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What happens when Stanford tackles sustainability.
Backed by a whopping $1.69 billion endowment, Stanford’s Doerr School of Sustainability — its first new school in more than 70 years — opened its doors two years ago, and what else came along with it but a new sustainability-focused accelerator specifically for the Stanford community. Seeking to move research out of the lab and into the real world, the Sustainability Accelerator provides early stage funding and a deep network of university-affiliated support to its grantees.
Now that the accelerator has staffed up, gathered insights from its first funding cohort, and given more structure to what is still a very flexibly organized program, I wanted to know more.
The basic concept sounded very Stanford-y indeed — gobs of money, a hugely valuable network, entrepreneurial vibes out the wazoo. But that’s nothing new. When I was at Stanford as an undergrad over a decade ago, The New Yorker’s Nicholas Thompson, now the CEO of the Atlantic (and a fellow Stanford alumnus), quipped that the school had come to resemble “a giant tech incubator with a football team.” This was in the early days of Snapchat and around the time when over a dozen computer science students dropped out to work on the Venmo-wannabe Clinkle, which went up in smoke soon after. Concerns about the university’s deep ties to Silicon Valley and the preponderance of potentially pointless startups coming out of it coexisted with plaudits poured on alumni founders with started-in-a-garage-now-we’re-here type stories.
I thought it was all a bit much. But now there’s a sustainability accelerator, and man, does that sound like something we could all get behind. So I talked with the accelerator’s faculty director, Yi Cui, and managing director, Jeff Brown, about the accelerator’s goals, what sets it apart from the infinite other funding avenues in Silicon Valley, and how they go about deciding what concepts have the potential for widespread adoption, either in the commercial or the policy space.
Brown himself is a Stanford alum with a deep background as a Silicon Valley engineer and founder — in other words, he can talk the talk as well as he walks the walk. Prior to his current role at the sustainability accelerator, he was founder and CEO of Novvi, which makes plant-based oils for use in the lubricants industry. He told me that one of the primary elements that sets Stanford’s accelerator apart from other incubators or venture capital funds is that it’s not just focused on technical solutions to climate and sustainability problems.
“There’s a lot of challenges beyond technology,” Brown told me. “This is market development, this is frameworks that need to be globally aligned, this is policy that leads to new legislation in a global scenario. And so at the accelerator, we’re thinking about these things at that scale, and working in a very interdisciplinary manner across all those spaces.”
Thirty-one projects were selected to join the accelerator’s initial cohort in the summer of 2022, their teams generally comprised of researchers with deep subject area expertise — mostly professors partnering with other professors, faculty members or postdocs. Topics spanned the gamut from highly technical ideas like electrifying steam cracking reactors for industrial chemical production to policy projects such as reforming California’s approach to wildfire management or partnering with stakeholders to support the energy transition in Southeast Asia.
“We are interested in water, food. We are interested in climate adaptation,” Cui, a Stanford professor in both the Materials Science & Engineering department as well as the Energy Science & Engineering Department, told me. “We are also interested in new approaches that could be highly scalable for sustainability — for example, synthetic biology.” He also cited grid decarbonization and industrial decarbonization as focus areas.
And yet Brown also told me it’s vital that all teams, even policy-focused ones, demonstrate that they have potential backers outside the Stanford bubble. For legislative solutions, “you have to go out into the community and find that people agree and are willing to adopt that and move forward with you.” And for technical solutions, Brown said, “you've got to show that customers are willing to receive it, and there are other funding sources that buy into that, as you're going to need increasing capital to scale.”
For the accelerator’s first cohort, projects were organized into one of three categories based on their level of maturity — planning, mid-range, and large-scale, which dictated the amount of funding they were eligible to receive. Brown didn’t want to disclose how much money Stanford is pouring into these projects (although he did say they have a “large budget” to work with) but a 2022 request for proposals indicates that Level 1 projects could secure up to $100,000, Level 2 up to $400,000, and Level 3 up to $1,000,000. It also noted that project teams can specify their own timelines, ranging from three months up to a year, with the option for follow-on funding based on a project’s progress.
Going forward, cohorts will be organized around particular climate themes, a.k.a. “flagship destinations,” which will include key metrics for scalability and speed. The first focus area for the 2024 group is greenhouse gas removal, for which 16 projects were chosen based on their potential to remove a gigaton (that’s a billion tons, folks) of greenhouse gas from the atmosphere by 2050, either by technical or policy means. Examples include transforming rocks and mining waste into efficient CO2 sponges, and developing a monitoring, reporting, and verification framework for ocean-based carbon removal.
Brown emphasized the importance of MRV particularly, the Achilles’ heel of many well-intentioned carbon removal efforts. Reforestation, for example, “is not a technology problem,” he told me. “It's a framework problem around the MRV challenge, and getting the legislation in place, and getting community alignment around the world on how to execute this properly.”
Some in the Stanford community worry, however, that the choice of greenhouse gas removal as a focus area was influenced by the university’s fossil fuel connections, as big oil and gas companies often tout carbon capture as a solution that would allow them to continue producing fossil fuels. The Doerr School does accept research funding from fossil fuel companies, and three years ago, Stanford’s Precourt Institute for Energy collaborated with Shell, ExxonMobil, and TotalEnergies to host a workshop on carbon management. The Doerr School itself cited the meeting as one of two events that led to the focus on greenhouse gas removal.
Cui, though, has downplayed the meeting’s influence on the accelerator. In an interview with the Stanford Daily, he said that “greenhouse gas removal has always been incredibly important to everybody. It’s not because of the workshop.” It’s one of a few key climate solutions he always brings up in his talks, he added. “So it wasn’t hard at all to get to the point and say this should be the first flagship destination.”
In an effort to build the right internal partnerships, the accelerator is launching a postdoc fellowship program, in which entrepreneurial fellows will team up with faculty members to work on projects that align with flagship destinations. The inaugural class should be announced by the end of July. Cui told me the accelerator staff is also contemplating an entrepreneur-in-residence type of program and finding ways to deepen connections with the Stanford Graduate School of Business, which has already partnered with the Doerr School for its ecopreneurship programs.
The point, of course, is to leverage the full weight of the Stanford network, giving project teams access to the entrepreneurial expertise of Silicon Valley as well as the interdisciplinary skillset among the university’s different schools and departments. It’s a much higher-touch experience than teams would get at other incubators or accelerators, Cui told me.
“We actually build an ecosystem,” he explained. “We provide coaching if it [a project] needs coaching. If it needs outside partners and connections, we build that in, we help the team to do that. And if the team doesn't have an entrepreneur type of person, we might hire a person to work with the team.”
And given the university’s reputation as, well, a tech incubator with a (now bad, I hear) football team, Cui stressed that there’s a surprising amount of promising research that never sees the light of day. “There are many technologies, many solutions actually developed in Stanford faculty’s lab — they don't come out, you're not even aware of them,” he told me. But their potential in the sustainability space could be huge, Cui said. “The accelerator’s function is super important to further grow and amplify the entrepreneurial spirit on Stanford campus, and also orient the faculty into working on scalable ideas.”
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On boasts and brags, clean power installations, and dirty air
Current conditions: Strong winds helped spark dozens of fires across parched Texas • India’s Himalayan state of Uttarakhand experienced a 600% rise in precipitation over 24 hours, which triggered a deadly avalanche • The world’s biggest iceberg, which has been drifting across the Southern Ocean for 5 years, has run aground.
President Trump addressed Congress last night in a wide-ranging speech boasting about the actions taken during his first five weeks in office. There were some familiar themes: He claimed to have “ended all of [former President] Biden’s environmental restrictions” (false) and the “insane electric vehicle mandate” (also false — no such thing has ever existed), and bragged about withdrawing from the Paris climate agreement (true). He also doubled down on his plan to boost U.S. fossil fuel production while spouting false statements about the Biden administration’s energy policies, and suggested that Japan and South Korea want to team up with the U.S. to build a “gigantic” natural gas pipeline in Alaska.
On the same day as the speech, new tariffs on imports from Canada, Mexico, and China came into effect, triggering retaliatory duties and causing stock markets to plunge. Experts are busy trying to figure out what it all means for American businesses and consumers. As Heatmap’s Robinson Meyer explained, the tariffs are likely to make electricity prices go up, raise construction costs, make gas more expensive at the pump, and make new cars costlier. Fossil fuel firms aren’t thrilled. The American Gas Association said the 10% tariff on Canadian natural gas “indicates potential impacts totaling at least $1.1 billion in additional costs to American consumers per year.” Chet Thompson, CEO of the American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers, said that “imposing tariffs on energy, refined products, and petrochemical imports will not make us more energy secure or lower costs for consumers.”
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick has implied Trump might lift these tariffs as soon as today, but TBD.
The Trump administration has ended a program that monitored the air quality at more than 80 U.S. embassies and consulates around the world, citing “budget constraints.” The program started in 2008 with the U.S. embassy in Beijing and expanded from there. The data collected, which was posted on the AirNow website, has been used in academic studies and credited with helping reduce pollution levels in the host countries, leading to better health outcomes. This move “puts the health of foreign service officers at risk” and could hinder research and policy, Dan Westervelt, a research professor at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, toldThe New York Times.
Clean power installations soared in the fourth quarter of 2024, sending total operational capacity above and beyond the 300 gigawatt mark, according to a new report from the American Clean Power Association. “It took more than 20 years for the U.S. to install the first 100 GW of clean power, five years to install the next 100 GW, and three years to install the most recent 100 GW,” the report says. Here are some takeaways:
ACPA
China plans to ramp up its efforts to rein in emissions, expanding its emissions trading system beyond power plants to to include industries such as steel, aluminum, and cement, Premier Li Qiang said in a report this week. “Li also confirmed China intends to continue to play a key role in diplomacy on emissions reduction, as the U.S. retreats from international cooperation,” Bloombergreported. The country plans to roll out major climate projects such as offshore wind farms, “new energy bases” across its deserts, with a goal of reaching peak emissions before 2030. China is the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases, and while it has been rapidly expanding renewable power generation, it also struggles to wean itself off coal.
The Supreme Court yesterday watered down the Environmental Protection Agency’s authority to regulate water pollution, siding with the city of San Francisco in an unusual lawsuit pitting the liberal hub against the environmental authority. In a 5-4 decision, the justices said the agency had overstepped its authority under the Clean Water Act when it issued permitting for a San Francisco wastewater treatment plant that empties into the Pacific. The permit included provisions that would have made San Francisco authorities responsible for ensuring the water quality in the Pacific met EPA standards. Justice Samuel Alito essentially wrote that the permitting rules were too vague. “When a permit contains such requirements, a permittee that punctiliously follows every specific requirement in its permit may nevertheless face crushing penalties if the quality of the water in its receiving waters falls below the applicable standards,” Alito wrote. The ruling will make it harder for the EPA to limit water pollution. Next up on the SCOTUS docket: nuclear waste!
Bernard Looney, the former CEO of oil giant BP, is the new boss of an AI startup that tells businesses how to cut their emissions.
A conversation with Resources for the Future’s David Wear on the fires in the Carolinas and how the political environment could affect the future of forecasting.
The Wikipedia article for “wildfire” has 22 photographs, including those of incidents in Arizona, Utah, Washington, and California. But there is not a single picture of a fire in the American Southeast, despite researchers warning that the lower righthand quadrant of the country will face a “perfect storm” of fire conditions over the next 50 years.
In what is perhaps a grim premonition of what is to come, several major fires are burning across the Southeast now — including the nearly 600-acre Melrose Fire in Polk County, North Carolina, a little over 80 miles to the west of Charlotte, and the more than 2,000-acre Carolina Forest fire in Horry County, South Carolina. The region is also battling hundreds of smaller brush fires, the smoke from which David Wear — the land use, forestry, and agriculture program director at Resources for the Future — could see out his Raleigh-area window.
Wear is also the co-author of a study by RFF and the U.S. Forest Service that came out in late 2024 and singled out the Southeast as facing a “particularly worrisome” rise in wildfire risk over the next half-century. I spoke with him this week to learn more about why the Carolinas are burning and what the future of fire looks like for the region. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
When discussing fires in the American West, we often talk about how historic suppression efforts are responsible for the megafires we see today. What was the historic fire regime like in the Southeast? What’s going on to make it a hot spot for wildfires?
First, there are the similarities. Both Western and Southeastern forests, especially pine forests, are fire-adapted systems; they need regular fires to maintain health. Anything that takes those forests out of balance is a problem, and fire suppression is an issue in the East and the West, and especially in the Southeast. But forests in the Southeast are the most heavily managed forests in the country — perhaps in the world. In many cases, they’re regularly burned; the South does more prescribed burning than the rest of the country combined. It’s a very, very common practice in this part of the world.
So we shouldn’t be surprised that there is fire in Southeastern forests. There have been big, episodic fires in the South, though they’re not as common. There was the fire in 2016 in East Tennessee, from the Smokies into Gatlinburg, with a number of fatalities and lots of structures damaged or destroyed. There have been big fire years in east and west Texas. And there have been big fire seasons in Florida, though it’s been a while.
How is population growth in the Southeast adding to the strain?
We’re accustomed to talking about the wildland-urban interface in the West, but it’s also a big issue in the Southeast. Some of our urban growth centers in the Southeast include the Raleigh-Durham area, where I live, and Atlanta, Nashville, and Florida. These are generally flat landscapes, as well as very heavily forested landscapes. As the population grows out of the city centers, they go into pine and mixed-pine hardwood forests that are fire-adapted ecosystems. Then you have interspersed communities with forest vegetation, and that’s a big issue.
I also read in your report that much of that land is privately owned, which makes management tricky.
Private ownership is about 89% of forests in the South. [Editor’s note: By comparison, only about a third of forests in the West are privately owned.] Even where you have public ownership, a lot of that is by the Department of Defense and concentrated in a couple of different areas in the Ozarks and southern Appalachians. Much of the landscape in the coastal plain and Piedmont — which is most of the South — is predominantly private ownership.
There’s a distinction to be made between commercial owners, like timber investment management companies or real estate investment trusts, who actively manage landscapes. With timber harvesting, there are a lot of risk mitigation activities and a lot of prescribed burning. But then you have over a million non-industrial private landowners with small holdings. If you’re trying to coordinate any kind of wildfire mitigation scheme using fuel treatments and the like, it requires some work.
Horry County, South Carolina, and Polk County, North Carolina, were not part of your paper’s list of counties vulnerable to wildfire. I’m curious if you think what we’re seeing now says something about the limits of the study and the data you had available, or if you have another takeaway about what’s going on.
Importantly, our study looked at long-term averages. Throughout the South, there is a fire regime, and in any given year, it is possible to have wildfires of consequence. I would point out that we were especially concerned this year because Hurricane Helene laid down an awful lot of trees and created a fuel load.
We’re also entering one of the two fire seasons in the South. Wildfire is most predominant in the spring and in the fall; it’s at those times when temperatures begin to rise but humidity remains low, and there are extended dry periods that allow the fuels to dry out. You have warm temperatures and wind in the spring, setting the stage for wildfire. Typically, that window will begin to close at the end of April because it’s pretty darn humid in the South at that point, and it’s much less likely that fuels will get dry enough to carry a fire.
The same thing happens in the fall: Temperatures may remain high, and if we don’t have a lot of precipitation and humidity — usually in October and into November — then you have the conditions right for fire. But as the climate shifts, we see the length of those seasons growing to the point where the fall is approaching the spring. Wildfires in January and February indicate that these two seasons are growing toward one another and providing a much longer season. Our paper showed that, when you account for climate change across all of those global climate models and representative concentration pathways, the windows for more wildfire activity and more intense wildfire activity are expanding.
Your paper cited wildfire risks across the Sun Belt. Today, the National Weather Service is warning of “potentially historic” fire conditions in central Texas. Can local emergency managers use your modeling to prepare for such situations?
Things like the year-to-year fire projections and the day-to-day forecasts best serve local emergency managers. Wildfire in the South is determined by the drying of fuels and temperature and humidity conditions, which vary daily. If we look over the last week, Saturday was beautiful in the Carolinas. It was sunny, in the 70s, dry, and a little windy. That was the day [hundreds of] fires started across the Southeast. And the next day, there were very few new fires. Mid-week projections of wildfire potential in the Southeast show that it’s really low, with the exception of Texas. It changes day to day, driven by fine-grain weather forecasts, and that gives emergency managers some insight into where they might want to pre-position crews or do pre-suppression activities.
What we’re doing with the modeling is asking, What is this going to look like in 50 years? The takeaway is that wildfire activity is going to remain strong and perhaps grow in the West, but the big structural change is really strong growth and active fire in the Southeast, where you have wildfire and wildlands proximal to millions of people and more vulnerable communities. It’s a fire regime that’s going to affect more people.
I also wanted to ask about the USDA Forest Service’s contributions to your paper. Do you think research like this could still happen today, given the Trump administration’s efforts to eliminate anything climate-related from the federal agenda?
I came to Resources for the Future six years ago after a long career with the Forest Service, so it’s hard for me to remain a dispassionate scientist here. I think we need to see how the dust settles. It’s hard to imagine a future where the agency and federal government do not have a high level of concern regarding fire — and I don’t think you can do any kind of effective planning, or thinking about the future, or targeting of activities without understanding how climate is likely to impact these disturbance regimes.
I don’t have the crystal ball that many people are seeking right now. We’ll have to wait to see. But our research demonstrates the vital role of understanding climate dynamics, and it shows how critical weather forecasts are for people with boots on the ground who are trying to stay ahead of disaster.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to reflect that about a third of land in the West is privately owned, not publicly owned.
Rob and Jesse visit Intersolar and Energy Storage North America.
Longtime listeners of Shift Key will recognize the name Intersolar and Energy Storage North America, one of the country’s premier solar industry conferences. Shift Key was live at this year’s event, hosting a panel on the present and future of the solar industry featuring a pair of marquee panelists: Tom Starrs, currently the vice president for government and public affairs at EDP Renewables, North America, who has more than 30 years of experience in the renewables industry; and Maria Robinson, until recently the director of the Department of Energy’s Grid Deployment Office and now the president and CEO of the Interstate Renewable Energy Council. (Robinson is also a repeat Shift Key guest.)
On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Rob and Jesse talk with the panelists about the momentum propelling solar energy forward in the U.S. and whether the uncertainty created by the Trump administration could put a damper on that. Shift Key is hosted by Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University, and Robinson Meyer, Heatmap’s executive editor.
Subscribe to “Shift Key” and find this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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Here is an excerpt from our conversation:
Maria Robinson: I actually want to go back to the permitting piece because I think this is directly related to the conversation. I suspect everyone here has tried to permit at some point in time on federal lands and found that to be an incredibly overwhelming experience, right? When we talk about this — and my new bugaboo, for the rest of my life, is we cannot call it NEPA anymore. It is not just NEPA. It is also the Fish and Wildlife Section 7 piece, it is also working with your state historical preservation offices. There are so many other pieces than just NEPA that some of these energy permitting reform bills do not, will not actually solve some of the issues that folks are looking at.
Jesse Jenkins: They’re too narrow, yeah.
Robinson: They’re just far too narrow, associated with that. And I think that was one of the things that I was not allowed to say like four weeks ago but I can say now. That did not go far enough in —
Robinson Meyer: Do you think that friendlier lawmakers in Congress understand this distinction? Or is it all the focus is still on NEPA?
Robinson: I think all the focus is still on NEPA, and there has to be a little bit more of that conversation, right? It was fascinating to me: This weekend, the National Governors Association met in D.C., and they all agreed on this resolution about, we need to do energy permitting. And the truth of the matter is, I think, I’m sure for many of you who’ve tried to work with a state historical preservation office, that you’re actually butting up against a lack of capacity at the state level sometimes, as opposed to at the federal level.
So there needs to be that conversation that is not just all, if we suddenly make vast changes to NEPA, that everything in terms of investment is and infrastructure is going to move faster. And I think that that is something that, especially Republican lobbyists and members of Congress and members of the administration can get behind, is that sort of efficiency, right? Efficiency is the word of the moment.
Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.