widespread popularity of wind turbines and solar panels, such as advanced nuclear reactors and direct air carbon capture.
By late 2023, however, the Biden administration’s legislative sweep was directing billions to the very range of technologies Ackva previously saw as neglected. So he turned his attention to shoring up those political wins.
The modern climate movement came into its own demanding that the world stop shrinking from inconvenient truths. But as polls increasingly showed the 2024 election trending toward Republicans, Ackva saw few funders propping up advocates with any influence over the GOP. Founders Pledge pumped millions into Deploy/US, a climate group where former Republican Representative Carlos Curbelo of Florida served as the top adviser, which then distributed the money to upward of 30 right-leaning climate groups, including the American Conservation Coalition and the Evangelical Environmental Network.
The bipartisan gamble paid off. In April 2024, Founders Pledge received an anonymous $40 million donation to bolster its efforts. Now an anonymous donor has granted Founders Pledge’s climate fund another $50 million, Heatmap has learned.
Founders Pledge declined to say whether the money came from the same unnamed source or separate donors. But the influx of funding has “radically transformed our ability to make large grants,” Ackva told me, noting that the budget before 2024 came out to about $10 million per year.
“The word exponential is overused,” he said. “But that’s roughly the trajectory.”
Amid the so-called green freeze that followed the Trump administration’s rollback of climate funding, Founders Pledge has joined other climate philanthropies in stepping in to back projects that have lost money. When Breakthrough Energy shuttered its climate program in March, Founders Pledge gave $3.5 million to serve as the primary funding for the launch of the Innovation Initiative, started by former staff from the Bill Gates-backed nonprofit.
Ackva said his organization is looking to invest in climate efforts across the political spectrum. But Founders Pledge’s focus on right-of-center groups wasn’t an election-year gimmick.
“You can’t just divest from the eco-right after the election,” he said. “That’s not an authentic way to build a civil society ecosystem.”
As Republicans in Congress proceed with their gutting of green funding, including through Trump’s One Big, Beautiful Bill Act, Ackva said it’s too soon to say whether the political strategy is paying off.
“If you think of grantmaking as making bets, some bets exceed others sooner, but that doesn’t make them bad bets,” Ackva told me. “Ultimately, philanthropy cannot define how a given policy goes. You can adjust the probabilities, maybe level the bets. But obviously it’s larger forces at play that shape how the One Big, Beautiful Bill gets made.”
The Senate may save or even expand parts of the IRA that support baseload power, e.g. nuclear and geothermal. But regardless, Ackva said, climate advocates are making a mistake training their focus so intently on the fate of this one law.
“It’s kind of the only thing that’s being discussed,” he said.
Meanwhile the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, better known as the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, is set for reauthorization next fall. The Energy Act of 2020 is slated for renewal this year. And funding for the Department of Energy is up for debate as the White House now pushes to expand the Loan Programs Office’s lending authority for nuclear projects by $750 million.
“Those are things we would see as at least as important as the Inflation Reduction Act,” Ackva said.
Given those deadlines, Ackva said he expected other donors to press advocates for plans last year on how to sway Republicans toward more ambitious bills this Congress. But after former Vice President Kamala Harris took over the Democratic ticket last year, he said he’d heard from his grantees “that they were asked what they were going to do with a Harris trifecta.”
“Everyone was betting on Harris to win,” he said. “There’s a very strong ideological lean among climate funders to a degree that was frankly a little bit shocking.”
The partisan divide over climate wasn’t always so pronounced. In 2008, the Republican presidential nominee, John McCain, ran on a more ambitious decarbonization platform than what President Barack Obama proposed in the White House.
There are dueling — though not mutually exclusive — narratives about how the American climate movement over-indexed on one side of the political spectrum. Both stories start in 2010.
The version liberals and leftists will find familiar is one that blames fossil fuel megadonors such as Charles and David Koch for aggressively promoting climate denial among Republican lawmakers.
The version told by Ted Nordhaus, the founder of the Breakthrough Institute think tank where Ackva got his start years before joining Founders Pledge, starts with the failure of the Obama-era cap-and-trade bill to pass through Congress.
When the legislation “went up in flames in 2010,” Nordhaus told me, a bunch of environmental philanthropies hired Harvard professor Theda Skocpol to author a 145-page report on what triggered the blaze.
“The report concluded that the problem is we were too focused on the technocratic, inside-the-Beltway stuff,” Nordhaus summarized. “We needed to build political power so the next time there’s an opportunity to do big climate policy, we would have the political power to put a price on carbon.”
Out of that finding came what Nordhaus called the “two-pronged, boots-on-the-ground” era of the movement, which backed college campus campaigns to divest from fossil fuels and also efforts to prevent new fossil fuel infrastructure such as the Keystone XL pipeline.
Reasonable people could debate the fiduciary merits of scrapping investments in natural gas companies or the value of blocking oil infrastructure whose cancellation spurred more shipments of crude on rail lines that face higher risk of a spill or explosion than pipelines. But once supporting fossil fuel divestment or opposing pipelines became the key litmus tests activists used to determine if a Democrat running for office took climate change seriously, the issue became more ideological.
“That made it impossible for any Democrat to become a moderate on climate, and made it impossible for any Republican to be a moderate on climate,” Nordhaus said. “The Republican Party has its own craziness and radicalism, but a bunch of that is negative polarization.”
To fund an effective “climate right,” Nordhaus said, Founders Pledge should seek out groups that don’t explicitly focus on the climate or environment at all.
“I’d be looking at which groups are all-in on U.S. natural gas, which has been the biggest driver of decarbonization in the U.S. over the last 15 years; which groups are all in and really doing work on nuclear; and which groups are doing work on permitting reform,” Nordhaus said. “That’s how you’re going to make progress with Republicans.”
I asked Ackva where the line would be for funding an eco right. Would Founders Pledge back groups that — like some green-leaning elements of Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s party or allies of France’s Marine Le Pen — support draconian restrictions on immigration in the name of reducing national emissions from the increased population?
“That would not be appropriate,” Ackva told me. “When we say we’re funding the eco right, like when we’re funding groups on the left or in the center, the things they are proposing don’t need to be exactly the things we will be prioritizing, but they need to be plausible, high-impact solutions.”
To Emmet Penney, a senior fellow focused on energy at the right-leaning Foundation for American Innovation, it’s an obvious play. The green left that has long dominated climate policy debates “is premised on aggressive permitting and environmental law that makes it impossible to actually build anything useful toward addressing the things they’re most afraid of.”
“It’s become clear to anyone who wants to build anything that what the environmental left has to offer simply doesn't work,” he told me. “Naturally, more centrist organizations who might not even otherwise be slated as right-wing now look that way and are becoming increasingly attractive to people who are interested in building.”
On Senate committees, a public lands selloff, and energy investment
Current conditions: Southern New England will experience its hottest day of the year so far today, with temperatures around 90 degrees Fahrenheit • Record levels of Sargassum seaweed are overwhelming Caribbean resorts • Saharan dust has spread across most of Florida and will continue over the coastal Southeast through this weekend.
1. The Senate’s first pass at IRA repeal cuts huge climate programs ...
On Wednesday evening, Republicans on the Senate’s Environment and Public Works Committee released their section of President Trump’s “One Big, Beautiful” budget reconciliation bill. “At least so far, it’s hardly deviating from the stark cuts to the Inflation Reduction Act that have already passed the House,” my colleague Emily Pontecorvo wrote in her analysis of the contents — although there is one Environmental Protection Agency grant program, for reducing pollution at ports, that had been targeted in by the House bill and is absent from the Environment and Public Works Committee’s text. As in the House bill, the latest text eliminates the $27 billion Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, which the Trump administration has sought to kill with accusations of fraud, though it has yet to produce any evidence of impropriety.
Elsewhere in the Senate, however, some Republicans appear more friendly toward preserving at least some IRA tax credits. “I would be in the camp that doesn’t think we need [to do] a full repeal and instead can live with a circumscribed, narrower version of the existing IRA credits,” Senator Todd Young of Indiana, a member of the Finance Committee, said, as reported by Axios. Senator John Curtis of Utah published an op-ed in Deseret News on Wednesday in which he argued that “the right policy solution must navigate tax credits and regulatory reform in what I believe is central to America’s economic future, the planet and our national security: energy.”
2. … and a public lands sell-off is back on the table
Senate Republicans are reviving a plan to sell off public lands to fund President Trump’s tax cuts after their colleagues in the House thwarted a similar proposal, Senator Mike Lee of Utah told reporters on Wednesday. According to the senator, a new version of the plan will be included in the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources’s pass at the bill, which will likely be made public on Monday, Bloomberg reports.
Representative Ryan Zinke of Montana helped lead the charge to kill the earlier version of the proposal in the House, although Lee added that his version would exempt Montana. Still — as I’ve reported — the plan would jeopardize as much as 500,000 acres of public land across Utah and Nevada alone. “These are the places people recreate with their families, they are places to hunt and fish, and they are held in trust for the American people to enjoy for generations to come,” Travis Hammill, the D.C. director for the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, said in a statement.
3. 2025 will be a banner year for energy investment, despite economic turbulence: IEA
Despite tariffs, trade wars, and economic uncertainty, the International Energy Agency anticipates a record $3.3 trillion investment in global energy in 2025, per a new report released Thursday. That represents a 2% rise from 2024. “The fast-evolving economic and trade picture means that some investors are adopting a wait-and-see approach to new energy project approvals, but in most areas we have yet to see significant implications for existing projects,” IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol said in a statement about the findings.
Around $2.2 trillion of the total global investment is “going collectively to renewables, nuclear, grids, storage, low-emissions fuels, efficiency, and electrification, twice as much as the $1.1 trillion going to oil, natural gas, and coal,” the report says. Solar specifically is booming, with a forecast of $450 billion in investment by 2025. The overall picture represents an enormous reversal from a decade ago, when fossil fuel investments were 30% higher than electricity generation, grids, and storage. That said, the research also found that investment in grids — at around $400 billion per year — is “failing to keep pace with spending on generation and electrification,” mainly because of “lengthy permitting procedures and tight supply chains for transformers and cables.” Read the full report here.
4. UK solar is having a record year due to unusually sunny spring
Carbon BriefSolar farms in the United Kingdom generated more electricity than ever before in the first five months of the year, according to a newly released accounting by Carbon Brief. The surge in solar energy was 42% higher than over the same period last year, growing from 5.4 terawatt-hours of electricity generated to a record 7.6 terawatt-hours. Carbon Brief credited the record output to the nation’s sunniest spring on record, although the publication notes it was also “aided by rising capacity, which reached 20.2GW in 2024, up by 2.3GW from 17.9GW a year earlier.” You can read the full report here.
5. ‘Atmospheric thirst’ is making droughts more severe: study
While extreme heat almost always has a climate change signal, the same cannot be said for droughts, which have different causes and feedback mechanisms that researchers are still working to understand. A new study published Wednesday in Nature has found that atmospheric evaporative demand — that is, the complex process of water evaporation into the atmosphere, also called “atmospheric thirst” — has increased drought severity by an average of 40%. Over the five years from 2018 to 2022, areas in drought have expanded 74% on average compared to the 1981 to 2017 period, with atmospheric evaporative demand “contributing to 58% of this increase,” the report further found. “We were very much shocked when we saw the results,” Solomon Gebrechorkos, a hydroclimatologist at the University of Oxford and lead author of the study, told The New York Times.
“A large majority of new residential houses and buildings in Germany feature a heat pump as their main heating system,” according to government numbers reported by Clean Energy Wire. “The climate-friendly heating technology was installed in more than two-thirds (69.4%) of the 76,100 homes finished in 2024, a 5% increase compared to 2023.”
The Environment and Public Works Committee largely preserved the cuts made by the House, with one odd exception.
The Senate GOP began working through Trump’s “One Big, Beautiful” budget reconciliation bill this week, and at least so far, it’s hardly deviating from the stark cuts to the Inflation Reduction Act that have already passed the House.
Republicans on the Environment and Public Works Committee released their section of the bill on Wednesday evening, and it retains many of the policy repeals and funding rescissions that were in the House version.
To be clear, it does not touch the IRA’s clean energy tax credits, the most controversial climate-related parts of the package. Their fate will be up to the Senate Finance Committee, which is not expected to release text for its section of the bill until at least next week. There has been no indication that Republicans in the upper chamber intend to fight for any of the myriad grant programs the IRA created.
Still, I’m looking closely to see if some of it might yet be saved. For example, there is, oddly, one Environmental Protection Agency grant program targeted by the House bill that is absent from this first text from the Environment and Public Works Committee: $3 billion to reduce air pollution at ports.
Here’s what is in the text.
The text published Wednesday would repeal and rescind funding for more than two dozen programs, most of which are administered by the EPA, the Department of Transportation, and the General Services Administration. The Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, the now-infamous lending program for clean energy projects targeted by EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin as a wasteful, fraudulent scheme perpetrated by the Biden administration, is still on the out list. Same goes for funding for oil and gas producers to reduce their methane emissions, plus a related fee that would be levied on operators who did not reduce methane leakage below a certain threshold.
The full list of cuts:
The text would also rescind two new pots of money that were not touched by the House bill — funding for Endangered Species Act recovery plans, strategies developed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to help threatened species thrive again, and general funding for the White House Council on Environmental Quality to train staff, do environmental reviews, and improve stakeholder and community engagement.
Like the House bill, the Senate committee’s text includes instructions to repeal the latest update to the nation’s tailpipe emissions standards for cars. The regulations are required under the Clean Air Act and were strengthened under the Biden administration for model years 2027 through 2032, requiring automakers to sell an increasing proportion of electric vehicles over time.
It would not, however, repeal the latest Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards (also known as the CAFE standards), which regulate how far a vehicle must be able to travel on a gallon of fuel and were targeted by the House bill.
This provision is one I’ll be watching closely, as Democrats are likely to challenge its inclusion. If Republicans want to pass the budget bill with a simple majority, they can only include policies that affect the federal budget, and as the Environmental Defense Fund told me, these standards are “regulations, not budgetary provisions.”
The text proposes the same pay-to-play permitting scheme that was in the House bill and would allow energy infrastructure developers to pay for expedited permitting. Like the House bill, it also asserts that environmental assessments made under this program “shall not be subject to judicial review.”
Coming up, we’ll be on the lookout for a text from the Energy and Natural Resources committee, which will reveal whether Senate Republicans have any interest in saving the Department of Energy’s loan guarantee program, administered by the Loan Programs Office, which provides essential support for the nuclear industry.