Net Zero

1. Comms closure
2. Methane progress
3. DAC dreams
4. Renewables shortfall
5. Finance cracks

Racewalking to sustainability at the Paris Olympics.

Climate comms at a nexus

The influential climate communications shop Climate Nexus will close this month after 13 years. Nexus was a fixture of my email inbox, always on hand with background and contacts for possible interviewees on the news of the day. It did more than almost any organization to promote basic climate science awareness among journalists, during a time when the role of climate in newsrooms expanded dramatically and evolved far beyond the stale, misleading scientist-vs-denier framing that used to be a hallmark of mainstream media coverage. The group had struggled to fill a funding gap left after the drying-up of funding from the MacArthur Foundation, which had been its main financial backer, and other donors.

In a way, Nexus was a victim of its own success, former and current staffers told me: In the Inflation Reduction Act era, climate feels like a problem society is actually making progress to solve, and thus less of an immediate concern for philanthropists. But paradoxically, measuring that progress in discrete quarterly KPIs is challenging, which can also turn big donors off; the Environmental Defense Fund, Sierra Club, and other environmental groups have also suffered waves of funding-related layoffs in the last year. Nexus also struggled at times to design programs that could satisfy both its increasingly nitpicky donor base and the broad coalition of researchers and activists it sought to represent, staffers said, including a reluctance by some donors to fund work promoting environmental justice and pressure by some of them to foreground technocratic, divisive climate solutions like carbon capture. The group also suffered, fundraising-wise, from its insistence on operating as a behind-the-scenes platform for experts, rather than a prominent public voice in its own right.

Methane progress

US oil and gas production is getting moderately cleaner.

The amount of methane emitted for each barrel of oil (or its gas equivalent) has fallen by more than half across the industry in the last several years, according to an analysis of federal data this week by Clean Air Task Force and other environmental groups. Federal and state regulations implemented in that time to prohibit the use of leak-prone hardware and gratuitous methane venting have made a big impact. CO2 emissions intensity is also falling, but more slowly. Until recently, methane was practically uncontrolled, but technologies to monitor and limit it are proliferating. Still, the report finds a huge gap between the best and worst actors, with large majors generally much cleaner than small independent drillers.

Carbon removal still won’t save the planet

Tech to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere took a big step forward this week, but remains far off course to reach the levels scientists believe will be necessary to keep global temperatures within the Paris Agreement targets.

Climeworks, a Swiss startup that was among the first companies to build a commercial-scale direct air capture (DAC) plant, switched on the world’s largest such facility in Iceland last month. Yesterday, the company unveiled a series of incremental improvements that it says will allow it to capture twice as much CO2 for half the cost and half the energy consumption of its existing tech. Climeworks plans to build its first “generation 3” facility in Louisiana, part of a project that was awarded a $50 million grant from the US Department of Energy in March.

While Climeworks’ first two plants together are capable of pulling about 40,000 tons of CO2 from the air annually — about 1% of the emissions of a typical coal-fired power plant — the new tech will put the company within reach of hitting several million tons per year by 2030 and a billion tons by 2050, co-founder and co-CEO Jan Wurzbacher told reporters.

It’s no surprise that Wurzbacher is bullish on carbon removal. But the company’s own cost forecasts, plus all of the other available evidence about how quickly the nascent industry can mature, suggest that without much more direct government intervention to force high-emitting companies to pay up for carbon removal credits, there will likely be a major shortfall in the availability of carbon removal by midcentury. Carbon removal tech breakthroughs don’t fundamentally make them a more feasible hedge against slow emissions reductions.

Renewables shortfall

China and Latin America are the only regions on track to meet a global goal to triple installed renewable energy capacity by 2030.

An assessment by the International Energy Agency found that even though renewable energy is growing by leaps and bounds — installations grew an unprecedented 64% globally from 2022 to 2023 — at the current pace they’ll fall 30% short of the ambitious goal countries agreed to at last year’s COP28 summit. It’s a different story in China, which is in a class of its own and just this week opened the world’s largest solar farm. China will also meet its green hydrogen production targets a year ahead of schedule, according to Rystad Energy.

Financial cracks

Rifts are emerging along familiar lines as climate finance negotiations get underway in preparation for the COP29 summit. Negotiators met in Bonn this week to talk about establishing a new fundraising target for climate finance, the big issue looming over global climate politics this year. Rich countries only recently met a longstanding $100 billion goal to fund the climate transitions of low- and middle-income countries. There are two main issues at stake, said Juan Pablo Hoffmaister, associate vice president for global climate cooperation at the Environmental Defense Fund. One is the number itself, with suggestions ranging from the same $100 billion to $2.4 trillion. The other is what exactly to count toward that goal: Only government grants and loans from rich countries, or a broader financial pool that could include the carbon market and private-sector investment? Rich countries are pushing for a lower number and a broader pool to take the heat off themselves, Hoffmaister said. There’s not much time to build a consensus before COP29, but Hoffmaister said he’s feeling optimistic that “by the time we get to Baku there it will be down to a few options that heads of state can choose between.”

New Energy

• Europe has so much renewable electricity that power prices are frequently dipping below zero — good news for consumers, but a big turnoff for investors. The solution is more batteries.

Fossil Fuels

• Saudi Aramco’s $12 billion sale of government-owned stock sold out in a few hours, a surprise for some on Wall Street who had warned that the shares were overpriced. It’s not clear how many buyers were Saudis vs. foreigners, but either way it’s a nice financial boost for the Kingdom’s economic diversification strategy. “They’re selling off such small percentages that it does seem like a pretty sustainable plan” to essentially convert below-ground oil into a usable asset, Jim Krane, an expert on Gulf energy policy at Rice University, told Semafor.
• A major gas pipeline deal between China and Russia is held up because of Beijing’s demands for a deep discount, complicating the Kremlin’s search for new energy income.

Tech

• A startup that raised $1 billion to turn trash into sustainable aviation fuel is on the verge of bankruptcy, in part because of unexpected technical challenges in its factory.

Politics & Policy

• The Sunrise Movement, a climate activist group that helped get Joe Biden elected, is holding off on endorsing his second run.

Minerals & Mining

• Hi-ho! The latest mineral commodity to see soaring prices as a result of the clean energy boom is silver.
• Pennsylvania’s longtime fracking boom could unlock a major new supply of lithium, which researchers found in “shocking” quantities in fracking wastewater.

EVs

• Volvo will issue the world’s first “passport” for electric vehicle batteries. All EVs sold in the European Union from 2027 will need to report the origins of their constituent parts, their carbon footprint, and their user history.

Food & Agriculture

• JBS, the world’s largest meat company, purchased thousands of cattle over the last few years that had been raised on illegal ranches in a protected region of the Amazon, according to a report from the nonprofit Environmental Investigations Agency. JBS didn’t reply to a request for comment.

Rhydian Cowley, Australian Olympic racewalker. Cowley is among a group of athletes at the upcoming Paris Olympics calling on the organizers to call off its sponsorship deal with Toyota because the vehicles it’s providing to the games aren’t 100% electric.

• Nippon executive warns of ‘nightmare’ scenario for a solo US Steel.
• Congress’ progressives despair over Biden’s border order.
• Salman Rushdie’s alleged assailant seeks plea deal with US.