Dec 8 2024

Alternative meat could help the climate. Will anyone eat it?

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here.

Last week, we celebrated Thanksgiving here in the US, and I had hearty helpings of ham and turkey alongside my mashed potatoes and green bean casserole.

Meat is often the star on our plates, but our love of animal-based foods is a problem for the climate. Depending on how you count it up, livestock accounts for somewhere between 10% and 20% of all greenhouse gas emissions.

A growing number of alternative foods seek to mimic or replace options that require raising and slaughtering animals. These include plant-based products and newly approved cultivated (or lab-grown) meats. An increasing number of companies are even raising microbes in the lab in the hopes that we’ll add them to the menu, as I covered in a story this week.

But as one of my colleagues always puts it when I tell him about some alternative food product, the key question is, will anyone eat it?

Food might just be one of the trickiest climate problems to solve. Technically, none of us has to be eating any of the highest-emissions foods—like beef—that are worst for the climate. But what we eat is deeply personal, and it’s often tied up with our culture and our social lives. Many people want hamburgers at a barbecue and nice steak dinners.

The challenge of our food system’s climate impact is only getting more tricky: richer countries tend to eat more meat, and so as populations grow and the standard of living rises around the world, we’re going to see emissions from livestock production rise, too.

In an effort to combat that trend, alternative food products aim to deliver foods similar to the ones we know and love with less harmful effects on the climate. Plant-based options like those from Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods have exploded in recent years, finding their way into supermarkets and even onto the menus of major fast-food brands like Burger King.

The problem is, a lot of alternative products have been struggling lately. Unit sales of meat alternatives in the US were down by 26% between 2021 and 2023, and fewer households are buying plant-based alternative meat options, according to a report from the Good Food Institute. Consumers say that alternatives still aren’t up to par on taste and price, two key factors that determine what people decide to eat.

So companies are racing to invent better products. I’ve spent a lot of time covering cultivated (or lab-grown) meats. To make these products, animal cells are grown in the lab and processed into things like chicken nuggets. Two companies got approval to sell cultivated chicken in the US in 2023, and we’ve seen both offer their products in limited runs at high-end restaurants.

But these products are still not quite the same thing as the meat we’re used to. When I tried a burger that contained cells grown in a lab, it was similar to plant-based ones that have a softer texture than I’m used to. Chicken from Upside Foods, served at a Michelin-starred restaurant, had similar textural differences. And these products are still only available at very small scales, if at all, and they’re expensive.

One key issue that comes up again and again as I report on these new products is what to call them. The industry strongly prefers cultivated, not “lab-grown.” Probably better to not remind people that they’re eating something grown in vats in a laboratory. As the companies that make these products often point out, we don’t typically use this sort of language for the animal-based products we’re used to. You’d never find the phrase “slaughtered baby cow” on a menu, just “veal.”

I was thinking about this issue of language and marketing again recently as I reported a story about a company looking to grow bacteria, dry it, and sell it to feed animals or people. I found myself a little weirded out by the prospect of dried microbe powder finding its way into my diet. But I don’t have a problem drinking wine or eating cheese, two products that rely on microbes and a fermentation process to exist.

Maybe LanzaTech will come up with a marketing plan that makes their microbe powder an easy addition to my Thanksgiving table. Ultimately though, no matter how well they’re marketed, I’m not sure how much we can rely on alternative products to solve the climate challenge that is our food system.

As is often the case when it comes to addressing climate change, we’re going to need not only some behavioral changes, but also technical solutions like cattle burp pills and new fertilizer options, as well as policy to help nudge our food system in the right direction.

Now read the rest of The Spark

Keeping up with climate

China announced it would ban the export to the US of several rare minerals that are crucial in technology like semiconductors. The move follows efforts by the US to shift supply chains away from China. (New York Times)

Donald Trump has pledged to ramp up tariffs on Chinese goods, while other nations around the world have already put such policies in place. (Rest of World)

Australia is on track to meet its 2030 emissions target. The country’s climate pollution is projected to fall more than 42% below 2005 levels by the end of the decade. (Bloomberg)

Talks to form an international plastic treaty fell apart this week. Some countries favored cutting down plastic production, while others, including oil-rich nations, pushed back. (Washington Post)

The US Department of Energy announced a nearly $7 billion loan to Stellantis and Samsung for two battery factories that will supply batteries for EVs. (New York Times)
→ That follows a $6.6 billion loan to Rivian to help the company build a stalled factory in Georgia. (Associated Press)
→ The Biden administration is racing to lock in loans and safeguard them against rollbacks before Donald Trump takes office in January. (E&E News)

California could increase use of ethanol, a move the state says could lower gas prices. But experts warn that expanded use of ethanol made from corn can have negative consequences for climate progress and the environment. (Inside Climate News)

Norway’s government is blocking plans to mine the sea bed. There were plans to begin offering permits in the first half of 2025, and preparations will continue during the suspension. (Reuters)
→ These deep-sea “potatoes” could be the future of mining for battery materials. (MIT Technology Review)

A decade ago, sea surface temperatures in the Pacific shot up in a dramatic marine heat wave. Now, scientists are looking for clues in that event to understand what rising temperatures will mean for the ocean. (New York Times)

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Dec 8 2024

What China’s critical mineral ban means for the US

MIT Technology Review Explains: Let our writers untangle the complex, messy world of technology to help you understand what’s coming next. You can read more from the series here.

This week, China banned exports of several critical minerals to the US, marking the latest move in an escalating series of tit-for-tat trade restrictions between the world’s two largest economies.

In explicitly cutting off, rather than merely restricting, materials of strategic importance to the semiconductor, defense, and electric vehicle sectors, China has clearly crossed a new line in the long-simmering trade war.

At the same time, it selected minerals that won’t cripple any industries—which leaves China plenty of ammunition to inflict greater economic pain in response to any further trade restrictions that the incoming Trump administration may impose.

The president-elect recently pledged to impose an additional 10% tariff on all Chinese goods, and he floated tariff rates as high as 60% to 100% during his campaign. But China, which dominates the supply chains for numerous critical minerals essential to high-tech sectors, seems to be telegraphing that it’s prepared to hit back hard.

“It’s a sign of what China is capable of,” says Gracelin Baskaran, director of the Critical Minerals Security Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a bipartisan research nonprofit in Washington, DC. “Shots have been fired.”

What drove the decision?

China’s announcement directly followed the Biden administration’s decision to further restrict exports of chips and other technologies that could help China develop advanced semiconductors used in cutting-edge weapon systems, artificial intelligence, and other applications.

Throughout his presidency, Biden has enacted a series of increasingly aggressive export controls aimed at curbing China’s military strength, technological development, and growing economic power. But the latest clampdown crossed a “clear line in the sand for China,” by threatening its ability to protect national security or shift toward production of more advanced technologies, says Cory Combs, associate director at Trivium China, a research firm.

“It is very much indicative of where Beijing feels its interests lie,” he says.

What exactly did China ban?

In response to the US’s new chip export restrictions, China immediately banned exports of gallium, germanium, antimony, and so called “superhard materials” used heavily in manufacturing, arguing that they have both military and civilian applications, according to the New York Times. China had already placed limits on the sale of most of these goods to the US.

The nation said it may also further restrict sales of graphite, which makes up most of the material in the lithium-ion battery anodes used in electric vehicles, grid storage plants, and consumer electronics.

What will the bans do?

Experts say, for the most part, the bans won’t have major economic impacts. This is in part because China already restricted exports of these minerals months ago, and also because they are mostly used for niche categories within the semiconductor industry. US imports of these materials from China have already fallen as US companies figured out new sources or substitutes for the materials.

But a recent US Geological Survey study found that outright bans on gallium and germanium by China could cut US gross domestic product by $3.4 billion. In addition, these are materials that US politicians will certainly take note of, because they “touch on many forms of security: economic, energy, and defense,” Baskaran says.

Antimony, for example, is used in “armor-piercing ammunition, night-vision goggles, infrared sensors, bullets, and precision optics,” Baskaran and a colleague noted in a recent essay.

Companies rely on gallium to produce a variety of military and electronics components, including satellite systems, power converters, LEDs, and the high-powered chips used in electric vehicles. Germanium is used in fiber optics, infrared optics, and solar cells.

Before it restricted the flow of these materials, China accounted for more than half of US imports of gallium and germanium, according to the US Geological Survey. Together, China and Russia control 50% of the worldwide reserves of antimony.

How does it affect climate tech?

Any tightened restrictions on graphite could have a pronounced economic impact on US battery and EV makers, in part because there are so few other sources for it. China controls about 80% of graphite output from mines and processes around 70% of the material, according to the International Energy Agency.

“It would be very significant for batteries,” says Seaver Wang, co-director of the climate and energy team at the Breakthrough Institute, where his research is focused on minerals and manufacturing supply chains. “By weight, you need way more graphite per terawatt hour than nickel, cobalt, or lithium. And the US has essentially no operating production.”

Anything that pushes up the costs of EVs threatens to slow the shift away from gas-guzzlers in the US, as their lofty price tags remain one of the biggest hurdles for many consumers.

How does this impact China’s economy?

There are real economic risks in China’s decision to cut off the sale of materials it dominates, as it creates incentives for US companies to seek out new sources around the world, switch to substitute materials, and work to develop more domestic supplies where geology allows.

“The challenge China faces is that most of its techniques to increase pain by disrupting supply chains would also impact China, which itself is connected to these supply chains,” says Chris Miller, a professor at Tufts University and author of Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology.

Notably, the latest announcement could compel US companies to develop their own sources of gallium and germanium, which can be extracted as by-products of zinc and aluminum mining. There are a number of zinc mines in Alaska and Tennessee, and limited extraction of bauxite, which produces aluminum, in Arkansas, Alabama, and Georgia.

Gallium can also be recycled from numerous electronics, providing another potential domestic path for US companies, Combs notes.

The US has already taken steps to counter China’s dominance over the raw ingredients of essential industries, including by issuing a $150 million loan to an Australian company, Syrah Resources, to accelerate the development of graphite mining in Mozambique.

In addition, the mining company Perpetua Resources has proposed reopening a gold mine near Yellow Pine, Idaho, in part to extract antimony trisulfide for use in military applications. The US Department of Defense has provided tens of millions of dollars to help the company conduct environmental studies, though it will still take years for the mine to come online, noted Baskaran and her colleague.

Wang says that China’s ban might prove “shortsighted,” as any success in diversifying these global supply chains will weaken the nation’s grip in the areas it now dominates.

What happens next?

The US is also likely to pay very high economic costs in an escalating trade war with China.

Should the nation decide to enact even stricter trade restrictions, Combs says China could opt to inflict greater economic pain on the US through a variety of means. These could include further restricting or fully banning graphite, as well other crucial battery materials like lithium; cutting off supplies of tungsten, which is used heavily in the aerospace, military, and nuclear power sectors; and halting the sale of copper, which is used in power transmission lines, solar panels, wind turbines, EVs, and many other products.

China may also decide to take further steps to prevent US firms from selling their goods into the massive market of Chinese consumers and industries, Miller adds. Or it might respond to stricter export restrictions by turning to the US’s economic rivals for advanced technologies.

In the end, it’s not clear either nation wins in a protracted and increasingly combative trade war. But it’s also not apparent that mutually assured economic damage will prove to be an effective deterrent. Indeed, China may well feel the need to impose stricter measures in the coming months or years, as there are few signs that President-elect Trump intends to tone down his hawkish stance toward China.

“It’s hard to see a Trump 2.0 de-escalating with China,” Baskaran says. “We’re on a one-way trajectory toward continued escalation; the question is the pace and the form. It’s not really an ‘if” question.”

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Dec 5 2024

Would you eat dried microbes? This company hopes so.

A company best known for sucking up industrial waste gases is turning its attention to food. LanzaTech, a rising star in the fuel and chemical industries, is joining a growing group of businesses producing microbe-based food as an alternative to plant and animal products.

Using microbes to make food is hardly new—beer, yogurt, cheese, and tempeh all rely on microbes to transform raw ingredients into beloved dishes. But some companies are hoping to create a new category of food, one that relies on microbes themselves as a primary ingredient in our meals.

The global food system is responsible for roughly 25% to 35% of all human-caused greenhouse gas emissions today (depending on how you tally them up), and much of that comes from animal agriculture. Alternative food sources could help feed the world while cutting climate pollution.

As climate change pushes weather conditions to new extremes, it’s going to be harder to grow food, says LanzaTech CEO Jennifer Holmgren. The company’s current specialty, sucking up waste gases and transforming them into ethanol, is mostly used today in places like steel mills and landfills.

The process the company uses to make ethanol relies on a bacterium that can be found in the guts of rabbits. LanzaTech grows the microbes in reactors, on a diet consisting of gases including carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, and hydrogen. As they grow, they produce ethanol, which can then be funneled into processes that transform the ethanol into chemicals like ethylene or fuels.

A by-product of that process is tons of excess microbes. In LanzaTech’s existing plants where ethanol is the primary product, operators generally need to harvest bacteria from the reactors, since they multiply over time. When the excess bacteria are harvested and dried, the resulting powder is high in protein. Some plants using LanzaTech’s technology in China are already selling the protein product to feed fish, poultry, and pigs.

Now, LanzaTech is expanding its efforts. The company has identified a new microbe, one they hope to make the star of future plants. Cupriavidus necator can be found in soil and water, and it’s something of a protein machine. The company says that after growing, harvesting, and drying the microbes, the resulting powder is more than 85% protein and could be added to all sorts of food products, for either humans or animals.

Roughly 80 companies around the world are making food products using biomass fermentation (meaning the microbes themselves make up the bulk of the product, rather than being used to transform ingredients, as they do in beer or cheesemaking), according to a report from the Good Food Institute, a think tank that focuses on alternative proteins.

The most established efforts in this space have been around since the 1980s. They use mycelial fungi, says Adam Leman, principal scientist for fermentation at the Good Food Institute.

Other startups are starting to grow other options for food products, including Air Protein and Calysta in the US and Solar Foods in Europe, Leman says. LanzaTech, which has significant experience raising microbes and running reactors, hopping into this space is a “really good sign for the industry,” he adds.

Many alternative protein companies have struggled in recent years—sales of plant-based meat products have dropped, especially in the US. Prices have gone up, and consumers say that alternatives aren’t up to par on taste and texture yet.

Making food with microbes would use less land and water and produce fewer emissions than many protein sources we rely on today, particularly high-impact ones like beef, Holmgren says. While it’s still early days for bacteria-based foods, one recent review found that mycoprotein-based foods (products like Quorn, made from mycelial fungi) generally have emissions lower than or similar to those of planet-friendly plant-based protein products, like those produced from corn and soy.

LanzaTech is currently developing prototype products with Mattson, a company that specializes in food development. In one such trial, Mattson made bread using the protein product as a sort of flour, Holmgren says. As for whether the bread tastes good, she says she hasn’t tried it yet, as the company is still working on getting the necessary certification from the US Food and Drug Administration.

So far, LanzaTech’s efforts have been relatively small-scale—the company is operating a pilot facility in Illinois that can produce around one kilogram of protein product each day. The company is working to start up a pre-commercial plant by 2026 that could produce half a metric ton of product per day, enough to supply the protein requirements of roughly 10,000 people, Holmgren says. A full-scale commercial plant would produce about 45,000 metric tons of protein product each year.

“I just want to make sure that there’s enough protein for the world,” Holmgren says.

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Dec 1 2024

This startup is getting closer to bringing next-generation nuclear to the grid

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here.

This is a busy time of year for all of us, and that’s certainly true in the advanced nuclear industry.

MIT Technology Review released our list of 15 Climate Tech Companies to Watch less than two months ago. Since then, awardee Kairos Power has had three big announcements about its progress toward building next-generation nuclear reactors.

Each of these bits of news represents an interesting aspect of the process. So let’s dig into the announcements and what they mean for where nuclear technology is going.

First, a quick refresher on Kairos Power: While nuclear plants today overwhelmingly use pressurized water to keep reactors cool, Kairos is using molten salt. The idea is that these reactors (which are also smaller than those typically built today) will help generate electricity in a way that’s safer and more efficient than conventional nuclear power.

When it comes to strategy, Kairos is taking small steps toward the ultimate goal of full-size power plants. Construction began earlier this year on Hermes, the company’s first nuclear test reactor. That facility will generate a small amount of heat—about 35 megawatts’ worth—to demonstrate the technology.

Last week, the company announced it received a construction permit for the next iteration of its system, Hermes 2. This plant will share a location with Hermes, and it will include the infrastructure to transform heat to electricity. That makes it the first electricity-producing next-generation nuclear plant to get this approval in the US.

While this news wasn’t a huge surprise (the company has been working with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for years), “any day that you’re getting a permit or a license from the NRC is an unusual and special day,” Kairos CEO Mike Laufer told me in an interview.

The company is developing a plan to work on construction for both Hermes and Hermes 2 at the same time, he added. When I asked if Hermes is still on track to start up in 2027 (as we reported in our profile of the company in October), Laufer said that’s an “aggressive timeline.”

While construction on test reactors is rolling, Kairos is forging ahead with commercial deals—in October, it announced an agreement with Google to build up to 500 megawatts’ worth of power plants by 2035. Under this agreement, Kairos will develop, construct, and operate plants and sell electricity to the tech giant.

Kairos will need to build multiple reactors to deliver 500 MW. The first deployment should happen by 2030, with additional units to follow. One of the benefits of building smaller reactors is learning as you go along and making improvements that can lower costs and make construction more efficient, Laufer says.

While the construction permit and Google deal are arguably the biggest recent announcements from Kairos, I’m also fascinated by a more niche milestone: In early October, the company broke ground on a salt production facility in Albuquerque, New Mexico, that will make the molten salt used to cool its reactors.

“Salt is one of the key areas where we do have some unique and specialized needs,” Laufer says. And having control over the areas of the supply chain that are specialized will be key to helping the company deliver electricity reliably and at lower cost, he adds.

The company’s molten salt is called Flibe, and it’s a specific mix of lithium fluoride and beryllium fluoride. One fun detail I learned from Laufer is that the mixture needs to be enriched in lithium-7 because that isotope absorbs fewer neutrons than lithium-6, allowing the reactor to run more efficiently. The new facility in Albuquerque will produce large quantities of high-purity Flibe enriched in lithium-7.

Progress in the nuclear industry can sometimes feel slow, with milestones few and far between, so it’s really interesting to see Kairos taking so many small steps in quick succession toward delivering on its promise of safe, cheap nuclear power.

“We’ve had a lot of huge accomplishments. We have a long way to go,” Laufer says. “This is not an easy thing to pull off. We believe we have the right approach and we’re doing it the right way, but it requires a lot of hard work and diligence.”

Now read the rest of The Spark

Another thing

Donald Trump pledged to enact tariffs on a wide range of products imported into the US. The plans could drive up the cost of batteries, EVs, and more, threatening to slow progress on climate and potentially stall the economy. Read more about the potential impacts for technology in the latest story from my colleague James Temple.

Keeping up with climate

The UN climate talks wrapped up over the weekend. In the resulting agreement, rich nations will provide at least $300 billion in climate finance per year by 2035 to developing nations to help them deal with climate change. (Carbon Brief)
→ This falls well short of the $1 trillion mark that many had hoped to reach. (MIT Technology Review)

Utilities might be spending a lot of money on the wrong transmission equipment on the grid. Dollars are flowing to smaller, local projects, not the interstate projects that are crucial for getting more clean energy online. (Inside Climate News)

Sustainable aviation fuel is one of the only viable options to help clean up the aviation industry in the near term. But what are these fuels, exactly? And how do they help with climate change? It’s surprisingly complicated, and the details matter. (Canary Media)

Automakers want Trump to keep rules in place that will push the US toward adoption of electric vehicles. Companies have already invested billions of dollars into an EV transition. (New York Times)

There’s a growing chasm in American meat consumption: The number of households that avoid meat has increased slightly, but all other households have increased their meat purchases. (Vox)

Trump has vowed to halt offshore wind energy, but for some projects, things take so long that a four-year term may not even touch them. (Grist)

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Nov 22 2024

China’s complicated role in climate change

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here.

“Well, what about China?”

This is a comment I get all the time on the topic of climate change, both in conversations and on whatever social media site is currently en vogue. Usually, it comes in response to some statement about how the US and Europe are addressing the issue (or how they need to be).

Sometimes I think people ask this in bad faith. It’s a rhetorical way to throw up your hands, imply that the US and Europe aren’t the real problem, and essentially say: “if they aren’t taking responsibility, why should we?” However, amid the playground-esque finger-pointing there are some undeniable facts: China emits more greenhouse gases than any other country, by far. It’s one of the world’s most populous countries and a climate-tech powerhouse, and its economy is still developing.

With many complicated factors at play, how should we think about the country’s role in addressing climate change?

China’s emissions are the highest in the world, topping 12 billion tons of carbon dioxide in 2023, according to the International Energy Agency.

There’s context missing if we just look at that one number, as I wrote in my latest story that digs into recent global climate data. Since carbon dioxide hangs around in the atmosphere for centuries, we should arguably consider not just a country’s current emissions, but everything it’s produced over time. If we do that, the US still takes the crown for the world’s biggest climate polluter.

However, China is now in second place, according to a new analysis from Carbon Brief released this week. In 2023, the country exceeded the EU’s 27 member states in historical emissions for the first time.

This reflects a wider trend that we’re seeing around the world: Developing nations are starting to account for a larger fraction of emissions than they used to. In 1992, when countries agreed to the UN climate convention, industrialized countries (a category called Annex I) made up about one-fifth of the world’s population but were responsible for a whopping 61% of historical emissions. By the end of 2024, though, those countries’ share of global historical emissions will fall to 52%, and it is expected to keep ticking down.

China, like all nations, will need to slash its emissions for the world to meet global climate goals. One crucial point here is that while its emissions are still huge, there are signs that the nation is making some progress.

China’s carbon dioxide’s emissions are set to fall in 2024 because of record growth in low-carbon energy sources. That decline is projected to continue under the country’s current policy settings, according to an October report from the IEA. China’s oil demand could soon peak and start to fall, largely because it’s seeing such a huge uptake of electric vehicles.

One growing question: With all this progress and a quickly growing economy, should we be expecting China to do more than just make progress on its own emissions?

As I wrote in the newsletter last week, the current talks at COP29 (the UN climate conference) are focused on setting a new, more aggressive global climate finance goal to help developing nations address climate change. China isn’t part of the group of countries that are required to pay into this pot of money, but some are calling for that to change given that it is the world’s biggest polluter.

One interesting point here—China already contributes billions of dollars in climate financing each year to developing countries, according to research published earlier this month by the World Resources Institute. The country’s leadership has said it will only make voluntary contributions, and that developed nations should still be the ones responsible for mandatory payments under the new finance goals.

Talks at COP29 aren’t going very well. The COP29 president called for faster action, but progress toward a finance deal has stalled amid infighting over how much money should be on the table and who should pay up.

China’s complex role in emissions and climate action is far from the only holdup at the talks. Leaders from major nations including Germany and France canceled plans to attend, and the looming threat that the US could pull out of the Paris climate agreement is coloring the negotiations.

But disagreement over how to think about China’s role in all this is a good example of how difficult it is to assign responsibility when it comes to climate change, and how much is at play in global climate negotiations. One thing I do know for sure is that pointing fingers doesn’t cut emissions.

Now read the rest of The Spark

Keeping up with climate

Fusion energy has been a dream for decades, and a handful of startups say we’re closer than ever to making it a reality. This deep dive looks at a few of the companies looking to be the first to deploy fusion power. (New York Times)
→ I recently visited one of the startups, Commonwealth Fusion Systems. (MIT Technology Review)

President-elect Donald Trump has tapped Chris Wright to lead the Department of Energy. Wright is head of the fracking company Liberty Energy. (Washington Post)

In the wake of Trump’s election, it might be time for climate tech to get a rebrand. Companies and investors might increasingly avoid using the term, opting instead for phrases like “energy independence” or “frontier tech,” to name a few. (Heatmap)

Rooftop solar has saved customers in California about $2.3 billion on utility bills this year, according to a new analysis. This result is counter to a report from a state agency, which found that rooftop panels impose over $8 billion in extra costs on consumers of the state’s three major utilities. (Canary Media)

Low-carbon energy needs much less material than it used to. Rising efficiency in making technology like solar panels bodes well for hopes of cutting mining needs. (Sustainability by Numbers)

New York governor Kathy Hochul has revived a plan to implement congestion pricing, which would charge drivers to enter the busiest parts of Manhattan. It would be the first such program in the US. (The City)

Enhanced geothermal technology could be close to breaking through into commercial success. Companies that aim to harness Earth’s heat for power are making progress toward deploying facilities. (Nature)
→ Fervo Energy found that its wells can be used like a giant underground battery. (MIT Technology Review)

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Nov 21 2024

Who’s to blame for climate change? It’s surprisingly complicated.

Once again, global greenhouse-gas emissions are projected to hit a new high in 2024.

In this time of shifting political landscapes and ongoing international negotiations, many are quick to blame one country or another for an outsize role in causing climate change.

But assigning responsibility is complicated. These three visualizations help explain why and provide some perspective about the world’s biggest polluters.

Greenhouse-gas emissions from fossil fuels and industry reached 37.4 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide in 2024, according to projections from the Global Carbon Budget, an annual emissions report released last week. That’s a 0.8% increase over last year.

Breaking things down by country, China is far and away the single biggest polluter today, a distinction it has held since 2006. The country currently emits roughly twice as much greenhouse gas as any other nation. The power sector is its single greatest source of emissions as the grid is heavily dependent on coal, the most polluting fossil fuel.

The US is the world’s second-biggest polluter, followed by India. Combined emissions from the 27 nations that make up the European Union are next, followed by Russia and Japan.

Considering a country’s current emissions doesn’t give the whole picture of its climate responsibility, though. Carbon dioxide is stable in the atmosphere for hundreds of years. That means greenhouse gases from the first coal power plant, which opened in the late 19th century, are still having a warming effect on the planet today.

Adding up each country’s emissions over the course of its history reveals that the US has the greatest historical contribution—the country is responsible for about 24% of all the climate pollution released into the atmosphere as of 2023. While it’s the biggest polluter today, China comes in second in terms of historical emissions, at 14%.

If the EU’s member states are totaled as one entity, the group is among the top historical contributors as well. According to an analysis published November 19 by the website Carbon Brief, China passed EU member states in terms of historical emissions in 2023 for the first time.

China could catch up with the West in the coming decades, as its emissions are significant and still growing, while the US and EU are seeing moderate declines.

Even then, though, there’s another factor to consider: population. Dividing a country’s total emissions by its population reveals how the average individual in each nation is contributing to climate change today.

Countries with smaller populations and economies that are heavily reliant on oil and gas tend to top this list, including Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and the United Arab Emirates.

Among the larger nations, Australia has the highest per capita emissions from fossil fuels, with the US and Canada close behind. Meanwhile, other countries that have high total emissions are farther down the list when normalized by population: China’s per capita emissions are just over half that of the US, while India’s is a small fraction.

Understanding the complicated picture of global emissions is crucial, especially during ongoing negotiations (including the current meeting at COP29 in Baku, Azerbaijan) over how to help developing nations pay for efforts to combat climate change.

Looking at current emissions, one might expect the biggest emitter, China, to contribute more than any other country to climate finance. But considering historical contributions, per capita emissions, and details about national economies, other nations like the US, UK, and members of the EU emerge as those experts tend to say should feature prominently in the talks.

What is clear is that when it comes to the emissions blame game, it’s more complicated than just pointing at today’s biggest polluters. Ultimately, addressing climate change will require everyone to get on board—we all share an atmosphere, and we’re all going to continue feeling the effects of a changing climate.

Notes on data methodology:

Emissions data is from the Global Carbon Project, which estimates carbon emissions based on energy use. Territorial emissions take into account energy and some industry, but don’t include land use emissions.
Data from the European Union is the sum of its current 27 member states. The bloc is represented together because the EU generally negotiates together on the international stage.
Historical emissions for some countries are disaggregated from former borders, including the former USSR and Yugoslavia.
The per capita emissions map uses official World Bank boundaries, with the exception of Taiwan, which has separate emissions data in the Global Carbon Project.
Western Sahara’s energy data are reported by Morocco, so its emissions are included in that total. Per capita emissions for Morocco are also used for Western Sahara on the map.
More detailed information about the Global Carbon Project methods (including the particulars on how territorial emissions are broken down) is available here.

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Nov 16 2024

What’s on the table at this year’s UN climate conference

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here.

It’s time for a party—the Conference of the Parties, that is. Talks kicked off this week at COP29 in Baku, Azerbaijan. Running for a couple of weeks each year, the global summit is the largest annual meeting on climate change.

The issue on the table this time around: Countries need to agree to set a new goal on how much money should go to developing countries to help them finance the fight against climate change. Complicating things? A US president-elect whose approach to climate is very different from that of the current administration (understatement of the century).

This is a big moment that could set the tone for what the next few years of the international climate world looks like. Here’s what you need to know about COP29 and how Donald Trump’s election is coloring things.

The UN COP meetings are an annual chance for nearly 200 nations to get together to discuss (and hopefully act on) climate change. Greatest hits from the talks include the Paris Agreement, a 2015 global accord that set a goal to limit global warming to 1.5 °C (2.7 °F) above preindustrial levels.

This year, the talks are in Azerbaijan, a petrostate if there ever was one. Oil and gas production makes up over 90% of the country’s export revenue and nearly half its GDP as of 2022. A perfectly ironic spot for a global climate summit!

The biggest discussion this year centers on global climate finance—specifically, how much of it is needed to help developing countries address climate change and adapt to changing conditions. The current goal, set in 2009, is for industrialized countries to provide $100 billion each year to developing nations. The deadline was 2020, and that target was actually met for the first time in 2022, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which keeps track of total finance via reports from contributing countries. Currently, most of that funding is in the form of public loans and grants.

The thing is, that $100 billion number was somewhat arbitrary—in Paris in 2015, countries agreed that a new, larger target should be set in 2025 to take into account how much countries actually need.

It’s looking as if the magic number is somewhere around $1 trillion each year. However, it remains to be seen how this goal will end up shaking out, because there are disagreements about basically every part of this. What should the final number be? What kind of money should count—just public funds, or private investments as well? Which nations should pay? How long will this target stand? What, exactly, would this money be going toward?

Working out all those details is why nations are gathering right now. But one shadow looming over these negotiations is the impending return of Donald Trump.

As I covered last week, Trump’s election will almost certainly result in less progress on cutting emissions than we might have seen under a more climate-focused administration. But arguably an even bigger deal than domestic progress (or lack thereof) will be how Trump shifts the country’s climate position on the international stage.

The US has emitted more carbon pollution into the atmosphere than any other country, it currently leads the world in per capita emissions, and it’s the world’s richest economy. If anybody should be a leader at the table in talks about climate finance, it’s the US. And yet, Trump is coming into power soon, and we’ve all seen this film before.

Last time Trump was in office, he pulled the US out of the Paris Agreement. He’s made promises to do it again—and could go one step further by backing out of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) altogether. If leaving the Paris Agreement is walking away from the table, withdrawing from the UNFCCC is like hopping on a rocket and blasting in a different direction. It’s a more drastic action and could be tougher to reverse in the future, though experts also aren’t sure if Trump could technically do this on his own.

The uncertainty of what happens next in the US is a cloud hanging over these negotiations. “This is going to be harder because we don’t have a dynamic and pushy and confident US helping us on climate action,” said Camilla Born, an independent climate advisor and former UK senior official at COP26, during an online event last week hosted by Carbon Brief.

Some experts are confident that others will step up to fill the gap. “There are many drivers of climate action beyond the White House,” said Mohamed Adow, founding director of Power Shift Africa, at the CarbonBrief event.

If I could characterize the current vibe in the climate world, it’s uncertainty. But the negotiations over the next couple of weeks could provide clues to what we can expect for the next few years. Just how much will a Trump presidency slow global climate action? Will the European Union step up? Could this cement the rise of China as a climate leader? We’ll be watching it all.

Now read the rest of The Spark

Another thing

Trump’s election will have significant ripple effects across the economy and our lives. His victory is a tragic loss for climate progress, as my colleague James Temple wrote in an op-ed last week. Give it a read, if you haven’t already, to dig into some of the potential impacts we might see over the next four years and beyond.

Keeping up with climate

The US Environmental Protection Agency finalized a rule to fine oil and gas companies for methane emissions. The fee was part of the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022. (Associated Press)
→ This rule faces a cloudy future under the Trump administration; industry groups are already talking about repealing it. (NPR)

Speaking of the EPA, Donald Trump chose Lee Zeldin, a former Republican congressman from New York, to lead the agency. Zeldin isn’t particularly known for climate or economic policy. (New York Times)

Oil giant BP is scaling back its early-stage hydrogen projects. The company revealed in an earnings report that it’s canceling 18 such projects and currently plans to greenlight between five and 10. (TechCrunch)

Investors betting against renewable energy scored big last week, earning nearly $1.2 billion as stocks in that sector tumbled. (Financial Times)

Lithium iron phosphate batteries are taking over the world, or at least electric vehicles. These lithium-ion batteries are cheaper and longer-lasting than their nickel-containing cousins, though they also tend to be heavier. (Canary Media)
→ I wrote about this trend last year in a newsletter about batteries and their ingredients. (MIT Technology Review)

The US unveiled plans to triple its nuclear energy capacity by 2050. That’s an additional 200 gigawatts’ worth of consistently available power. (Bloomberg)

Five subsea cables that can help power millions of homes just got the green light in Great Britain. The projects will help connect the island to other power grids, as well as to offshore wind farms in Dutch and Belgian waters. (The Guardian)

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Nov 7 2024

The US is about to make a sharp turn on climate policy

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here.

Voters have elected Donald Trump to a second term in the White House.

In the days leading up to the election, I kept thinking about what four years means for climate change right now. We’re at a critical moment that requires decisive action to rapidly slash greenhouse-gas emissions from power plants, transportation, industry, and the rest of the economy if we’re going to achieve our climate goals.

The past four years have seen the US take climate action seriously, working with the international community and pumping money into solutions. Now, we’re facing a period where things are going to be very different. A Trump presidency will have impacts far beyond climate, but for the sake of this newsletter, we’ll stay focused on what four years means in the climate fight as we start to make sense of this next chapter.

Joe Biden arguably did more to combat climate change than any other American president. One of his first actions in office was rejoining the Paris climate accord—Trump pulled out of the international agreement to fight climate change during his first term in office. Biden then quickly set a new national goal to cut US carbon emissions in half, relative to their peak, by 2030.

The Environmental Protection Agency rolled out rules for power plants to slash pollution that harms both human health and the climate. The agency also announced new regulations for vehicle emissions to push the country toward EVs.

And the cornerstone of the Biden years has been unprecedented climate investment. A trio of laws—the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the CHIPS and Science Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act—pumped hundreds of billions of dollars into infrastructure and research, much of it on climate.

Now, this ship is about to make a quick turn. Donald Trump has regularly dismissed the threat of climate change and promised throughout the campaign to counter some of Biden’s key moves.

We can expect to see a dramatic shift in how the US talks about climate on the international stage. Trump has vowed to once again withdraw from the Paris agreement. Things are going to be weird at the annual global climate talks that kick off next week.

We can also expect to see efforts to undo some of Biden’s key climate actions, most centrally the Inflation Reduction Act, as my colleague James Temple covered earlier this year.

What, exactly, Trump can do will depend on whether Republicans take control of both houses of Congress. A clean sweep would open up more lanes for targeting legislation passed under Biden. (As of sending this email, Republicans have secured enough seats to control the Senate, but the House is uncertain and could be for days or even weeks.)

I don’t think the rug will be entirely pulled out from under the IRA—portions of the investment from the law are beginning to pay off, and the majority of the money has gone to Republican districts. But there will certainly be challenges to pieces, especially the EV tax credits, which Trump has been laser-focused on during the campaign.

This all adds up to a very different course on climate than what many had hoped we might see for the rest of this decade.

A Trump presidency could add 4 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions to the atmosphere by 2030 over what was expected from a second Biden term, according to an analysis published in April by the website Carbon Brief (this was before Biden dropped out of the race). That projection sees emissions under Trump dropping by 28% below the peak by the end of the decade—nowhere near the 50% target set by Biden at the beginning of his term.

The US, which is currently the world’s second-largest greenhouse-gas emitter and has added more climate pollution to the atmosphere than any other nation, is now very unlikely to hit Biden’s 2030 goal. That’s basically the final nail in the coffin for efforts to limit global warming to 1.5 °C (2.7 °F) over preindustrial levels.

In the days, weeks, and years ahead we’ll be covering what this change will mean for efforts to combat climate change and to protect the most vulnerable from the dangerous world we’re marching toward—indeed, already living in. Stay tuned for more from us.

Now read the rest of The Spark

Another thing

Jennifer Doudna, one of the inventors of the gene-editing tool CRISPR, says the tech could be a major tool to help address climate change and deal with the growing risks of our changing world.

The hope is that CRISPR’s ability to chop out specific pieces of DNA will make it faster and easier to produce climate-resilient crops and livestock, while avoiding the pitfalls of previous attempts to tweak the genomes of plants and animals. Read the full story from my colleague James Temple.

Keeping up with climate

Startup Redoxblox is building a technology that’s not exactly a thermal battery, but it’s not not a thermal battery either. The company raised just over $30 million to build its systems, which store energy in both heat and chemical bonds. (Heatmap)

It’s been a weird fall in the US Northeast—a rare drought has brought a string of wildfires, and New York City is seeing calls to conserve water. (New York Times)

It’s been bumpy skies this week for electric-plane startups. Beta Technologies raised over $300 million in funding, while Lilium may be filing for insolvency soon. (Canary Media)

→ The runway for futuristic electric planes is still a long one. (MIT Technology Review)

Meta’s plan to build a nuclear-powered AI data center has been derailed by a rare species of bee living on land earmarked for the project. (Financial Times)

The atmospheric concentration of methane—a powerful greenhouse gas—has been mysteriously climbing since 2007, and that growth nearly doubled in 2020. Now scientists may have finally figured out the culprits: microbes in wetlands that are getting warmer and wetter. (Washington Post)

Greenhouse-gas emissions from the European Union fell by 8% in 2023. The drop is thanks to efforts to shut down coal-fired power plants and generate more electricity from renewables like solar and wind. (The Guardian)

Four electric school buses could help officials figure out how to charge future bus fleets. A project in Brooklyn will aim to use onsite renewables and smart charging to control the costs and grid stress of EV charging depots. (Canary Media)

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Nov 7 2024

Trump’s win is a tragic loss for climate progress

Donald Trump’s decisive victory is a stunning setback for climate change.

The Republican president-elect’s return to the White House means the US is going to squander precious momentum, unraveling hard-won policy progress that was just beginning to pay off, all for the second time in less than a decade.

It comes at a moment when the world can’t afford to waste time, with nations far off track from any emissions trajectories that would keep our ecosystems stable and our communities safe. Under the policies in place today, the planet is already set to warm by more than 3 °C over preindustrial levels in the coming decades.

Trump could push the globe into even more dangerous terrain, by defanging President Joe Biden’s signature climate laws. In fact, a second Trump administration could boost greenhouse-gas emissions by 4 billion tons through 2030 alone, according to an earlier analysis by Carbon Brief, a well-regarded climate news and data site. That will exacerbate the dangers of heat waves, floods, wildfires, droughts, and famine and increase deaths and disease from air pollution, inflicting some $900 million in climate damages around the world, Carbon Brief found.

I started as the climate editor at MIT Technology Review just as Trump came into office the last time. Much of the early job entailed covering his systematic unraveling of the modest climate policy and progress that President Barack Obama had managed to achieve. I fear it will be far worse this time, as Trump ambles into office feeling empowered and aggrieved, and ready to test the rule of law and crack down on dissent.

This time he’ll be staffed all the more by loyalists and idealogues, who have already made plans to force out civil servants with expertise and experience from federal agencies including the Environmental Protection Agency. He’ll be backed by a Supreme Court that he moved well to the right, and which has already undercut landmark environmental doctrines and weakened federal regulatory agencies.

This time the setbacks will sting more, too, because the US did finally manage to pass real, substantive climate policy, through the slimmest of congressional margins. The Inflation Reduction Act and Bipartisan Infrastructure Law allocated massive amounts of government funding to accelerating the shift to low-emissions industries and rebuilding the US manufacturing base around a clean-energy economy.

Trump has made clear he will strive to repeal as many of these provisions as he can, tempered perhaps only by Republicans who recognize that these laws are producing revenue and jobs in their districts. Meanwhile, throughout the prolonged presidential campaign, Trump or his surrogates pledged to boost oil and gas production, eliminate federal support for electric vehicles, end pollution rules for power plants, and remove the US from the Paris climate agreement yet again. Each of those goals stands in direct opposition to the deep, rapid emissions cuts now necessary to prevent the planet from tipping past higher and higher temperature thresholds.

Project 2025, considered a blueprint for the early days of a second Trump administration despite his insistence to the contrary, calls for dismantling or downsizing federal institutions including the the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Federal Emergency Management Agency. That could cripple the nation’s ability to forecast, track, or respond to storms, floods, and fires like those that have devastated communities in recent months.

Observers I’ve spoken to fear that the Trump administration will also return the Department of Energy, which under Biden had evolved its mission toward developing low-emissions technologies, to the primary task of helping companies dig up more fossil fuels.

The US election could create global ripples as well, and very soon. US negotiators will meet with their counterparts at the annual UN climate conference that kicks off next week. With Trump set to move back into the White House in January, they will have little credibility or leverage to nudge other nations to step up their commitments to reducing emissions.

But those are just some of the direct ways that a second Trump administration will enfeeble the nation’s ability to drive down emissions and counter the growing dangers of climate change. He also has considerable power to stall the economy and sow international chaos amid escalating conflicts in Europe and the Middle East.

Trump’s eagerness to enact tariffs, slash government spending, and deport major portions of the workforce may stunt growth, drive up inflation, and chill investment. All that would make it far more difficult for companies to raise the capital and purchase the components needed to build anything in the US, whether that means wind turbines, solar farms, and seawalls or buildings, bridges, and data centers.

view from behind Trump on stage election night 2024 with press and crowd — President-elect Donald Trump speaks at an election night event in West Palm Beach, Florida.

His clumsy handling of the economy and international affairs may also help China extend its dominance in producing and selling the components that are crucial to the energy transition, including batteries, EVs, and solar panels, to customers around the globe.

If one job of a commentator is to find some perspective in difficult moments, I admit I’m mostly failing in this one.

The best I can do is to say that there will be some meaningful lines of defense. For now ,at least, state leaders and legislatures can continue to enact and implement stronger climate rules. Other nations could step up their efforts to cut emissions and assert themselves as global leaders on climate.

Private industry will likely continue to invest in and build businesses in climate tech and clean energy, since solar, wind, batteries, and EVs have proved themselves as competitive industries. And technological progress can occur no matter who is sitting in the round room on Pennsylvania Avenue, since researchers continue striving to develop cleaner, cheaper ways of producing our energy, food, and goods.

By any measure, the job of addressing climate change is now much harder. Nothing, however, has changed about the stakes.

Our world doesn’t end if we surpass 2 °C, 2.5 °C, or even 3 °C, but it will steadily become a more dangerous and erratic place. Every tenth of a degree remains worth fighting for—whether two, four, or a dozen years from now—because every bit of warming that nations pull together to prevent eases future suffering somewhere.

So as the shock wears off and the despair begins to lift, the core task before us remains the same: to push for progress, whenever, wherever, and however we can.

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Nov 3 2024

How a breakthrough gene-editing tool will help the world cope with climate change

Jennifer Doudna, one of the inventors of the breakthrough gene-editing tool CRISPR, says the technology will help the world grapple with the growing risks of climate change by delivering crops and animals better suited to hotter, drier, wetter, or weirder conditions.

“The potential is huge,” says Doudna, who shared the 2020 Nobel Prize in chemistry for her role in the discovery. “There is a coming revolution right now with CRISPR.”

Last month, the Innovation Genomics Institute (IGI), which Doudna founded, hosted the Climate & Agriculture Summit at the University of California, Berkeley, where speakers highlighted the role that genome editing can play in addressing the rising dangers of climate change. Doudna sat down for a brief interview with MIT Technology Review on the sidelines of the closed-door event.

She and her coauthors published their landmark paper on the technique in Science 12 years ago, demonstrating that a bacterial immune system could be programmed to locate and snip out specific sections of DNA. The earliest patients have begun receiving the first approved medical treatment created with the genomic scissors, a gene therapy for sickle-cell disease—and a growing list of foods created with CRISPR are slowly reaching grocery store shelves.

Many more CRISPR-edited plants and animals are on the way, and a number of them were altered to promote traits that could help them survive or thrive in conditions fueled by climate change, beginning to fulfill one long-standing promise of genetic engineering. That includes the offspring of two cattle that Acceligen, a Minnesota-based precision breeding business, edited to have shorter coats better suited to hotter temperatures. In 2022, the US Food and Drug Administration determined that meat and other products from those cattle “pose low risk to people, animals, the food supply, and the environment” and can be marketed for sale to American consumers.

Other companies are harnessing CRISPR to develop corn with shorter, stronger stalks that could reduce the loss of crops to increasingly powerful storms; novel cover crops that can help sequester more carbon dioxide and produce biofuels; and animals that could resist zoonotic diseases that climate change may be helping to spread, including avian influenza.

For its part, IGI is working to develop rice that can withstand drier conditions, as well as crops that may suck up and store away more carbon dioxide, the principal greenhouse gas driving climate change.

Older genetic modification techniques, which involve moving genes from one organism into another, have already delivered agricultural blockbusters, including crops that are resistant to herbicides and corn, potatoes, and soybeans with enhanced protections against pests. The use of such tools to alter crops sparked fears that so-called Frankenfoods would worsen allergies and cause diseases in humans, though these health worries were widely overblown.

The grand hope is that CRISPR’s ability to precisely remove specific parts of the DNA within the existing genomes of plants and animals will make it faster and easier to create climate-resilient crops and livestock, avoiding many of the pitfalls of earlier breeding and editing techniques. The added promise is that the resulting products may prove more appealing to the public, since they often won’t carry DNA from other organisms—and won’t be labeled as bioengineered. (CRISPR can, however, be used to create such transgenic plants and animals as well.)

“It’s very exciting to see these products coming out, because they have real-world impacts that are incredibly important, especially as we’re dealing with the changing climate and with our expanding population,” says Doudna, a biochemistry professor at the University of California, Berkeley.

But there are still considerable obstacles to developing and commercializing transformative new crops and animals, as well as limits to how much the tool may help farmers and communities in regions that become excessively hot, dry, or wet in the coming decades.

The coming CRISPRed foods

In recent years, the US Department of Agriculture has loosened its rules on governing and labeling genetically modified foods in ways that clear the path for many CRISPR alterations.

The department still often oversees and requires disclosures for transgenic plants and animals. But it determined that it will not regulate foods when genome-editing tools like CRISPR are used to make “a single modification that could have otherwise been produced through conventional breeding” over longer time periods.

“We’re simply providing a trait that could have occurred naturally,” Doudna says of the regulatory distinction. “It’s just that we accelerated that process with CRISPR.”

The USDA has confirmed to companies or research groups that several dozen crops developed through the use of CRISPR would be exempt from regulation, according to a review of public documents by MIT Technology Review.

Harnessing CRISPR and similar technologies will be crucial to feed a growing global population without dramatically expanding the land, fertilizer, and other resources dedicated to farming, says Chavonda Jacobs-Young, the USDA’s chief scientist. Jacobs-Young appeared on stage at the UC Berkeley conference and also spoke with MIT Technology Review.

“We need high-tech tools,” she says. “That’s going to be an important key to us helping make sure that we have a safe, abundant, delicious … and affordable food supply.”

Chavonda Jacobs-Young and Jennifer Doudna — Chavonda Jacobs-Young, the USDA’s chief scientist, and UC Berkeley professor Jennifer Doudna, the UC Berkeley professor who co-developed CRISPR, spoke at the Innovation Genomics Institute’s Climate & Agriculture Summit.

Conventional breeding methods—which include cross-breeding varieties of plants and animals or using radiation or chemicals to create mutations—is a messy process. It can create numerous changes throughout the genome that aren’t necessarily beneficial, requiring significant trial and error to tease out improvements.

“The exciting thing with CRISPR for gene editing is you can make changes exactly where you want them,” says Emma Kovak, senior food and agriculture analyst at the Breakthrough Institute. “It’s absolutely huge in terms of saving time and money.”

As powerful and precise as CRISPR is, however, it still takes considerable work to target the right part of the genome, to evaluate whether any changes provide the hoped-for benefits—and, crucially, to ensure that any edits don’t come at the cost of overall plant health or food safety.

But improved gene-editing tools have also helped to revive and accelerate research to better understand the complex genomes of plants, which are often several times longer than the human genome. This work is helping scientists identify the genes responsible for relevant traits and the changes that could deliver improvements.

Doudna says we’ll see many more crops altered to bolster resilience to climate change as the research in this field progresses.

“In the future, as we uncover more and more of those fundamental genetics of traits, then CRISPR can come in as a very practical application for creating the kinds of plants that will deal with these oncoming challenges,” she says.

Practical plants and polite cows

IGI’s efforts to develop a type of rice that could be more drought tolerant than standard varieties highlight both the promise and challenges ahead.

Several research groups have used CRISPR to disable a gene that influences the number of tiny pores in the plant’s leaves. These pores, known as stomata, allow rice to take in carbon dioxide, emit oxygen, and release water as a means of controlling temperature. The hope is that with fewer stomata, the plants could preserve more water in order to survive and grow in drier conditions.

But it’s proved to be a tricky balancing act. Earlier research efforts knocked out the so-called STOMAGEN gene. That eliminated as much as 80% of pores, which certainly reduced water loss. But it also undermined the plants’ ability to absorb carbon dioxide and release oxygen, both of which are critical to photosynthesis.

IGI researchers zeroed in on a different gene, EPFL10, which had a less dramatic effect, reducing the number of pores by about 20%. According to research that the group published, this tweak helped the plants preserve water but didn’t affect its ability to regulate temperatures or exchange gases.

“It takes plant breeding to the next level,” Doudna says of CRISPR. “We can adjust the numbers of those pores by dialing up or down certain genes … to the levels that actually support plant growth [and] allow farmers to produce rice of the quality and with the yields that they need, but without the loss of water.”

The organization is also exploring ways that CRISPR could address climate change more directly. That includesa research program aimed at reducing the methane that cattle belch out, which is the primary source of greenhouse-gas emissions related to livestock.

IGI is working with researchers at the University of California, Davis, and elsewhere to explore whether CRISPR and other emerging tools could be used to alter microbes in the stomachs of cattle in ways that would reduce their production of the powerful greenhouse gas.

A number of research groups and startups are working to reduce those emissions through feed additives, often derived from a type of seaweed. But the hope is that changes to the microbiome of cows could be permanent and inheritable, says Brad Ringeisen, executive director of the IGI.

“If we succeed, it could potentially be something that could be applicable to nearly every cow in the world,” he says.

Labeling and safety

Kovak says there are still plenty of challenges that could hold up the development of CRISPR-edited animals and plants, including the continuing regulatory obstacles facing products where foreign DNA is introduced or more complicated edits are made. So could the ongoing battles over the intellectual rights to the tool and the variants of it that are emerging, and the costs or burdens that companies must bear to make use of the technology.

Doudna herself has been at the center of a messy, bitter, and twisting dispute with the Broad Institute over ownership of the key CRISPR patents. (The Broad is affiliated with MIT, which owns MIT Technology Review.) Each group has secured numerous patents in various countries for certain aspects and varieties of the tool.

The continuing legal battles have created complexity and uncertainty for companies hoping to harness CRISPR to develop commercial products.

Doudna has founded or cofounded several startups, including Caribou Biosciences, which has sublicensed access to certain CRISPR patents for uses including agriculture. She didn’t respond to a follow-up question on this issue before press time.

“While we have seen a lot of progress in a relatively short time, having the various CRISPR patents controlled by a few entities has at times slowed or stopped some agricultural products from hitting the market,” the IGI’s Ringeisen said in an email response.

But he adds that there’s been ongoing progress on discovering and using related gene-editing tools that aren’t already tied up in patents.

Meanwhile, natural-food retailers, skeptics of genetically modified organisms, and others have harshly criticized the USDA’s stance on governing and labeling genetically altered foods. They assert that altered crops have had harmful environmental consequences and that the rules don’t provide consumers with the transparency they need to make informed choices about the foods they buy and consume.

Doudna stresses that it is crucial to use CRISPR and similar tools cautiously. But she says the US has struck the right balance in its approach to regulation and labeling.

“It’s really informed. It really is based on science,” she says. “Rather than looking at how that plant or crop was created, the question is, What is the final product?”

She says the IGI has strived to act as a “voice of reason” on these issues, helping to counter fears and misunderstandings by providing scientific information about how CRISPR can be used to treat human diseases, help farmers adapt to climate change, or address other threats in people’s lives.

“From the very beginning, of course, it was clear that this was going to be a powerful tool that could be misunderstood and could be misused,” she says. “But it also has tremendous potential to help us tackle a lot of these challenges.”

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