Climate Now

This week, Julio Friedmann and Darren Hau join James Lawler to talk about the latest climate news. The news of the week covers Executive Director of the International Energy Agency Fatih Birol's latest comments on Europe's energy plans, a new innovation in home insulation with Aeroseal that could help reduce energy use (born from a U.S. National Lab), RMI's new home energy tool, the increase of coal capacity, but also of wind in 2023, JP Morgan's reality check on fossil fuel phase-out, and Scotland's realization that its 2030 climate goals were 'out of reach.'

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This week on Climate News Weekly, James Lawler is joined by Dina Cappiello. They discuss the latest on green banks, the recent turmoil at the SBTI, the power of solar sheep, and more.

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This week on Climate News Weekly, James Lawler sits down with Julio Friedmann and Darren Hau. They discuss the passing of climate leader Richard Benedict, a new geoengineering experiment, new California rules for energy distribution and use, and the emergence of a new biomass startup.

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This week on Climate News Weekly, James Lawler and Julio Friedmann discuss coal-fired power plant closures in New England, how the DOE is spending billions to spur innovation in technologies to decarbonize top-emitting industries, the role that AI can play in a variety of climate change fighting efforts, and more.

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In the U.S. alone, 162 million people will experience a worse quality of life due to the changing climate within the next 30 years. Rising sea levels stand to displace 13 million Americans in the long run while wildfires and other risks are likely to displace millions more. With 3.2 million American climate migrants to-date, it’s time to start thinking about what our country’s future might look like.

Even these statistics may be vast underestimates because nailing down someone’s exact reason for moving is harder than it may seem. So, how do we determine what factors influence people’s decisions to move? Why is climate migration about more than beating the heat? What history brought us here and where are we headed? This week’s episode with investigative journalist and author Abrahm Lustgarten will answer these questions and more.

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This week on Climate News Weekly, James Lawler is joined by Julio Friedmann and Canary Media Reporter Julian Spector. Julio reports on his experience at CERAWeek, and discusses rising energy demand. Julian shares his thoughts on new battery construction projects.

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In 2023, electric vehicle drivers reported that, when pulling up to one of the more than 140,000 EV public charging stations across the United States, something went wrong about 21% of the time, leaving them unable to charge their vehicles. Such unreliability in charging availability could be crippling to what needs to be rapid growth in the EV market, and produces particular challenges to fleet operators considering EV adoption. They will be dependent on reliable EV charging to ensure their business remains operational and on schedule.

Increasing the reliability of public EV charging is a two-part problem: 1) understanding what causes charging failures in a system that is a combination of electrical hardware, computer hardware, and software, and 2) having a workforce that knows how to solve the problems. In the final episode of our series examining the fleet charging landscape in the US, we are joined by Kianna Scott and Walter Thorn of ChargerHelp!, a company that offers charger support services, and charging technician training certification programs. We will discuss why we need specialized training to develop a workforce that can service EV chargers, and what kind of servicing infrastructure will be necessary to support the expansion of a widespread and reliable national EV charging network.

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This week on Climate News Weekly, James Lawler is joined by GreenBiz Editor at Large Heather Clancy, as well as regular contributors Dina Cappiello and Julio Friedmann. They discuss the latest updates to the Science Based Targets Initiative dashboard and what they really mean for companies' climate goals, what happens at the Aspen Ideas: Climate festival and CERAWeek, as well as the DOE's latest Voluntary Carbon Dioxide Removal Purchasing Challenge, and more.

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This week we're joined by Dina Capiello and Julio Friedmann to talk about the latest climate news. The IEA released its global warming emissions report for 2023, and emissions continue to rise, but at a slower rate than in previous years. Meanwhile, to better track those emissions, EDF launched its long-anticipated MethaneSAT on March 4th, a satellite that will measure methane pollution worldwide. And on March 6th the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commissions (SEC) released its final rules to require companies to disclose their climate risk.

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Today, given route lengths and cargo capacity, it is possible to electrify 65% of medium-duty and 49% of heavy-duty trucks. Commercial fleets’ are responding to this promise, with announced commitments to electrification surpassing 140,000 vehicles in 2022 in the United States alone. Still, the number of electric fleet trucks currently on the road in the US is well under 1% of all medium and heavy duty trucks, and companies are facing a dearth of EV charging infrastructure to support the expansion of these commercial fleets.

The good news is, companies are emerging to fill the gaps in charging infrastructure, assuage concerns from prospective EV fleet owners, and make commercial adoption not just a possibility but an advantage. In this episode, the second installment of a three-part series on the state and future of electric fleet charging, Climate Now is joined by three industry leaders: Anthony Harrison (TeraWatt Infrastructure), Jonathan Colbert (Voltera), and Jeffrey Prosserman (Voltpost). Anthony, Jonathan, and Jeffrey join Climate Now’s James Lawler and Darren Hau to discuss what factors prospective EV fleet adopters are considering, what their companies are doing to facilitate buildout of charging infrastructure, and how that buildout means growth for many industries – not just EV charging.

You can find the full transcript as well as sources mentioned in this episode here: https://climatenow.com/charging-electric-fleets-2-3

These interviews were recorded in Summer 2023. Since then, Voltera has published additional playbooks, which you can find here: Playbook 1, Playbook 2, Playbook 3.

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In this week's episode of Climate News Weekly, James Lawler, Julio Friedmann, and Darren Hau discuss falling natural gas prices and the impact of that on the energy transition, how leasing companies are responding to the EV industry, the need for more sustainable aviation fuel (SAF), and more.

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In the United States, nearly one quarter of national greenhouse gas emissions come from the 280 million vehicles that drive on the nations roads each year. And while fleet vehicles – including the ~5 million buses, garbage trucks, law enforcement vehicles and more that make up public fleets, and the ~6.5 million rental cars, taxis, delivery trucks, long-haul trucks, and more that make up commercial fleets – represent only a small fraction of those vehicles, they are an excellent target for early electric vehicle (EV) adoption, by virtue of their affordability through bulk pricing, their ability to demonstrate EV technology to a wide audience, and the outsized impact fleet electrification could have in reducing air pollution that stems from auto emissions.

But critical to the wide-spread adoption of electric fleets, is wide-spread development of charging infrastructure that will support those fleets, which have unique charging demands in comparison to the personal EV. In this first installment of a three-part series examining the state and future of electric fleet charging, Climate Now is joined by EV charging entrepreneurs Nathan King (itselectric), and Arcady Sosinov and Rob Anderson (Freewire Technologies) to explore the current EV charging landscape in the US, what makes fleet charging a challenge, and new strategies and technologies that are helping existing infrastructure meet the growing demand for EV charging.

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On today's episode of Climate News Weekly, James Lawler and Julio Friedmann discuss the IEA's 50th anniversary, Siemens' plans to open a US-based transformer plant, Ireland's energy woes, and more.

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In the late 1970’s, English chemist Dr. James Lovelock and American biologist Dr. Lynn Margulis published a research paper hypothesizing that living organisms – without intention or agency – could have a regulatory effect on their environment that helped ensure their continued habitability. While the Gaia hypothesis they originated has remained controversial for the last four decades, it has provided a provocative explanation for why the Earth remained more or less clement over its ~4 billion year history, even though the sun that warms it has grown about 30% brighter over that time span. Of course, there have been notable catastrophic exceptions to Earth’s habitable stability – in the form of cataclysmic Snowball Earth events that froze the entire planet at least twice in its first 3.5 billion years of existence.

In our latest episode, Probable Futures founder Spencer Glendon explores another application of the Gaia Hypothesis, as it applies to human civilizations. In a December 2023 newsletter, Mr. Glendon examines how for much of the last 12,000 years, humans have been agents in shaping the stable global climate from which we are a beneficiary, through the expansion of agriculture and its related deforestation. By releasing CO2 at rates that balanced the cooling effects of various planetary orbital shifts, humans helped avoid the planet plunging into another Ice Age. But, much like the Snowball Earth events of the Precambrian Era, the advent and acceleration of fossil fuel combustion then shifted people’s relationship with climate from stabilizing to potentially catastrophic. The difference between the ancient and modern examples is that now – with awareness of the problem – humans can impact their environment with intention and agency. Join us as we examine how past climate stability has shaped much of humanity’s world view, and how that might impact our approach in responding to climate change now.

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In this episode of Climate News Weekly, James Lawler sits down with Julio Friedmann and Darren Hau to discuss potential responses to California's most recent torrential rains, how both California and the UK are responding to heat pumps, the EU's new emission targets and plan, and more.

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Passage of the U.S. Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) in 2022 was a game changer in the United States’ effort to address climate change. The hundreds of billions of dollars the IRA has made available for clean energy and climate mitigation projects will likely double the pace of U.S. decarbonization. While this rapid expansion in clean energy development is tied to the sheer scale of the IRA (it is the largest climate spending bill ever passed), how climate spending from this bill is taking place is also a critical.

Most of the IRA funding for climate change mitigation is in the form of generous tax credits for developing a new project, or producing clean energy. But, most developers that could receive credits for large capital projects don’t have enough tax liability to use them. As a solution, for the first time ever, IRA tax credits for clean energy development were made transferable, meaning that the credits can be sold for cash to third parties. To understand what this finance rule change means, Climate Now sat down with Crux CEO Alfred Johnson, whose startup company provides a comprehensive platform for buyers and sellers in this new transferable tax credit market. Alfred explains how tax credit transfers work, why they are so important to unlocking the financing potential of the IRA, and Crux’s role in cultivating the clean energy tax credit ecosystem.

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On this week's episode of Climate News Weekly, James Lawler and Julio Friedmann discuss the consequences of the Biden administration's decision to delay the approval of a LNG export plant in Louisiana, some European countries' plans to transition away from coal, what happens when storms super charge windmills, and more.

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This week on Climate News Weekly, host James Lawler is joined by Julio Friedmann, Darren Hau, and Canary Media Reporter Julian Spector. They discuss the various issues facing EV users and owners during the US' recent cold snap, new developments in British carbon capture projects, concerns that recent US electricity demand will strain the grid, and the latest developments in Hawaii's newest virtual power plant.

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Since 2019, the cost of wind and solar electricity production has been lower than that from fossil fuels, and costs are projected to continue falling well into the next decade. But for renewable energy to truly dominate the electricity market, it needs to be cheap and reliable, even when the sun is not shining and the wind is not blowing. That means the battery market needs to grow, too.

So far, short-duration lithium batteries have dominated the market of grid-scale battery storage, but a recent report from the U.S. National Renewable Energy Laboratory has highlighted the importance of developing longer-duration and lower cost storage options as a key to greater integration of renewable energy into the national grid.

So what types of long-duration batteries are emerging as contenders for widespread, gridscale storage? And what needs to happen to incorporate these batteries into the grid? Climate Now sat down with two leaders in the emerging grid storage market: Jeff Chapin, co-founder of Haven Energy, and Antonio Baclig, founder of Inlyte Energy, to get a read on the state and future of the quickly growing battery storage industry.

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Julio Friedmann, Dina Cappiello, Darren Hau and Eric Wesoff join James Lawler to discuss this week's climate news. Why is the Auxin solar tariff case still a thing? How did we manage to reduce global emissions while increasing GDP last year? China works to establish a vehicle-to-grid (VTG) case study. Meanwhile, more of Biden's 2020 voters now list climate change as their top priority. What does this mean for the 2024 election? Nathaniel Stinnett also joins Climate Now again to explain some key climate election news.

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In this week’s episode of Climate News Weekly, Julio Friedmann, Dina Cappiello, and Darren Hau join James Lawler to discuss the US Treasury’s new guidance for what can qualify for a "green hydrogen" tax credit, Tesla no longer being the world's largest EV manufacturer, the EPA granting Louisiana the right to manage applications for deep geologic storage of CO2, and an update on a proposed Liquid Natural Gas (LNG) project in the Gulf Coast.

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In January of 2023, a headline from Boston Consulting Group read: The voluntary carbon market [VCM] is thriving. Their evidence? A 4-fold increase in the value of the market in the course of a year, to a valuation over $2 billion USD and growing. Nine months later, Reuters headlined a very different take: Carbon credit market confidence ebbs as big names retreat, citing the first dip in the number of credits used by companies in at least 7 years. What was causing such rapid growth in the VCM? What caused the decline? And, what is the chance of the VCM recovering?

In the final episode of our 3 part examination of VCMs, we take a look at how these markets have evolved in terms of their growth and their efficacy, how they are operating right now, and what their future could look like. To shape our conversation, we are joined by a group of VCM buyers, sellers, consultants and skeptics: Katie Sierks (Microsoft), Laura Zapata (Clearloop), Dr. Colin McCormick and Alex Dolginow (Carbon Direct), and Dr. Joe Romm (Penn Center for Science, Sustainability, and the Media).

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Join us for the second of our three-part series on voluntary carbon offset markets, where we take a look at three companies that have very different strategies for removing carbon from the atmosphere. Vesta aims to increase the amount of atmospheric carbon that the ocean can absorb by infusing coastal systems with sand composed of naturally reactive minerals like olivine. Mast Reforestation generates carbon offsets by maintaining and protecting forests in wildfire-prone areas. And Climeworks uses a mechanical system to filter carbon straight from the atmosphere to sequester it underground.

For each of these companies, we will explore how their company's carbon removal techniques work, and examine whether (and how) they can provide measurable and verifiable offsets to ensure that the carbon credits they sell are providing a viable benefit to climate mitigation.

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The voluntary carbon offset market (VCM) – in which customers can pay for third-parties to avoid emitting CO2 or remove it from the atmosphere on their behalf – has existed for over 30 years, and has been controversial for nearly as long. On the one hand, the VCM can provide a path for hard-to-decarbonize sectors or businesses to reach net-zero emissions goals, and it can help finance development of important carbon removal technologies, like direct air capture. On the other hand, the market is rife with opportunities for exploitation and the sale of ineffective carbon credits.

In the first of a three-part episode exploring the current and future state of the voluntary carbon offset market, Climate Now is joined by Dr. Colin McCormick, Alex Dolginow, Derik Broekhoff and Dr. Mark Trexler – four experts in the VCM space, to examine why it is so difficult to create an effective and reliable carbon offset market, and whether there is a path forward for doing so.

For a full transcript and sources, go here: https://climatenow.com/podcast/episode-1-of-3-the-voluntary-carbon-offset-market/

Editor's note: At 30:12, Derik Broekhoff mentions "carbon credit rating agencies." Here are some of these which he shared with us after the recording:

• Calyx Global (https://calyxglobal.com/)
• BeZero (https://bezerocarbon.com/)
• Sylvera (https://www.sylvera.com/)

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For our last episode of Climate News Weekly this year, we're reviewing the top climate space stories of 2023 according to our series regulars Julio Friedmann, Dina Cappiello, and Darren Hau. Climate Now Host James Lawler and Managing Producer Emma Crow-Willard moderate a conversation spanning the latest COP28 deal, new developments in methane regulation and tracking, the climate crises that struck the world, EV growth, and more. Thank you for joining us, and see you next year!

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How much CO2 is it possible to remove in the United States and at what cost? Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory scientists and researchers from more than a dozen institutions have completed a first-of-its-kind national assessment of carbon dioxide removal options, ranging from the role of cropland soils, carbon capture, CO2 transport, and more. In today’s episode, Climate Now interviewed several of the report’s authors to provide an overview of the negative emissions pathways—ones that physically remove CO2 from the atmosphere—that can help the United States reach net zero carbon emissions by 2050, or sooner.

You can read the new report and learn more at https://livermorelab.info/Roads2Removal

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Today in Climate News Weekly, we continue our coverage of COP28 with three people who each covered a different aspect of the conference. First, we speak with Julian Moore of Climatebase to discuss this COP's focus on how climate change impacts global health, while Julio Friedmann, regular contributor, sent us an updated on-the-ground recording of this experiences in Dubai. Finally, we invited Dina Cappiello to sit down with us after her return from the conference to give us her post-COP28 reflections and a look at what we should be tracking as the conference winds down.

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On this week's episode of Climate News Weekly, host James Lawler sits down with Dr. Jennifer Pett-Ridge, Senior Staff Scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Lab, to discuss an upcoming report on carbon dioxide removal, or CDR, titled "Roads to Removal: Options for Carbon Dioxide Removal in the United States." Additionally, two of our regular Climate News contributors, Dina Cappiello and Julio Friedmann, share their impressions, thoughts, and reactions to COP28, which is taking place in Dubai in the UAE this year. Both Dina and Julio joined us both from the ground at the conference.

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In 2023, two major insurers joined a growing list of companies that will no longer offer new home insurance policies in California. In Florida, the situation is worse, with more than a dozen large home insurance companies retreating from the state. Both states have seen devastating property losses due to extreme forest fires and hurricanes - risks that are only increasing due to the changing climate.

But why can’t the insurance companies simply adjust premiums to reflect the changing risk that climate change is bringing, rather than leaving a market entirely? Because like many economic models, insurance risk is assessed based on historical data (in some cases, by law), which is not particularly reflective of future (or even present) risk.

Dr. Spencer Glendon, Founder of Probable Futures and former Head of Research at the investment firm Wellington Management, returns to Climate Now to examine how much our historical experiences can be used to inform how we should respond to our rapidly changing world, and how the roles of quantitative data, empirical analysis, and storytelling may need to shift for us to make the most of our collective wisdom in preparing for challenges of the future.

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On this week's episode of Climate News Weekly, James Lawler is joined by Julio Friedmann and Darren Hau as they discuss the latest US-China climate statement ahead of COP28, new developments in the EV space, the US's Fifth National Climate Assessment, the impact of climate change on Taylor Swift concerts, and more.

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In this week's episode of Climate News Weekly, James Lawler and Ben Hone, Climate Now's Marketing Manager sit down with Nathaniel Stinnett, Founder & Executive Director of the Environmental Voter Project, to go over last week's US elections and what they mean for climate action. Then, James is joined by Julio Friedmann and Darren Hau to discuss the past week's top climate headlines. They discuss the reality behind headlines claiming that EV adoption is slowing down, a lawsuit against California's new truck emissions law, the opening of a new direct air capture facility in California, and more.

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“Geoengineering” refers to the intentional intervention in Earth processes for the purpose of mitigating climate change. A controversial topic, geoengineering is typically divided into two categories: carbon dioxide removal and solar radiation management. This second category, also known as SRM, made headlines this summer when the White House released a report that “opened the door” to future research on the topic.

In principle, SRM includes any technology that could be used to reflect some of the sun’s energy from the Earth in order to decrease the amount of associated heating, effectively cooling the planet. And while the study of SRM has mostly been limited to the lab and to date no large-scale experiments have been conducted, more people are calling for the idea to be explored further as global warming increases. At the same time, others are saying the door needs to remain shut, as the potential for unintended political, societal and ecological side effects are just too great.

To help us understand why - why is SRM being considered, and why are people concerned that it is being considered, Climate Now brought together five experts – Professors Frank Biermann (Utrecht Univ.), David Keith (Univ. Chicago), Chukwumerije Okereke (Alex Ekwueme Federal Univ. Ndufu-Alike, Nigeria), Jennie Stephens (Northeastern Univ.), and Claudia Wieners (Utrecht Univ.) – to debate the merits and risks of examining SRM as a possible climate solution.

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On today’s Climate News Weekly episode, James Lawler is joined by Julio Friedmann. They pay tribute to Saleemul Huq, leading climate action advocate from Bangladesh who passed away on October 28, discuss issues facing the Panama Canal and how they impacts global trade, and have a conversation about two offshore wind stories: Ørsted's announcement that it is abandoning its New Jersey project and the Biden administration approval of the largest offshore wind project off the coast of Virginia.

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On today’s Climate News Weekly episode, James Lawler is joined by Dina Cappiello to discuss Chevron's latest acquisition of Hess, what really happens when CO2 is captured in the US, the severe impacts of Hurricane Otis and what they mean, and more.

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In 2015, Pope Francis - head of the Catholic Church - published Laudato Si: On Care For Our Common Home, a “papal cyclical,” or open letter, to the world’s more than 1.3 billion Catholics about the ethical imperative of addressing climate change, and the relationship between environmental stewardship and social justice. The publication had an impact: in church-goers’ confidence in the scientific evidence for climate change, in country leaders who cited it in the COP21 negotiations that led to the Paris Agreement, and in catalyzing an international movement among the Catholic community to fight climate change.

But as he makes clear in the follow up “apostolic exhortation” released earlier this month, called Laudate Deum, Pope Francis knows the work accomplished so far is not enough. Climate Now was joined by Dr. Mary Evelyn Tucker, Director of the Forum on Religion and Ecology at Yale University, to examine this urgent papal call for progress in protecting the environment and the poor, and the impact it may have in the global climate movement.

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On today’s Climate News Weekly episode, James Lawler, Julio Friedmann, and Dina Cappiello discuss the need to invest in our grids to ensure a reliable energy transition, in the US and abroad, the sobering reality that climate change is speeding up species' extinctions, and how new European climate reporting rules for companies will impact future decision-making.

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On today’s Climate News Weekly episode, James Lawler, Julio Friedmann, and Dina Cappiello discuss Tesla's new prices for their electric vehicles, Exxon's massive purchase of rival Pioneer Natural Resources for $60 billion, the announcement of 7 new hydrogen hubs by the White House, and the latest on the EU's progress towards their climate goals.

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The US's energy system is at a crossroads. As more and more renewable energy projects come online and demand for electricity keeps rising, many utilities and developers are being asked to build more transmission infrastructure to bring all this power to consumers.

In this episode, we explore the challenges faced in developing new long-distance, high-voltage transmission lines, and the importance of transmission expansion in connecting renewable energy resources to the grid and achieving national decarbonization goals. Patrick Whitty, Senior Vice President of Transmission Public Affairs for Invenergy, a global developer, owner, and operator of energy infrastructure, sheds light on these obstacles. We also discuss policy solutions that can accelerate the buildout of transmission infrastructure, such as interregional power transfer requirements, transmission tax incentives, and streamlined permitting.

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On today’s Climate News Weekly episode, James Lawler and Julio Friedmann discuss how a US government shut down could impact firefighter pay, the oil and gas industry Adipec conference and what it means ahead of COP28, the latest EV sale numbers, and how Pope Francis' new letter, "Laudate Deum," relates to climate action.

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On today’s Climate News Weekly episode, Dina Cappiello recaps her Climate Week NYC experience. We discuss the International Energy Agency’s updated 1.5°C scenario, including an in-depth explanation of what a “scenario” is, China’s strong stance against phasing out fossil fuels, and the potential promises of Fervo Energy’s newest geothermal plant breaking ground.

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The United States’ aging electricity grid is a problem. Over 70% of the major transmission networks – which transfer electricity from power generation centers to endpoint users in homes and buildings, sometimes in other states – are at least 25 years old, and much of the grid was built in the 1960s and 1970s. As the number of renewable energy projects being built to meet clean energy goals increases, the problem of how to connect them to the grid is only growing larger, as transmission infrastructure projects can take decades to approve and build, and utilities navigate the energy storage landscape.

The US faces an existential question: as it looks ahead to a clean energy future, what should it do about its electricity grid? Should state and regional utility networks be rebuilt, or should they be replaced with more distributed forms of electricity production and storage—like microgrids with rooftop solar and local wind energy projects? Or does the solution lie in a combination of both?

Climate Now posed these questions to two experts whose work examines the future of electricity generation and storage in the United States. Paul Denholm is a senior research fellow at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, specializing in the technical, economic, and environmental impacts and benefits of large scale deployment of renewable electricity generation. Bill Nussey is an author, CEO and venture capitalist whose 2022 book, “Freeing Energy,” examines the disruptive nature of distributed energy generation and its potential to produce cheaper and more reliable electricity, faster. Tune in to hear what they have to say about the future of the US electricity grid.

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From a new White House climate jobs training program that echoes the Civilian Conservation Corp of the FDR era, to UK’s Prime Minister Rishi Sunak rolling back carbon reduction targets, global leaders are taking a stance after the UN’s Climate Week in New York. Also, big industry is grappling with finding low-carbon business models that can outlive government subsidies, a close examination of climate risk is imperiling the US home insurance market, and the EU gets a dose of reality about the extent to which they are overdosing on air pollution.

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This has been a big week for nations and companies ‘talking the talk’ about reducing their emissions footprints, from updated commitments at the G20 summit, to a carbon-neutral product launch by Apple, and the family that owns the Mærsk shipping company creating its own clean shipping fuel supply chain with a green methanol subsidiary company.

But which of these groups are also ‘walking the walk’ and making real strides in accelerating the transition away from fossil fuels? Climate News Weekly co-hosts James, Dina, and Julio break it down.

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When the U.S. Inflation Reduction Act was signed into law in August 2022, policy analysts predicted that the incentives it provided for renewable energy deployment, home electrification and EV adoption would put the U.S. on track to reach at least two thirds of its 2030 emissions reduction target. Twelve months later, we can now start to track how well the nation is progressing towards those predictions.

In terms of unlocking private capital and kickstarting new clean energy projects, the IRA is profoundly exceeding expectations, already creating tens of billions of dollars in new investments in what has been dubbed a U.S. “manufacturing renaissance.” But according to Oliver Kerr, North America lead for market analytics company Aurora Energy Research, a national energy transformation requires integration as well as manufacturing. Climate Now spoke with Oliver about the impact of the IRA on renewable energy growth, as well as the policy reforms and grid infrastructure updates that are still needed to ensure that public and private investments being made in clean energy manufacturing will translate to 100% fossil free U.S. electricity in the coming decade.

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This past week the climate has been busy inundating every aspect of life: Hurricane Idalia caused damages across Florida, Georgia, and the Carolinas, fueled by increased ocean temperatures. Meanwhile insurance companies are leaving, yet Florida's governor refuses to take money from the Inflation Reduction Act to help reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the state. In Ecuador, the Yasuní Referendum was passed, banning more exploration and drilling of oil in the biodiverse Yasuní National Park.

Get caught up on this news and other climate news from this past week in our latest 'This Week in Climate News' segment.

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You may recall an Auxin Solar tariff case in which a small domestic solar PV manufacturer, Auxin Solar, alleged that solar cells produced in Cambodia, Thailand, Malaysia, and Vietnam were circumventing U.S. trade duties against China. On August 18th, the U.S. Department of Commerce issued their final ruling in the case, determining that solar cells from those countries were in fact circumventing U.S. trade duties. Companies will now be required to self-certify that they are not circumventing U.S. trade duties against China.

Why was this case such a big deal? Most solar cells sold in the U.S. have been sourced from Asia, so U.S. solar developers will now have to pay more to get their solar panels from those countries. With the tariff, and tax credits from the Inflation Reduction Act, many solar developers are now looking for domestic solar manufacturers instead. Up to 155 GW of new U.S. manufacturing capacity has been announced over the last year, according to the Solar Energy Industry Association (SEIA). In this episode, we are joined by Leslie Chang, Director of Strategy and Policy at domestic solar manufacturer Caelux Corporation to understand what this means for business and U.S. solar adoption.

How do we build the capacity to manufacture solar in the US?

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There are over 8 billion square meters of rooftops in the US that are viable for solar energy generation, and could produce as much as 40% of national energy needs. And yet, only 8% of US households have installed rooftop solar panels. With so much available space, and with the average cost of energy from solar much lower than the cost of energy from the grid, why aren't more homeowners installing solar?

Climate Now sat down with Solar United Neighbors Executive Director Anya Schoolman to discuss how upfront costs and legacy business models for utilities companies have slowed the adoption of residential solar, and how Solar United Neighbors is working to help homeowners, businesses, communities and even entire cities overcome some of those barriers and go solar.

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One of the most controversial parts of the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act - the most ambitious climate spending bill in history - was the large pot of federal dollars that could now subsidize the nascent Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) industry. The bill provides for the expansion of the 45Q tax credit, which now allocates up to $85 per metric ton of CO2 that is captured from a point source of emissions like power plants or factories, and then is injected deep underground for permanent storage. At this price point, the IRA provides - for the first time ever - a viable revenue stream for most CCS projects.

Proponents of CCS argue that CO2 reductions will need to happen faster than the world can dismantle its dependence on fossil fuels and thus investment in carbon management technologies need to start now. Opponents say that investments in CCS divert funding from lower cost decarbonization efforts, thus slowing net carbon reductions, and that they incentivize polluting industries to continue their operations.

In this episode, Climate Now has brought together four experts to examine the arguments both for and against CCS. Join us and our guests Charles F. Harvey (MIT), Kurt House (KoBold Metals), Sue Hovorka (UT Austin) and George Peridas (LLNL) for a moderated discussion about what role - if any - CCS should play in the path to global net zero.

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The Nobel-prize winning discovery of how to create synthetic ammonia has been called the “most momentous technical advance in history,” and for good reason. Today about half of the food consumed worldwide comes from the increased harvest yields resulting from ammonia-based fertilizers. We could not sustain the global population without it.

While ammonia production is critical to modern day global food security, and will need to increase to support a growing population, it is also extremely energy- and emissions-intensive. Ammonia produces twice as much CO2 per metric ton of product than steel, 4 times as much as cement, and accounts for ~2% of global emissions.

Talus Renewables is among a growing number of companies working to change that by creating fossil-fuel free “green ammonia,” and they are the first to have deployed their product in the market. The company provides modular, small-scale ammonia production facilities that can be shipped to remote growing regions and allow farms or groups of farms to produce their own fertilizer using clean energy. Climate Now sat down with Talus Renewables co-founder, Hiro Iwanaga, to discuss how this production system reduces complex supply chain and transportation costs as well as emissions, and how it is helping improve global food security and sustainable agriculture at the same time.

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2020 was a record breaking season for forest fires in California. Over 4 million acres burned, releasing enough CO2 into the atmosphere to wipe out the prior 18 years of emissions reductions progress in the state. Effective forest restoration and management can make forests more resilient to the increasing threats of climate change: drought, fire and insects, and help ensure that the carbon trapped in those forests stays there. But who should pay the cost of restoring and maintaining those forests?

Mast Reforestation is a company that replants and stewards the regrowth of fire-ravaged forests of the western U.S., many of which cannot grow back without intervention. Their work is paid for by forest carbon credits, a contentious practice of offsetting corporate or personal emissions by paying to grow and/or protect forests that sequester atmospheric carbon via photosynthesis. We sat down with CEO Grant Canary to discuss why active forest regeneration is necessary, whether forest carbon credits are an effective way to pay for that work, and what the alternatives could be.

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In September 2022, two pipelines carrying natural gas from Russia across the floor of the North Sea were sabotaged, rupturing and emitting an estimated 500,000 tons of the potent greenhouse gas methane (the primary component of natural gas) into the atmosphere before they could be sealed again. While the impact of these Nord Stream pipeline explosions on climate change was widely covered in the news, they represent a mere blip (about 0.3%) in the amount of methane unintentionally leaking into the atmosphere each year from oil and gas operations.

This week, we talk with Christophe McGlade of the International Energy Agency about why so much methane leaks from oil and gas infrastructure, and why - until now, its climate impact has been so little recognized. We also explore how new methane tracking tools allow companies and corporations to quickly and economically stop methane leaks, and why this could make a powerful dent in global greenhouse gas emissions.

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The Biden Administration in the U.S. has set a goal of achieving a net-zero emissions economy by 2050, which among other things means that U.S. households, and the appliances and machines that run within them, will need to be powered almost entirely by carbon-free electricity. A practical implication of that goal is that about 1 billion machines in homes across the nation will need to be replaced or converted from fossil-powered to electric within the next 3 decades. It sounds like a lot - but is it?

A recent report from the nonprofit Rewiring America examined how quickly high-efficiency, electric technologies – like heat pumps, EV vehicles and induction stoves – are replacing sales of their fossil-powered counterparts, and compared that to what needs to happen this year, next year, and over the next five years to ensure that American homes are on track to decarbonize. So are we on track? What needs to happen in the near-term to ensure we reach our mid-century decarbonization goals? And what are the most impactful upgrades that people can make to their homes to support the decarbonization movement? Rewiring America’s Director of Research Cora Wyent and Head of Market Transformation Stephen Pantano sat down with Climate Now to break it down.

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In 2003, the U.S. Department of Defense released a report entitled, “An abrupt climate change scenario and its implications for United States national security,” which “imagined the unthinkable” – that gradual global warming could lead to relatively abrupt changes in climate patterns, significantly reducing global food production, and with it “the human carrying capacity of the Earth’s environment.” Two decades later, the scenario of abrupt climatic shifts resulting from global warming is not so unthinkable, and the U.S. military now formally regards climate change as a threat, according to Meredith Berger, Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Energy, Installations and the Environment.

In 2022, three branches of the U.S. military (Army, Navy and Air Force) released climate strategies detailing decarbonization goals for their operations. Ms. Berger is responsible for overseeing implementation and execution of the Department of the Navy’s climate strategy, which includes commitments to 100% carbon pollution free electricity by 2030, a 50% reduction in building emissions by 2032, and optimizing route planning and ship speed to maximize fuel efficiency. Climate Now spoke with Meredith Berger to discuss why climate change is classified as a threat to national security, how a climate strategy aligns with the mission of the navy, and how the navy plans to reach their decarbonization goals.

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Landfills emit about 2% of the world's greenhouse gases, but in terms of lowering global emissions, they represent some of the lowest hanging fruit. When organic waste – like municipal food waste, agricultural waste, and forest residue – is disposed of by burial in a landfill or incineration, the organic material within is broken down to methane or CO2, and released to the atmosphere. But if that organic waste is diverted to other forms of disposal, those emissions could be avoided.

Steve Wirtel, the Executive Vice President of Business Development at Kore Infrastructure, joined Climate Now to explain how Kore’s biomass thermal conversion (slow pyrolysis) process can be used to dispose of organic waste, sequester carbon and generate energy. We explore how Kore’s modular design works, how it can be adapted for various feedstock inputs and consumer products (including hydrogen), how this kind of technology is financed, and how slow pyrolysis can align with emission reduction legislation and environmental justice objectives.

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Since humans began settling down and building civilizations 10,000 years ago, the Earth's climate has been relatively stable. But before that, the climate was more unstable - unpredictable - and humans were nomads, forced to follow the good climate for food and shelter. Today, the global average temperature is higher than it has ever been since the beginning of civilization. What does this mean for the future of human civilization? Could this mean a return to instability? Can we make civilization resilient to such dramatic changes in climate that we have never before experienced as a society?

Dr. Spencer Glendon of Probable Futures joins Climate Now to speak about his work to change how we think about, talk about, and plan for the future of society.

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A 2022 study by Yale University found that two thirds of Americans (67%) rarely or never talk about climate change, and rarely or never hear people they know talking about it either. Despite the existential threat that it poses, one third of Americans (32%) only hear about global warming in the media a few times a year - or less!

Are these statistics shocking? Or does it matter that people don’t talk much about climate change? How important is public awareness and public discussion in the fight to address climate change? How much does public opinion shape climate policy, or drive individuals to reduce their own climate impacts? And, if climate communication IS important, how do we get more conversations started?

To mark Climate Now’s 100th episode, we partnered with the Network for Business Sustainability (NBS) to take an introspective look at the role of science communication: how does talking about climate change help address it? We are joined by three experts who look at communication in different ways: David Fenton, Founder of Fenton Communications, a social change communications firm, Leah Thomas, Founder of Intersectional Environmentalist - a climate justice collective known for its reach in environmental storytelling through social media, and Dr. Elke Weber, Professor in Energy and the Environment and in Psychology and Public Affairs at Princeton University. Together, we examine why communicating about climate change is hard, why we need to do it anyway, and what strategies, tools and events have the biggest impact in increasing awareness of the climate crisis and motivation to develop solutions.

Interested in how this knowledge could inform workplace climate conversations? Our partners at NBS just published an article on that subject, based on these interviews. Check it out!
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In 1909, headlines declared the U.S. would run out of petroleum by 1940. In 1945, the estimate was that the U.S. had 13 more years of petroleum reserves left. In 1966, we only had 10 more years before the “figurative dipstick in the United States’ oil supplies” came out dry. In the 1970’s United States, alarmist projections about exponential growth of energy demands expected that we would run out of fossil fuels by the year 2000, and yet - since 2000, our consumption of energy from fossil fuels has nearly doubled.

We have a pretty consistent track record of underestimating our available fuel reserves, and how much of those reserves we will consume as technology changes and efficiency increases. In this episode, Kingsmill Bond (Energy Strategist at RMI) and Nat Bullard (Senior Contributor with BloombergNEF) examine why it is so difficult to anticipate our future energy needs and their costs. Kingsmill Bond posits in his recent report that this is the beginning of the end of fossil fuel demand for electricity, and investors are starting to take note.

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According to a 2022 poll from the Associated Press, although 93% of Americans acknowledge that human activity impacts climate, nearly half of Americans (47%) feel that their actions don’t have an impact on climate change. And yet, we know – it is the collective momentum of tiny particles of snow that drive an avalanche.

In our upcoming episode, Climate Now sits down with James Regulinski, co-founder of Carbon Collective, to discuss the role of investing - even among individual, “retail” investors - in determining the pace at which clean energy technologies can replace our global dependence on fossil fuels. We will discuss why investing in your retirement and investing in clean energy technologies can be well-aligned endeavors, why most environmental, social and governance (ESG) investment portfolios aren’t having the impact they should, and why even small investments can make a big difference in accelerating the path to decarbonization.

Carbon Collective Disclaimer regarding the use of MSCI data to develop ESG funds:

The claims Carbon Collectively repeatedly makes are:

• MSCI explicitly states that their data should not be used to determine how good or ethical a company is, just as supplemental data to understand its exposure to risk from ESG-related issues. This means the use of the data as a measure of how ethical your portfolio is, is not supported by the data provider, even when it is sold as such.
• MSCI (and other data providers) use data that is self-reported by the companies. This data is not standardized or verified by MSCI or anyone. The result is data that is noisy/inconsistent. When used to build funds, the fund design is inconsistent with scientific reports of the actions we need to take to address the E of ESG. For example, the IPCC report states that if we want to stay below 2 deg warming (which is already disastrously high), we can not invest any new money in fossil fuel exploration or reserve development. However, funds using MSCI data routinely have oil and gas companies. This is not MSCI's "fault," but it is an artifact of using that data.
• When you use single-factor scores to judge a company, unrelated factors can "balance" each other out. So a high S score can balance a low E score. This can also lead to the inclusion of companies that are inconsistent with models of how we solve climate change.

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Since the Industrial Revolution nearly 150 years ago, global average temperatures have increased by more than 1 degree C (1.9 degrees F), with the majority of that warming occurring since 1975. But during these recent decades of accelerated warming, temperatures in the arctic (latitudes above 66 degrees north) have have been rising even faster - nearly four times faster than the average global rate. The most readily observable impact of such intensive localized warming has been the rapid melting of the Greenland ice sheet, which is significant enough to be turning heads of even stalwart climate skeptics. But a less discussed (and perhaps even more dangerous) positive feedback to the warming planet is the rate at which permafrost is melting due to the quickly elevating arctic temperatures.

Dr. Susan Natali, Arctic Program Director and senior scientist at the Woodwell Climate Research Center, sat down with Climate Now to teach us about permafrost: what it is, why it is disappearing, and the potentially drastic - and so far barely accounted for - impact it can have on greenhouse gas emissions. Listen to find out why tackling decreasing global greenhouse gas emissions as fast as possible is likely even more urgent than we thought.

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The built environment represents one of society’s largest environmental impacts - contributing nearly one fifth of global GHG emissions, not to mention impacts on natural resources like air and water quality, local ecosystems, and quality of life for residents. Increasingly, policies and public opinion are concentrating on reducing those impacts - creating incentives for new construction and urban development to become more sustainable - to become more “green.”

But how do you define whether a building (or a city) is green? Tommy Linstroth is the founder and CEO of Green Badger, a company that provides sustainability accounting services for new construction projects, and Hilari Varnadore is the Vice President for Cities at the U.S. Green Building Council. The two joined Climate Now to explain the globally leading metric for quantifying sustainability of the built environment: Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certification. Tune in to hear how buildings, stadiums and cities can become LEED certified - what the process entails, what the criteria are, and why every new construction project and city planner should want to be certified as “green” through a process like LEED.

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Every approach to decarbonizing the energy sector comes with its share of costs and benefits: renewables are cheap and clean, but require enormous amounts of land and are not always available when power is needed. Batteries provide useful back up power, but add cost to a renewable-supplied grid and compete with other needs for critical minerals like lithium and cobalt. Carbon capture on fossil fuel power plants can prevent stranded assets, but is expensive and could extend dependence on fossil fuels.

Net-zero pathway recommendations, like those from Princeton University, BloombergNEF, and the International Energy Agency, aim to maximize the benefits of these various solutions, while minimizing the costs. But the one technology whose role within this balancing act is the most controversial is nuclear power.

In our upcoming episode, we are joined by a panel of energy science and policy experts to understand the present role of nuclear power in our energy sector, why nuclear energy continues to be included in decarbonization scenarios, whether or not it should be, and how the industry would need to evolve for it to play an effective role in a clean energy future.

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On March 30, 2023, in partnership with the Livermore Lab Foundation and The Maddy Institute, Climate Now hosted a one day summit in Fresno, CA, examining the intersection of climate change and agriculture. Agriculture is both a leading driver of greenhouse gas emissions (contributing nearly one fifth of all global emissions) and a potential solution to removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

Fresno, located in the heart of California's Central Valley, also illuminates the other side of the agriculture-climate change coin: one of the nation's most valuable agricultural regions, producing over a quarter of the nation's food, is threatened by extreme droughts - and this year, extreme floods - brought on by climate change.

At Climate Now's one day summit, farmers, business owners, scientists, policymakers, educators and activists gathered to discuss how to prepare for the changing climate in California and other agriculture producing regions, the challenges inherent to adaptation, and the opportunities that could come with adopting climate friendly technologies and practices.

For this week's episode, join us for the key takeaways from this event.

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Renewable natural gas (RNG), made from the decomposition of organic waste like livestock manure, is not necessarily net-zero if it's burned to run a turbine or drive a car. But what if the RNG is not burned, but is rather pyrolyzed, breaking it down into hydrogen and another product called "carbon black," an essential component of car tires, among other things? Then the hydrogen can be used and the carbon black can be sold in solid form instead of releasing the carbon into the atmosphere. From its Nebraska-based plant, Monolith converts renewable methane into both green hydrogen and carbon black using the world's largest plasma torch (more about that in the episode). Now they are developing a commercial clean hydrogen operation, which they will use to create ammonia to sell for fertilizer.

Join us for our conversation with Monolith co-founder and CEO Rob Hanson to learn about methane pyrolysis, the markets for carbon-negative industrial products, and how the Inflation Reduction Act is supporting green (or clean) hydrogen production processes (like Monolith's) in the United States.

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As we transition to a clean energy economy, demand for minerals like copper, cobalt, nickel, and lithium is projected to skyrocket. According to a 2022 report from the International Energy Agency, the total mineral demand from clean energy technologies will quadruple by 2040 under their “sustainable development scenario” or at least double under stated policies. Where will all those minerals come from and how can they be accessed in a responsible way?

In this episode Kurt House, CEO of KoBold Metals, explains how their company is working to aggregate, digitize, organize, and analyze global geologic data to systematically search the Earth's crust for these four key minerals.

Skip ahead:
00:00 This Week in Climate News
09:21 How much new mining do we need?
14:12 How KoBold aggregates and analyzes data
17:54 Environmental and social responsibility in mining

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For a building owner, building decarbonization has myriad benefits: lower utility bills, lower maintenance, healthier and more comfortable living. But the barriers to reaching those benefits are large, particularly the high upfront costs and complicated renovation process (many inspections, many permits, coordinating with many contractors). Scale up to trying to decarbonize every building in a city, and the problems scale up, too - each building has its unique challenges to decarbonization, based on location, age, state of repair, and use. But - it turns out that by decarbonizing buildings on a city level, the solutions can scale up, too.

In this final installment of our three-part series examining Ithaca, New York’s road to full building decarbonization, we are joined by the team of people who are identifying solutions to these pain points in Ithaca. We will explore how bulk purchasing power, streamlined contracting, and development of communal clean energy infrastructure can clear the pathway to the city’s net-zero goals, and how these principles might serve as a blueprint to other cities in the U.S.

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Reducing average global temperatures. Preserving biodiversity. Decreasing the risk of droughts, floods and hurricanes. Reducing air pollution. Reducing utility bills. Creating new jobs and opportunities. Building community engagement. Fostering environmental equity and justice.

There doesn’t need to be just one reason to decarbonize a city. And when the specific needs, concerns and goals of communities are accounted for in decarbonization plans, the chances of local buy-in and of an equitable energy transition increase dramatically. Hear why, in the second part of Climate Now’s three-part deep-look into Ithaca, New York’s plans to decarbonize every building in their city. Panelists from a multi-venue live event series, held in Autumn 2022, discuss how Ithaca has approached prioritizing social justice in its plans, and why this is such an integral part of their decarbonization strategy.

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On February 15, 2023, the U.S. Senate held a hearing considering a national clean fuels program, modeled after California’s state-wide Low-Carbon Fuel Standard (LCFS). The LCFS sets an annually decreasing standard of net carbon intensity (amount CO2 emissions per unit energy) for all the fuels being sold in the state. Companies that produce fuels or fuel equivalents below the carbon intensity threshold can sell low-carbon fuel credits. Companies that produce and sell fuels above the carbon intensity threshold must buy credits, thus creating a market force to encourage low-carbon fuel production and discourage carbon-intensive fuel production.

Since the California LCFS standard was enacted more than a decade ago, transportation sector emissions in the state have declined by about 10% due to the program, outpacing the scheduled carbon intensity decreases. Other states and nations have taken note, with similar policies being adopted in the EU, Canada, Brazil, and Washington State and Oregon. Climate Now sat down with Colin Murphy, Deputy Director of the Policy Institute for Energy, Environment, and the Economy at University of California, Davis, to learn the details of how and why this emission reduction policy works, what impact it has had, and how energy companies are responding.

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2022 potentially marked a turning point for the U.S. electric vehicle (EV) market, with new EV car sales increasing by 65% over 2021 sales, and now accounting for nearly 6% of all new vehicle sales. (If EVs maintained a 65% annual growth rate, they would reach 100% of new vehicle sales in about 6 years.) But for medium and heavy duty vehicles, which produce an outsize share of U.S. transportation-related greenhouse gasses, the transition to zero-emissions vehicles is still trying to gain traction. In 2021, electric vehicles accounted for about 1% of bus sales, and about 0.1% of all truck sales.

Battery electric vehicles could already replace about half of the freight trips completed each day in the U.S., so it is not technological readiness that is slowing EV adoption in the freight and large vehicle industry. Ray Minjares, Heavy-Duty Vehicles Program Director at the International Council on Clean Transportation, explains what is: the marketplace structure that dictates how freight vehicles are bought and sold. Ray sat down with Climate Now to examine how this marketplace works today, the policies and financing alternatives that could make zero-emission vehicles easier to adopt, and the climate and air quality impacts that would come with decarbonization of the trucking industry.

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More than one third of the world’s 2,000 largest publicly traded companies have made some kind of net-zero commitment, and the list is growing quickly. A critical part of those corporate plans will be securing cleanly sourced electricity for their energy needs, but that requires that there is enough fossil-free electricity available on the grid for every company that prefers to use it. In 2021, renewable energy and nuclear power, combined, accounted for only about 37% of global electricity production. How can a company ensure that their electricity comes from among those fossil-free sources? And how can companies encourage the growth of clean electrical capacity, so that it will meet the growing demand of consumers?

These kinds of questions are exactly what Doug Miller, Deputy Director of Market & Policy Innovation at the Clean Energy Buyers Institute (CEBI), aims to answer. CEBI is a non-profit organization that collaborates with policy makers, leading philanthropies, and energy market stakeholders to identify and expedite the implementation of clean energy market solutions. They have also worked closely with the World Resources Institute (WRI), who designed the Greenhouse Gas Protocol, the most commonly used standards for companies to assess their carbon emissions impact. Doug joined Climate Now to explain what those standards are, why they are evolving, and some of the innovative tools that CEBI has identified that could be incorporated into the GHG Protocol to help both national electricity grids and the companies that use them achieve their decarbonization goals faster.

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Electrification is going a long way in decarbonizing small vehicles (like passenger cars) in the global transportation sector, which produces about 16% of global emissions. But for long-haul transportation: trucking, shipping and the aviation industries, electrification is far from being technologically ready. Enter a controversial solution: biodiesel. Biodiesel is a fuel derived from organic matter like plants, algae or animal fats, which started to popularize globally just this century. However, early generation biodiesel had its drawbacks: first - they are not a perfect replacement for the fuels used in diesel engines, and can only be used as an additive to fossil diesel: decreasing, but not eliminating carbon emissions. Then there was the fact that clearing forest land to grow crops to make biodiesel could produce more emissions than just using fossil diesel.

Two companies: Neste and ClearFlame, are among a growing cohort of energy producers exploring more sustainable replacements to diesel fuels.We spoke with Chris Cooper and Matt Leuck (Neste) and BJ Johnson (ClearFlame) about the use of renewable liquid fuels, like renewable diesel that is made from organic waste (like spent cooking oil), that can be used as a 100% replacement for fossil diesel in engines. Stay tuned for Climate Now’s next episode, where we explore how renewable diesel is produced, how it compares in terms of environmental impact relative to fossil- and first generation bio-diesels, and how much and how fast the market for renewable diesels could grow.

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In November 2021, the City of Ithaca announced the approval of a plan to decarbonize all of its buildings by 2030. In this first-of-its-kind decarbonization plan, Ithaca outlined a pathway to electrify roughly 6,000 homes and buildings as a first step to enacting the city’s own Green New Deal - a resolution established to locally address climate change, economic inequality, and racial injustice. The task is monumental - technically, financially and practically. First, an effective decarbonization plan had to be developed - how do you actually decarbonize 6,000 buildings? Second, the city had to figure out how to finance a ~ $500 million dollar infrastructure investment project with a city budget of ~ $90 million dollars. And finally, the city had to ensure that they had buy-in from building owners and that building retrofits were prioritized equitably and without disadvantaging any groups, particularly those who have been traditionally marginalized in the past.

So how are they doing it, and can other cities learn from the path that Ithaca has forged? In a three-part live event series, Climate Now brought together experts, city planners, and local business and community leaders to explain what it has taken for Ithaca to enact its decarbonization plan, what has worked well, and what lessons can be learned. Our next episode will highlight the key takeaways from those conversations - stay tuned!

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On April 22, 1970, 20 million people across the U.S. marched, attended speeches and sat in teach-ins, marking the first Earth Day, and spurring on the enactment of the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act and the founding of the EPA, all of which occurred later that year. Then and now, activism has been critical to enacting environmental and climate policy, and in shifting attitudes of the general public to the urgency of mitigating climate change, but why is activism so important, and how can it be done effectively?

Climate Now sat down with Bill McKibben, author, journalist and environmental activist who has led protest movements against development of the Keystone Pipeline Project (which aimed to pipe oil from the tar sands of Alberta, Canada to Nebraska where it could link with other pipelines heading to the refineries of Texas), and for the global divestment from fossil fuels (currently amounting to $40 trillion of lost capital for fossil fuel companies, and counting). Bill joined us to discuss why activism is so important to enacting climate policy, how the biggest movements come together, and the work that needs to be done next.

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In 2021, U.S. President Biden signed an executive order with the directive to achieve 100% carbon-pollution free electricity in the United States by 2030. The goal is certainly achievable: currently wind and solar are the cheapest forms of electricity generation, the installed capacity of utility-scale solar and wind has increased more than 2000% in the last 15 years, and there are already 1.3 terawatts (TW) of clean energy generation + storage projects seeking to connect to the grid, roughly enough for the grid to reach 80% zero-carbon electricity. But it is one thing to plan clean energy generation facilities, and another to build and connect those facilities into the national power grid, which is done with the oversight of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC).

FERC is required to regulate the interstate transmission of natural gas, oil, an electricity, which means they work to ensure that a hypothetical wind project in Iowa transmitting electricity to Chicago, Illinois follows all federal and state permitting requirements along its entire path. That gets complicated, and currently those 1.3 TW of clean energy projects are sitting in a backlog that is taking several years to process. Neil Chatterjee, Chairman of FERC in 2017 and again from 2018-2020, joined Climate Now to explain why getting new clean power connected to the grid is so difficult, how the process can be streamlined, and why that is so critical to reaching the U.S.’s climate goals. Stay tuned!

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The agricultural sector produces about a tenth of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, and while most of that comes from livestock (about 2/3), emissions from crop production still total about 2.2 billion metric tons of CO2-equivalent. Interestingly, we only actually use about half of what we grow: this is not because of food waste (its own issue), but because more than half of any crop is residue: the stems, shells, husks and anything else left behind at the end of a crop harvest.

Charm Industrial is a new company with a plan to convert those crop residues (~ half a billion tons in the US alone) from a source of greenhouse gas emissions to a sink. Crop residues are usually left on harvested fields to decompose (or are burned), partially restoring the soils, and partially returning all the CO2 they absorbed during the growing season to the atmosphere. Charm plans to harvest those residues and convert them into bio-oil and biochar. The biochar returns to the soils for restoration; the bio-oil can be buried for CO2 sequestration or replace fossil-derived fuels. Climate Now sat down with Charm CEO and Co-founder Peter Reinhardt, to discuss how their technology works, and why interest is growing in this approach to carbon removal.

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“We've built an entire industrial economy around a set of energy sources, and we're now thinking about diversifying way beyond that. And that's a big set of changes.” What will it take to diversify our energy economy, and how do we actually do it? That is the remit of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), according to Kate Gordon, senior advisor to the U.S. Secretary of Energy.

In this week's podcast, Ms. Gordon joins us to discuss how the DOE is structured today; how they’re working with states, local governments, and tribes to reduce energy consumption and support an equitable clean energy economy and the new industries that come with it - like hydrogen and carbon removal; and what major pieces of legislation are driving the DOE’s energy transition work - and how.

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The carbon footprint of stuff

For the last two centuries, continuous economic growth (the increase in the quantity and quality of the economic goods and services that a society produces, per capita) has been recognized as the critical driver in the drastic global decrease in extreme poverty.

The problem is, an ever-increasing "quantity and quality of economic goods and services" - in the current economy at least - requires ever increasing consumption of raw materials: minerals, water, energy, trees, soil. And consumption has its own price. In addition to myriad environmental and biodiversity impacts, an estimated 45% of global greenhouse emissions come from the extraction of raw materials and the production of goods: the food we eat, the clothes we wear, the products we use.

So is it possible to break the link between decreasing poverty and increasing consumption? Climate Now sat down with two experts on 'the circular economy' - an idea that hinges on eliminating waste from the production process, circulating products and materials instead of disposing of them at their end of life, and engaging in practices that preserve or regenerate natural resources. Dr. Ke Wang, project leader for the World Resource Institutes' Platform for Accelerating the Circular Economy (PACE), and Laura Wittig, Founder and CEO of Brightly, a consumer services company with a mission of scaling sustainable consumerism, joined us to explain what needs to happen to create a more circular economy - from the scale of global economies all the way down to the individual consumer.

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Last week, LLNL's National Ignition Facility successfully 'ignited' a nuclear fusion reaction equivalent to what takes place in the sun: the conversion of hydrogen to helium + energy. In a first, the experiment produced more energy than was needed to initiate the reaction. While the experiment lasted only fractions of a second, it proved what had been hypothesized since the 1960’s: that lasers can be used to induce energy-generating fusion in a laboratory setting. The enormity of this achievement is that it brings the possibility of cheap, clean and safe nuclear fusion energy one step closer to reality. Joined by guest hosts Julio Friedman and Darren Hau, Climate Now sat down with Dr. Annie Kritcher, the principal designer for the successful fusion experiment, to discuss what they have accomplished, why it was so significant, and what the National Ignition Facility will be focusing on next in their work to make nuclear fusion a viable energy source.

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Can Earth’s geothermal heat warm - and cool - your home?

The hottest day ever recorded on Earth was on July 10, 1913. Thermometers in California’s Death Valley measured 134oF. The coldest day ever recorded on land (not on an Antarctic ice sheet) was in the tiny Siberian settlement of Oymyakon, which got as cold as -90oF on February 6, 1933. But anyone standing in either of these locations, on these days of extreme hot and cold, were a mere 30 feet away from much more reasonable temperatures - about 50-60oF. They only needed to dig down. Bedrock is not a very good conductor of heat, and as such - even when atmospheric temperatures fluctuate wildly, geothermal temperatures - the temperature of the subsurface - remains relatively constant.

Climate Now sat down with Kathy Hannun, co-founder and president of Dandelion Energy to learn how geothermal heat pumps take advantage of stable subsurface temperatures to produce highly efficient and low-cost heating and cooling systems for buildings. Stay tuned to find out how these systems work, why they are likely the most efficient way of controlling indoor climates, what obstacles are slowing the wholesale conversion of furnaces and air conditioning units to geothermal heat pumps, and how those obstacles can be addressed.

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A micro-grid is a local grid. That means that energy generation occurs locally (no giant transmission lines) to support local energy demand, and it has the option to operate independently from a traditional regional power grid. These kinds of grids are attractive because they can take advantage of growing renewable energy infrastructure like rooftop solar, and they can create resiliency against regional grid failures, which are becoming increasingly frequent with the climate change-related uptick of extreme weather events.

But wouldn’t utility companies, whose revenue is generated from conventional grid use, and who control more than 99% of the nation’s electricity supply, use their enormous lobbying weight to prevent the proliferation of microgrids?

Not necessarily, according to Cecilia Klauber, an engineer working on the security and resilience of power system infrastructure at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Cecilia provides a business case for why regional utility companies might want to invest in microgrid infrastructure, and explains how the growing microgrid network across the US will provide energy resiliency and reliability for both energy providers and users. Stay tuned!

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Is the battery revolution here? Or have we already been living in it for three decades?

Renewable energy sources - wind and solar - have become the cheapest and fastest growing form of electricity generation. But the industry has not yet escaped the perennial criticism that keeps many from believing that the world could run entirely on renewable energy: what happens when the sun isn’t shining or the wind isn’t blowing? To date, batteries have not been a particularly convincing answer, due both to their cost and their limited ability to store industrial scale electricity for more than a few hours at a time.

But that might be changing. After more then three decades of remarkable innovation, the price of lithium batteries has dropped 97%, and the power storage potential of a battery has increased 3.4-fold. Nate Blair, who manages the Distributed Systems and Storage Analysis Group at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), joined Climate Now to discuss where we are today in developing grid-scale energy storage systems. Stay tuned to find out what role batteries will play in the transition to clean electricity, why lithium batteries are currently leading the way in grid battery storage, and what other technologies we might expect in grid storage portfolio in the next 10-30 years.

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Since its founding in 1952, the mission of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) has been to meet urgent national security needs through scientific and technological innovation. Expanding from its focus on nuclear weapons science at the height of the Cold War, LLNL has become a national research leader in counterterrorism, intelligence, defense, and energy, with its emphasis in the latter being to advance national energy security while also reducing its impact. And critical to reducing the environmental impact of the national energy sector is determining how to remove historical greenhouse gas emissions (what has already been released) from the atmosphere in parallel with ongoing global decarbonization efforts.

Climate Now’s James Lawler was invited to tour LLNL’s Carbon Capture Lab, home to a team of scientists working to reduce the cost and bottlenecks of implementing large-scale carbon capture facilities, to learn how this research is developed, where the state-of-the-art is in carbon capture technology, and where we could go next (Direct Air Capture skyscrapers?).

#carboncapture

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How many crises can we address at once?

In October of this year, headlines broke that the global animal population in 2018 is 69% smaller than it was a half century ago, in 1970. It is the latest bad news in a string of studies on biodiversity loss, which is happening at a rate not seen on this planet since the last mass extinction. It also follows on the heels of an analysis from the U.N. World Food Program, estimating that due to Russia’s war in Ukraine, a record 345 million people are at risk of starvation this year, and that it is likely that by the end of this decade, the cumulative progress made in reaching the U.N.’s 2015 goal of eradicating hunger by 2030 will be 0%.

Conservation of natural lands and freshwater ecosystems are critical to biodiversity preservation efforts, but how do you feed the world without agricultural development, and how do you stem the impact of climate change without developing land-intensive clean energy solutions like wind and solar? It turns out, solutions to these issues do not have to be mutually exclusive.

Melissa Ho, Senior Vice President of the World Wildlife Fund, joined Climate Now to discuss how WWF addresses the competing priorities for humanity and the natural world, and why a holistic valuation of the services healthy ecosystems provide can help us develop co-beneficial solutions to all of these crises.

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The side benefit of reducing building emissions? Increasing quality of life.

Building operations (heating, cooling and electrification) account for 27% of global CO2 emissions, but represent some of the lowest-hanging fruit in the challenge of global decarbonization. With efficient design and transitioning to cleanly-sourced electricity, like solar panels, building-related emissions could be decreased by as much as 80%.

Katy McGinty, vice president and chief sustainability officer of Johnson Controls and Ian Harris, business development manager at BlocPower, joined Climate Now to discuss how implementing smart control technologies, more insulated building envelopes, and clean-energy technologies like solar power and heat pumps, aren’t just critical to reaching global net-zero goals, they also make homes and buildings safer, more comfortable, and more affordable to live and work in. And with smart business approaches and community buy-in, building decarbonization can be a tool for environmental justice as much as climate mitigation, by engaging low-income communities, underserved communities and communities of color in the fight against climate change.

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The global shipping industry emits ~1 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide annually, about as much as the sixth highest emitting nation in the world. In hopes of changing course, the International Maritime Organization (IMO) has mandated that starting in 2023, most commercial vessels will have to document their CO2 emissions, and demonstrate progress towards reaching the IMO objective of an industry-wide 40% reduction in emissions by 2030.

But that is easier said than done. As we learned in earlier conversations on maritime shipping (here and here), low-emission alternatives to the cheap and extremely dirty bunker fuels that ships currently use are far from ready to deploy at scale. So what can ship owners do to start cutting their emissions as soon as next year?

We spoke with Co-founder and CEO of the start-up Seabound, Alisha Fredriksson, about her teams' proposed solution: equipping ships with carbon capture devices that trap and store CO2 from fuel exhaust. The CO2 can be brought to port and either sold for CO2 utilization projects, or permanently stored underground. Learn more about how their technology works and their business case for why it is a good idea to get onboard with carbon capture.

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For some sectors of our economy, electrification as a decarbonization strategy is a whole lot easier said than done. Take the steel industry - which is responsible for 11% of global CO2 emissions. A large part of those emissions come from the ‘coking’ process - where coal-fired furnaces burning at up to 1,100 degrees Celsius (2,000 degrees Fahrenheit) are used to break the bonds between iron and oxygen in the ore materials used to make steel. Driving this reaction with electricity, instead of a coal furnace, is an enormous challenge - but one that Boston Metals are taking the lead on.

Climate Now sat down with Adam Rauwerdink, senior vice president of Boston Metals, to better understand the landscape of developing clean steel technologies, and why the electrification process they are developing - “molten oxide electrolysis” - could be the decarbonization solution that the steel industry needs.

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Mitigating climate change is a race against time, requiring “rapid, far reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society,” according to the IPCC, who says we need to halve global emissions by 2030. But Tom Dinwoodie of Epic Institute argues that this kind of rapid change actually isn’t unprecedented, when compared to technologies of the 19th and 20th centuries, which repeatedly went from expensive and obscure to globally adopted in the course of a few decades: electricity, automobiles, aviation, television, computers, the internet.

In this episode, we are joined by Tom, who explains why he thinks clean energy technologies like wind and solar are on a similar path of exponential growth, and John Witchel, CEO of King Energy, who provides a ‘boots-on-the-ground’ perspective of how these industries are changing. Through the lens of his company’s work, incentivizing rooftop solar installation in multi-tenant commercial buildings, John explains why the capitalistic and innovative spirit of industry might just provide the “rapid and unprecedented” change we so critically need.

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Calls for transparent information on the carbon footprint of a product, service, company or government are getting louder from consumers and investors, and will likely be soon codified in regulations like the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s proposed rule on climate risk reporting for publicly traded companies. But how do you actually account for all the emissions released in the production process or in a company activity? Is it even possible to accurately quantify?

Charles Cannon, a manager of RMI’s climate intelligence program, investigates ways to improve the quality of product level greenhouse gas information (like how much CO2 was released to manufacture your new refrigerator?). He sat down with Climate Now to explain the challenges involved in carbon accounting - the term for quantifying greenhouse gas emissions - and how those challenges might be addressed.

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The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), signed into U.S. law by President Joe Biden on August 16th, might be the biggest climate investment in history, but it does not look much like the kinds of policies that have been most championed by climate activists and economists. There is no carbon tax, no cap and trade program, no specific emissions targets. Instead, the law combines a slew of incentives like rebates and tax credits aimed to encourage significant growth of the clean energy and electric vehicle sectors.

To understand what is in the IRA, and what exactly its impact could be on reducing national greenhouse gas emissions, we spoke with Dr. Jesse Jenkins, who leads the REPEAT Project at Princeton University. Dr. Jenkins’ team performed an independent climate and economic impact analysis of the IRA, and he walked us through the details of the climate mitigation measures in this package: what decarbonization strategies are being employed, who is most impacted by the measure, and how much emissions reduction will result from the policies of this bill.

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International waters don’t belong to anybody, but everybody is connected to them. Like the global burden created by greenhouse gas emissions from any one country, company or individual, what a single country or corporation chooses to put into the ocean as a climate change solution could be felt by the global community, if it turns out to have negative consequences on ocean chemistry or ecosystems.

In this final installment of our deep dive into the potential and risks of ocean carbon dioxide removal (CDR) techniques, we consider how this nascent industry should be monitored and regulated. We will take a look at the existing international legal frameworks relevant to ocean CDR - how they originated, how they apply, who is responsible for enforcing them, and what oversight needs to be put in place before these technologies start to scale up.

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Did you know plastic bags were originally intended to be an environmental solution? The idea was to replace paper bags in an effort to reduce deforestation. In 1935, cane toads were another fix - they were introduced to Australian sugarcane plantations to control insect pests. But, the ecological disaster this invasive species created far outweighed their agricultural benefit. It is often hard to anticipate the downstream environmental impacts of our actions, even when we are working in good faith to solve a problem. Given the globally interconnected nature of the oceans, and the reality that oceans are so underexplored that we have better maps of other planets in our solar system than we do of the ocean floor, ocean carbon dioxide removal technologies are a category ripe for unintended consequences.

So does it make sense to proceed, to continue developing ocean CDR technologies? What are start-ups doing to determine whether their approaches will be safe and effective? What kind of regulatory oversight will be needed for these technologies, and what kinds of information will they have to consider to assess safety and efficacy?

In this second installment of our three-part series, we apply a healthy dose of skepticism to these developing ocean CDR technologies. We ask how we can effectively monitor the impacts of ocean CDR, if it can be done at all, and who should be doing it.

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More than 4 billion years ago, when Earth was still in its infancy, the atmosphere held more than 100,000 times the amount of CO2 it does today. Ever so slowly, that CO2 was absorbed into the oceans, where it reacted with rocks of the seafloor or was scavenged by organisms, eventually becoming trapped in sediment and slowly sequestered into Earth’s deep interior. This is the Earth’s deep-carbon cycle - nature’s way of regulating greenhouse gasses.

This week, Climate Now takes you on a special three-part podcast series that explores a novel suite of technologies, termed Ocean Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR), that aims to speed up Earth’s natural GHG regulator by enhancing the biogeochemical processes already happening in the oceans. In our first episode, we are joined by a suite of entrepreneurs who see the climate-saving and profit-making potential of Ocean CDR, who walk us through what these technologies are, how they work, and why they could be so valuable to mitigating climate change.

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On June 30, 2022, the United States Supreme Court handed down a decision on the case “EPA v. West Virginia,” ruling in a 6-3 vote that the EPA exceeded its statutory authority by setting greenhouse gas emissions standards that would effectively require utilities to shift away from fossil fuel-sourced power generation to renewables.

At the time of the decision, it was met with a raft of alarmist headlines, forecasting that it would be a disaster for climate change mitigation, and that it threatens the future regulatory authority of all federal agencies. Is it really that bad?

In this episode, Michael Gerrard, professor of professional practice in climate change law and policy at Columbia University, helps us understand exactly what the EPA v. West Virginia decision said, and what its impact is likely to be.

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In 2017, the V.C. Summer Nuclear Plant expansion - meant to hail the renaissance of nuclear power in the US - came screeching to a halt. The project, to build two new reactors at an existing South Carolina facility, was canceled after being delayed more than a year, costing $9 billion USD, and still being only 40% complete. Now, the only new nuclear project in the works in the U.S. is the Vogtle Plant expansion in Georgia; a project also more than a year behind schedule, and billions of dollars over budget. Still, nuclear projects remain a focus of government and think tank decarbonization strategies. Why?

Dr. Amory Lovins, adjunct professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Stanford University, and international authority on the clean energy transition, joins Climate Now to explain why he thinks nuclear should no longer be considered as a source of energy. For Amory, it's not just the chance of environmental catastrophe or nuclear proliferation that make it a non-starter, it's the economics.

00:00 - Introducing Climate Now
00:32 - Introducing Amory Lovins
01:12 - How much energy is supplied from nuclear power
02:02 - Amory explains why he believes that nuclear has no business case
16:25 - If nuclear has no business case, why do governments continue to invest in it?

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Heating, cooling and electrifying buildings produces nearly one fifth of global greenhouse gas emissions, but by employing existing energy efficient technologies and switching to renewables, we could cut 87% of building-related emissions by 2050. So, how do we get there?

Climate Now speaks with two companies working to eliminate the barriers to decarbonizing buildings. Andy Frank, founder of Sealed, explains how Sealed makes it easier for homeowners to implement energy efficiency improvements by reducing upfront costs and managing the improvement project. Jeff Hendler and Zohra Roy of Logical Buildings share how their company empowers real estate managers and building owners with the data they need to optimize their energy usage.

00:00 Andy Frank, Sealed
15:58 Jeff Hendler and Zohra Roy, Logical Buildings

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In the international carbon offset market, the average price of removing one tonne of CO2 from the atmosphere is still below $15 USD, nowhere near enough to cover the costs of carbon capture and storage (CCS). As Dr. Sheila Olmstead (University of Texas, Austin) explained in a recent Climate Now podcast episode, this is why CCS is one of the few climate technologies not experiencing exponential growth. “Unless there's a market for captured CO2, then it doesn't make economic sense… to adopt these carbon capture technologies.”

But what if, instead of making captured CO2 the only marketable product, the capture is accomplished while also producing other goods and services?

Climate Now spoke with three pioneers developing startup programs in California that plan to use biowaste (that is, agricultural residues or vegetation cleared from forests to increase their resiliency to drought, fire or infestation) to produce hydrogen fuel and CO2. The technique is called 'bioenergy and carbon capture and storage,' or BECCS. The hydrogen can be sold and the CO2 captured and stored underground. Join us for our discussion with George Peridas of Lawrence Livermore National Lab, Jonathan Kusel of the Sierra Institute for Community and Environment, and Josh Stolaroff of Mote, to hear how this approach could make CCS economically feasible, perhaps even profitable, while also providing a benefit to local communities already experiencing the worst impacts of climate change, and an essential service for the well-being of our planet.

01:40 - Introduction to BECCS (bioenergy with carbon capture and storage)
02:06 - Introduction to BICRS (biomass carbon removal and storage)
03:10 - Quick overview of carbon capture utilization and storage
04:50 - Challenges of carbon capture
05:27 - George Peridas and Jonathan Kusel on the Indian Valley Wood Utilization Campus project
14:57 - The importance of hydrogen
15:47 - Joshuah Stolaroff explains how to produce hydrogen using waste biomass
17:20 - Introduction to Mote
28:41 - Carbon capture skepticism and risks

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Each year, we produce about 30 billion tonnes of concrete globally. That’s nearly 10,000 pounds, or more than 2 entire cars-worth of concrete, per person, per year. We produce enough steel to build more than 2700 Empire State Buildings annually. We produce more than 100 pounds of plastic per person, each year. And with all of this material production, we also produce a lot of greenhouse gas emissions.

Nearly one-third of global GHG emissions come from industry, with steel, concrete, and chemical manufacturing (i.e. plastics) being the largest contributors. These industries are tough to decarbonize because they require performing chemical reactions at high temperatures, not easily achieved through electrification, and because they emit greenhouse gasses as a by-product.

Climate Now sat down with Dr. Rebecca Dell of the ClimateWorks Foundation, the largest philanthropic program in the world dedicated to reducing and eliminating greenhouse gas emissions that come from the material economy. Dr. Dell shares how these industries are approaching decarbonization, and what kind of technological, policy and market innovations will be needed to reduce the industrial carbon footprint.

01:32 - Rebecca Dell's background
04:17 - ClimateWorks
04:30 - What is the "industrial sector" in the climate context?
05:48 - Decarbonizing petrochemicals (i.e. plastics)
17:51 - Decarbonizing concrete and cement
30:04 - Decarbonizing steel

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Are we underestimating the potential of increased efficiency? It wouldn’t be the first time.

In 2021, the International Energy Agency and the U.S. Energy Information Administration forecasted a 50% increase in global energy demand by 2050. Such forecasts have echoes of the 1970’s, when – in the middle of a global energy crisis – forecasters were anticipating as much as a 300% increase in energy demand over the next 3 decades. Those forecasters missed the mark by about 250%, because they didn’t count on the significant efficiency improvements in home appliances, vehicle fuel economy, industry and home energy demands that kickstarted in the 1980’s.

In this episode, featuring Dr. Amory Lovins of RMI and Dr. Roger Aines of Lawrence Livermore National Lab (LLNL), we explore whether energy forecasters are missing the mark again: projecting only incremental efficiency gains in the next 30 years, despite the fact that we already have the technologies and smart design approaches that would allow global energy demand to decrease by more than 70%, while still providing the same services of today.

Joined by a group of LLNL scientists, Amory, Roger and host James Lawler discuss the potential of smart and integrative design approaches that can provide savings in both energy emissions and costs, as well as the obstacles that are keeping us from taking full advantage of these approaches. Listen wherever you like to get your podcasts, or listen with the transcript at climatenow.com!

00:12 - Introduction
00:40 - The Energy Efficiency Resource
03:02 - Why focus on efficiency?
07:11 - How efficiency increases security and reliability of energy delivery
08:16 - How efficiency can be cost effective
11:39 - Energy efficiency trends in the last 50 or so years
15:08 - How to think about efficiency moving forward
23:43 - What methods do we need to employ to get to net-zero. What role does efficiency play?

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“Inertia is a hell of a thing. Inertia is there, and there is very little motivation for an incumbent to change course. So you have to have that disruption from the outside. The same thing with financial services.” - Marilyn Waite, Climate Finance Fund

In the 2019/2020 fiscal year, the global climate finance sector reached a record 632 billion US dollars. Unfortunately - that is a little short of the more than $3 trillion US dollars needed each year to keep warming under 2 degrees C, according to the IPCC. The Climate Finance Fund (CFF) is a philanthropic organization whose mandate is to close that gap by mobilizing capital towards climate solutions.

How do they do that? CFF focuses on bringing creative climate solutions to market with early investing, and supporting industry-led initiatives and regulatory changes that encourage financial institutions to divest from fossil fuels and invest in clean technology. Managing Director Marilyn Waite joined Climate Now to share the changes CFF’s projects have already brought about, who the big disruptors are in climate finance, and how to get the world’s biggest banks and lenders to take note that it is time to go green.

01:23 - Marilyn Introduction
04:09 - What is CFF?
07:58 - Clean Energy Credit Union
10:41 - Clean energy borrowing today
12:14 - Impact-first VCs and Climate Fintech
17:43 - Banking on Climate Chaos
20:50 - Systems change - Partnership for Carbon Accounting Financials

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Lawrence Livermore National Lab, Princeton University, and the IPCC have all published proposed climate mitigation pathways: strategies for economically reaching net-zero emissions by mid-century for California, the U.S., and the world, respectively. And they are not alone. Any given pathway to net-zero emissions offers some combination of efficiency improvements, expansion of renewable energy sources, and some amount of so-called "negative emissions," using technologies and natural processes that capture and store carbon. But what determines the ratio of these three decarbonization methods? What determines which particular ratio will produce the lowest-cost and most feasible pathway for society?

Climate Now sat down with Dr. EJ Baik, to discuss her research on the least-cost pathway for decarbonizing California’s electrical grid by 2045. EJ explains how major decarbonization pathways are modeled, the assumptions behind those models, and why sometimes the most economical way to reach net-zero is not what you’d expect.

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For years we’ve been hearing that the clean energy transition is going to be expensive. But the recent working paper, Empirically grounded technology forecasts and the energy transition, suggests that the high estimates of the expense to transition to renewable energy have been inflated, and that it may in fact be cheaper to transition to renewables than to stay on fossil fuels, regardless of the costs of the changing climate. Using probabilistic cost forecasting methods, the authors of the paper project that because of the exponentially decreasing cost curve of renewables like wind and solar, fossil fuels will become nearly obsolete in just 25 years.

Climate Now spoke with co-author of the paper, Dr. Doyne Farmer, to better understand their model and what that might mean for policy and investments. Dr. Farmer is the Director of the Complexity Economics program at the Institute for New Economic Thinking at the Oxford Martin School, Baillie Gifford Professor in the Mathematical Institute at the University of Oxford and an External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute.

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Among the top importers of Russian oil are the EU, Germany, Italy, The Netherlands, and France. The EU accounted for 71% of oil imports from Russia 2 months after the war in Ukraine began. But cutting off oil and gas imports from Russia completely can pose great challenges. The EU is attempting to wean off of Russian oil dependence in response to the invasion of Ukraine by hastening renewable energy adoption.

The 1970’s oil crises led to a flattening of the exponential demand growth for oil globally. It never recovered thanks to improvements in efficiency. What lessons can we learn from the past as we face the current oil and gas crisis brought on by Putin’s war? We spoke with Amory Lovins, co-author of a recent RMI article assessing the geopolitical dynamics driving a pivot away from fossil fuels.

Chapters:

1:29 The 70’s energy crisis compared to today

10:09 Russia’s energy role

14:12 Policy change following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

23:15 How might this impact Europe’s energy sources over the next several years?

26:48 How might this impact renewable energy adoption around the world?

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If the international shipping sector were a country, it would be the sixth largest CO2 emitting nation in the world. Every year, 11 billion tons of goods - about 80% of all the goods we use or consume - reach us by ship, emitting nearly a billion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere in the process. And, about 40% of those goods - nearly 4.5 billion tons - are fossil fuels.

Unlike switching to renewable energy and electric road vehicles, there is not an obvious short-term economic benefit to decarbonizing shipping, which makes even the simplest solutions (like slowing down the ships!) difficult to incentivize. Climate Now sat down with Bryan Comer, Marine Program Lead at The International Council on Clean Transportation (ICCT), to discuss the shipping industry's decarbonization goals, the policy changes needed to reach them, and the future of sustainable shipping.

1:02 What is the ICCT?
3:17 Overview of the shipping industry
6:49 What are the emissions reduction goals of the shipping industry?
9:36 Strategies to reach these reduction goals
14:10 Challenges to accomplish the emissions reduction goals

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Soil - that mixture of degraded bedrock, decomposing organic matter, and microorganisms, that nourishes the root systems of plants and trees - already has a soil carbon bank 4x that of vegetation. And, by changing how we manage our soils, it is possible to increase their capacity for trapping CO2 in the form of organic carbonand enhance the agricultural productivity of a region.

Dr. Asmeret Asefaw Berhe, Professor of Soil Biogeochemistry and Falasco Chair in Earth Sciences in the Department of Life and Environmental Sciences at University of California, Merced, is a global leader in the carbon storage potential of soils. She sat down with Climate Now to explain why soils are so good at trapping carbon, how much they could hold, and what we can do to increase soil carbon storage.

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Today, 26% of the global population - about 2 billion people - live without reliable access to safe drinking water. And, as climate change worsens, the availability of fresh water will only decrease. By 2050, as many as 3.2 billion people could live in severely water-scarce regions of the world. More than half the global population will experience water scarcity for at least one month a year.

Options for mitigating this crisis are limited: we can use less water, discourage population growth in urban centers, or find new water sources.

On World Water Day 2022, Jon Freedman, Senior Vice President of Global Governmental Affairs for SUEZ Water Technology Solutions, joined Climate Now to make the case for water reuse as one of those alternative sources. Technology already exists to purify and safely use recycled water - Israel reuses nearly 90% of its wastewater effluent, primarily for irrigation. The question that remains is how to encourage adoption of water reuse as part of regional and national conservation strategies, and how to finance the necessary infrastructure development

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The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission wants to standardize climate disclosures for publicly traded companies. What does that mean?

On March 21, 2022 the SEC released a proposal for a new rule: publicly traded companies will have to provide disclosures about how the changing climate will affect their business, and how their business is affecting climate.

This move would formalize a reporting system for climate-related disclosures that investors are increasingly demanding. Climate Now sat down with Nir Kaissar, a market economics columnist for Bloomberg Opinion and portfolio manager, to understand what these proposed disclosure requirements entail, how they fit into the scope of the SEC's mandate, and what the impact of their adoption will be for businesses, investors, policymakers and the public.

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In the race for decarbonization, the shipping industry faces major challenges. Fuel is cheap, almost half the price of gasoline. And, most ships last between 20-25 years, meaning that the turnover to cleaner shipping could take far longer than road transportation, where the average car is only 12 years old.

But there is some wind in the sails of maritime decarbonization initiatives.

Maria Gallucci, a climate journalist with Canary Media, has spent the last 5 years investigating the challenges and opportunities of decreasing maritime emissions. She spoke with Climate Now about why it is so hard to decarbonize this sector, and the diversity of approaches that are being explored, with a focus on ammonia and wind-powered propulsion.

Chapters:
00:00 Maria's background
02:08 Why is shipping so hard to decarbonize?
05:43 How is shipping regulated?
08:20 What technologies and alternative fuels for shipping could replace fossil fuels?
11:08 Ammonia:
- 11:08 Pros and cons of ammonia for shipping
-14:25 What needs to happen to convert shipping to ammonia-powered?
-17:18 Addressing the challenges of ammonia
23:10 What startups are tackling shipping's emission problem?
25:25 Wind-powered propulsion in the shipping industry
28:12 Battery-electric shipping and carbon capture

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One of the most efficient ways to get to a net-zero economy is to generate electricity from renewable sources, and then make as many things run on electricity as possible. But, as more end-use services (transportation, heating, industry) are electrified, and the source of electricity transitions from fossil fuels to renewables like solar and wind, the electricity supply chain - the pathway from electricity producers to consumers - will need to evolve, too.

In this episode, we spoke with Monica Varman, a clean energy technology investor at G2 Venture Partners who specializes in investments in grid resilience. We spoke with Monica about how the electricity sector works and how it is evolving: What is the pathway from creating electricity from a renewable or fossil fuel source, to being able to flip a switch in our home and have the light come on? And how are companies innovating the electricity generation-transmission-distribution supply chain to prepare us for a carbon-neutral future?

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In 2021 alone, more than $32 billion dollars were invested in green-technology startups, a four-fold increase from five years earlier. But how far will those dollars go? Only about 25% of venture-backed startups actually make the transition from an innovative idea to a successful business.

And when we are considering green technology, choosing which companies will have the biggest impact means much more than a return on investment. It will determine how fast we can reach a carbon-free global economy, and how dire the impact of climate change will be.

So how do investors pick the startups with the most potential? We spoke with G2 Venture Partners' Brook Porter, a chemical engineer-turned environmental technology investor with over two decades of experience in sustainability and technology development, about which companies are leading the way, how they succeeded, and what to be looking for among the up-and-comers in the green technology sector.

Episode breakdown:
00:40 Brook's background
04:30 What type of company will succeed?
10:00 Wright's Law of innovation
11:20 Is there a template for low-risk, high yield investment in climate tech?
13:13 VC typical startup failure rate
14:18 What trends is G2V following?
27:00 How does policy impact venture investments?
29:13 Hydrogen vs Electric cars
33:54 Technologies to decarbonize aviation

Climate Now is made possible, in part, by science partners like the Livermore Lab Foundation. The Livermore Lab Foundation supports climate research and carbon cleanup initiatives underway at Lawrence Livermore National Lab, which is a Department of Energy applied science and research facility. More information about the Foundation's work can be found at livermorelabfoundation.org.

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What will it take to get 100% of new car sales to be electric by 2030? Is it consumer demand? Is it political pressure? How about we just increase both?

The Zero Emission Transportation Association (ZETA) is the first industry-backed coalition advocating for 100% EV sales by 2030, and they have devised a federal roadmap for reaching that goal. Joe Britton of ZETA and Dr. Sweta Chakraborty of Pioneer Public Affairs sat down with us to outline the ZETA roadmap, with a focus on the role of public policy in incentivizing manufacturers to go electric, and the role of public messaging to increase consumer confidence in electric vehicles.

Listen now to learn about the six policy initiatives needed to electrify road transportation in the U.S.

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Decarbonizing our global economy is critical to staying below the 1.5C threshold of warming, but so is reducing the amount of carbon dioxide already in the atmosphere. By 2050, we will need to remove about ten billion tonnes of CO2 every year. Currently, we are capturing and sequestering about 40 million tonnes a year - about 0.4% of what’s needed by 2050, and less than 0.1% of the CO2-equivalent of global energy and industry emissions.

For comparison, renewable electricity has ramped up to 12% of global electricity consumption. Electric vehicles now make up nearly 9% of all new car sales. These climate-friendly tech sectors are growing quickly, but carbon capture, utilization and storage (CCUS) is not keeping pace.

Environmental economist Dr. Sheila Olmstead, professor of public affairs at the University of Texas at Austin, set out to discover what is holding back rapid growth in CCUS, and how to overcome those obstacles. She sat down with Climate Now to share what she is learning.

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There is a lot of focus within climate tech on how to decarbonize cars—whether that be via electric batteries, hydrogen fuel cells, or other emerging technologies—but what about eliminating the need for cars altogether?

How can we better design our cities and suburbs so that they are centered around humans, not cars? Cars do not need to be the primary method of urban transportation, and alternatives such as public transportation and micromobility have benefits far beyond simply reducing carbon emissions.

Listen now to our conversation with Dr. Meredith Glaser, urban mobility researcher and lecturer at the University of Amsterdam, and Dr. Kevin Krizek, professor of Environmental Design at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

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Climate policy at the federal level is integral to mitigating the climate crisis. Unfortunately, the United States has had a hard time so far passing ambitious climate legislation. Why is that?

From the outside, the situation often seems hopeless. But what does it look like from inside Washington? To find out, Climate Now spoke with Alex McDonough.

Alex started his career as a policy advisor for Senator Harry Reid, co-founded Clean Energy for America, and is now a policy advisor and partner at Pioneer Public Affairs, a clean energy lobbying firm.

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Heavy-duty, long-haul trucks - known as Class 8 trucks - account for more than 1 billion tons of carbon dioxide emissions worldwide each year.

Electrification, while a practical option for most of the trucking industry (see last week's episode), is not yet as feasible for long-haul Class 8 trucks. |

What options might exist to decarbonize heavy-duty trucking in the short and medium term, if not with electrification?

Climate Now spoke with two entrepreneurs whose companies are developing alternative technologies to reduce heavy-duty transport emissions: Bav Roy, co-founder and COO of Verne, a start-up optimizing hydrogen storage for fuel cell trucks; and Paul Gross, the co-CEO and co-founder of Remora, a startup that captures carbon from the exhaust pipe of trucks.

Listen now as we explore the challenges and growth opportunities for these two technologies, infrastructure considerations, and more.

Chapters:
00:15 Heavy-duty emissions
1:44 Verne Hydrogen introduction
6:03 Remora Carbon Capture introduction
7:14 Why it's hard to decarbonize trucking
9:35 Why use fuel cells?
12:23 Verne technology
14:50 Remora technology
22:08 Verne market timeline
27:05 Remora market timeline
29:35 Wrap-up discussion with hosts Darren and James

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In 2019, medium- and heavy-duty trucks accounted for about a quarter of U.S. transportation emissions while representing less than 4% of vehicles on the road, according to the U.S. EPA.

It is clear the trucking industry must decarbonize in order for the transportation sector, and the economy as a whole, to reach net-zero emissions, but which emerging technologies will move freight vehicles into climate-friendly territory is not yet clear, though electric is making great strides.

Climate Now spoke with the North American Council for Freight Efficiency's (NACFE) Executive Director Mike Roeth and Director of Emerging Technologies Rick Mihelic, as well as former RMI Senior Associate for Carbon-Free Mobility's Jessie Lund (now at CALSTART), about why electric trucks are leading the carbon-free trucking game.

Chapters:
2:03 What is NACFE?
4:20 Current state of the trucking industry
9:35 Technologies for decarbonizing trucking
15:25 Are hydrogen fuel cell vehicles scalable?
17: 20 Understanding total cost of ownership (TCO) for trucks - traditional, electric, hydrogen
24:13 Fueling the 3-way "horse race": infrastructural requirements for electric, gas, and hydrogen trucks
27:43 NACFE tested 13 real electric trucks on real roads with real drivers: here's what they found.
31:04 The state of the electric trucking market today

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Ride-sharing services currently result in 69% more emissions, on average, than the trips they displace, according to a recent study by the Union of Concerned Scientists.

But, if the ride-sharing vehicles were electric, it's a whole different story. Replacing one gasoline-powered ride-sharing car with an electric vehicle (EV) has three times the climate benefit as replacing a personal car with an EV.

Some companies like Cruise and Aurora go even further, developing electric autonomous fleets, which could further reduce the carbon footprint of ride-share vehicles.

Climate Now spoke with Dave Rubin, Head of Policy Research at Cruise, a self-driving, ride-sharing service, to understand how electric and autonomous vehicles could help us decarbonize road transportation, and the challenges ahead for wide-scale adoption.

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Climate Now is kicking off our Decarbonizing Transportation series by addressing a question that looms over the electric vehicle market: how can we sustainably manufacture and recycle EV batteries?

To learn about electric vehicle battery trends and challenges, we are joined by Andy Stevenson, former Special Projects Associate at Tesla and former Chief Financial Officer of Redwood Materials, a battery recycling company.

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The Connecticut Green Bank, the first green bank in the US, has unlocked over $2 billion in capital toward clean energy projects and other climate solutions since it was established by the state legislature in 2011.

So, what is the green bank model? How does it compare to other methods of clean energy finance? And what are their impact?

Climate Now speaks with Connecticut Green Bank President and CEO Bryan Garcia to find out.

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Earth's oceans play a key role in slowing climate change, absorbing nearly a third of anthropogenic CO2 emissions.

And they could, potentially, absorb more.

In this episode, Climate Now explores developing methods to enhance ocean-based carbon dioxide removal. What do we know about each technique, and what are the associated risks?

Learn more in our conversation with Dr. Wil Burns, visiting professor at Northwestern University's Environmental Policy and Culture Program and emeritus co-founding director of the Institute for Carbon Removal Law and Policy at American University.

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In November 2021, representatives from around the world gathered to update their climate commitments at the 26th United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Conference of the Parties (COP 26) in Glasgow, Scotland.

The conference received substantial attention from media and climate groups around the globe, the likes of which we haven't seen since COP 21 - the 2015 Paris Climate Accords.

So why was there so much anticipation leading up to this year's COP? What were the expectations, and were they met? And do the new commitments made at COP 26 put us on track to meet global climate targets?

Megan Darby, Editor of Climate Home News, a UK-based news organization that covers the international politics of the climate crisis, joined Climate Now to unpack the key results from COP 26.

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Wind energy is one of the cheapest sources of energy today, but it accounts for only ~6% of global electricity generation.

To limit global warming to 2 degrees C or less, wind energy will need to scale up to about 5 times its current size. |

So, how can this be achieved? What are the challenges to scaling wind energy to this degree? How does off-shore wind fit into this equation? And what needs to happen this decade to put us on track?

Climate Now is joined by Dr. Simon Watson, Director of the Delft University of Technology Wind Energy Institute, to discuss the role of wind energy in the transition to a low-carbon economy.

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Much of the focus surrounding climate action is on mitigation: how do we reduce the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, and avoid catastrophic climate change in the coming decades?

But the reality is the climate is already changing - and will continue to change even under the most optimistic mitigation scenarios. So what is being done to adapt and prepare for these changes?

Beth Gibbons, Executive Director of the American Society of Adaptation Professionals, joined Climate Now to discuss how - and whether - North American cities are adapting to a changing climate, and what still needs to happen to ensure people and places are protected.

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"The [investment market] we have in place now is not working for people, it's not working for the planet, and it's actually not working for most investors."

This is according to Amit Bouri, Co-founder and CEO of the Global Impact Investing Network (the GIIN), an international community dedicated to increasing the scale and effectiveness of impact investing.

Impact investments are made with the intention of producing a positive change, for example in addressing the climate crisis, while simultaneously earning financial returns. And it appears more and more investors are showing interest, as the impact investment market reached $715 billion in 2020, according to the GIIN, and is expected to keep rising.

Climate Now sat down with Amit Bouri to discuss the growing impact investment market and its drivers, how climate change plays a role, and how investors can measure the impact of their dollars.

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A growing population, groundwater depletion, poor water infrastructure, overuse, and water waste threaten our global freshwater supply.

Throw climate change into the mix, and the water crisis is exacerbated, as precipitation becomes less reliable and average global temperatures rise.

The water crisis, like the climate crisis, is projected to get worse, but there are solutions both corporations and governments can adopt to mitigate the negative impacts and prepare.

Climate Now spoke with Will Sarni, Founder and CEO of Water Foundry and a global thought leader on water challenges, to learn about the strategies and technologies available to assuage the water crisis.

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Most climate models in use today are based upon large-scale, well-understood physical relationships that drive global temperature and precipitation trends.

But the effects of complicated interactions that occur on smaller scales, which may still be significant, are harder to capture in these models.

That is why Dr. Laure Zanna of New York University and her colleagues are employing machine learning techniques, which can "learn" the effects of these interactions without explicitly solving the physics, to improve climate modeling. Climate Now spoke with Dr. Zanna to learn more.

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What does it take to turn an idea that could help fight climate change into a self-sustaining business? We often hear the glamorous stories of startups that have made it, but little about the struggles, the learning, and the luck required to get there.

Pol Knops, Founder and Chief Technology Officer of Green Minerals, joined Climate Now to share his ongoing journey to design, develop and market a process that transforms carbon dioxide emissions into a useful product.

Green Minerals speeds up the natural process of mineralization, in which CO2 chemically reacts with iron, magnesium or calcium-rich minerals to form a new mineral, permanently trapping the CO2.

The Green Minerals mineralization process uses olivine to react with captured CO2 to create feedstocks for the concrete and paper industries.

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How do we finance the cost of mitigating climate change, while discouraging continued use of fossil fuels? The largest public statement of economists in history argues for a carbon tax - which would charge a fee for every ton of carbon dioxide emitted.

But, if one country charges a different carbon tax than another, what would happen to international trade? Would fossil fuel use and emissions-intensive industrial processes actually decrease, or just move to a country without a carbon tax?

Carbon border adjustments attempt to address these issues, and come with their own legal, economic and practical complexities.

Listen to Climate Now's new podcast episode featuring conversations with Dr. Adele Morris, former Policy Director for Climate and Energy Economics at the Brookings Institution, Dr. David Weisbach, Professor of Law at the University of Chicago, Dr. Brian Flannery, Visiting Fellow for Resources for the Future, and Shuting Pomerleau, Climate Policy Analyst at the Niskanen Center. These experts help us unravel how carbon border adjustments could work, and their role in building solutions to the climate crisis.

Time Codes:

• 0:00 - carbon border adjustment economics
• 13:45 - carbon border adjustment logistics
• 30:00 - carbon border adjustment legality
• 34:30 - carbon pricing

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A rapidly expanding list of companies have announced plans to go "carbon neutral" or "net zero". Often, these plans include at least some offsetting of greenhouse gas emissions by purchasing credits from forest carbon offset programs.

But buyers beware: our look into how forest carbon offsets are determined and sold suggests that there is a lot of work to be done before we will be able to monetize the carbon absorptive power of trees in our effort to reduce net emissions.

Climate Now spoke with four experts: Dr. Charles Canham of The Cary Institute, Dr. Danny Cullenward, Policy Director of CarbonPlan, Dr. Grayson Badgley of Black Rock Forest and Columbia University, and Christine Cadigan of the American Forest Foundation to better understand what is and is not working in the forest carbon offset market.

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For businesses, a changing climate is not just about worsening weather patterns. Businesses must be prepared for what is likely to be an era of rapidly accelerating change to many dimensions of their operations, including changes in shareholder expectations, supply chains, multi-dimensional risks to physical assets, and impacts on labor, among others.

A critical dimension to preparing for these changes is risk assessment and reporting. The Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD) was established in 2015 to provide businesses with guidance on how to disclose both financial risks and opportunities that are associated with our changing climate.

Emily Wasley runs WSP USA's Corporate Climate Resilience practice. We spoke with Emily to gain a better understanding of the TCFD guidelines, and some perspective on the growing interest from businesses seeking to become resilient to a changing climate.

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In the first episode of our two-part series, we learned how NASA's Orbiting Carbon Observatory made it to space despite overwhelming odds from David Crisp, the mission's principal investigator.

Today, we released the sequel, where we explore the science of carbon dioxide remote sensing, and how the data collected by the OCO missions 2 and 3 can be used to address the climate crisis.

Dr. David Crisp returns, and with Dr. Annmarie Eldering, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory Project Scientist for the OCO-3 mission, explains what we have learned so far from the Orbiting Carbon Observatory missions.

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On the 24th of February, 2009, David Crisp was in the control center at Vandenberg Air Force base counting down the seconds for the Orbiting Carbon Observatory to launch.

It was a project he had led for a decade - and it was the first NASA mission that would measure atmospheric carbon dioxide from space.

Hundreds of millions of dollars and years of work had gone into that moment, but David and his team had yet to face their greatest challenge...

This week, Climate Now is releasing a two-part series on NASA's Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO) missions, including the saga of its multi-decadal journey to completion and the impact it could have on the fight to end climate change.

David Crisp, Senior Research Scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, shares his experience as the Principal Investigator for the OCO missions with Climate Now in this episode.

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Many climate change mitigation proposals are land-use intensive. Are these proposals feasible without negatively impacting biodiversity? Can we develop solutions for both the climate and biodiversity crises?

There has been an historic lack of collaboration between climate and conservation efforts. To address this, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) produced their first-ever joint report in June to determine solutions that benefit both biodiversity and climate change.

Dr. Pete Smith, a co-author of the IPBES/IPCC report and professor of Soils and Global Change at the University of Aberdeen, joined Climate Now to explain why biodiversity should not be forgotten in the climate fight.

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The climate crisis has myriad effects on American businesses, from where properties are located and their likelihood of encountering extreme weather, to where materials are sourced and potential supply-chain complications. These effects inevitably carry with them financial risks and opportunities which can impact pensions, stock markets, and business operations.

So how can businesses begin to calculate their financial risk from the effects of climate change? And why is this seemingly impossible task important?

We'll address this question with Tory Grieves, Vice President of Analytics for The Climate Service, a company that provides businesses the tools to calculate their climate-related financial risks and opportunities.

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Is there such a thing as "perfect" energy? With nuclear fusion, the answer is maybe.

Fusion energy would be safe to human health, environmentally clean, and essentially limitless.

But, developing a sustainable fusion reaction still faces significant engineering hurdles and is likely decades away from becoming a reality.

So, where are we in the development of fusion technology? What technical challenges remain? And what practical challenges must be overcome to make fusion a competitive energy source?

Sir Steven Cowley, director of the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, and Dr. Aneeqa Khan, Research Fellow in Nuclear Fusion at The University of Manchester, answer these questions in this episode.

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Despite being a reliable, zero-emissions alternative to energy derived from fossil fuels, nuclear energy remains mired in controversy.

Opponents often cite four reasons not to include nuclear in the portfolio of alternative energy sources that will replace fossil fuels: its cost, what to do with radioactive waste, the increased risk of nuclear weapons proliferation, and environment and health impacts resulting from accidents or meltdowns.

But how are these risks quantified and how do they compare to other energy sources, including carbon-intensive energy? As the climate crisis worsens, can we really afford to exclude nuclear from the list of solutions?

Dr. David Keith, internationally-recognized climate and energy scientist and entrepreneur out of Harvard University, helps us understand how the risks of employing nuclear compare to the risks of not using it.

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Transitioning to a sustainable energy economy will require significant input of investment capital. But how do investors decide which companies and technologies to back as society moves toward a carbon neutral future?

Salim Samaha heads energy project investments in the Americas for Global Infrastructure Partners. GIP is a national leader in private equity investments in renewable energy, with ownership stakes in over 90 gigawatts of operating or developing renewable energy projects.

In this episode, Mr. Samaha explains the role of private equity investments in the clean energy transition and the types of projects GIP is funding.

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Trees are an incredible resource for mitigating climate change, with myriad environmental benefits - not least their ability to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and store it for hundreds to thousands of years.

Reforestation - the process of replanting trees in depleted areas - should be included in the array of climate solutions, but it isn't as simple as merely planting any tree anywhere.

Dr. Susan Cook-Patton and her colleagues created the Reforestation Hub, which provides county-level information about the best regions and geographic areas to plant trees to maximize CO2 uptake via reforestation.

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China currently produces more greenhouse gas emissions than the next three biggest emitters - the United States, European Union, and India - combined, making a commitment from China to decarbonize its economy essential to reaching global carbon neutrality.

But given China is the manufacturing epicenter of the world, the path to decarbonization is not straight forward. So, what targets were set in China's most recent 5-year plan and does this put them on track to meet their goal of net-zero emissions by 2060?

How does China's political landscape affect its ability, and willingness, to transition to clean energy? And where is China currently investing its resources?

We explore these topics with Georgetown University's Joanna Lewis, Center for American Progress' Laura Edwards, and Sustainable Finance Institute's Johnny Huang (Huang, Zhong).

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How do we reach global net-zero emissions by 2050, when there is almost no chance of completely ending our dependence on fossil fuels by that time? The solution will require Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR) – a host of natural and technological techniques for drawing CO2 out of the atmosphere, effectively producing ‘negative emissions’.

We spoke with Dr. Roger Aines, the Energy Program Chief Scientist and lead of the Carbon Initiative at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, to learn about the various carbon dioxide removal methods, their advantages, costs and challenges, and who is helping advance them.

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In order to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, we must (in addition to reducing emissions) capture carbon and permanently store it where it cannot be released, a process known as carbon sequestration.

So, what is currently being done to advance carbon sequestration? What policy and economic levers need to be implemented to incentivize its wide-scale deployment?

To answer these questions, Climate Now spoke with Dr. Julio Friedmann, Senior Research Scholar at the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University SIPA and previously the Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for the Office of Fossil Energy at the Department of Energy.

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What incentives are needed for airlines to adopt sustainable aviation fuel (#SAF) and decarbonize air travel? How does SAF get tested and approved for use in commercial aviation?

Who are the players in this space now and how much SAF is already being used? Steve Csonka joins Climate Now to discuss this important new technology.

Steve Csonka is the Executive Director of the Commercial Aviation Alternative Fuels Initiative (CAAFI), where he connects a coalition of airlines, aircraft manufacturers, energy producers, researchers, and U.S. government agencies to advance sustainable jet fuel for commercial use.

Note: This podcast was recorded on April 13, 2021, and there have been a few updates since then. In addition to World Energy, Gevo, and Neste, Eni and Air BP are now also producing SAF, and Fulcrum completed construction of its waste-to-fuel facility in Nevada and will likely be producing fuel by the end of 2021.

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As the climate crisis worsens, more and more companies are committing to go "net-zero". Most of these commitments include the purchase of carbon offsets or investment in negative emissions projects, designed to offset the emissions resulting from companies' operations.

The carbon offset market is in high demand due to this surge of net-zero pledges, but does the market actually work? How can companies be sure their dollars are removing carbon that otherwise wouldn't be removed from the atmosphere? And what are the risks of a market that doesn't uphold its promise of truly offsetting emissions?

Dr. Mark Trexler of the Climatographers and Derik Broekhoff of the Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI) joined Climate Now to discuss the carbon offset market, what's wrong with it, and what its future could be.

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Declining renewable energy costs have sparked a renewed interest in green hydrogen, which has the potential to decarbonize sectors that are harder to electrify.

Because hydrogen doesn't occur by itself on Earth, it must be separated from other elements, such as oxygen in water. Electrolysis is the process of using electricity from renewable energy to extract hydrogen from water.

Dr. Ben Wiley, Duke University Professor of Chemistry, joins Climate Now to explain hydrogen electrolysis, where it makes sense to integrate into the energy economy, and the technology he is helping develop to improve its productivity.

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How exactly are plants converted into liquid transportation fuel? And what obstacles does bioenergy need to overcome in order to displace fossil fuels in the US energy economy and abroad?

Jerry Tuskan is the CEO of the Center for Bioenergy Innovation and Group Lead for Plant Systems Biology in the Biosciences Division at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, where he has been since 1990.

He also holds a joint appointment at the Joint Genome Institute - a Department of Energy Office of Science user facility - where he helps lead the Plant Science Program.

Dr. Tuskan joined Climate Now to help us understand the biomass to biofuel process and how the sector can expand to meet our net-zero emissions targets.

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Bioenergy is a renewable energy for its carbon neutrality - plants absorb CO2 during photosynthesis and emit the same amount when combusted for energy. But to significantly reduce our reliance on fossil fuels, substantial amounts of biomass, or organic matter, are required.

What types of biomass can sustainably and economically be used for energy? What policy or market adjustments can be made to allow bioenergy to compete with more affordable oil or gasoline?

Climate Now hosts James Lawler and Katherine Gorman spoke with Matthew Langholtz, Natural Resource Economist at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, to better understand biomass availability and the role bioenergy could play in the transition away from fossil fuels.

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Climate impact assessment models carry significant weight when developing mitigation and adaptation strategies. So, what climate models exist, and what factors do they include? What scenarios are they projecting, and what should we make of these projections?

We had the opportunity to ask these questions to Dr. Joeri Rogelj, a lead author of the IPCC's forthcoming sixth assessment report. Dr. Rogelj is Director of Research and Lecturer in Climate Change and the Environment at the Grantham Institute at Imperial College London.

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National governments are best-suited to provide the bold, swift action required by the climate crisis through policy. But which policies, exactly, should be passed? What are the pros and cons of each, and which are already proven to be effective in other countries?

In this episode, we talk with Danny Richter, Vice President of Government Affairs at Citizens' Climate Lobby, to discuss some of these questions, including what a price on carbon might look like in the United States.

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What are the possible paths and necessary steps to achieve net-zero emissions in the United States by 2050? Which energy sources could sufficiently decrease our reliance on natural gas and oil to meet that target? And how much will those new energy sources need to scale from where they are today?

Dr. Eric Larson is a lead author of the Net-Zero America Report - a Princeton University research initiative that presents five possible pathways to achieving net-zero emissions by 2050 - and Senior Research Engineer at Princeton's Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment.

In this episode, Dr. Larson takes Climate Now hosts James Lawler and Katherine Gorman through the various pathways to net-zero, including the technologies that could help us achieve it.

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According to the IPCC's 2018 report, carbon capture and storage - in addition to a significant reduction in emissions - will be necessary in order to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels.

But what is carbon capture, how does it work, and what is its potential?

Dr. Howard Herzog, MIT Energy Initiative Senior Research Engineer, and a pioneer of carbon capture technology, joined Climate Now to help us understand carbon capture and storage and its role on our path to net-zero emissions.

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Dr. Sergey Paltsev, Deputy Director of MIT's Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change, spoke with Climate Now hosts James Lawler and Katherine Gorman about climate projections and the tools he and his colleagues at MIT use to communicate projected outcomes to policymakers and the public.

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Dr. Ian Bolliger, Climate Data Scientist at Rhodium Group and affiliate of the Climate Impact Lab, joins Climate Now podcast hosts Katherine Gorman and James Lawler to explain how we measure the costs of climate change (in dollar terms) across sectors and communities. Putting a number on these costs can help businesses, governments, and communities better allocate funding towards adaptation and prevention.

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Hosts Katherine Gorman and James Lawler discuss how politicians can create climate campaigns and what role regional, state, and the federal governments play in advancing climate action.

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How do we determine the real cost of a ton of carbon? Listen to find out.

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Hosts Katherine Gorman and James Lawler interview Dr. Bob Kopp, Climate Scientist at Rutgers University and Director of the Institute of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences, about sea level change and how we estimate the costs of climate damages.

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Dr. Kerry Emanuel, professor of Atmospheric Science at MIT and co-founder of the MIT Lorenz Center discusses how we can solve climate change.

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Hi and welcome to the Climate Now podcast, hosted by Katherine Gorman and James Lawler! Climate Now is a multi-platform resource on the science of climate change, covering the key scientific theories underpinning our understanding of how and why the climate is changing; our global energy system and the emissions we produce; the various approaches to addressing and reversing climate change and their respective costs; policy opportunities and pitfalls; energy and climate-related technologies; and other topics. Check out our videos, articles, and podcasts at climatenow.com

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