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New scientific interventions are here to fight climate change. But they aren't silver bullets

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Monday, April 22, 2024

TRACY, Calif. —  Behind a chain-link fence in a nondescript corner of San Joaquin County sits one of California’s — and perhaps the world’s — best hopes for combating climate change. Here at the nation’s first commercial direct air capture facility, towering trays of limestone mineral powder are working round-the-clock to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Robots skitter and whir around the 40-foot tall columns, which are part of a multi-step process that will ultimately convert the CO2 to concrete, rendering the planet-warming compound into nothing more harmful than a stone. “We need to do this all around the world,” said Vikrum Aiyer, head of public policy for Heirloom, the California-based company that owns and operates the facility. The good news, he said, is that “CO2 removed anywhere is CO2 removed everywhere.” Aggressive and impactful reporting on climate change, the environment, health and science. The idea for their carbon-removal technology was born in the wake of a 2018 special report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which found that limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius over preindustrial levels will require transformative innovations in energy, land, urban and industrial systems that go beyond national pledges to cut back on emissions. The 1.5-degree limit is an internationally-agreed-upon benchmark intended to prevent the worst effects of climate change. But the planet is already beginning to experience the effects of that warming, including worsening wildfires, simmering oceans, extreme heat waves, prolonged droughts, crop shortages and species loss. Last year was the planet’s hottest on record so far, with the global average temperature hovering around 2.67 degrees — or 1.48 degrees Celsius — warmer than the late 1800s. Maurisha Agustin, a production technician, works inside the 40-foot-tall carbon dioxide extractor. (Paul Kuroda / For The Times) While reducing the use of fossil fuels is the surest way to prevent that warming from getting worse, Aiyer and many other experts, researchers and public officials are converging around the notion that scientific intervention will be necessary. “We need to move fast, and we need more lawmakers to not move at the speed and scale of government, but rather at the speed and scale of our children’s generation, and the next generation, depending on it,” he said.The government is getting on board, however — as is Silicon Valley. The Tracy facility is capable of capturing 1,000 tons of CO2 per year, which will be stored for centuries in concrete that is already being used to build bridges, roads and other local infrastructure. The company makes a profit by selling carbon removal credits to buyers such as Microsoft, Stripe and Klarna, which are investing heavily in the technology.But it will take a lot more than 1,000 tons of annual CO2 removal to make a dent in global warming: Current CO2 levels in the atmosphere are 425 parts per million and counting. To truly make a difference will require carbon removal at the gigaton scale, or billions of tons each year, according to the IPCC. Trays layered with calcium hydroxide are designed to extract carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. (Paul Kuroda / For The Times) Christian Theuer, Heirloom’s policy communications manager, explains how carbon dioxide extraction works. (Paul Kuroda / For The Times) Earlier this year, the U.S. Department of Energy awarded $50 million to Heirloom and its partners to develop what will become a massive, million-ton direct air capture facility in Louisiana. The funding was part of a larger $1.2-billion investment into direct air capture technologies announced by the Biden administration last year. Several Los Angeles startups are also getting into the carbon removal game, including Captura, a company working to remove CO2 from the upper ocean, and Avnos, a company whose technology produces water while capturing carbon. Avnos also recently secured funding from the Department of Energy. The hope is that operating such projects around the country and the world will not only stop global warming, but eventually help reverse it, said Christian Theuer, Heirloom’s policy communications manager.“You halt it by getting to net zero, by not putting out any new CO2 emissions into the atmosphere,” Theuer said as he circled the towers in Tracy. “Then you can move into the negative emissions territory, where you’re cleaning up legacy pollution that is already warming the planet.”But direct air capture is only one of the many ways scientists, policymakers and researchers are hoping to alter the planet’s worrisome trajectory. Solar radiation modification — a form of geoengineering designed to artificially cool the planet — is also being seriously studied as a solution.There are many forms of solar radiation modification, including a concept known as marine cloud brightening, which uses sea salt particles to increase the reflectivity of clouds in order to reflect more sunlight away from Earth. A program run by the University of Washington recently initiated a test of the concept off the coast of San Francisco.But perhaps the most promising — or at least the most studied — geoengineering solution is known as stratospheric aerosol injections. Proposed methods for climate intervention include stratospheric aerosol injections and marine cloud brightening. (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) The basic idea is to manually re-create the process of volcanic eruptions, which cool the planet by spewing sulfur and other particles into the stratosphere, temporarily blocking sunlight. Researchers already know from studying volcanoes that this infusion of sulfur creates a planetary cooling effect that can last two or three years. That and other forms of solar radiation modification are gaining so much attention that last year, the White House released a congressional report on the matter that not only considers its feasibility, but also outlines the urgent need for a framework to govern its research. Solar radiation modification “offers the possibility of cooling the planet significantly on a timescale of a few years,” the report says. “Such cooling would tend to reverse many of the negative consequences of climate change, albeit with ramifications which are now poorly understood.”Indeed, such a concept carries many potential benefits as well as potential risks, according to Chris Field, director of the Woods Institute for the Environment at Stanford University. Field led a major National Academies of Sciences report on solar geoengineering that is reflected in the White House’s findings. Towering structures of fans and trays capture carbon dioxide inside the Heirloom plant in Tracy. (Paul Kuroda / For The Times) “We have a pretty solid understanding that injecting aerosols in the stratosphere would make the average temperature cooler, but you would want to do a lot more than that if you were serious about a deployment of this stuff,” Field said. “You would want to know about the regional effects and you would want to know about the possibility of any unintended consequences outside the climate system. You’d also want to know a lot about what kinds of strategies you would have in place to make this governable.”Last year, a company called Make Sunsets made headlines when it began testing stratospheric aerosol injections by releasing sulfur-filled weather balloons from a launch site in Mexico. The move generated considerable opposition from the scientific community, which said it was too soon to conduct such experiments without more guardrails. An open letter signed by more than 110 physical and biological scientists in the wake of the incident affirmed “the importance of proceeding with responsible research.”Part of the reason for concern is that when sulfur dioxide leaves the stratosphere and sinks into the lower atmosphere, it can potentially fall as acid rain. That doesn’t mean the concept isn’t worth studying, but it does mean transparency about funding, research and results must be made available for broad discussion, Field said. Maurisha Agustin monitors a laptop inside the Heirloom plant. (Paul Kuroda / For The Times) “If it doesn’t have a certain level of public trust — especially in the world’s developing countries — there is essentially no way that it could be deployed and sustained over an extended period,” he said. He added that it is not really possible to design a stratospheric deployment that is limited to one part of the world’s geography, meaning that any injections would have global implications. Critically, Field and other experts said geoengineering should not take the place of decarbonization, or efforts to reduce or eliminate CO2 emissions around the world. California has committed to reaching carbon neutrality by 2045.“There’s no world in which solar geoengineering is a solution to climate change — it’s kind of a Band-Aid so that we don’t experience the full range of impacts of the climate change that’s still there,” Field said. “And it’s really important to recognize that, because it’s just a Band-Aid, we really don’t want it to take attention away from decarbonization.”While direct air capture and aerosol injections do show potential, there are other concepts for cooling the planet that have garnered some interest — or at least raised some eyebrows.A Southern California-based organization called the Planetary Sunshade Foundation has posited that the best solution to climate change isn’t here on Earth, but rather in outer space, where a massive sail-like structure could reflect sunlight away from the planet.“We are on track to continue to see significant increases in global temperature, and so solar radiation modification will continue to be talked about more and more,” said Morgan Goodwin, the foundation’s executive director. “And the planetary sunshade, we believe, is the sustainable, long-term way of doing solar radiation modification.” The sail — or more likely, the collection of sails — would need to measure approximately 580,000 square miles in size to offset 1 degree Celsius of warming, Goodwin said. It would need to be located at the Lagrange 1 Point in space, nearly 1 million miles from Earth — a location where the gravitational pull of the sun and Earth would essentially pin the object in place.The design requirement calls for a material that is thin, light and capable of blocking sunlight. Basically “aluminum foil,” Goodwin said. Offsetting 1 degree Celsius of global warming would require approximately 580,000 square miles of sunshade material nearly 1 million miles from Earth. (Planetary Sunshade Foundation) The result would be shading that is diffuse and spread out evenly across the entire globe. The amount of solar shading — about 1% — would be less than what most people can perceive on Earth, and its effect would be less than what some high-altitude clouds already have on sunlight, he said. The concept is similar to a solar sail spacecraft, forms of which have already been deployed in space. A proposed NASA solar cruiser mission would fly a large solar sail to the Lagrange 1 Point, though the project has stalled due to lack of funding. Goodwin said the Sunshade Foundation is advocating for that mission to fly, and for the U.S. government and other agencies to consider their technological proposals.“There’s so much energy and so many resources in the space sector, and part of what we’re saying is that the space sector can play a role as part of the climate solution,” he said. But like other climate adaptation solutions, there are potential downsides. For one, such a project would be large and expensive, and would require constant upkeep and maintenance when meteorites and space debris impact the sails. What’s more, there are unknown unknowns, such as whether even a small percentage of sunlight reduction could affect photosynthesis and have an adverse impact on agricultural crops. But the idea is more “sustainable and responsible” than other forms of solar radiation modification, Goodwin said, although he stressed that it, too, should not take the place of emissions-reduction efforts.“I feel much more hopeful about the future knowing that I can help advance this and help make this a reality, and give us all a much better shot,” he said. “You know, the future is far from certain, and it will be far stranger than we imagined.” Newsletter Toward a more sustainable California Get Boiling Point, our newsletter exploring climate change, energy and the environment, and become part of the conversation — and the solution. You may occasionally receive promotional content from the Los Angeles Times. Back on Earth, the limestone towers are already up and running in Heirloom’s 50,000 square-foot direct air capture facility in Tracy. The process there involves heating limestone in a massive kiln, which turns it into a mineral powder that is spread onto the towering stacks of trays. The powder acts like a sponge for CO2 — pulling it from the air and hardening into a crust. Once saturated, it is returned to the kiln where the CO2 is extracted, and the cycle begins again. The extracted CO2 is transported off site where Heirloom’s partner, CarbonCure Technologies, injects it into recycled water that is used to make concrete that is now being used throughout Bay Area infrastructure. “Once it’s in that concrete, it’s not going back into the atmosphere,” Theuer said of the CO2. “It’s permanently a part of that product. Even if in some scenario you blew up the building associated with it, it would still stay embedded amid the rubble and wouldn’t reenter the atmosphere. It’s now a stone.” The process is different than carbon capture, which involves capturing CO2 at the source where it is emitted. Carbon capture plays a role in the state’s cap-and-trade program, which sets limits on greenhouse gas emissions and allows companies to buy and sell their unused credits. That program has seen mixed results, with some critics saying it ultimately enables more pollution and creates more allowances for emissions. As a commercial operation, Heirloom sells its carbon offsets to a voluntary market at a rate of $600 to $1,000 per net ton, and the company says it does not take investments from oil and gas businesses. Already, some fossil fuel companies have shown interest in direct air capture technology, including at least seven oil and gas producers that have invested in, or are working to develop, direct air capture projects. Aiyer said he is closely watching Senate Bill 308, new legislation in California that would create a framework by which the state government approves standards for carbon removal. It would also compel heavy emitters in the state to account for their emissions through offset purchases or removals, among other measures. But there are potential downsides to direct air capture, including its high energy costs, which could limit the technology’s ability to expand. The Heirloom facility and many others run on 100% renewable energy, including wind and solar power, but experts say fusion and geothermal energy could be potential sources for such technology in the future. And while concrete storage is currently the best available option for carbon sequestration in the U.S., cement is a known contributor to fossil fuel emissions. Heirloom officials said they anticipate transitioning to underground storage wells in the future, pending permitting approval from the Environmental Protection Agency. Geologic storage is already used in parts of Europe, and there are at least 506 billion tons of accessible pore space for permanent CO2 storage in the U.S., they said. What’s more, the interest from Big Oil has met with broader concerns that carbon removal, geoengineering and other climate change solutions could have the unintended consequence of enabling society to continue its reliance on fossil fuels. If these tools can clean CO2 or cool the planet, the logic goes, then the use of gas-guzzling cars, smog-producing products, and oil and gas drilling can continue as usual.It’s a refrain many working in the climate adaptation space have heard before. Still, the steady hum of progress has given even those most entrenched in the battle against global warming some semblance of optimism for the future. “These technologies — whether it is our pathway of direct air capture or other carbon removal technologies — should not be a fig leaf for additional fossil fuel expansion,” Aiyer said. “We need to make sure that we are reducing our reliance on emissions and fossil fuel production, and we need to do these removals.”

Giant sun shades, 40-foot-tall air filters, stratospheric sulfur injections: Here are some of the wild and wondrous ways we might save the planet.

TRACY, Calif. — 

Behind a chain-link fence in a nondescript corner of San Joaquin County sits one of California’s — and perhaps the world’s — best hopes for combating climate change.

Here at the nation’s first commercial direct air capture facility, towering trays of limestone mineral powder are working round-the-clock to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Robots skitter and whir around the 40-foot tall columns, which are part of a multi-step process that will ultimately convert the CO2 to concrete, rendering the planet-warming compound into nothing more harmful than a stone.

“We need to do this all around the world,” said Vikrum Aiyer, head of public policy for Heirloom, the California-based company that owns and operates the facility. The good news, he said, is that “CO2 removed anywhere is CO2 removed everywhere.”

Aggressive and impactful reporting on climate change, the environment, health and science.

The idea for their carbon-removal technology was born in the wake of a 2018 special report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which found that limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius over preindustrial levels will require transformative innovations in energy, land, urban and industrial systems that go beyond national pledges to cut back on emissions.

The 1.5-degree limit is an internationally-agreed-upon benchmark intended to prevent the worst effects of climate change. But the planet is already beginning to experience the effects of that warming, including worsening wildfires, simmering oceans, extreme heat waves, prolonged droughts, crop shortages and species loss. Last year was the planet’s hottest on record so far, with the global average temperature hovering around 2.67 degrees — or 1.48 degrees Celsius — warmer than the late 1800s.

A production technician inside a towering structure with fans

Maurisha Agustin, a production technician, works inside the 40-foot-tall carbon dioxide extractor.

(Paul Kuroda / For The Times)

While reducing the use of fossil fuels is the surest way to prevent that warming from getting worse, Aiyer and many other experts, researchers and public officials are converging around the notion that scientific intervention will be necessary.

“We need to move fast, and we need more lawmakers to not move at the speed and scale of government, but rather at the speed and scale of our children’s generation, and the next generation, depending on it,” he said.

The government is getting on board, however — as is Silicon Valley. The Tracy facility is capable of capturing 1,000 tons of CO2 per year, which will be stored for centuries in concrete that is already being used to build bridges, roads and other local infrastructure. The company makes a profit by selling carbon removal credits to buyers such as Microsoft, Stripe and Klarna, which are investing heavily in the technology.

But it will take a lot more than 1,000 tons of annual CO2 removal to make a dent in global warming: Current CO2 levels in the atmosphere are 425 parts per million and counting. To truly make a difference will require carbon removal at the gigaton scale, or billions of tons each year, according to the IPCC.

Trays layered with calcium hydroxide are designed to extract carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

Trays layered with calcium hydroxide are designed to extract carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

(Paul Kuroda / For The Times)

A man in a black jacket and blue hard hat stands beside a bank of trays

Christian Theuer, Heirloom’s policy communications manager, explains how carbon dioxide extraction works.

(Paul Kuroda / For The Times)

Earlier this year, the U.S. Department of Energy awarded $50 million to Heirloom and its partners to develop what will become a massive, million-ton direct air capture facility in Louisiana. The funding was part of a larger $1.2-billion investment into direct air capture technologies announced by the Biden administration last year.

Several Los Angeles startups are also getting into the carbon removal game, including Captura, a company working to remove CO2 from the upper ocean, and Avnos, a company whose technology produces water while capturing carbon. Avnos also recently secured funding from the Department of Energy.

The hope is that operating such projects around the country and the world will not only stop global warming, but eventually help reverse it, said Christian Theuer, Heirloom’s policy communications manager.

“You halt it by getting to net zero, by not putting out any new CO2 emissions into the atmosphere,” Theuer said as he circled the towers in Tracy. “Then you can move into the negative emissions territory, where you’re cleaning up legacy pollution that is already warming the planet.”

But direct air capture is only one of the many ways scientists, policymakers and researchers are hoping to alter the planet’s worrisome trajectory. Solar radiation modification — a form of geoengineering designed to artificially cool the planet — is also being seriously studied as a solution.

There are many forms of solar radiation modification, including a concept known as marine cloud brightening, which uses sea salt particles to increase the reflectivity of clouds in order to reflect more sunlight away from Earth. A program run by the University of Washington recently initiated a test of the concept off the coast of San Francisco.

But perhaps the most promising — or at least the most studied — geoengineering solution is known as stratospheric aerosol injections.

Graphic showing proposed methods for climate intervention, including modifying incoming or outgoing solar radiation

Proposed methods for climate intervention include stratospheric aerosol injections and marine cloud brightening.

(National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration)

The basic idea is to manually re-create the process of volcanic eruptions, which cool the planet by spewing sulfur and other particles into the stratosphere, temporarily blocking sunlight. Researchers already know from studying volcanoes that this infusion of sulfur creates a planetary cooling effect that can last two or three years.

That and other forms of solar radiation modification are gaining so much attention that last year, the White House released a congressional report on the matter that not only considers its feasibility, but also outlines the urgent need for a framework to govern its research.

Solar radiation modification “offers the possibility of cooling the planet significantly on a timescale of a few years,” the report says. “Such cooling would tend to reverse many of the negative consequences of climate change, albeit with ramifications which are now poorly understood.”

Indeed, such a concept carries many potential benefits as well as potential risks, according to Chris Field, director of the Woods Institute for the Environment at Stanford University. Field led a major National Academies of Sciences report on solar geoengineering that is reflected in the White House’s findings.

Towering structures of fans and trays that capture carbon dioxide

Towering structures of fans and trays capture carbon dioxide inside the Heirloom plant in Tracy.

(Paul Kuroda / For The Times)

“We have a pretty solid understanding that injecting aerosols in the stratosphere would make the average temperature cooler, but you would want to do a lot more than that if you were serious about a deployment of this stuff,” Field said. “You would want to know about the regional effects and you would want to know about the possibility of any unintended consequences outside the climate system. You’d also want to know a lot about what kinds of strategies you would have in place to make this governable.”

Last year, a company called Make Sunsets made headlines when it began testing stratospheric aerosol injections by releasing sulfur-filled weather balloons from a launch site in Mexico. The move generated considerable opposition from the scientific community, which said it was too soon to conduct such experiments without more guardrails. An open letter signed by more than 110 physical and biological scientists in the wake of the incident affirmed “the importance of proceeding with responsible research.”

Part of the reason for concern is that when sulfur dioxide leaves the stratosphere and sinks into the lower atmosphere, it can potentially fall as acid rain. That doesn’t mean the concept isn’t worth studying, but it does mean transparency about funding, research and results must be made available for broad discussion, Field said.

An Heirloom worker monitors a laptop

Maurisha Agustin monitors a laptop inside the Heirloom plant.

(Paul Kuroda / For The Times)

“If it doesn’t have a certain level of public trust — especially in the world’s developing countries — there is essentially no way that it could be deployed and sustained over an extended period,” he said. He added that it is not really possible to design a stratospheric deployment that is limited to one part of the world’s geography, meaning that any injections would have global implications.

Critically, Field and other experts said geoengineering should not take the place of decarbonization, or efforts to reduce or eliminate CO2 emissions around the world. California has committed to reaching carbon neutrality by 2045.

“There’s no world in which solar geoengineering is a solution to climate change — it’s kind of a Band-Aid so that we don’t experience the full range of impacts of the climate change that’s still there,” Field said. “And it’s really important to recognize that, because it’s just a Band-Aid, we really don’t want it to take attention away from decarbonization.”

While direct air capture and aerosol injections do show potential, there are other concepts for cooling the planet that have garnered some interest — or at least raised some eyebrows.

A Southern California-based organization called the Planetary Sunshade Foundation has posited that the best solution to climate change isn’t here on Earth, but rather in outer space, where a massive sail-like structure could reflect sunlight away from the planet.

“We are on track to continue to see significant increases in global temperature, and so solar radiation modification will continue to be talked about more and more,” said Morgan Goodwin, the foundation’s executive director. “And the planetary sunshade, we believe, is the sustainable, long-term way of doing solar radiation modification.”

The sail — or more likely, the collection of sails — would need to measure approximately 580,000 square miles in size to offset 1 degree Celsius of warming, Goodwin said. It would need to be located at the Lagrange 1 Point in space, nearly 1 million miles from Earth — a location where the gravitational pull of the sun and Earth would essentially pin the object in place.

The design requirement calls for a material that is thin, light and capable of blocking sunlight. Basically “aluminum foil,” Goodwin said.

An illustration of the sun's rays being deflected by a giant sunshade

Offsetting 1 degree Celsius of global warming would require approximately 580,000 square miles of sunshade material nearly 1 million miles from Earth.

(Planetary Sunshade Foundation)

The result would be shading that is diffuse and spread out evenly across the entire globe. The amount of solar shading — about 1% — would be less than what most people can perceive on Earth, and its effect would be less than what some high-altitude clouds already have on sunlight, he said.

The concept is similar to a solar sail spacecraft, forms of which have already been deployed in space. A proposed NASA solar cruiser mission would fly a large solar sail to the Lagrange 1 Point, though the project has stalled due to lack of funding. Goodwin said the Sunshade Foundation is advocating for that mission to fly, and for the U.S. government and other agencies to consider their technological proposals.

“There’s so much energy and so many resources in the space sector, and part of what we’re saying is that the space sector can play a role as part of the climate solution,” he said.

But like other climate adaptation solutions, there are potential downsides. For one, such a project would be large and expensive, and would require constant upkeep and maintenance when meteorites and space debris impact the sails. What’s more, there are unknown unknowns, such as whether even a small percentage of sunlight reduction could affect photosynthesis and have an adverse impact on agricultural crops.

But the idea is more “sustainable and responsible” than other forms of solar radiation modification, Goodwin said, although he stressed that it, too, should not take the place of emissions-reduction efforts.

“I feel much more hopeful about the future knowing that I can help advance this and help make this a reality, and give us all a much better shot,” he said. “You know, the future is far from certain, and it will be far stranger than we imagined.”

Newsletter

Toward a more sustainable California

Get Boiling Point, our newsletter exploring climate change, energy and the environment, and become part of the conversation — and the solution.

You may occasionally receive promotional content from the Los Angeles Times.

Back on Earth, the limestone towers are already up and running in Heirloom’s 50,000 square-foot direct air capture facility in Tracy.

The process there involves heating limestone in a massive kiln, which turns it into a mineral powder that is spread onto the towering stacks of trays. The powder acts like a sponge for CO2 — pulling it from the air and hardening into a crust. Once saturated, it is returned to the kiln where the CO2 is extracted, and the cycle begins again.

The extracted CO2 is transported off site where Heirloom’s partner, CarbonCure Technologies, injects it into recycled water that is used to make concrete that is now being used throughout Bay Area infrastructure.

“Once it’s in that concrete, it’s not going back into the atmosphere,” Theuer said of the CO2. “It’s permanently a part of that product. Even if in some scenario you blew up the building associated with it, it would still stay embedded amid the rubble and wouldn’t reenter the atmosphere. It’s now a stone.”

The process is different than carbon capture, which involves capturing CO2 at the source where it is emitted. Carbon capture plays a role in the state’s cap-and-trade program, which sets limits on greenhouse gas emissions and allows companies to buy and sell their unused credits. That program has seen mixed results, with some critics saying it ultimately enables more pollution and creates more allowances for emissions.

As a commercial operation, Heirloom sells its carbon offsets to a voluntary market at a rate of $600 to $1,000 per net ton, and the company says it does not take investments from oil and gas businesses. Already, some fossil fuel companies have shown interest in direct air capture technology, including at least seven oil and gas producers that have invested in, or are working to develop, direct air capture projects.

Aiyer said he is closely watching Senate Bill 308, new legislation in California that would create a framework by which the state government approves standards for carbon removal. It would also compel heavy emitters in the state to account for their emissions through offset purchases or removals, among other measures.

But there are potential downsides to direct air capture, including its high energy costs, which could limit the technology’s ability to expand. The Heirloom facility and many others run on 100% renewable energy, including wind and solar power, but experts say fusion and geothermal energy could be potential sources for such technology in the future.

And while concrete storage is currently the best available option for carbon sequestration in the U.S., cement is a known contributor to fossil fuel emissions. Heirloom officials said they anticipate transitioning to underground storage wells in the future, pending permitting approval from the Environmental Protection Agency. Geologic storage is already used in parts of Europe, and there are at least 506 billion tons of accessible pore space for permanent CO2 storage in the U.S., they said.

What’s more, the interest from Big Oil has met with broader concerns that carbon removal, geoengineering and other climate change solutions could have the unintended consequence of enabling society to continue its reliance on fossil fuels. If these tools can clean CO2 or cool the planet, the logic goes, then the use of gas-guzzling cars, smog-producing products, and oil and gas drilling can continue as usual.

It’s a refrain many working in the climate adaptation space have heard before. Still, the steady hum of progress has given even those most entrenched in the battle against global warming some semblance of optimism for the future.

“These technologies — whether it is our pathway of direct air capture or other carbon removal technologies — should not be a fig leaf for additional fossil fuel expansion,” Aiyer said. “We need to make sure that we are reducing our reliance on emissions and fossil fuel production, and we need to do these removals.”

Read the full story here.
Photos courtesy of

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Billionaire hedge fund founder Tom Steyer is running for governor

Billionaire hedge fund founder, climate change warrior and major Democratic donor Tom Steyer is running for governor. Fossil fuel and migrant detention facility investments will likely draw attacks from his fellow Democrats.

Billionaire hedge fund founder Tom Steyer announced Wednesday that he is running for governor of California, arguing that he is not beholden to special interests and can take on corporations that are making life unaffordable in the state.“The richest people in America think that they earned everything themselves. Bulls—, man. That’s so ridiculous,” Steyer said in an online video announcing his campaign. “We have a broken government. It’s been bought by corporations and my question is: Who do you think is going to change that? Sacramento politicians are afraid to change up this system. I’m not. They’re going to hate this. Bring it on.” Protesters hold placards and banners during a rally against Whitehaven Coal in Sydney in 2014. Dozens of protesters and activists gathered downtown to protest against the controversial massive Maules Creek coal mine project in northern New South Wales. (Saeed Khan / AFP/Getty Images) Steyer, 68, founded Farallon Capital Management, one of the nation’s largest hedge funds, and left it in 2012 after 26 years. Since his departure, he has become a global environmental activist and a major donor to Democratic candidates and causes. But the hedge firm’s investments — notably a giant coal mine in Australia that cleared 3,700 acres of koala habitat and a company that runs migrant detention centers on the U.S.-Mexico border for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement — will make him susceptible to political attack by his gubernatorial rivals. Steyer has expressed regret for his involvement in such projects, saying it was why he left Farallon and started focusing his energy on fighting climate change. Democratic presidential candidate Tom Steyer addresses a crowd during a presidential primary election-night party in Columbia, S.C. (Sean Rayford / Getty Images) Steyer previously flirted with running for governor and the U.S. Senate but decided against it, instead opting to run for president in 2020. He dropped out after spending nearly $342 million on his campaign, which gained little traction before he ended his run after the South Carolina primary.Next year’s gubernatorial race is in flux, after former Vice President Kamala Harris and Sen. Alex Padilla decided not to run and Proposition 50, the successful Democratic effort to redraw congressional districts, consumed all of the political oxygen during an off-year election.Most voters are undecided about who they would like to replace Gov. Gavin Newsom, who cannot run for reelection because of term limits, according to a poll released this month by the UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies and co-sponsored by The Times. Steyer had the support of 1% of voters in the survey. In recent years, Steyer has been a longtime benefactor of progressive causes, most recently spending $12 million to support the redistricting ballot measure. But when he was the focus of one of the ads, rumors spiraled that he was considering a run for governor.In prior California ballot initiatives, Steyer successfully supported efforts to close a corporate tax loophole and to raise tobacco taxes, and fought oil-industry-backed efforts to roll back environmental law.His campaign platform is to build 1 million homes in four years, lower energy costs by ending monopolies, make preschool and community college free and ban corporate contributions to political action committees in California elections.Steyer’s brother Jim, the leader of Common Sense Media, and former Biden administration U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy are aiming to put an initiative on next year’s ballot to protect children from social media, specifically the chatbots that have been accused of prompting young people to kill themselves. Newsom recently vetoed a bill aimed at addressing this artificial intelligence issue.

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This Ohio County Banned Commercial Wind and Solar. Not So Fast, Residents Said.

This story was originally published by Canary Media and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Restrictions on solar and wind farms are proliferating around the country, with scores of local governments going as far as to forbid large-scale clean-energy developments. Now, residents of an Ohio county are pushing back on one such ban on renewables—a move that […]

This story was originally published by Canary Media and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Restrictions on solar and wind farms are proliferating around the country, with scores of local governments going as far as to forbid large-scale clean-energy developments. Now, residents of an Ohio county are pushing back on one such ban on renewables—a move that could be a model for other places where clean energy faces severe restrictions. Ohio has become a hotspot for anti-clean-energy rules. As of this fall, more than three dozen counties in the state have outlawed utility-scale solar in at least one of their townships. In Richland County, the ban came this summer, when county commissioners voted to bar economically significant solar and wind projects in 11 of the county’s 18 townships. Almost immediately, residents formed a group called the Richland County Citizens for Property Rights and Job Development to try and reverse the stricture.  ​“To me, it just is bad for the county — the whole county, not just one or two townships.” By September, they’d notched a crucial first victory, collecting enough signatures to put the issue on the ballot. Next May, when Ohioans head to the polls to vote in primary races, residents of Richland County will weigh in on a referendum that could ultimately reverse the ban. It’s the first time a county’s renewable-energy ban will be on the ballot in Ohio. From the very beginning, ​“it was just a whirlwind,” said Christina O’Millian, a leader of the Richland County group. Like most others, she didn’t know a ban was under consideration until shortly before July 17, when the commission voted on it. “We felt as constituents that we just hadn’t been heard,” O’Millian said. She views renewable energy as a way to attract more economic development to the county while reining in planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions. Brian McPeek, another of the group’s leaders and a manager for the local chapter of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, sees solar projects as huge job opportunities for the union’s members. ​“They provide a ton of work, a ton of man-hours.” Many petition signers ​“didn’t want the commissioners to make that decision for them,” said Morgan Carroll, a county resident who helped gather signatures. ​“And there was a lot of respect for farmers having their own property rights” to decide whether to lease their land. While the Ohio Power Siting Board retains general authority over where electricity generation is built, a 2021 state law known as Senate Bill 52 lets counties ban solar and wind farms in all or part of their territories. Meanwhile, Ohio law prevents local governments from blocking fossil-fuel or nuclear projects. The Richland County community group is using a process under SB 52 to challenge the renewable-energy ban via referendum. Under that law, the organization had just 30 days from the commissioners’ vote to collect signatures in support of the ballot measure. All told, more than 4,300 people signed the petition, though after the county Board of Elections rejected hundreds of signatures as invalid, the final count ended up at 3,380—just 60 more than the required threshold of 8 percent of the number of votes in the last governor’s election. Although the Richland County ban came as a surprise to many, it was months in the making. In late January, Sharon Township’s zoning committee asked the county to forbid large wind and solar projects there. After discussion at their February 6 meeting, the county commissioners wrote to all 18 townships in Richland to see if their trustees also wanted a ban. A draft fill-in-the-blanks resolution accompanied the letter. Signed resolutions came back from 11 townships. The commissioners then took up the issue again on July 17. Roughly two dozen residents came to the meeting, and a majority of those who spoke on the proposal were against it. Commissioners deferred to the township trustees. “The township trustees who were in favor of the prohibition strongly believe that they were representing the wishes of their residents, who are farming communities, who are not fans of seeing potential farmland being taken up for large wind and solar,” Commissioner Tony Vero told Canary Media. He pointed out that the ban doesn’t cover the seven remaining townships and all municipal areas. ​“I just thought it was a pretty good compromise,” he said. The concerns over putting solar panels or wind turbines on potential farmland echo land-use arguments that have long dogged rural clean-energy developments—and which have been elevated into federal policy by the Trump administration this year. Groups linked to the fossil-fuel industry have pushed these arguments in Ohio and beyond. “It’s a false narrative that they care about prime farmland,” said Bella Bogin, director of programs for Ohio Citizen Action, which helped the Richland County group collect signatures to petition for the referendum. Income from leasing some land for renewable energy can help farmers keep property in their families, and plenty of acreage currently goes to growing crops for fuel—not food. ​“We can’t eat ethanol corn,” she added. Under Ohio’s SB 52, counties—not townships—have the authority to issue blanket prohibitions over large solar and wind farms, with limited exceptions for projects already in the grid manager’s queue. In Richland County’s case, the commissioners decided to defer to townships even though they didn’t have to. The choice shows how SB 52 has led to ​“an inconsistently applied, informal framework that has created confusion about the roles of counties, townships, and the Ohio Power Siting Board,” said Chris Tavenor, general counsel for the Ohio Environmental Council. Under the law, ​“county commissioners should be carefully considering all the factors at play,” rather than deferring to townships. “I think it’s important for my children to have…the opportunities that go along with having wind and solar.” Even without a restriction in place, SB 52 lets counties nix new solar or wind farms on a case-by-case basis before they’re considered by the Ohio Power Siting Board. And when projects do go to the state regulator, counties and townships appoint two ad hoc decision-makers who vote on cases with the rest of the board. As electricity prices continue to rise across Ohio, Tavenor hopes the state’s General Assembly will reconsider SB 52, which he and other advocates say is unfairly restrictive toward solar and wind—two of the cheapest and quickest energy sources to deploy. “Lawmakers should be looking to repeal it and make a system that actually responds to the problems facing our electric grid right now,” he said. Commissioner Vero, for his part, said he has mixed feelings about the referendum. “It’s America, and if there’s enough signatures to get on the ballot, more power to people,” he said. However, he objects to the fact that SB 52 allows voters countywide to sign the petition, even if they don’t live in one of the townships with a ban, and said he hopes the legislature will amend the law to prevent that from happening elsewhere. Yet referendum supporters say the ban matters for the entire county. “It affects everybody, whether you live in a city, a township, or a village,” McPeek said. As he sees it, restrictions will deter investment from not only companies that build wind and solar but also those that want to be able to access renewable energy. ​“To me, it just is bad for the county—the whole county, not just one or two townships.” Renewable-energy projects also provide substantial amounts of tax revenue or similar PILOT payments for counties, helping fund schools and other local needs. ​“I think it’s important for my children to have more clean electric [energy] and all the opportunities that go along with having wind and solar,” Carroll said. Now that the referendum is on the ballot, the Richland County group will work to build more support and get out the vote next spring. ​“Education and outreach in the community is basically what we’re going to focus on for the campaign coming up in the next few months,” O’Millian said. “So now it goes to a countywide vote, and the population of the county gets to make that decision, instead of three guys,” McPeek said.

Climate
Energy
Government

Ian McEwan’s Haunting Vision of the Future

It’s perhaps fair to observe that Ian McEwan has entered the elegiac phase of his career. It happens to us all eventually, I suppose, whether one makes donuts or novels; eventually pondering what came before takes up most of your dwindling time. He looked back at the past in his last two novels: Machines Like Me (2019) is set in a 1980s England depicted through an alt-historical lens (the Brits lost the Falklands war to Argentina, but, in a version of the country where Alan Turing still lives, flying cars already exist), and Lessons (2022), a portrait of a feckless boomer born the same year McEwan was, 1948, spans 70 years of its protagonist’s unremarkable, faintly gilded life, one that never quite escapes the shadow of a sexual assault at the hands of his piano teacher, Ms. Cornell, when he was 14. McEwan’s fiction has always been about the need to make meaning from catastrophe, to awaken or shield the moral imagination through the intellect, and in his new book, What We Can Know, the catastrophe is the future and the elegy is for our species, as the oceans rise and prospects grow dour.The book concerns a literary scholar, Thomas Metcalfe, in a diminished England, one McEwan imagines as half-submerged and wholly disillusioned by 2119. The country’s green fields have turned into inland deltas, the southern coast has been eaten by what survivors call The Inundation—erosion of the coasts and rewriting of the world’s topography by the onrush of salt water, spurred not just by climate change but also by a catastrophic tsunami in the Atlantic caused by an errant Russian nuclear missile that landed short of America—and what remains of civilization has reorganized itself around an archipelago in which travel is hard and the only growth industries are data recovery and atmospheric management.McEwan sketches a scarily plausible dystopia, in which Civilization hasn’t ended; after decades of hanging by a thread it has stabilized, salvaged by our weary successors who are forever bound to pay for our excesses. People move through the future quietly, their lives bracketed by scarcity and the faint hum of desalination plants. Interracial love has rendered most people honey-colored, just as the 1998 movie Bulworth predicted would become a necessity, and those with pale skin now face discrimination and othering; there was no stopping those from the global south from moving north to seek higher ground and cooler climates, especially after Pakistan and India’s nuclear exchange.In this world the humanities have become an archival curiosity and Metcalfe, a professor at the underfunded University of the South Downs, teaches to near-empty rooms. He is a relic of the humanities in a world that no longer values them, “a poor cousin to the water scientists,” as he puts it. His colleagues envy the grant money that still flows to the climatologists and biotechnologists in the new “Renaissance of Necessity.” His own work of retracing the biographies of dead poets and their spouses from an archive of the entire internet, made possible only by Nigerian ingenuity, is a ritual of mourning, an act of faith performed in the ruins of meaning. The old moral questions persist, but without the luxury of conviction. McEwan’s novels have grown more austere, more haunted by the sense that the moral and narrative architectures that once defined Western civilization have finally given out.When Metcalfe refers to the twenty-first century as the “century of hubris,” he’s not sneering, he’s nostalgic. His generation has a life expectancy of 64. Electronics are scarce, plane travel nonexistent. Those born into collapse can no longer imagine progress, only curation, it seems. Amid this landscape of loss, Metcalfe begins his excavation of Francis Blundy, a prominent early-millennial poet who once read a cycle of sonnets called “A Corona for Vivien” to a coterie of literati at a dinner in 2014. The poem is ostensibly about his life with his wife, but comes in later years to achieve widespread and enduring fame largely because of the controversy surrounding its nonexistence—no copy of it exists—and the persistent belief that it was a suppressed masterpiece containing profound truths about a changing world during the years of what twenty-second-century citizens have come to call “The Derangement.” That is the time we the reader are living through now, when the world is on a collision course with ever more calamitous climate change–powered disasters. We are promised a future that is One Battle After Another with the elements, in which no political solutions seem possible. Over time, McEwan’s novels have grown more austere, more haunted by the sense that the moral and narrative architectures that once defined Western civilization—its faith in reason, progress, democratic governance—have finally given out.The world of What We Can Know is one of threadbare survival and epistemological doubt. It’s a book about the failure of understanding, and it reads like the work of a man who has accepted that no form of mastery, literary or otherwise, will save us. Yet the mastery is there for all to see: McEwan’s prose has never been looser or more humane. Gone is the mechanical precision that once made his moral contraptions click. What remains is an older writer’s acceptance of disorder, an embrace of the fog. The sentences are warm even when the world they describe has cooled due to nuclear dust settling into the atmosphere as The Derangement faded. The mystery of the poem’s disappearance and the suggestion that it might have been suppressed, or bought off by oil interests, or simply burned, drives the narrative as Metcalfe digs deeper into the moral archaeology of Blundy’s life. Blundy is vain, brilliant, intermittently tender, and wholly convinced that his intellect confers moral immunity. Vivien, a scholar of the Romantic poet John Clare, has allowed her own academic career to calcify in service of her husband’s as a poet. McEwan renders the contours of her domestic life—the long dinners for “the Barn set,” the ironing, the peeled potatoes for the poet’s birthday—as both parody of how much information those living through The Derangement collected digitally about their lives and as a lament for where it was all headed. Hers is a mind turned servant to another’s ambition, the life of the highly educated housewife whose tragedy is self-knowledge.The revelations in her confession arrive with the deliberate rhythm of memory loosening its hold. Vivien recounts her earlier marriage to Percy Greene, a kind craftsman and luthier whose mind begins to fray with Alzheimer’s. It is while caring for Percy that she meets Francis, who charms her, seduces her, and eventually persuades her that the sick man’s death would be merciful—an event he brings about himself, with a mallet. Francis, having inherited both his widow and his violin, begins the slow work of absorbing the dead man’s life into his own art.That theft—and its moral, emotional, and artistic dimensions—forms the novel’s true moral crisis. When, years later, Francis reads “A Corona for Vivien” aloud at a dinner table thick with smoke and brandy, she recognizes its falseness immediately. The poem, a lush meditation on love, mortality, and the natural world, is the inverse of everything the man believes. “I don’t like country walks,” he once told her. “I don’t know the names of flowers and I don’t give a damn.” In that moment she understands that he has not only stolen her husband’s essence but forged a counterfeit of her own devotion. What Metcalfe finds is not the poem itself but explanation of its absence, made manifest in the form of Vivien’s confession. Her memoir, retrieved from a sealed container beside her first husband’s violin, rewrites the story entirely. It reveals a marriage rooted in exploitation, a literary myth built on cruelty. Francis, a self-anointed genius who dismissed climate change as hysteria, depended on Vivien’s labor and intellect even as he erased them. That night, after the guests have gone, Vivien rolls up the poem’s vellum scroll and feeds it into the dairy stove. The act is both vengeance and mercy: the burning of a false idol. Her decision to destroy his work, committing it to the fire on the night of its triumph, is both punishment and release, the act of a woman reclaiming the one power left to her: the right to silence him.Climate change here is not backdrop but the lens through which all the characters must see the world. It muddies everything: the meanings of guilt, of authorship, of love. The irony that Metcalfe’s entire project—his attempt to reconstruct a bygone world from fragments—is perhaps animated by the same delusion that animated Blundy’s poetry does not escape McEwan. The belief that language can fix what nature destroys, or at least allow us a way past it, lives in both the protagonist and the object of his obsession here. He pores over Vivien’s letters, texts, and shopping lists as if they were fossils, “tokens of vitality” in an era when vitality itself has become an endangered condition. McEwan uses that obsession to mirror our own digital archiving of catastrophe, the endless documentation that substitutes for action.Francis’s climate denial, meanwhile, is more than characterization; it is McEwan’s indictment of the twenty-first-century elite class that refuses to imagine the crisis as worth sacrificing our decadent comforts and entitlements for. The poet’s failure to perceive the natural world except as metaphor becomes, in hindsight, a metaphor for civilization’s failure to perceive its own ending. McEwan, who turned 77 this year, writes with the lucidity of a craftsman who knows he’s constructing his own monument to a future he will never know. If Atonement asked whether fiction could redeem guilt, What We Can Know suggests that the very possibility of redemption might be foolhardy.Like McEwan’s most famous novel, Atonement, What We Can Know has a nested structure—beginning with Metcalfe’s frame, then Vivien’s confession, and the recovered fragments of Francis’s correspondence—and it recalls Atonement, too, in its fascination with the ethics of narrative control. Francis Blundy, in his climate-denying, classicist arrogance, is an emblem of the old order, one that governs our world today: male, murderous, self-mythologizing, possessed by delusions that are driving us all off a cliff. Vivien’s corrective isn’t enough to save her first husband, or the world, from Francis’s harm. There is no justice to be found. If Atonement asked whether fiction could redeem guilt, What We Can Know suggests that the very possibility of redemption might be foolhardy. But continue we must; the future McEwan envisions is grim but not loveless. Metcalfe, trudging between the archives and his coastal home, finds an unexpected companion in his colleague Rose Church, and their late-blooming affection, growing into an on-again, off-again literature department romance—halting, courteous, tinged with exhaustion—gives the novel its fragile heartbeat. When Rose reveals her pregnancy near the end, McEwan resists sentimentality. The child’s birth is not salvation; it is continuation, “the next link in the chain of futility and care.” Still, that flicker of human persistence feels like grace.If 2011’s Solar was McEwan’s comic treatment of environmental hubris, What We Can Know is its deeper, more tragic echo. Here, climate change functions as the novel’s moral solvent, dissolving the old binaries—guilt and innocence, art and theft, preservation and erasure—until all that remains is entropy. “The imagined poem triumphs over the real,” Metcalfe concludes, “because the imagination is all we have left.” In that single sentence lies both McEwan’s despair and his faith: despair that human artifice has supplanted the natural world, faith that it might still bear witness to the loss.

It’s perhaps fair to observe that Ian McEwan has entered the elegiac phase of his career. It happens to us all eventually, I suppose, whether one makes donuts or novels; eventually pondering what came before takes up most of your dwindling time. He looked back at the past in his last two novels: Machines Like Me (2019) is set in a 1980s England depicted through an alt-historical lens (the Brits lost the Falklands war to Argentina, but, in a version of the country where Alan Turing still lives, flying cars already exist), and Lessons (2022), a portrait of a feckless boomer born the same year McEwan was, 1948, spans 70 years of its protagonist’s unremarkable, faintly gilded life, one that never quite escapes the shadow of a sexual assault at the hands of his piano teacher, Ms. Cornell, when he was 14. McEwan’s fiction has always been about the need to make meaning from catastrophe, to awaken or shield the moral imagination through the intellect, and in his new book, What We Can Know, the catastrophe is the future and the elegy is for our species, as the oceans rise and prospects grow dour.The book concerns a literary scholar, Thomas Metcalfe, in a diminished England, one McEwan imagines as half-submerged and wholly disillusioned by 2119. The country’s green fields have turned into inland deltas, the southern coast has been eaten by what survivors call The Inundation—erosion of the coasts and rewriting of the world’s topography by the onrush of salt water, spurred not just by climate change but also by a catastrophic tsunami in the Atlantic caused by an errant Russian nuclear missile that landed short of America—and what remains of civilization has reorganized itself around an archipelago in which travel is hard and the only growth industries are data recovery and atmospheric management.McEwan sketches a scarily plausible dystopia, in which Civilization hasn’t ended; after decades of hanging by a thread it has stabilized, salvaged by our weary successors who are forever bound to pay for our excesses. People move through the future quietly, their lives bracketed by scarcity and the faint hum of desalination plants. Interracial love has rendered most people honey-colored, just as the 1998 movie Bulworth predicted would become a necessity, and those with pale skin now face discrimination and othering; there was no stopping those from the global south from moving north to seek higher ground and cooler climates, especially after Pakistan and India’s nuclear exchange.In this world the humanities have become an archival curiosity and Metcalfe, a professor at the underfunded University of the South Downs, teaches to near-empty rooms. He is a relic of the humanities in a world that no longer values them, “a poor cousin to the water scientists,” as he puts it. His colleagues envy the grant money that still flows to the climatologists and biotechnologists in the new “Renaissance of Necessity.” His own work of retracing the biographies of dead poets and their spouses from an archive of the entire internet, made possible only by Nigerian ingenuity, is a ritual of mourning, an act of faith performed in the ruins of meaning. The old moral questions persist, but without the luxury of conviction. McEwan’s novels have grown more austere, more haunted by the sense that the moral and narrative architectures that once defined Western civilization have finally given out.When Metcalfe refers to the twenty-first century as the “century of hubris,” he’s not sneering, he’s nostalgic. His generation has a life expectancy of 64. Electronics are scarce, plane travel nonexistent. Those born into collapse can no longer imagine progress, only curation, it seems. Amid this landscape of loss, Metcalfe begins his excavation of Francis Blundy, a prominent early-millennial poet who once read a cycle of sonnets called “A Corona for Vivien” to a coterie of literati at a dinner in 2014. The poem is ostensibly about his life with his wife, but comes in later years to achieve widespread and enduring fame largely because of the controversy surrounding its nonexistence—no copy of it exists—and the persistent belief that it was a suppressed masterpiece containing profound truths about a changing world during the years of what twenty-second-century citizens have come to call “The Derangement.” That is the time we the reader are living through now, when the world is on a collision course with ever more calamitous climate change–powered disasters. We are promised a future that is One Battle After Another with the elements, in which no political solutions seem possible. Over time, McEwan’s novels have grown more austere, more haunted by the sense that the moral and narrative architectures that once defined Western civilization—its faith in reason, progress, democratic governance—have finally given out.The world of What We Can Know is one of threadbare survival and epistemological doubt. It’s a book about the failure of understanding, and it reads like the work of a man who has accepted that no form of mastery, literary or otherwise, will save us. Yet the mastery is there for all to see: McEwan’s prose has never been looser or more humane. Gone is the mechanical precision that once made his moral contraptions click. What remains is an older writer’s acceptance of disorder, an embrace of the fog. The sentences are warm even when the world they describe has cooled due to nuclear dust settling into the atmosphere as The Derangement faded. The mystery of the poem’s disappearance and the suggestion that it might have been suppressed, or bought off by oil interests, or simply burned, drives the narrative as Metcalfe digs deeper into the moral archaeology of Blundy’s life. Blundy is vain, brilliant, intermittently tender, and wholly convinced that his intellect confers moral immunity. Vivien, a scholar of the Romantic poet John Clare, has allowed her own academic career to calcify in service of her husband’s as a poet. McEwan renders the contours of her domestic life—the long dinners for “the Barn set,” the ironing, the peeled potatoes for the poet’s birthday—as both parody of how much information those living through The Derangement collected digitally about their lives and as a lament for where it was all headed. Hers is a mind turned servant to another’s ambition, the life of the highly educated housewife whose tragedy is self-knowledge.The revelations in her confession arrive with the deliberate rhythm of memory loosening its hold. Vivien recounts her earlier marriage to Percy Greene, a kind craftsman and luthier whose mind begins to fray with Alzheimer’s. It is while caring for Percy that she meets Francis, who charms her, seduces her, and eventually persuades her that the sick man’s death would be merciful—an event he brings about himself, with a mallet. Francis, having inherited both his widow and his violin, begins the slow work of absorbing the dead man’s life into his own art.That theft—and its moral, emotional, and artistic dimensions—forms the novel’s true moral crisis. When, years later, Francis reads “A Corona for Vivien” aloud at a dinner table thick with smoke and brandy, she recognizes its falseness immediately. The poem, a lush meditation on love, mortality, and the natural world, is the inverse of everything the man believes. “I don’t like country walks,” he once told her. “I don’t know the names of flowers and I don’t give a damn.” In that moment she understands that he has not only stolen her husband’s essence but forged a counterfeit of her own devotion. What Metcalfe finds is not the poem itself but explanation of its absence, made manifest in the form of Vivien’s confession. Her memoir, retrieved from a sealed container beside her first husband’s violin, rewrites the story entirely. It reveals a marriage rooted in exploitation, a literary myth built on cruelty. Francis, a self-anointed genius who dismissed climate change as hysteria, depended on Vivien’s labor and intellect even as he erased them. That night, after the guests have gone, Vivien rolls up the poem’s vellum scroll and feeds it into the dairy stove. The act is both vengeance and mercy: the burning of a false idol. Her decision to destroy his work, committing it to the fire on the night of its triumph, is both punishment and release, the act of a woman reclaiming the one power left to her: the right to silence him.Climate change here is not backdrop but the lens through which all the characters must see the world. It muddies everything: the meanings of guilt, of authorship, of love. The irony that Metcalfe’s entire project—his attempt to reconstruct a bygone world from fragments—is perhaps animated by the same delusion that animated Blundy’s poetry does not escape McEwan. The belief that language can fix what nature destroys, or at least allow us a way past it, lives in both the protagonist and the object of his obsession here. He pores over Vivien’s letters, texts, and shopping lists as if they were fossils, “tokens of vitality” in an era when vitality itself has become an endangered condition. McEwan uses that obsession to mirror our own digital archiving of catastrophe, the endless documentation that substitutes for action.Francis’s climate denial, meanwhile, is more than characterization; it is McEwan’s indictment of the twenty-first-century elite class that refuses to imagine the crisis as worth sacrificing our decadent comforts and entitlements for. The poet’s failure to perceive the natural world except as metaphor becomes, in hindsight, a metaphor for civilization’s failure to perceive its own ending. McEwan, who turned 77 this year, writes with the lucidity of a craftsman who knows he’s constructing his own monument to a future he will never know. If Atonement asked whether fiction could redeem guilt, What We Can Know suggests that the very possibility of redemption might be foolhardy.Like McEwan’s most famous novel, Atonement, What We Can Know has a nested structure—beginning with Metcalfe’s frame, then Vivien’s confession, and the recovered fragments of Francis’s correspondence—and it recalls Atonement, too, in its fascination with the ethics of narrative control. Francis Blundy, in his climate-denying, classicist arrogance, is an emblem of the old order, one that governs our world today: male, murderous, self-mythologizing, possessed by delusions that are driving us all off a cliff. Vivien’s corrective isn’t enough to save her first husband, or the world, from Francis’s harm. There is no justice to be found. If Atonement asked whether fiction could redeem guilt, What We Can Know suggests that the very possibility of redemption might be foolhardy. But continue we must; the future McEwan envisions is grim but not loveless. Metcalfe, trudging between the archives and his coastal home, finds an unexpected companion in his colleague Rose Church, and their late-blooming affection, growing into an on-again, off-again literature department romance—halting, courteous, tinged with exhaustion—gives the novel its fragile heartbeat. When Rose reveals her pregnancy near the end, McEwan resists sentimentality. The child’s birth is not salvation; it is continuation, “the next link in the chain of futility and care.” Still, that flicker of human persistence feels like grace.If 2011’s Solar was McEwan’s comic treatment of environmental hubris, What We Can Know is its deeper, more tragic echo. Here, climate change functions as the novel’s moral solvent, dissolving the old binaries—guilt and innocence, art and theft, preservation and erasure—until all that remains is entropy. “The imagined poem triumphs over the real,” Metcalfe concludes, “because the imagination is all we have left.” In that single sentence lies both McEwan’s despair and his faith: despair that human artifice has supplanted the natural world, faith that it might still bear witness to the loss.

Climate
Crisis
Nature

China's Diesel Trucks Are Shifting to Electric. This Could Change Global LNG and Diesel Demand.

China is rapidly replacing its aging diesel trucks with electric models, signaling a major shift in the world’s largest vehicle market

HANOI, Vietnam (AP) — China is replacing its diesel trucks with electric models faster than expected, potentially reshaping global fuel demand and the future of heavy transport.In 2020, nearly all new trucks in China ran on diesel. By the first half of 2025, battery-powered trucks accounted for 22% of new heavy truck sales, up from 9.2% in the same period in 2024, according to Commercial Vehicle World, a Beijing-based trucking data provider. The British research firm BMI forecasts electric trucks will reach nearly 46% of new sales this year and 60% next year.Trucking has been considered hard to decarbonize since electric trucks with heavy batteries can carry less cargo than those using energy-dense diesel. Proponents of liquefied natural gas have viewed it as a less polluting option while technology for electric heavy vehicles matures.Liquefied natural gas, or LNG, is natural gas cooled to a liquid fuel for easy storage and transport. China’s trucking fleet, the world’s second-largest after the U.S., still mainly runs on diesel, but the landscape is shifting. Transport fuel demand is plateauing, according to the International Energy Agency and diesel use in China could decline faster than many expect, said Christopher Doleman, an analyst at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis. Electric trucks now outsell LNG models in China, so its demand for fossil fuels could fall, and "in other countries, it might never take off,” he said. Costs fall in China’s electric truck pivot The share of electrics in new truck sales, from 8% in 2024 to 28% by August 2025, has more than tripled as prices have fallen. Electric trucks outsold LNG-powered vehicles in China for five consecutive months this year, according to Commercial Vehicle World.While electric trucks are twice to three times more expensive than diesel ones and cost roughly 18% more than LNG trucks, their higher energy efficiency and lower costs can save owners an estimated 10% to 26% over the vehicle’s lifetime, according to research by Chinese scientists.“When it comes to heavy trucks, the fleet owners in China are very bottom-line driven,” Doleman said.Early sales were buoyed by generous government incentives like a 2024 scheme for truck owners to trade in old vehicles. Owners can get up to about $19,000 to replace older trucks with newer or electric models.Investments in charging infrastructure are also boosting demand for electric trucks.Major logistics hubs, including in the Yangtze River Delta, have added dedicated charging stations along key freight routes. Cities like Beijing and Shanghai have built heavy-duty charging hubs along highways that can charge trucks in minutes.CATL, the world’s largest maker of electric vehicle batteries, launched a time-saving battery-swapping system for heavy trucks in May and said it plans a nationwide network of swap stations covering 150,000 kilometers (about 93,000 miles) out of China's 184,000 kms (about 114,000 miles) of expressways. Global energy markets will feel the impact The surge in sales of electric trucks is cutting diesel use and could reshape future LNG demand, analysts say.Diesel consumption in China, the second-largest consumer of the fuel after the U.S., fell to 3.9 million barrels per day in June 2024, down 11% year-on-year and the largest drop since mid-2021, partly reflecting the shift to LNG and electric trucks, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.“The rise of China’s electric truck sector is one of the more under-reported stories in the global energy transition, especially given its potential impact on regional diesel trade flows,” said Tim Daiss of APAC Energy Consultancy.LNG truck sales peaked in Sept 2023 and March 2024 after China eased transport restrictions imposed during the COVID-19 pandemic, said Liuhanzi Yang of ICCT Beijing. By June 2025, sales had slipped 6% as electric trucks gained ground.Shell’s 2025 LNG Outlook projects that demand for imported LNG in China, the world’s largest LNG importer, will continue to rise partly due to LNG trucks. It also suggests LNG trucking might expand to other markets, such as India.China’s electric trucks are already cutting oil demand by the equivalent of more than a million barrels a day, estimates the New York-based research provider Rhodium Group.But Doleman views LNG as a “transitional step” unlikely to be seen apart from in China, where a vast pipeline infrastructure, abundant domestic gas production and byproducts like coke oven gas created conditions conducive to LNG-fueled trucking not seen elsewhere. China’s is planning new emission standards for vehicles that will limit multiple pollutants and set average greenhouse gas targets across a manufacturer’s fleet. This will make it “almost impossible” for companies relying solely on fossil-fuel vehicles to comply, Yang said.A 2020 ICCT study found LNG-fueled trucks cut emissions by 2%-9% over 100 years but can be more polluting in the short run due to leaks of methane, a potent planet-warming gas that can trap more than 80 times more heat in the atmosphere in the short term than carbon dioxide. Modern diesel now nearly matches LNG in air-quality performance. China is eyeing the global electric truck market Already the world’s largest exporter of passenger cars, China is turning its sights to the global electric truck market. Chinese automakers have kept costs down and sped up truck manufacturing while ensuring different parts work seamlessly together with in-house production of most key components, from batteries to motors and electronics, said Bill Russo, founder and CEO of the Shanghai-based consultancy Automobility Limited. China's hyperactive delivery industry, particularly urban freight trucks, has been an early proving ground for these vehicles, he noted.In 2021-2023, exports of Chinese heavy-duty trucks including EVS to the Middle East and North Africa grew about 73% annually while shipments to Latin America rose 46%, according to a McKinsey & Company report. The share of electrics is expected to grow, though limited charging infrastructure could pose a challenge.China's Sany Heavy Industry says it will start exporting its electric trucks to Europe in 2026. It is has already exported some electric trucks to the U.S., Asian countries like Thailand and India, and the the United Arab Emirates, among others.In June, Chinese EV maker BYD broke ground in Hungary for an electric truck and bus factory, with an eye toward a mandatory European target of cutting carbon emissions from new trucks by 90% by 2040 compared to 2019 levels.Prices of zero-emission trucks in Europe must roughly halve to become affordable alternatives to diesel, according to another study in 2024 by McKinsey.Volvo told The Associated Press that it didn't comment on competitors but welcomed “competition on fair terms," while Scania did not respond.“Things are shaking up,” Daiss said. ___The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.Photos You Should See – Nov. 2025

Climate
CO2
Energy

Onboard the world’s largest sailing cargo ship: is this the future of travel and transport?

The Neoliner Origin set off on its inaugural two-week voyage from France to the US with the aim of revolutionising the notoriously dirty shipping industryIt is 8pm on a Saturday evening and eight of us are sitting at a table onboard a ship, holding on to our plates of spaghetti carbonara as our chairs slide back and forth. Michel Péry, the dinner’s host, downplays the weather as a “tempête de journalistes” – something sailors would not categorise as a storm, but which drama-seeking journalists might refer to as such to entertain their readers.But after a white-knuckle night in our cabins with winds reaching 74mph or force 12 – officially a hurricane – Péry has to admit it was not just a “journalists’ storm”, but the real deal. Continue reading...

It is 8pm on a Saturday evening and eight of us are sitting at a table onboard a ship, holding on to our plates of spaghetti carbonara as our chairs slide back and forth. Michel Péry, the dinner’s host, downplays the weather as a “tempête de journalistes” – something sailors would not categorise as a storm, but which drama-seeking journalists might refer to as such to entertain their readers.But after a white-knuckle night in our cabins with winds reaching 74mph or force 12 – officially a hurricane – Péry has to admit it was not just a “journalists’ storm”, but the real deal.Part way through the journey the front sail had to be repaired. Photograph: Arthur Jacobs/NeolineI am onboard the Neoliner Origin, the world’s largest sailing cargo ship, for its two-week inaugural voyage from the west coast of France to Baltimore, Maryland, in the US. And it is not all plain sailing.By operating at a reduced speed, and chasing the wind, the Neoliner Origin’s goal is to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 80% compared with an equivalent diesel-powered cargo ship – and in the process, chart a course to decarbonise the notoriously dirty shipping industry.It is being powered primarily by the two semi-rigid sails made from carbon and fibreglass and a backup diesel-electric engine.Onboard are eight passengers, more than a dozen crew and 1,204 tonnes of cargo, including 500,000 bottles of Hennessy cognac, container-loads of refrigerated French brioche, a dozen forklifts and eight hybrid Renault cars.I accepted the invitation to sail on the Neoliner Origin because, as an environmental writer, its first transatlantic journey happened to align with my own goal: to travel from my home in Berlin to visit my family in Canada without flying, in a bid to reduce my carbon footprint.Roughly 80% of goods traded worldwide are transported by ship, and the industry accounts for about 3% of global carbon emissions. If shipping were a country, it would be the world’s sixth-largest emitter. Much of the shipping industry also uses one of the dirtiest of all fossil fuels: called heavy fuel oil, or bunker fuel, it is the tar-like sludge found at the bottom of a barrel of refined oil.To do something real for the planet – it’s the dream of my lifeWind-powered cargo ships could even offer an alternative to flying, one of the most carbon-intensive activities. Though only 10% of the global population flies, aviation accounts for 2.5% of global emissions.“I’ve been dreaming about being captain on this ship for 15 years,” says one of the Neoliner Origin’s captains, Antonin Petit, who grew up sailing off Brittany with his family, collecting rubbish from the sea as they went along the French coast.Two semi-rigid sails made of carbon and fibreglass power the Neoliner Origin, which also has a backup diesel engine“To do something real for the planet by not burning any fuel oil into the atmosphere to carry goods by sea – it’s the dream of my life,” he says.Onboard, the days soon find their own rhythm: breakfast, lunch and dinner with the other passengers and crew in the dining room, meals often inspired by French cuisine, and always followed by a cheese plate. We entertain ourselves with card games in the passengers’ lounge and whale-watching from the top deck, where we spot fin whales and dolphins, as well as seabirds of all shapes and sizes.We are invited up to the bridge, where we learn that the engine is only being used at 20% to 50% of its capacity, which means the sails are doing their job and reducing fuel consumption.But three days into the journey, things take a turn. The top panel of one of the carbon sails cracks and then shatters, rendering it unusable – suspected to be due to a flaw in the design and dimensions of the panel.Dolphins were seen on the voyage, as well as fin whales. Photograph: Arthur Jacobs/NeolineThe sail cannot be repaired until we arrive in the tiny archipelago of Saint-Pierre and Miquelon off Canada’s coast a week later, when a team of five technicians fly in from France and painstakingly reconstruct the sail in a makeshift workshop in the cargo hold over the next five days.The front sail is still usable, so onward and westward we go. But this single sail throws the ambitious fuel and emissions reductions goals for the journey into disarray. The crew are forced to rely on the 4,000kW engine for the next 12 days of the crossing until Baltimore.It is also bad timing. We have navigated towards a low-pressure system, hoping to use the powerful winds to propel us. But the winds do not behave as the weather-forecasting software has modelled – a gap between prediction and reality that crew members say is becoming more common thanks to the effects of climate breakdown.Antonin Petit, one of Neoliner Origin’s captains. Photograph: Arthur Jacobs/NeolineInstead, the depression stops right on top of the ship and stays there for a day and a half, resulting in the slip-sliding dinner and leaving me relieved I remembered to pack sea sickness tablets.The new ship is still in its pilot phase, fresh from the shipyard, the crew reminds us, so hiccups are to be expected. For now, adventure is part of the cost of the journey.So is this really the future of transport and travel?According to research by the International Council on Clean Transportation (ICCT), 90% of shipping decarbonisation will require a switch from dirty bunker oil to greener fuels – renewable hydrogen, ideally – with the other 10% including efficiency improvements such as retrofitting sails to ships for wind-assisted propulsion.Bryan Comer, marine programme director with the ICCT, says: “There is an opportunity for wind-assisted propulsion to reduce fuel consumption and costs, which is useful because renewable hydrogen will be three to four times more expensive than fossil fuels.”For passenger ships, however, there is an additional cost – that of a ticket: a two-week crossing from Saint-Nazaire to Baltimore on Neoline costs €3,200 (£2,800).For cargo ships, using wind is not as simple as adding two sails, however. A cargo ship with sails must either be built from scratch – the Neoliner Origin cost €60m to build – or undergo an expensive retrofit.Neoliner Origin prepares to depart on its maiden voyage from Saint-Nazaire in Brittany. Photograph: A Jacobs/NeolineThere is also the question of size: the 136-metre-long roll-on, roll-off Neoliner Origin is the largest of a new wave of sailing cargo ships, but small compared with the 400-metre Suez canal-blocking behemoths used in international shipping.Wind propulsion can have a greater impact for smaller ships, but it would “require more of those ships to move the same amount of cargo,” says Comer.“So that doesn’t seem like a realistic pathway for international shipping, where things are just getting bigger and bigger.”Michaela onboard Neoliner Origin. Photograph: Arthur Jacobs/NeolineDespite the broken sail and low-pressure system, we arrive at the port of Baltimore only a day later than planned. Though Neoline will not publish its first set of data on its fuel consumption for another six months, estimates from the captain suggest that the ship reduced its fuel consumption by nearly half of what a conventional cargo ship would use, relying on just one sail and the engine. Neoliner Origin has sold more than 100 passenger tickets for further journeys over the next few months.After two weeks of adventure, I am happy to be reunited with terra firma. And the final accounting for my journey from Berlin to Ottawa without flying wound up as 22 days travelling over 9,500km (5,900 miles), through nine cities, with 30 hours spent on trains and 15 days on one very low-carbon and exciting cargo-ship crossing of the ocean.It was the end of my journey, but Petit sees the Neoliner Origin’s first crossing as not just the beginning of the ship’s life, but the culmination of decades of work. “I’m so proud to finally be here,” he says.To align his personal convictions with his professional life was worth waiting for, he says. “It’s a reconciliation of two parts of my life that were previously separate. Neoline allows me that – and we’ll try to strengthen that and make it last.”

Climate
Transportation

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