This story was originally published by High Country News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

This April, at a steak dinner with oil and gas executives at the Mar-a-Lago Club, in Florida, former President Donald Trump made a request backed by a hefty promise: If the CEOs in attendance raised $1 billion to support his reelection bid, he would lower their taxes and eviscerate environmental and public health protections once he became president, clearing away the “regulatory burdens” that stand in the way of their companies injecting more carbon into the atmosphere—and profiting handsomely from it.

According to reporting by the Washington Post, Trump promised to reverse dozens of Biden administration policies, including a moratorium on approvals for liquefied natural gas exports, new restrictions on Arctic drilling, and many regulations of oil and gas drilling on public land. For good measure, he’d also scrap electric vehicle mandates and bring an immediate end to all offshore wind development.

Judging from Trump’s record, he fully intends to fulfill these promises, and then some. And his mission will be backed by a playbook—alarming for its extreme approach—fashioned by a right-wing coalition intent on dismantling the administrative state.

It’s astounding that the presumptive Republican presidential nominee can solicit a billion-dollar bribe to sell out America’s public lands and not be immediately disqualified or even prosecuted. After all, one-time Secretary of the Interior Albert B. Fall was disgraced and tossed into jail for doing the same thing, in an incident known as the Teapot Dome scandal in the 1920s. Even more dumbfounding is that, according to some polls, President Biden and Trump are statistically tied among young voters on the issue of climate change.

The reason for this is simple—and, I might add, simplistic. In March 2020, during a Democratic presidential debate, then-candidate Biden said his climate policy included “no more drilling on federal land.” He made a similar statement during a town hall in 2019. And yet, during the first four months of 2024, the Bureau of Land Management issued 969 permits to drill. So much for “no more drilling.” And that’s not all: In 2023, the administration approved a scaled-back—yet still massive and highly destructive—version of the controversial Willow drilling project on Alaska’s North Slope.

Climate advocates are right to hold Biden’s feet to the fire, and to count these moves as black marks on his record. But it is naive, foolish, and destructive to let these missteps obscure the administration’s more subtle, but ultimately more meaningful, actions to protect the climate and public lands from the fossil fuel industry. To see no difference between Biden and Trump is simply ignorant.

Biden’s public land and climate policies were all over the place during his first two years in office, but more recently he has cemented his legacy as a conservationist. In late April I wrote about a slew of new public lands protections enacted by the administration. In the weeks since, Biden’s Environmental Protection Agency has implemented new rules limiting coal power plants’ emissions of greenhouse gasses, mercury, and other toxic air pollutants; tightening regulations on coal ash disposal; and clamping down on wastewater releases by power plants. Additionally, the BLM proposed ending federal coal leasing in America’s largest coal field, Wyoming’s Powder River Basin, which signals a potential death knell for a declining industry. The BLM also canceled 25 oil and gas leases in a 40,000-acre area of southeastern Utah that is rich with cultural resources.

Since a Donald Trump “climate policy” is a contradiction in terms, we’ll look instead at Trump’s energy aims, which consist of little more than “unlock(ing) our country’s God-given abundance of oil, natural gas, and clean coal” by shredding environmental and public health protections at the behest of billionaire petroleum executives. Never mind that those same executives have boasted about achieving record-high domestic oil production and liquefied natural gas exports under the Biden administration. Never mind that ExxonMobil brought in $8.6 billion in after-tax profits during the first three months of the year—not too shabby for an industry purportedly under siege by radical environmentalists.

Since the Trump campaign lacks a concrete platform, a group of right-wing organizations calling themselves Project 2025 have taken it upon themselves to fashion an agenda and even a staff for the next administration to “rescue the country from the grip of the radical Left.” The coalition has published a document called “Mandate for Leadership,” which lays out a playbook for each government sector, providing an eerie glimpse into a second Trump presidency.

The chapter on the Department of the Interior was penned by none other than William Perry Pendley, a notorious anti-public lands zealot who served as Trump’s acting director of the BLM—illegitimately. In it, Pendley unabashedly advocates for returning to the pre-multiple use days, when the BLM was known as the Bureau of Livestock and Mining. He reiterates the absurd claim that wild horses pose an existential threat to public lands and calls for the immediate “rollback of Biden’s orders” and the reinstatement of “the Trump-era Energy Dominance Agenda.” Per the playbook, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and the rest of the region would be reopened to drilling; the full Willow project (five drill sites rather than the scaled-back three) would be approved; coal leasing would be restored; drilling permits would be expedited; methane emissions rules and other pollution limits would be rescinded; national monuments would be shrunk or eliminated; protections for sage grouse, grizzlies, wolves and other imperiled species would be removed; and the administration would try to repeal the Antiquities Act of 1906.

And that’s just the DOI chapter. The Energy Department and EPA sections strike similar notes, calling on Trump to, among other things, “Stop the war on oil and natural gas;” lift the moratorium on liquefied natural gas export approvals (and stop considering climate change as a reason to stop LNG projects); support repeal of the Inflation Reduction Act and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, both of which have created thousands of jobs in the clean energy and climate change mitigation industries; shift the departments’ focus away from climate change and renewable energy; end greenhouse gas emissions reporting for all but a select few facilities; and roll back coal plant pollution regulations.

The damage inflicted during Trump’s first term was somewhat mitigated by the administration’s incompetence. Project 2025’s 920-page playbook looks to remedy that, supplementing Trump’s greed and power-hunger with corporate-backed ideology and expertise. In office, Trump would create an authoritarian regime that cracks down on civil liberties, criminalizes immigrants, and bolsters the police state, while also letting corporate interests run wild at the expense of the planet and its most vulnerable people.

A recent report from Wood Mackenzie, a natural resource analytics firm, predicts that a Trump victory in November would bring an “immediate deceleration in support for decarbonization” and “unabated fossil generation would expand.” The report warns that “These steps would push the US even further away from a net zero emissions pathway.”

Biden may have broken a promise, but when it comes to Trump vs. Biden on the climate, the contrast couldn’t be more stark.

Tom Steyer is skeptical of human kindness—at least as a means to positive global change. As he describes in his new book, Cheaper, Faster, Better: How We’ll Win the Climate War, the billionaire climate activist argues that to address an issue as “complex” and “rife with self-interest” as the transition away from fossil fuels, the world can’t rely on companies and organizations to act out of sheer altruism. “I’m skeptical of any solution that requires humanity’s collective heart to grow three sizes,” he writes.

Instead, he points to another tool: capitalism.

It’s a force he’s intimately familiar with, and one he has clearly benefited from. You may remember Steyer from his recent bid for president—or maybe you don’t, because he dropped out in early 2020 after earning just 11 percent of the Democratic vote in the South Carolina primaries—but before that, Steyer earned a fortune as the founder of Farallon Capital, a hedge fund that under his leadership he says grew from $6 million to more than $20 billion over two and a half decades.

In 2012, after some self-reflection and an especially impactful meet-up in the Adirondacks with environmentalist and author Bill McKibben, Steyer left Farallon to pursue climate advocacy. (McKibben had just published an article in Rolling Stone titled, “Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math,” and Steyer heard him on the radio. “I cold-called him,” Steyer recalls, “and said, ‘You want to go on a hike?'”) In 2021, Steyer co-founded Galvanize Climate Solutions, a climate investment firm.

Still a “proud and committed” capitalist, he argues that “markets are the quickest way for human beings to change things at scale,” whether that applies to oil and tobacco or clean drinking water and vaccines. Markets, he writes, are amoral. And for a long time, fossil fuels ruled. But now, Steyer sees the world at a turning point. As he told me over Zoom in April, “cleaner is cheaper.” And for wealthy investors, himself included, doing the “right thing” by funding green solutions can also be profitable.

“Part business book, part climate manifesto, part memoir,” as his marketing team described it, Cheaper, Faster, Better reads as one long monologue in which Steyer argues that readers should become, like him, “climate people” and incorporate climate into “every big decision you make.” Throughout, he compares our fight against climate change to World War II: The question, “‘What are you doing to fight climate change?'” he writes, “is the ‘What did you do in the war?’ of our time.”

In a wide-ranging, 45-minute conversation, I asked Steyer about his views on carbon–footprint shaming, celebrities like Taylor Swift flying private, and what the super-wealthy owe the world. You can read an edited and condensed version of our conversation below.

You write about capitalism’s role in addressing the climate crisis. But capitalism is part of the reason we got into this mess. Why do you still trust it to work now?

When you think about capitalism’s role in society, capitalism scales. And the organizations that solve society’s needs and wants are profit-driven businesses. But it is absolutely essential that the rules be set up in society so that even self-interested individuals and organizations do what’s in society’s interest.

I think we’re at a point where the interest of business will be in providing sustainable answers, both because of the rules that government has put in, and the programs like the Inflation Reduction Act that are designed to say to people who are profit-oriented, “Build this. This is what our society needs.”

I think that business has to have frameworks from the government, and from, in effect, the will of the people to build the things that society needs. That’s how it’s supposed to work. That’s why I think the engine of getting this done will be capitalism, but it’s got to be within that framework. Carrots and sticks are critical.

If there are rules and incentives, and it’s in investors’ best interest to pay attention to climate change, as you argue in the book, why do so many still put their money into fossil fuels?

I think that it’s pretty simple. They’re betting on the status quo. They’re making money, a lot of money, from oil and gas right now. And they’re betting that that won’t change.

If something can’t go on forever, eventually, it must stop. And that’s where we are in fossil fuels. The status quo cannot keep going. In the last 10 months, every single [month] has been the hottest month in recorded history. We’re on a trajectory in terms of emissions and air temperature and ocean temperature that is absolutely unsustainable. We need to make this change. And now we’re at a place where, technologically, it’s to our advantage. Eighty-six percent of the new electricity generation in the world last year was renewable, for example.

There’s the old Hemingway quote, “How did you go bankrupt? Two ways: slowly, and then all at once.” New technologies will slowly eat away at the status quo, until then, all of a sudden, they go vertical.

You write in the book, “I’m pretty sure I don’t just have a carbon-neutral footprint, I have a carbon-negative one.” Why do you think that? Have you ever tried to measure it?

For a long time, we’ve been doing a huge experiment using rotational grazing and regenerative agriculture on a ranch [in the San Francisco Bay Area]. It’s a huge science experiment to see if there’s a different way of raising animals in a way that’s helpful to the soil, to the water, to the animals, and for CO2.

I believe that using techniques to put carbon back in the soil, in a substantial way, means I probably do have a negative carbon footprint. But I’m not sure. But as I said, carbon shaming is not the way to go. This is a societal answer. This is not something people can answer on their own.

[Editor’s note: Scientists say the jury is still out on how much carbon regenerative ranching can net-sequester on a global scale.]

Yes, you write in the book about carbon–footprint shaming, and how it can be unproductive to criticize public servants like [climate envoy] John Kerry who’ve flown on private planes for their work. What do you think about people on social media who track celebrities’ private plane trips? Like Taylor Swift?

I never fly on a private plane. I know what it looks like from an emissions standpoint, and it’s almost mind-blowing. And we live in a society where, basically, you’re allowed to pollute for free. For a long time, we didn’t realize that there are unintended consequences of burning fossil fuels. Now we know that, but we still don’t charge for it.

My feeling is, if you’re going to take a private plane, that means, by definition, you’re rich. Which means you can afford to pay for your pollution. And if you’re not paying for your pollution, you’re basically making us pay for your pollution. Not just people in the United States, but people all over the world who are much, much, much, much poorer than you. That doesn’t seem fair.

So if you want to fly on a private plane, you should make sure that you’re doing something to take away that cost, at a minimum.

[Editor’s note: Taylor Swift reportedly offsets her flights with carbon credits, though it’s unclear exactly how the offsets are applied and whether her offsets (or anyone’s, for that matter) are effective.]

What do you think is the single most impactful thing a billionaire could do to address climate change?

They should invest in solutions. We need to bring finance to bear, fast, to build these companies to solve these problems. If you have billions of dollars, you can invest billions of dollars. Let’s do it in a way that makes you a bunch of money, but let’s do it.

A lot of people say they want to do the right thing. Okay, do the right thing.

You and your wife plan to give away the majority of your wealth as part of the Giving Pledge. As some of my colleagues have reported, billionaires giving away large chunks of their fortunes sounds great on paper, but many are still making billions, potentially, in industries or in ventures that are not great for the climate or the world. How, if at all, can that process be better?

I think the point about the Giving Pledge is that you recognize that you didn’t earn all your money by yourself. That, in fact, all of society has conspired over a long period of time, with amazing sacrifices by people for hundreds of years, to produce an environment where people could make that much money.

I think it seems to me to be absolutely incumbent on everybody to realize that they didn’t earn that money by themselves. Millions and tens of millions and hundreds of millions of people sacrificed for hundreds of years to build that framework. And so they, in effect, own part of what you have.

From my standpoint, the idea of giving back to society and recognizing that we’re all part of this together, and always have been—that’s a big point about this book, is we need to do this together. That’s the point of the Giving Pledge to me. To recognize, you’re not separate. You didn’t do it. It’s not yours. It’s all of ours. We have a responsibility to each other. Everybody. Not just billionaires, but everybody.

You end the book with an anecdote about your adult daughter, who was worried about bringing children into a world plagued by climate change. You tell her that having kids is the “ultimate statement of optimism.” Can you tell me more about what you meant by that?

I think that having a kid means that you believe that we’re going to pass on a world that is not just habitable, but is wonderful. We’re saying, “Our kids and our grandkids are going to live in a world that’s better than the one we were born into.” And we’re gonna do it. I really believe it. We just have to apply ourselves.

People often think that there’s a conflict between being optimistic and knowing we have a real problem. We do have a real problem. Of course we do. But that doesn’t mean we can’t and won’t solve it.

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

For a decade, wind farm companies had been eyeing Molok Luyuk—a mountain ridge of religious importance to tribes in Northern California, whose people have worked for years to protect it. It’s also widely biodiverse, with elk, mountain lions, and black bears, as well as 40 rare plants such as the pink adobe lily. 

Mia Durham is the secretary for the Yocha Dehe Wintun Nation, a tribe that has been in a relationship with Molok Luyuk for thousands of years. In response to petitions filed by wind energy companies that wanted to develop the area, the tribe and its allies asked President Joe Biden to protect it in 2019. 

“That’s what heightened it for us and put us on track of moving forward as quickly as possible,” Durham said. “We wanted to protect sacred sites that are there. They were going to be severely impacted.”

One way to protect landscapes and waterways such as Molok Luyuk is to have them declared national monuments, a term used to designate that a section of land is federally protected from development and harm. While Congress designates national parks, only a president can designate a national monument.

That’s what happened earlier this month when the Biden administration expanded a national monument to include Molok Luyuk, joining the mountain ridge to the nearby Berryessa Snow Mountain National Monument, nearly 350,000 acres of coastal range in Northern California. Tribes are now working on a co-stewardship agreement for the Molok Luyuk area, but not for the whole national monument. 

But the tribes that have a relationship with Molok Luyuk aren’t done with their advocacy. They’ve protected the area from energy development, but they still have little say in how the land is managed. While the federal government has pushed co-stewardship agreements over the years, national monuments are still considered property of the federal government.

Now that Berryessa includes Molok Luyuk, the US Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) are in talks to enter into a co-stewardship agreement with the Yocha Dehe Wintun Nation, Kletsel DeHe Wintun Nation, and the Cachil DeHe Band of Wintun Indians of the Colusa Rancheria. The details are still being hashed out, but the Yocha Dehe Wintun Nation is excited to bring traditional knowledge to the management of Molok Luyuk. 

Melissa Hovey is the manager at Berryessa Snow Mountain National Monument, and she said that co-management happens between BLM and the Forest Service. These federal agencies can enter into co-stewardship agreements with tribes, but they can’t delegate management without congressional approval.

“Co-management means decision-making authority,” she said. “Co-stewardship means one entity still has the decision-making authority.”

You would think that “co-stewardship” and “co-management” would be simple terms to define, but there are numerous federal documents that have used the two terms interchangeably over the years. Co-stewardship is a broad term that describes agreements made between federal agencies and tribal nations to hash out shared interests in the management of federal lands. Co-management refers to a stronger tribal presence and decision-making power. 

In 2015, the Berryessa Snow Mountain National Monument was created under President Barack Obama using the Antiquities Act—a 1906 law that allows the president to protect places of historic and scientific interest on federal land and make them national monuments. Berryessa was protected because of the area’s biodiversity: 80 different species of butterflies, black bears, California newts, and predatory birds. Molok Luyuk translates from Patwin to English as “Condor Ridge,” in reference to the endangered California condor that used to fly along the ridge. 

Congressional action is not the only way to gain co-management powers. The Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition in Utah has one of the most successful stories of tribes gaining co-management status—they were given “true co-management” by an Intergovernmental Cooperative Agreement.

In 2022, the federal government agreed to co-manage Bears Ears National Monument with the Hopi Tribe, Navajo Nation, Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, Ute Indian Tribe of the Uintah and Ouray Reservation, and the Pueblo of Zuni. For the first time ever, tribal nations worked with federal agencies to draft a resource-management plan that would dictate how a national monument should be run. 

Patrick Gonzales-Rogers is a professor at the Yale School of Environment where he specializes in tribal sovereignty and natural resources. He is also the former director of the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition. 

Co-managment allows tribes to exercise sovereignty, according to Gonzales-Rogers. “It allows them to be more assertive,” he added. And when that happens, tribes can bring in religious and spiritual practices to utilize traditional knowledge, wisdom that had been minimized by federal agencies in the past. 

Gonzales-Rogers is hopeful that, exponentially, these choices will compound, “and may even have a nexus to say something like landback,” a reference to a movement that is not only rooted in a mass return of land to Indigenous nations and peoples, but also tribes having sovereignty to steward the land that was taken from them. 

Gonzales-Rogers thinks the two terms have not been very well-defined over the years, but said co-stewardship agreements might be a good way to start building to co-management.

And the more tribes have autonomy over their ancestral lands, the better it is for conservation goals. According to a recent study, equal partnerships between tribes and governments are the best way to protect public lands—the more tribal autonomy, the better the land is taken care of. 

Mia Durham with the Yocha Dehe Wintun Nation is excited to get started in drawing up its own co-stewardship agreement on Molok Luyuk. “I hope it doesn’t take long, because we’ve been managing these lands already, so it shouldn’t be hard to put it on a piece of paper,” she said. 

“There are lots of people who say, ‘Nimby, nimby, nimby,’ and the people who say, ‘Nimby, nimby, nimby,’ they don’t live right next door to it.”

That’s what one retiree told Reveal’s Jonathan Jones when he traveled to upstate New York to find out why so many people in the rural town of Copake are fighting to stop a massive solar energy project from being built.

Jonathan’s story, a version of which first aired in January, sheds light on one of the key reasons why it’s so difficult to build the green energy infrastructure we need to transition away from fossil fuels—even in a deep-blue state. “We are not climate deniers, nor are we NIMBYists,” another resident told Jonathan. “We believe in the need for renewable energy, and we just want to have a say in how it’s done so that it’s reasonable and is consonant with the kind of community that we have and what we want.”

The result: The solar project—which is supposed to supply enough renewable power for 15,000 households—has been stalled for years.

The situation in Copake is far from unique. Once you’ve listened to the Reveal podcast, I also recommend reading Henry Carnell’s recent Mother Jones story about the decade-long legal morass that has delayed the completion of a transmission line that’s supposed to deliver power from 161 midwestern wind and solar projects.

This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

After the House of Representatives passed legislation that would allow mining companies more legal rights to federal lands by a bipartisan vote of 216-195 earlier this month, a bipartisan group of Senate sponsors are moving it through their chamber.

“With the passage of the Mining Regulatory Clarity Act, we’re codifying existing precedent and unlocking our rich domestic mineral resources,” said Bruce Westerman (R-AK), the chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee, after the House passed the bill on May 8.

Nine Democrats joined with Republicans to pass the legislation, including co-sponsor Mary Peltola (D-AK).

Western legislators are leading the effort to pass the Mining Regulatory Clarity Act with the explicit goal of erasing the new legal precedent the 2022 Rosemont decision created. In that decision, the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals sided with conservation groups, ruling that the federal government was wrong to assume the Rosemont Copper Company, mining in the Santa Rita mountains in southern Arizona, had a right to dump mining waste on federal land where the company could prove no valid mineral claim. A mining claim is valid when a company discovers a physical mineral deposit, such as lithium, lead or zinc, and the company asserts their right to mine it, according to the Bureau of Land Management. 

The bipartisan support for blocking the Rosemont decision follows the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022, which incentivized mining companies to take advantage of the Advanced Manufacturing Production Credit to develop mining projects for critical minerals included in the law. Many of the critical minerals designated by the Biden administration, such as zinc, manganese, and lithium, are integral to electric vehicle batteries and the transition toward a carbon-free economy.

“Everything from lithium-ion batteries to satellites relies on critical minerals, and we should be responsibly mining those right here in the US,” Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nev.), who introduced the Senate bill with Sen. Jim Risch (R-Idaho), said in a press release. “My legislation will undo the damage of the misguided Rosemont decision and protect thousands of jobs across the West.”

There were 509 active mining plans of operation and another 806 active mining notices on federal lands in 2023, according to Steve Feldgus, deputy assistant secretary of land and minerals management at the Department of the Interior.

The Center for Biological Diversity and Save the Scenic Santa Ritas, nonprofit organizations working in Arizona, led the effort to sue the US Forest Service over its decision to allow the Rosemont Copper Company to use federal lands to dump mining waste. The Tohono O’odham Nation, Pascua Yaqui Tribe, and Hopi Tribe, among others, consider the area to be sacred, ancestral land, prompting conservation groups to file suit and prevent further development.

“What we correctly argued and the court, we think, got it right, was that if you’re going to assert rights against the United States…the agency has to check and the company has to prove that it actually has the rights under the [1872] Mining Law,” said Roger Flynn, an environmental attorney who litigated on behalf of conservation groups against the United States Forest Service in the Rosemont decision. 

Flynn and other lawyers argued that the Forest Service must check the validity of mining claims before allowing a company to use federal land. The Mining Law of 1872 states that any nonmineral land next to mines used for “mining, milling, processing, beneficiation, or other operations” shall not exceed five acres, and Flynn successfully argued to the court that the Rosemont Copper Mine violated that part of the Mining Law.

Before the 2022 Rosemont decision, as a legal precedent, the Forest Service often did not require proof of valid mining claims. According to Flynn, who teaches courses on mining law at the University of Colorado, the agency has historically greenlit dozens of mining projects on federal land because of its interpretation of the 1872 Mining Law. 

“I think the [1872] Mining Law automatically gives rights to these companies, the agencies do not have the discretion to say no. The Rosemont mine changed that,” Flynn said. “And that’s what has caused the industry to go to their supporters and basically take away the few guardrails that actually exist in the Mining Law.”

The Rosemont decision affirmed the previous Arizona District Court decision requiring the Forest Service to examine claim validity before allowing a mining company to put claims on federal land. 

“It’s a hugely important tool for citizens who are trying to stop bad mines. Our group stresses that we’re not against mining,” said Rob Peters, executive director of Save the Scenic Santa Ritas. “But there are some places like the Santa Ritas and Patagonias that are of global biodiversity significance.”

Even with the Forest Service now preventing Rosemont from using federal lands to dump waste rock and tailings, the company is still mining the deposit.

The passage of the Mining Regulatory Clarity Act in the House and bipartisan support for it in the Senate could force the White House to intervene. The Biden administration released a statement opposing the bill in April. Senate sponsors include Kyrsten Sinema (I-Ariz.), Jacky Rosen (D-Nev.), and Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska).

Murkowski said she co-sponsored the Mining Regulatory Clarity Act because she believes the Rosemont decision gave federal agencies too much authority to deny claims to federal lands.

“It’s just yet another example of ensuring that our agencies are held accountable to what we have crafted in the law and don’t take too much discretionary license,” Murkowski told Inside Climate News. “I think what [the Forest Service] did was a determination that was beyond the limits of their authority.” 

Cortez Masto’s office told Inside Climate News in a statement that the legislation will not “fundamentally change the permitting process for mining on federal lands.” 

But while Congress raced to expand the legal rights of mining companies on federal land, conservation groups raised concerns about the impacts of the bill if it becomes law.

“If the [Rosemont] decision is overturned legislatively, like they are trying to do, I know that many of our key fights would be jeopardized, many of our key wins would be instantly overturned,” said Laiken Jordahl, the Southwest conservation advocate for the Center for Biological Diversity. “I mean, it makes no sense on its face, that a mining company can dump toxic waste on areas where they have no claims on public land.”

The Mining Regulatory Clarity Act would specifically amend the law to read “a claimant shall have the right to use and occupy to conduct operations on public land, with or without the discovery of a valuable mineral deposit” to ensure mining companies can continue staking mining claims on federal land.

In January, more than 90 environmental, climate, and Indigenous groups sent a letter to Congress opposing the law and argued that the bill would allow mining companies to permanently occupy federal public lands without valid proof of mineral deposits and would preclude other types of development on federal lands.

“There cannot be a just and equitable transition to a carbon-free future, with legislation like this that sacrifices our lands, waters, public health, sacred sites and communities,” they wrote.

Flynn noted that the precedent established in the Rosemont decision forces mining companies to prove the validity of their use of public land, in line with how other companies or groups must prove the validity of their claims.

“Mining being subject to the same laws as everybody else, that’s not going to stop mining,” Flynn said. “In some places, the worst places for the worst mines, it might, but that’s the way it should be.”

After the Mining Regulatory Clarity Act’s passage in the House, Cortez Masto and Risch urged Senate leadership to take up the Mining Regulatory Clarity Act as soon as possible. The Senate bill was referred to the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources on May 9, the day after the bill passed the House. No further action has been taken.

With increased interest in mining due to federal incentives, Flynn and other prominent conservationists urged Congress to reform the 1872 Mining Law to pass stronger regulations for how mining companies can operate on public lands. The Mining Regulatory Clarity Act would do the opposite.

“It’s just fear mongering, because [mining companies] want to go back to being the top dog on the block, and all Rosemont did was somewhat equalize the playing field and have mining treated like any other use on public lands,” Flynn said.

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Some of the world’s most profitable—and most polluting corporations—have invested in carbon offset projects that have fundamental failings and are “probably junk,” suggesting industry claims about greenhouse gas reductions were likely overblown, according to new analysis.

Delta, Gucci, Volkswagen, ExxonMobil, Disney, easyJet and Nestlé are among the major corporations to have purchased millions of carbon credits from climate friendly projects that are “likely junk” or worthless when it comes to offsetting their greenhouse gas emissions, according to a classification system developed by Corporate Accountability, a nonprofit, transnational corporate watchdog.

Some of these companies no longer use CO2 offsets amid mounting evidence that carbon trading does not lead to the claimed emissions cuts—and in some cases may even cause environmental and social harms.

However, the multibillion-dollar voluntary carbon trading industry is still championed by many corporations including oil and gas majors, airlines, automakers, tourism, fast-food and beverage brands, fashion houses, banks and tech firms as the bedrock of climate action—a way of claiming to reduce their greenhouse gas footprint while continuing to rely on fossil fuels and unsustainable supply chains.

Yet, for 33 of the top 50 corporate buyers, more than a third of their entire offsets portfolio is “likely junk”—suggesting at least some claims about carbon neutrality and emission reductions have been exaggerated according to the analysis. The fundamental failings leading to a “likely junk” ranking include whether emissions cuts would have happened anyway, as is often the case with large hydroelectric dams, or if the emissions were just shifted elsewhere, a common issue in forestry offset projects.

“These findings add to the mounting evidence that peels back the greenwashed facade of the voluntary carbon market and lays bare the ways it dangerously distracts from the real, lasting action the world’s largest corporations and polluters need to be taking,” said Rachel Rose Jackson, Corporate Accountability’s director of research.

The fossil fuel industry is by far the largest investor in the world’s most popular 50 CO2 offsetting schemes. At least 43 percent of the 81 million CO2 credits purchased by the oil and gas majors are for projects that have at least one fundamental flaw and are “probably junk,” according to the analysis.

The transport industry, which accounts for about a fifth of all global planet-warming emissions, has also relied heavily on carbon offsetting projects to meet climate goals. Just over 42 percent of the total credits (55 million) purchased by airlines and 38 percent purchased by automakers (21 million) for the top 50 projects are likely worthless at reducing emissions, the analysis found.

The top 50 projects include forestry schemes, hydroelectric dams, solar and wind farms, waste disposal, and greener household appliances schemes across 20 (mostly) developing countries, according to data from AlliedOffsets, the most comprehensive emissions trading database, which tracks projects from inception. They account for almost a third of the entire global voluntary carbon market (VCM), suggesting that junk or overvalued carbon credits that exaggerate emission reduction benefits could be the norm.

The VCM industry works by carbon credits being tradable “allowances” or certificates that allows the purchaser to offset 1 ton of carbon dioxide or the equivalent in greenhouse gasses by investing in environmental projects anywhere in the world that claim to reduce carbon emissions.

Climate experts say that the carbon trading market has failed to produce the promised planetary benefits, delayed the transition away from oil, gas, and coal, and caused harm to forests and communities in developing countries where most offset projects are located.

On Tuesday, the Biden administration published new guidelines on responsible participation in VCMs which they say will drive credible and ambitious climate action. But critics argue that offsets are fundamentally flawed.

“Overall, carbon offsets are, according to most expert analyses, neither credible nor scalable to the urgency and scale of the carbon dioxide problem,” said Richard Heede, co-director of the Climate Accountability Institute, a nonprofit research and education group.

“This report documents the prevalence of ‘worthless’ or ‘likely junk’ carbon offsets in the global Voluntary Carbon Market, and undermines the corporate rationale for claiming emissions reductions based on such credits,” Heede added.

The new sector-by-sector analysis found:

Fossil fuel firms and airlines

Oil and gas majors are among the largest corporate buyers of likely junk offsets. Almost half (49 percent) the 3.7 million carbon credits purchased by ExxonMobil are for two projects classified as likely junk or worthless. Internal company documents show that scientists at ExxonMobil, which is one of the world’s worst greenhouse gas emitters, were accurately predicting the impact of fossil fuels on the climate in the 1970s.

A spokesperson for ExxonMobil said: “Carbon offsets are a viable way to [reduce emissions and reach net zero], which is why we continue to evaluate them. We’re working to verify the claims cited in this analysis.”

With the exception of fossil fuel firms, Delta has purchased more carbon credits than any other corporation. Just over 35 percent of the 41 million carbon credits purchased by Delta were from 11 offset projects which are likely worthless or junk, according to Corporate Accountability.

In California, a 2023 civil class-action alleged that Delta misrepresented itself as carbon-neutral as the company’s reliance on the carbon trading market renders its climate friendly representations as false and misleading. The judge reduced the scope of the lawsuit last month after Delta rejected the allegations and filed a motion to dismiss. The case continues.

A spokesperson said the company is investing in sustainable aviation fuel, more fuel-efficient aircraft and reducing fuel use through operational efficiencies in a bid to reach “net zero” by 2050. “We have shifted away from carbon neutrality and offsets.”

Meanwhile almost 72 percent of the 11 million carbon credits ever purchased by easyJet, a popular low-cost European airline, were for projects classified as likely junk. In 2022, the airline announced plans to transition away from offsetting in favor of a “roadmap to net zero” emissions by 2050 through more fuel-efficient aircraft and perational efficiencies as well as sustainable aviation fuel and carbon capture and storage—technologies which scientists have warned could exacerbate the climate crisis.

An easyJet spokesperson said: “In the short period we did offset customer emissions, we had robust due diligence processes in place, with all projects recommended by expert partners and all required to meet the highest standards available.”

A 2021 joint investigation by the Guardian revealed that major airlines including Delta and easyJet were using unreliable “phantom” carbon credits to claim their flights were carbon neutral.

Car makers, entertainment giants, luxury goods

Almost half (46 percent) of the 11 million CO2 credits purchased by Volkswagen from the top 50 projects were likely junk, according to the analysis. The German carmaker recently announced a joint venture to develop its own carbon credit projects and said they increasingly rely on on-site inspections, due diligence and audit processes to verify projects. VW aims to reduce its emissions by 90 percent compared to 2018 by converting its energy supply and increasing energy efficiency among other measures.

In the world of entertainment, almost 62 percent of the 5.8 million carbon credits retired by Disney are from two offset projects which have been classified as likely junk or worthless.

The analysis also found that 75 percent of the 4.4 million carbon credits purchased by the Italian luxury fashion house Gucci have been for projects classified as likely junk. Gucci, which was once a high-profile proponent of offsetting, last year dropped its carbon neutral claim amid growing evidence that the rainforest projects it relied on were likely junk and potentially harmful. Gucci is finalizing new climate commitments with a greater focus on cutting absolute emissions through its supply chain.

The food and drinks industry is a major climate polluter—and investor in carbon markets, with 37 percent of the industry-wide credits purchased from projects classified as likely junk.

Food and drink industry

The analysis found that almost 36 percent of the 2.2 million carbon credits purchased by Nestlé, the world’s largest food and beverage company, were from five offset projects which have been classified as likely junk. Nestlé said that it stopped purchasing credits from these projects in 2021/2022. “Reaching net zero emissions at Nestlé does not involve using offsetting: we focus on GHG emissions reductions and removals within our value chain to reach our net zero ambition.”

While some corporations have signaled a shift away from carbon offsetting, the VCM is still valued between $2 and $3 billion—despite warnings that the industry is a false solution delaying the world’s transition away from oil, gas and coal.

“This research once again shows that big corporate polluters claiming climate credentials are the main buyers of junk credits. But racking up carbon credits doesn’t make you a climate leader. Cutting fossil fuels does. We can’t offset our way to a safe climate future,” said Erika Lennon, senior attorney at the Centre for International Environmental Law (Ciel).

“For all the talk about carbon credits accelerating climate action, they are actually greenwashing climate destruction.”

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

As US communities take big oil to court for allegedly deceiving the public about the climate crisis, polling shared with the Guardian shows that a majority of voters support the litigation, while almost half would back an even more aggressive legal strategy of filing criminal charges.

The poll, which comes as the world’s first-ever criminal climate lawsuit was brought in France last week, could shed light on how, if filed, similar US cases might be viewed by a jury.

The 40 existing US lawsuits against major oil companies, filed by cities and states, are based on civil charges such as tort law and racketeering protections. But last year, the consumer advocacy nonprofit Public Citizen proposed also filing criminal charges—most notably, homicide—against the companies.

Big Oil, the argument goes, knew pollution from the use of fossil fuels could have lethal consequences and yet still fought to delay climate action, which could be considered grounds for charges of reckless or negligent homicide.

Asked for comment about the legal theory last year, the American Petroleum Institute, the top US fossil fuel lobby group, said that “the industry has achieved its goal of providing affordable, reliable American energy to US consumers while substantially reducing emissions and our environmental footprint.”

The seemingly radical idea has received “real, serious interest” from several district attorneys’ offices, said Aaron Regunberg, senior policy counsel with Public Citizen’s climate program. But it has also garnered some skepticism.

To see how the scheme plays with ordinary Americans, Public Citizen teamed up with progressive polling firm Data for Progress to survey 1,200 likely US voters. Conducted earlier this month, the poll was weighted to be representative of likely voters by age, gender, education, race, geography, and voting history.

Asked if fossil fuel companies “should be held legally accountable for their contributions to climate change,” 62 percent of voters said yes, suggesting majority support for the existing civil lawsuits against oil companies. That included 84 percent of Democrats, 59 percent of Independents and 40 percent of Republicans. The results confirm a majority opinion suggested by earlier national and state polls.

“[V]oters strongly want to see companies held accountable for their harmful actions,” said Grace Adcox, senior climate strategist at Data for Progress from the organization and advocacy group Fossil Free Media.

The poll went on to explain that while oil companies are already facing civil lawsuits, some climate advocates have also “proposed criminal prosecutions against these companies.”

It asked: “Knowing what you do now, do you support or oppose criminal charges being filed against oil and gas companies to hold them accountable for deaths caused by their contributions to climate change?” In response, 49 percent of those surveyed said they would “strongly” or “somewhat” support the effort, compared with 38 percent who said they would not. The results indicate that though the idea is new, it may not be too “out there” for many Americans, said Regunberg.

Of Democrats, 68 percent said they would back the idea, which Regunberg said was “huge,” especially because Democratic districts are much more likely to bring such legal action against the fossil fuel industry. He was “surprised,” he said, to find that the idea received support from nearly a third of Republicans, at 32 percent.

“A significant number of Republicans would support these prosecutions, even if none of their party’s leaders have the courage to buck their fossil fuel donors,” Regunberg said.

Chesa Boudin, former district attorney from San Francisco, which sued big oil in 2017, has expressed interest in Public Citizen’s legal theory.

Boudin, who was elected on a progressive agenda, said the poll was not just a useful way to judge support for criminal climate litigation, but could also show how potential jurors might view the cases.

“It gives you an indication of what a cross-section of citizens on a jury might do with this kind of evidence,” said Boudin, who was in 2022 removed from office amid conservative backlash.

Bringing criminal charges against Big Oil would come with major challenges at every step, experts say, from a lack of political will, to scarce resources in public prosecutors’ offices, to potential difficulties in proving causality.

Building political support for the projects may also not be easy, but Adcox of Data for Progress said the poll shows it could be possible.

“These national findings show these cases may be able to earn popular support, particularly in blue jurisdictions,” she said.

Oil companies have yet to face criminal climate-related charges in the United States. But last week, eight victims of extreme weather and three NGOs filed a criminal case against the French oil company TotalEnergies, alleging its fossil fuel exploitation has contributed to deadly climate disasters. In the US, energy companies PG&E and BP have previously been charged with homicide. (Both companies pleaded guilty and paid penalties and fines worth billions of dollars.)

Because it relies on precedent, “the law is an inherently backward-looking, conservative institution,” said Boudin. That can make it difficult to use new legal theories.

“And yet the law does change and evolve and grow,” he added. “The fact that this hasn’t been done before may lead many to say, well, it can’t be done, there’s no precedent. But there was no precedent for anything until there was.”

This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Get ready for an active hurricane season. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is predicting the greatest number of named storms this hurricane season since the forecasts began in 1998. 

NOAA expects above-normal hurricane activity this season, with 17 to 25 named storms including eight to 13 hurricanes and four to seven major hurricanes of category 3, 4 or 5 strength, packing winds of 111 miles an hour or more. The federal agency based its unprecedented forecast on a confluence of factors, most notably near-record sea surface temperatures that are as warm now as they normally are in August.

“That forecast is the greatest number of storms that we’ve forecast,” said Ken Graham, director of the National Weather Service. “Now is the time to prepare.”

The average season features 14 named storms including seven hurricanes and three major hurricanes, according to NOAA. The season begins June 1 and ends Nov. 30.

“This season is looking to be an extraordinary one,” said Rick Spinrad, administrator of NOAA. “Remember it only takes one storm to devastate a community.”  

NOAA said the sea surface temperatures were poised to power more storms. Forecasters also based their predictions on what they anticipate will be a quick transition to La Niña conditions, leading to a decrease in wind shear or atmospheric choppiness that can weaken or break apart storms. They also cited the potential for an above-normal African monsoon, which can produce African easterly waves that seed the strongest and longer-lived storms.  

The federal agency said there was an 85 percent chance for an above-normal season, 10 percent chance for a near-normal season and five percent chance for a below-normal season.

The forecast was consistent with others. Forecasters at Colorado State University also predicted an “extremely active” season, with 23 named storms including 11 hurricanes and five major hurricanes. At the University of Pennsylvania, forecasters expected 33 named storms. The most named storms ever recorded during a single hurricane season was 30 in 2020.

“We’re not forecasting the most active season on record but certainly a hyper-active season,” said Phil Klotzbach, a senior research scientist in the Department of Atmospheric Science at Colorado State University.

The Colorado State forecasters said there was a 62 percent chance of a major hurricane striking the U.S., with a 34 percent chance of one of the storms making landfall along the East Coast, including the Florida peninsula, and 42 percent chance along the Gulf Coast. They also said there was a 66 percent chance of a major hurricane tracking through the Caribbean.

This activity would be well above the average from 1991 to 2020. The Colorado State forecasters issued their predictions with above-normal confidence, in contrast to last year when an unusual confluence of factors created more uncertainty than normal. That year warm sea surface temperatures were expected to enhance activity, but a developing El Niño pattern, it was thought, would temper that activity. 

“This year pretty much everything is pointing in the same direction,” Klotzbach said. “There’s not a lot of seasons where everything is pointing in the same direction.”

The sea surface temperatures are tracking even hotter than at this time last year, when an unprecedented marine heat wave led to triple-digit temperatures in the Florida Keys over the summer and widespread coral bleaching, said Brian McNoldy, senior research associate in the Rosenstiel School of Marine, Atmospheric, and Earth Science at the University of Miami.

Recently, temperatures across a swath of the Atlantic known as the Main Development Region, for the frequency of hurricanes that form here, have averaged 82.5 degrees Fahrenheit, he said. Normally at this time of year the average temperature is 78.5 degrees.

“It’s insane. It’s blowing past any of the other records that were recently set,” McNoldy said. “2023 and now 2024 don’t look like previous years anymore. They’re just so far above anything. So I don’t think it’s just climate change.”

Experts say trade winds across the Atlantic have been weaker than normal, leading to less water evaporation and mixing that can cool water temperatures. Also there have been fewer plumes of Saharan dust blowing across the Atlantic, which can help shield sunlight.

“We’ve never seen anything like this, and it just keeps going up and it’s not even returning to the 2023 record, which was outlandish,” McNoldy said. “We’re all kind of watching this in shock.”

David Zierden, Florida’s state climatologist based in the Center for Ocean-Atmospheric Prediction Studies at Florida State University, pointed out that while hurricane forecasting has improved, it remains difficult to predict where the storms might track.

“These seasonal outlooks can’t forecast where these storms might occur or where they might make landfall,” he said. “So we have to be equally prepared about any year.”

This story was originally published by Yale e360 and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Can metals that naturally occur in seawater be mined, and can they be mined sustainably? A company in Oakland, California, says yes. And not only is it extracting magnesium from ocean water—and from waste brine generated by industry—it is doing it in a carbon-neutral way. Magrathea Metals has produced small amounts of magnesium in pilot projects, and with financial support from the Defense Department, it is building a larger-scale facility to produce hundreds of tons of the metal over two to four years. By 2028, it says it plans to be operating a facility that will annually produce more than 10,000 tons.

Magnesium is far lighter and stronger than steel, and it’s critical to the aircraft, automobile, steel, and defense industries, which is why the government has bankrolled the venture. Right now, China produces about 85 percent of the world’s magnesium in a dirty, carbon-intensive process. Finding a way to produce magnesium domestically using renewable energy, then, is not only an economic and environmental issue, it’s a strategic one. “With a flick of a finger, China could shut down steelmaking in the US by ending the export of magnesium,” said Alex Grant, Magrathea’s CEO and an expert in the field of decarbonizing the production of metals.

“China uses a lot of coal and a lot of labor,” Grant continued. “We don’t use any coal and [use] a much lower quantity of labor.” The method is low cost in part because the company can use wind and solar energy during off-peak hours, when it is cheapest. As a result, Grant estimates their metal will cost about half that of traditional producers working with ore.

Magrathea—named after a planet in the hit novel The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy—buys waste brines, often from desalination plants, and allows the water to evaporate, leaving behind magnesium chloride salts. Next, it passes an electrical current through the salts to separate them from the molten magnesium, which is then cast into ingots or machine components.

While humans have long coaxed minerals and chemicals from seawater—sea salt has been extracted from ocean water for millennia—researchers around the world are now broadening their scope as the demand for lithium, cobalt, and other metals used in battery technology has ramped up. Companies are scrambling to find new deposits in unlikely places, both to avoid orebody mining and to reduce pollution. The next frontier for critical minerals and chemicals appears to be salty water, or brine.

Brines come from a number of sources: Much new research focuses on the potential for extracting metals from briny wastes generated by industry, including coal-fired power plants that discharge waste into tailings ponds; wastewater pumped out of oil and gas wells—called produced water; wastewater from hard-rock mining; and desalination plants.

Large-scale brine mining could have negative environmental impacts—some waste will need to be disposed of, for example. But because no large-scale operations currently exist, potential impacts are unknown. Still, the process is expected to have numerous positive effects, chief among them that it will produce valuable metals without the massive land disturbance and creation of acid-mine drainage and other pollution associated with hard-rock mining.

According to the Brine Miners, a research center at Oregon State University, there are roughly 18,000 desalination plants, globally, taking in 23 trillion gallons of ocean water a year and either forcing it through semipermeable membranes—in a process called reverse osmosis—or using other methods to separate water molecules from impurities. Every day, the plants produce more than 37 billion gallons of brine—enough to fill 50,000 Olympic-size swimming pools. That solution contains large amounts of copper, zinc, magnesium, and other valuable metals.

Disposing of brine from desalination plants has always been a challenge. In coastal areas, desal plants shunt that waste back into the ocean, where it settles to the sea floor and can damage marine ecosystems. Because the brine is so highly concentrated, it is toxic to plants and animals; inland desalination plants either bury their waste or inject it into wells. These processes further raise the cost of an already expensive process, and the problem is only growing as desal plants proliferate globally.

Finding a lucrative and safe use for brine will help solve plants’ waste problems and, by using their brine to feed another process, nudge them toward a circular economy, in which residue from one industrial activity becomes source material for a new activity. According to OSU estimates, brine from desalination plants contains $2.2 trillion worth of materials, including more than 17,400 tons of lithium, which is crucial for making batteries for electric vehicles, appliances, and electrical energy storage systems. In some cases, mining brine for lithium and other metals and minerals could make the remaining waste stream less toxic.

For many decades manufacturers have extracted magnesium and lithium from naturally occurring brines. In California’s Salton Sea, which contains enough lithium to meet the nation’s needs for decades, according to a 2023 federal analysis, companies have drilled geothermal wells to generate the energy required for separating the metal from brines.

And in rural Arkansas, ExxonMobil recently announced that it is building one of the largest lithium processing facilities in the world — a state-of-the-art facility that will siphon lithium from brine deep within the Smackover geological formation. By 2030, the company says it will produce 15 percent of the world’s lithium.

Miners have largely ignored the minerals found in desalination brine because concentrating them has not been economical. But new technologies and other innovations have created more effective separation methods and enabled companies to focus on this vast resource.

“Three vectors are converging,” said Peter Fiske, director of the National Alliance for Water Innovation at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley. “The value of some of these critical materials is going up. The cost of conventional [open pit] mining and extraction is going up. And the security of international suppliers, especially Russia and China, is going down.“

There is also an emphasis on—and grant money from the Department of Defense, the Department of Energy, and elsewhere for—projects and businesses that release extremely low, zero, or negative greenhouse gas emissions and that can be part of a circular economy. Researchers who study brine mining believe the holy grail of desalination—finding more than enough value in its waste brine to pay for the expensive process of creating fresh water—is attainable.

Improved filtering technologies can now remove far more, and far smaller, materials suspended in briny water. “We have membranes now that are selective to an individual ion,” said Fiske. “The technology [allows us] to pick through the garbage piles of wastewater and pick out the high-value items.” One of the fundamental concepts driving this research, he says, “is that there is no such thing as wastewater.”

NEOM, the controversial and hugely expensive futuristic city under construction in the Saudi Arabian desert, has assembled a highly regarded international team to build a desalination plant and a facility to both mine its waste for minerals and chemicals and minimize the amount of material it must dispose of. ENOWA, the water and energy division of NEOM, claims that its selective membranes—which include reverse and forward osmosis—will target specific minerals and extract 99.5 percent of the waste brine’s potassium chloride, an important fertilizer with high market value. The system uses half the energy and requires half the capital costs of traditional methods of potassium chloride production. ENOWA says it is developing other selective membranes to process other minerals, such as lithium and rubidium salts, from waste brine.

The Brine Miner project in Oregon has created an experimental system to desalinate saltwater and extract lithium, rare earth, and other metals. The whole process will be powered by green hydrogen, which researchers will create by splitting apart water’s hydrogen and oxygen molecules using renewable energy. “We are trying for a circular process,” said Zhenxing Feng, who leads the project at OSU. “We are not wasting any parts.”

The concept of mining desalination brine and other wastewater is being explored and implemented all over the world. At Delft University of Technology, in the Netherlands, researchers have extracted a bio-based material they call Kaumera from sludge granules formed during the treatment of municipal wastewater. Combined with other raw materials, Kaumera—which is both a binder and an adhesive, and both repels and retains water—can be used in agriculture and the textile and construction industries.

Another large-scale European project called Sea4Value, which has partners in eight countries, will use a combination of technologies to concentrate, extract, purify, and crystallize 10 target elements from brines. Publicly funded labs in the US, including the Department of Energy’s Ames Laboratory, at Iowa State University, and Oak Ridge National Laboratory, in Tennessee, are also researching new methods for extracting lithium and other materials important for the energy transition from natural and industrial brines.

At the Kay Bailey Hutchison Desalination Plant in El Paso, Texas, which provides more than 27 million gallons of fresh water a day from brackish aquifers, waste brine is trucked to and pumped into an injection well 22 miles away. But first, a company called Upwell Water, which has a facility near the desalination plant, wrings more potable water from the brine and uses the remaining waste to produce gypsum and hydrochloric acid for industrial customers.

There are hurdles to successful brine mining projects. Christos Charisiadis, the brine innovation manager for the NEOM portfolio, identified several potential bottlenecks: high initial investment for processing facilities; a lack of transparency in innovation by the water industry, which might obscure problems with their technologies; poor understanding of possible environmental problems due to a lack of comprehensive lifecycle assessments; complex and inconsistent regulatory frameworks; and fluctuations in commodity prices.

Still, Nathanial Cooper, an assistant professor at Cambridge University who has studied metal recovery from a variety of industrial and natural brines, considers its prospects promising as environmental regulations for a wide range of industries become ever more stringent.

“Companies that produce wastewater are going to be required to do more and more to ensure the wastewater they dispose of is clean of pollutants and hazardous material,” he said. “Many companies will be forced to find ways to recover these materials. There is strong potential to recover many valuable materials from wastewater and contribute to a circular economy.”

This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Inside a cinder block office building perhaps best known for the Hindu temple and table tennis club next door, a startup company is testing what may be one of the hottest new developments in clean energy technology.

At the back of a small warehouse laboratory buzzing with fans and motors, an MIT spinoff company called Electrified Thermal Solutions is operating something its founders call the Joule Hive, a thermal battery the size of an elevator.  

The Hive is a large, insulated metal box loaded with dozens of white-hot ceramic bricks that convert electricity to heat at temperatures up to 1800 degrees Celsius—well beyond the melting point of steel—and with enough thermal mass to hold the heat for days.

As the price of renewable energy continues to plummet, one of the biggest challenges for the clean energy transition is finding a way to convert electricity to high temperature heat so societies don’t have to continue burning coal or natural gas to power heavy industries. Another thorny issue is finding a way to store energy—in this case heat—for when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow.

“If you are running an industrial plant where you’re making cement or steel or glass or ceramics or chemicals or even food or beverage products, you burn a lot of fossil fuels,” Daniel Stack, chief executive of Electrified Thermal Solutions, said. “Our mission is to decarbonize industry with electrified heat.”

The industrial sector accounts for nearly one-fourth of all direct greenhouse gas emissions in the US, which drive climate change, according to the EPA. Thermal batteries powered by renewable energy could reduce roughly half of industry’s emissions, according to a 2023 report by the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions, a nonprofit, and its affiliated Renewable Thermal Collaborative. 

Additional emissions come from chemical reactions, such as carbon dioxide that is formed as an unwanted byproduct during cement production, and from methane that leaks or is intentionally vented from natural gas pipes and other equipment. 

The challenge to replacing fossil fuel combustion as the go to source for heat, is that there aren’t a lot of good options available to produce high temperature heat from electricity, Stack said. Electric heaters, like the wires that turn red hot in a toaster, work well at low temperatures but quickly burn out at higher temperatures. Other, less common materials like molybdenum and silicon carbide heaters can withstand higher temperatures, but are prohibitively expensive.

As a grad student at MIT, Stack wondered if firebricks, the bricks commonly used in residential fireplaces and industrial kilns, could be a less expensive, more durable solution. Bricks do not typically conduct electricity, but by slightly altering the recipe of the metal oxides used to make them, he and ETS co-founder Joey Kabel were able to create bricks that could essentially take the place of wires to conduct electricity and generate heat.

“There’s no exotic metals in here, there’s nothing that’ll burn out,” Stack said standing next to shelves lined with small samples, or “coupons,” of brick that he and his team have tested to find the ones with the best heating properties. 

One of Electrified Thermal Solution’s biggest champions is MIT nuclear engineering research scientist Charles Forsberg, Stack’s former thesis advisor and an advisor to the company.

“I have no doubt that this is going to go commercial,” Forsberg, who, along with Stack and MIT hold the patent to the technology, said. “I’m 77, it’s just sort of an intuitive feel of 50 years in the game.” 

Forsberg said his only concern was whether Electrified Thermal Solutions would be the ones to bring the technology to fruition, noting that many clean energy technologies have been invented in the U.S. only to gain commercial success in China.  

Recent government funding has given the company a significant boost.

In January, ETS received a $5 million US Department of Energy grant to help build its first commercial-scale demonstration project at the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, an independent organization that provides contract research and development services to government and industrial clients. 

The project will demonstrate how the thermal battery could provide high temperature heat for a number of industrial processes including cement manufacturing, which currently relies primarily on burning coal for heat. 

Massimo Toso, president and chief executive of Buzzi Unicem USA, one of the largest cement producers in the US and an industrial partner with ETS on the DOE grant, praised the company’s thermal battery.

“ETS’s Joule Hive Thermal Battery is the first industrial heat decarbonization solution we have identified that could potentially enable us to cost effectively and completely eliminate the use of fossil fuels in our heating processes,” Toso said in a written statement. 

In March, Ashland, a specialty chemical manufacturer based in Wilmington, Delaware, was awarded up to $35 million in a matching grant from the Energy Department to fund what would be the first commercial deployment of ETS’s thermal batteries. 

Joule Hives would be installed at Ashland’s ISP Chemicals plant in Calvert City, Kentucky that requires large volumes of high temperature steam to run its operations. 

Curt Jawdy, a senior manager with the Tennessee Valley Authority, a partner on the grant and the local electric utility for Calvert City, said ETS’s ability to charge its thermal battery during off peak hours allows industrial facilities to decarbonize without placing greater strain on the utility’s electric grid.

Jawdy said he also liked the company’s technology.

“Simpler is always better,” he said. “The fact that the brick is also the heating element, and you just supply electricity to the brick itself, simplifies the system significantly.”

The project would replace natural gas-fired boilers at the Calvert City plant with ETS’s thermal batteries. Air blown through the Joule Hive batteries would transfer flame-temperature heat to the boilers to generate steam.

The project would reduce greenhouse gas emissions associated with steam generation at the plant by nearly 70 percent, according to the DOE.

In 2022, Ashland released 72,000 tons of carbon dioxide from burning natural gas at the plant, according to data the company reported to the Environmental Protection Agency.  

Those emissions are equal to the annual greenhouse gas emissions of 17,000 automobiles, a significant source of climate pollution in a town of 2,500 people, the EPA says.

The DOE grant would split the cost of the project with Ashland up to a total of $70 million. Ashland would oversee the installation of the thermal batteries at its facility, a process that would involve a certain amount of risk for such a first of its kind installation.

Carolmarie Brown, a spokeswoman for Ashland, said the company is still evaluating the project. “There are many factors driving the decisions we will make as we proceed,” Brown said. “Large scale decarbonization includes thorough evaluations of the options, projects and innovations to move forward, and we’re in the early phase of the process.”

As Ashland continues to evaluate the project, Stack and colleagues are continuing to scale up their capabilities.

From the company’s beginning in 2020, ETS has outsourced production of its electrically conductive bricks to an industrial brick manufacturer that follows ETS’s proprietary recipe. After several years placing orders for small test batches of bricks, ETS recently received its first multi-ton order.

“Now, if you want two tons, [or, if] you want 2,000 tons, the manufacturer is ready to do that for us,” Stack said. “We’re off to the races.”