Methane Capture

International concern is growing over the rising level of atmospheric methane, a greenhouse gas second in influence only to carbon dioxide, and responsible for 25-30% of global warming since the start of the Industrial Revolution. Methane is a naturally occurring trace gas in Earth’s atmosphere that was present at a preindustrial concentration of 700 parts … Read more

Temperature Spike

Over the last few weeks, a new scholarly term has appeared in the lexicon of climate science: gobsmackingly bananas. The phrase was coined by a leading climate scientist, Zeke Hausfather, to describe the outcome of a new analysis of global warming by him and his colleagues at Berkeley Earth. The work reveals a sharp global … Read more

Carbon Tariffs

Ask climate policy specialists about the best approach to rapidly phase out fossil fuels, and it’s a good bet that many will offer carbon pricing as the answer. Innumerable economic studies bear this out, but the powerful effect of a carbon tax is also pretty intuitive. As long as comparably priced clean alternatives exist, using … Read more

Offshore Oil

Last Friday, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM), part of the US Department of the Interior, announced a new five-year program for oil and gas leasing in federal waters on the outer continental shelf. BOEM periodically revises its offshore oil and gas leasing program in accordance with the 1953 Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act … Read more

Supreme Madness

In February of 2020, a small Atlantic herring fishing company, Loper Bright Enterprises, sued the US Secretary of Commerce over the actions of the National Marine Fisheries Service, a federal agency in the Commerce Department. NMFS has authority to regulate fisheries under a 1976 federal law, the Magnusen-Stevens Fisheries Conservation and Management Act. The law … Read more

Planetary Boundaries

Last week, an interdisciplinary team of twenty-nine scientists from labs spanning four continents published a comprehensive update of a “planetary boundaries framework,” an analysis of Earth’s ability to withstand human impacts. From the temperature record of the past 10,000 years, deduced from glacier ice cores, we know that Earth’s environment was exceptionally stable while civilization … Read more

Geothermal Energy

Over the past few months, both the popular press and specialty publications in the renewable energy field have been abuzz with excitement about the commercialization of a new geothermal energy technology by a Houston-based startup company, Fervo Energy. The approach, called Enhanced Geothermal Systems (EGS), uses hydraulic fracturing (fracking) techniques developed by the oil and … Read more

Voluntary C Markets

Last week, the Swiss company Climeworks, a leading player in the nascent direct air capture industry, sponsored an informational webinar featuring speakers from The Nature Conservancy and JPMorgan Chase. TNC is among the world’s largest environmental nonprofit organizations, with a staff of hundreds of scientists deploying their expertise to conserve land and water resources around … Read more

Greens’ Dilemma

Five weeks ago, I wrote in Earthward about the beneficial impacts that two new US laws – the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL) and the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) – are expected to have on reducing greenhouse gas emissions through the remainder of the 2020s. The Princeton Net Zero lab found that the reductions are quite … Read more

Hydrogen

This week, pv magazine USA, which offers daily updates on the solar industry, reported that the Biden administration is forming a Hydrogen Interagency Task Force to be jointly led by the Department of Energy and the White House Office of Domestic Climate Policy. According to Mary Frances Repko, the White House deputy national climate advisor, … Read more