Climate Now

🎧🎙️NEW EPISODE - PARTNER CONTENT! https://hubs.li/Q02LZYdh0 As a Climate Now listener, we know you appreciate frank and thoughtful debate about the climate crisis. So we'd like to share an episode from a podcast that looks at how climate change is changing our energy systems. Energy vs Climate Podcast features energy experts David Keith, Sara Hastings-Simon and Ed Whittingham. They break down the hard truths and tough choices posed by the energy transition from the heart of Canada’s oil country. Through their topics and their guests, David, Sara, and Ed bring new honesty around the sharp trade-offs between climate action and economic progress . The episode we're sharing with you is called, "Buzzkill: Understanding the Shift in Media Perception Towards EVs," with special guest Dr. Simon Evans, deputy editor and policy editor at Carbon Brief. Together, they tease apart EV fact from fiction. We think you'll really enjoy it. Listen to Energy vs Climate wherever you get your podcasts and check out https://hubs.li/Q02L-02H0 for their next live webinars, where you too can join in on the discussion.

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🎧🎙️NEW EPISODE! https://hubs.li/Q02KsMty0 The United States’ Renewable Fuel Standard Program requires a certain volume of renewable fuel be used to replace or reduce fossil fuel use. Each gallon of renewable fuel is assigned a Renewable Identification Number or RIN, which allows renewable fuel volumes to be tracked, traded, bought, and sold. These multifunctional numbers affect the entire fuel industry, including both conventional and renewable fuel producers. According to one of our next guests in the series, RINs are little-known and poorly understood – even in the renewable fuel industry. Discover how RINs function as a subsidy, mandate, tax, and a financial asset all at once. Tune in as we dissect the “most complex environmental credit ever written” with two experts in the field: George Hoekstra, President of HoekstraTrading LLC and Brooke Coleman the Executive Director of the Advanced Biofuels Business Council.

🎧🎙️NEW EPISODE! https://hubs.li/Q02HCrCL0 Ethanol-to-jet is one pathway to produce sustainable aviation fuel (SAF). Until recently, this pathway was out of reach for commercial production. That changed this year when LanzaJet opened the world’s first ethanol-to-SAF plant, the Freedom Pines Fuels Plant, in Soperton, Georgia. LanzaJet projects that the plant will produce nine million gallons of SAF in its first year in operation. In our third installment of our sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) series, we sat down with LanzaJet’s Vice President of Commercial, Stéphane Thion. Tune in to hear from Stéphane about drop-in fuel standards, SAF supply chains, LanzaJet’s offtakers and partners, and the company’s plans for ethanol-to-SAF plants around the world.

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This week, we discussed several climate-related headlines with Julio Friedmann and Darren Hau. One such story was the Financial Times' report that the planet is headed for a 12th straight month above the 1.5C Paris Agreement limit. Carbon Direct's Julio Friedmann, who joined us from the Bloomberg Green Conference in Seattle, shared why this story is so unsettling for climate scientists: "I saw a talk yesterday by the climate scientist Johan Rockström, and he pointed out this exact data, and what is alarming is that we can't explain the jump in atmospheric temperature or ocean temperatures or ice failure. We can't predict these. We can't understand them. El Nino plays a role, but it's only a partial role. It can't fully explain the dramatic jump we're seeing. That part of it is as alarming as anything else. It's not just the jump and the trends, we are off the map.” [03:39]

In Climate News Weekly, we discuss the largest direct air capture purchase to date (500,0000 tons of CO2). Here’s Julio Friedmann's analysis on the implications of this deal: “This represents the maturation of these projects in the market. It's a big step forward. We don't know the actual price, but it's got to be well above a billion dollars and could be cinching in on $2 billion. It's the largest ever direct air capture purchase, by a lot. Importantly in their terms, Microsoft said that they are just doing saline formation storage. There is no associated oil or gas production from this, by contract. It also reflects the fact that the market is valuing the CO2 removal higher than the oil production, and that is an important signal, both to send and receive. It's a very big deal. It is also far, far away from the volumes we need to hit our 2030 climate targets, we need over 1.6 billion tons of removal a year and we are not on that trajectory yet.” [14:16]

Always great to be the podcast of the week! Many thanks to Opna for highlighting our episode.

Last week, The New York Times reported that Tesla's electric vehicle market share dipped below 50 percent. Climate News Weekly Co-Host Darren Hau explained how we got here and what this means for Tesla and other EV manufacturers: “People have seen this coming for many years. Tesla had the market only to itself, and it had extremely high levels of market penetration, 70 percent plus, but more OEMs and startups have gotten into the space and released vehicles that are pretty competitive. Now, what’s interesting to note is who’s coming up in the space. Not every manufacturer has been able to eat into Tesla's market share. It really depends on the quality of your product and how good it is. Manufacturers like Hyundai and Kia have done really, really well because they found this sweet spot of value, performance, and technology. BMW has also done very well on their electric vehicle sales. This is positive progress. The more OEMs that get into the space, the better.” [09:45]

KoBold Metals, an AI-driven geoscience company, made headlines last week with its discovery of a copper deposit that could yield up to 300,000 tons per year. A crucial resource for the energy transition, copper is used to make EVs, power grids, and energy storage systems. Here’s Climate News Weekly Co-Host Darren Hau on KoBold’s unique approach to exploration: “Historically, the way mining companies have worked is they identify an area that's likely to have some deposit of interest, and then they do exploration, but the methodology might be a little rudimentary. So, they would drill holes in regular sections or semi-random areas to try to find that mother lode. The problem is every time you drill a hole, it costs a lot of money. So, what KoBold’s trying to do is to reduce that cost of exploration. And they run multiple models in parallel to say, ‘based on the information we know, here's what the underground structure might look like’. And where they have the highest variance in prediction, they say, ‘let's drill there so we can at least reduce our uncertainty’. They found a deposit that could have around 300,000 tons per year of copper production, which translates to billions of dollars a year.” [17:58]