Dec 5 2023
Fossil-fuel emissions are over a million times greater than carbon removal efforts

Carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels are on track to reach a record high by the end of 2023. And a new report shows just how insignificant technologies that pull greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere are by comparison. 

Worldwide, those emissions are projected to reach 36.8 billion metric tons in 2023, a 1.1% increase from 2022 levels, according to this year’s Global Carbon Budget Report, released today. As delegates gather in Dubai for this year’s UN climate summit, a record-setting year for emissions underscores the need to make dramatic changes, and quickly. 

“There has been great progress in reducing emissions in some countries—however, it just isn’t good enough. We’re drastically off course,” Mike O’Sullivan, a lecturer at the University of Exeter and one of the authors of the report, said via email. 

Europe’s emissions dropped around 7% from last year, while the US saw a 3% reduction. But overall, coal, oil, and natural-gas emissions are all still on the rise, and nations including India and China are still seeing emissions growth. Together, those two nations currently account for nearly 40% of global fossil-fuel emissions, though Western nations including the US are still the greatest historical emitters.

“What we want to see is fossil-fuel emissions decreasing, fast,” said David Ho, a climate scientist at the University of Hawaii at Manoa and a science advisor at Carbon Direct, a carbon management company, via email. 

However, one technology sometimes touted as a cure-all for the emissions problems has severe limitations, according to the new report: carbon dioxide removal. Carbon removal technologies suck greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere to prevent them from further warming the planet. The UN panel on climate change has called carbon removal an essential component of plans to reach international climate targets of keeping warming at less than 1.5 °C (2.7 °F) above preindustrial levels. 

The problem is, there’s very little carbon dioxide removal taking place today. Direct air capture and other technological approaches collected and stored only around 10,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide in 2023. 

That means that, in total, emissions from fossil fuels were millions of times higher than carbon removal levels this year. That ratio shows that it’s “infeasible” for carbon removal technologies to balance out emissions, O’Sullivan says: “We cannot offset our way out of this problem.”

The report also had bad news about nature-based approaches. Efforts to pull carbon out of the atmosphere with methods like reforestation and afforestation (in other words, planting trees) accounted for more emissions removed from the atmosphere than their technological counterparts. However, even those efforts are still being canceled out by current rates of deforestation and other land-use changes.

“The only way to solve this crisis is with major changes to the fossil-fuel industry,” O’Sullivan says. Technologies like carbon removal “only become important if emissions are drastically cut as well.”

There are many tools available to start making more progress on emissions in the near term, as a UN climate report released earlier this year laid out: deploying renewables like wind and solar, preventing deforestation and cutting methane leaks, and increasing energy efficiency are all among the low-cost solutions that could cut emissions in half by 2030.  

Ultimately, carbon removal could also be part of the answer, but there’s a lot of work left to do, Ho says. Now is a good time to study and develop carbon removal technologies, figure out the risks and benefits of different approaches, and determine which ones can be scaled up while avoiding ecological and environmental-justice issues, he adds. 

None of that is likely to happen fast enough to achieve the progress needed on emissions cuts this decade. In the Global Carbon Budget report, researchers estimate how close we are to sailing past climate limits. The researchers estimate that there’s about 275 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide left to emit before we exceed 1.5 °C (2.7 °F) of warming. At this rate, the world is on track to blow that budget within about seven years, around the end of the decade. 

“We have agency, and nothing is inevitable,” O’Sullivan says. “The world will change and is changing—we just need to speed up.”

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Nov 26 2023
Your guide to talking about climate tech over the holidays

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

Ah, the holidays. Time for good food, quality moments with family, and hard questions about climate change … or is that last one just something that happens to me?

I’m a climate reporter, so at parties I’m often peppered with questions about my job, and more broadly about climate change and climate technology. Sometimes these questions can spark a heated conversation, and I have to admit, I often change the subject or sneak away for a cookie. But all these conversations have shown me that a lot of people have heard confusing things about climate change on cable news or the internet or from their friend in book club, and they want to know more. 

With Thanksgiving and other big holidays coming up, you might find yourself in a similar position. So grab some green bean casserole (made with canned green beans, of course) and let’s dig into a few questions about climate technology that might come up. 

Touchy Climate Topic #1: I’ve heard EVs are worse for the environment than regular cars—the power has to come from somewhere, after all. 

In almost every case today, battery-powered vehicles produce fewer emissions than those with internal-combustion engines. The exact size of those differences does depend on where you are in the world, what is powering the electrical grid, and what sort of vehicle you’re driving in the first place. 

Regional differences can be significant, as catalogued in a 2021 study from the International Council on Clean Transportation. In the US and Europe, an electric car will cut emissions by between 60% and 70% relative to a gas-powered one. In places like China and India, where the grid is powered by a higher fraction of fossil fuels like coal, the savings are lower—20% to 35% in India and 35% to 45% in China. 

Vehicle size matters here too. If you really stack the deck, it’s true that some vehicles with batteries in them can wind up being worse for the planet than some vehicles with combustion engines. Take, for instance, the Hummer EV, a monstrosity that is responsible for 341 grams of carbon dioxide per mile driven. That’s more than a Toyota Corolla running on gasoline (269 grams), according to a 2022 analysis by Quartz research.

One crucial point to remember is that there’s a clear path for EVs to keep getting even better in the future. Batteries are getting more efficient. Recycling efforts are underway (more on this later). And grids around the world are seeing more power coming from low-carbon sources like wind, solar, hydro, and nuclear. That all adds up to EVs that will continue to get cleaner over time. 

Touchy Climate Topic #2: What about all that mining for the materials that make clean tech? Isn’t that going to destroy the planet? 

This one is tough, and there’s a lot of complexity when it comes to all the stuff (yes, that’s the technical term) that we need to address climate change. There are very real environmental and human rights issues around mining of all sorts. 

We’ll need to mine a lot in order to build all the technology required to address climate change: about 43 million metric tons of minerals by 2040 in order to be on track for net-zero goals, according to the International Energy Agency.

The volume of mining is even higher if you take into account that some minerals are present in pretty low concentrations. Take copper, for example—a common material used for everything from transmission lines to EV batteries. Getting one ton of copper can require moving over 500 tons of rock, since sites mined today tend to have concentrations of copper below 1%. 

However, even if you take into account all that waste rock, the energy transition is likely going to involve less mining than the fossil-fuel economy does today. The details will depend on how much recycling we can do, as well as how technologies evolve. If you want more details, I’d highly recommend this stellar analysis from Hannah Ritchie for a comparison.

Any mining can be harmful for the environment and for people living near mines. So it’s still worth paying careful attention to how these projects are progressing, and how we can lighten the burden of new technologies. But climate technology isn’t going to create a brand-new level of mining. 

Touchy Climate Topic # 3: I heard they’re stacking wind turbine blades, solar panels, and EV batteries in landfills. Isn’t the waste from all this “clean” tech going to be a big problem? 

Manufacturers are racing to get more clean energy technologies built and running, which means that in a few decades many will be reaching the end of their useful lives, and we’ll need to figure out what to do with them.

Take solar panels, for example. In 2050, we could see as much as 160 million metric tons of cumulative waste from solar panels. Sounds like a lot—and it is—but there’s a bigger problem. By then we’ll have generated a total of about 1.8 billion metric tons of e-waste, and plastic waste will top 12 billion metric tons. (For other comparisons, check out this Inside Climate News story, and the original article those numbers come from in Nature Physics.)

Overall, waste from climate tech is likely to be a facet of a much more substantial problem. Even so, there are still plenty of good reasons not to just throw old technology into the landfill. Many of the materials needed to make these items are expensive and could be reused to alleviate the need for more mining. 

The good news is, widespread efforts are underway to recycle solar panels, lithium-ion batteries, and even wind turbine blades. So yes, there’s a waste problem looming, but there’s plenty of opportunity to address that now and in the future. 

In the end, if you’re going to talk about climate tech at your holiday meal, remember that some people are more interested in fighting than in having a conversation, so it’s okay to just change the subject sometimes! If you’re looking for something else to talk about, I’d suggest you bring up the fact that crabs have evolved independently so many times there’s a word for the process. (It’s called carcinization.)

Enjoy your conversations about crabs and/or climate tech, and have some mashed potatoes for me!

Related reading

For more on EVs, and specifically the topic of hybrids, check out this story from last year. And for my somewhat conflicted defense of huge EVs, give this one a read.

On mining, I’d recommend this interview my colleague James Temple did with a Department of Energy official on the importance of critical minerals for clean energy. I’ll also point you to this newsletter I wrote earlier this year busting three myths about mining for clean energy. 

And if you’re curious to read about recycling, here are recent stories I’ve written about recycling wind turbine blades, solar panels, and batteries. 

Another thing

The power grid is getting more complicated, but AI might be able to help. AI could make the grid faster and more resilient in a range of ways, from allowing operators to make faster decisions to making EVs part of the solution. Check out the latest from my colleague June Kim for more!

Keeping up with climate  

New York has purchased 30,000 heat pumps for public housing units. The appliances could help save energy, cut costs, and address climate change, and these and other trials will be key in finding units that work for renters, a common barrier for the technology. (The Verge)

In related news, the US Department of Energy just announced $169 million in federal funding for domestic heat pump manufacturing. (Wired)

→ This is how heat pumps work. (MIT Technology Review)

A $100 billion promise from nearly 15 years ago is still having effects on climate negotiations, including the upcoming UN climate talks. (Grist)

How to get more people into EVs? Pay them to turn in their old gas-guzzlers. New programs in Colorado, Vermont, and California are testing out the approach. (Bloomberg)

Pumping water up and down hills can be a cheap and effective way to store energy. But there’s a growing question about where the water for new storage projects will come from. (Inside Climate News)

Electricity supplies are changing around the world, and these charts reveal how. I loved the world map showing where fossil fuels are declining (the US, most of Europe, Japan) and where they’re still growing. (New York Times)

→ Here’s which countries are most responsible for climate change. (MIT Technology Review)

Eat Just, a maker of vegan eggs and lab-grown meat, is in a tricky financial spot. The company has faced lawsuits and difficulties paying its vendors on time, according to a new investigation. (Wired) 

The country of Portugal produced more than enough renewable electricity to serve all its customers for six straight days earlier this fall. (Canary Media)

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Nov 19 2023
What’s coming next for fusion research

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

We’ve covered the dream of fusion before in this newsletter: the power source could provide consistent energy from widely available fuel without producing radioactive waste. 

But making a fusion power plant a reality will require a huge amount of science and technology progress. Though some milestones have been reached, many are yet to come. At our EmTech MIT event this week, I sat down with Kimberly Budil, director of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL). 

She was at the center of the science news world last year, when researchers from the national lab achieved what’s called net energy gain, finally demonstrating that fusion reactions can generate more energy than is used to start them up. 

During our conversation on stage, I asked her about this moment for fusion research, where the national labs fit in, and where we go from here. 

The moment

In December 2022, a group of scientists sat in a control room that looked like something out of a space mission. They focused 2 million joules of laser energy onto a target about the size of a pea. Hydrogen fuel inside that target began to compress, releasing energy as the atoms inside fused together. 

And this time, more energy came out than what went in—something that had never happened before.

“This was really just a moment of great joy and vindication for all of the thousands of people who have poured their heart and soul into this pursuit over many decades,” Budil told me on stage at the event. 

Many people thought it would never work, she explained—that the lab would never get to the level of precision needed with the lasers, or get the targets perfect enough to house the reaction. “The laser is a miracle, a modern engineering miracle,” she said during her talk. And “the targets are incredible, precision works of art.” 

It’s “very, very hard to make fusion work,” Budil told me. And the moment researchers achieved net energy didn’t represent the finish line, but one milestone in a series of many still to come. 

The aftermath

After the first successful demonstration of net energy gain, “the first priority was to repeat it,” Budil said. “But the next five shots were duds. They really did not work.” 

It seemed to be mostly a problem with the targets, those tiny fuel pellets that the lasers shoot at. The targets need to be virtually perfect, with no defects. Making one takes around seven months from start to finish. 

It wound up taking around six months to repeat the initial success, but over the summer, the lab achieved the highest energy gain to date. The team achieved net energy gain twice more in October. 

There’s still a lot to learn about fusion, and researchers are trying to do just that with these repeated attempts. On stage, Budil ticked through some of the questions they still had: Could the scientists make changes to the targets? Alter the laser pulse shape? Turn the energy up? 

There’s been steady progress on the science and engineering behind fusion energy for decades, Budil said, but new questions always come up as progress gets made. 

I asked her when she thought this energy source might be ready for prime time. “My best guess is that you could have a demo power plant in 20 years,” she told me. Some startups are making bolder claims than that, predicting a decade or less, “but I think the challenges are much more significant than people realized at the beginning. Plasmas are really complicated,” she said. 

Ultimately, researchers at the national lab won’t be the ones to build a power plant: that’s the role of the private sector, Budil says. But the researchers plan to keep working as part of the growing ecosystem of fusion. 

Budil counsels a bit of patience as researchers around the world work to reach the next big fusion milestone: “The fusion community is definitely known for its irrational exuberance. My job for the last year has been half to get people excited about big science and public science, and the other half is to manage expectations for fusion energy, because it’s going to be very hard.” 

Related reading

The road to this moment in fusion has been a long one. Check out some of our old magazine covers on the topic, from as early as 1972.  

The dream of fusion power isn’t going away, as I wrote in a newsletter earlier this fall.

The first net energy gain in a fusion reactor was a huge moment, but the ultimate application for energy is still many breakthroughs away.

Helion says its first fusion plant will be online as soon as 2028. Experts are skeptical of this and other ambitious timeline announcements, as my colleague James Temple covered earlier this year.

Keeping up with climate  

The US and China have agreed to work together to ramp up renewables and cut emissions. The agreement comes as President Biden and President Xi Jinping meet in person this week. (New York Times)

The first planned small-scale nuclear plant in the US is officially no more. Startup NuScale canceled plans for the project after it failed to line up enough customers willing to pay the rising cost of electricity. (Wired)

→ We were promised smaller nuclear reactors. Where are they? (MIT Technology Review)

A German flow-battery company, CMBlu, just pulled in $100 million in funding. The money is a big boon for a technology that has long struggled to bring the cost savings it’s promised. (Canary Media)

Car dealerships aren’t ready, or in some cases very willing, to sell electric vehicles. That could undermine progress on cleaning up transportation. (Washington Post)

Electrifying heating systems and other appliances in homes could be a major part of cleaning up emissions attributed to buildings. The problem is, renters might have trouble taking advantage of existing incentives for home electrification. (The Verge)

Exxon Mobil is setting up a facility to produce lithium, a key material for the batteries that power EVs. It’s a new foray for the fossil-fuel giant. (New York Times)

A new wave of startups is working to address the threat of wildfires. The field, increasingly termed “firetech,” can help prevent fires, or detect them once they start. (Canary Media)

Companies are racing to set up massive insect farms. The bugs can provide protein for animal feed, in a method that could help cut emissions from agriculture. (Washington Post)

Floods, heat waves, storms, and fires fueled by climate change are getting worse across the US. The hazards will increase unless greenhouse-gas emissions are cut quickly, according to a new report from the US government. (Bloomberg)

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Nov 12 2023
I tried lab-grown chicken at a Michelin-starred restaurant

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

The waiter lifted the lid with a flourish. Inside the gold-detailed ceramic container, on a bed of flower petals, rested a small black plate cradling two bits of chicken. Each was coated with a dark crust (a recado negro tempura, I later learned) and topped with edible flowers and leaves.  

A swanky restaurant in San Francisco isn’t my usual haunt for reporting on climate and energy. But I recently paid a visit to Bar Crenn, a Michelin-starred spot and one of two restaurants in the US currently serving up lab-grown meat. The two morsels on the plate in front of me were what I’d come for: a one-ounce sampling of cultivated chicken, made in the lab by startup Upside Foods. 

Small wisps of what looked like smoke rose from the dish mysteriously. I wondered if this was my imagination playing tricks on me, adding to the theatrics of the moment. I later discovered a small reservoir for dry ice inside the cylinder the meat was brought out in. As I pondered my plate, I wondered if this could be a future staple in my diet, or if the whole thing might turn out to all be smoke and mirrors. 

Lab to table

Cultivated meat, also called cultured or lab-grown meat, is meat made using animal cells—but not animals themselves. Upside Foods, along with another US-based company called Good Meat, got the green light from regulators earlier this year to begin selling cultivated chicken products to consumers.

Both companies chose to roll out their products first in high-end restaurants. Good Meat, a subsidiary of Eat Just, is serving up its chicken in China Chilcano, a DC spot headed up by chef José Andrés. Upside Foods landed its products in Bar Crenn. 

Neither restaurant could be accused of being cheap, but the placement of these products on a commercial menu is still something of a milestone in affordability for cultivated meat. The world’s first lab-grown burger, served in 2013, cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to make. Upside hasn’t shared how much the chicken on my plate cost to grow and serve, but Bar Crenn sells the dish for $45 on an a la carte menu. 

I ordered a few other items, including a pumpkin tart topped with what appeared to be gilded pumpkin seeds and a grilled oyster dish comprising two oyster bellies with smoked cream and pickled tapioca. (Yes, apparently it’s possible to butcher an oyster.)

Bar Crenn removed most meat from its menu in 2018, a decision attributed to “the impact of factory farming on animals and the planet,” according to the restaurant’s website. It does still serve seafood, though (hence, the oyster bellies).

So Upside’s chicken is the only land-based meat available on the menu. It’s only served on a limited basis, though. Reservations are available once each month for a special Upside Foods night, and they sell out fast.

a hand holding the cultivated chicken piece up for the camera to see the texture

CASEY CROWNHART

Tucking in

After I snapped a few photos, it was time to dig in. While we were given silverware, the servers encouraged us to pick up the chicken pieces with our fingers. The flavor was savory, a bit smoky from the burnt chili aioli. It was tough to discern, with all the seasonings, sauces, and greens on top, but I thought I detected a somewhat chicken-ish flavor too. 

More than the taste, I was intrigued by the texture. This is often what I find isn’t quite right in alternative meats—if you’ve ever tried a plant-based burger like the one from Impossible Foods, you might have had the experience of a slightly softer product than one made with conventional meat. I noticed the same thing when I tried a burger made with part plant-based and part cultivated ingredients earlier this year. 

And Upside Foods has taken on a difficult task where texture is concerned, aiming to make not a chicken nugget, burger, or other blended product, but a whole-cut chicken filet. 

Whole-cut meat like chicken breast or steak is made of complicated structures of protein and fat that form as muscles grow and work. That’s hard to replicate, which is why we see so many alternative-meat companies going after things like burgers or chicken nuggets. 

But Upside wanted its first offering to be a lab-grown chicken filet. And the result is at least partway there, at least in my opinion. Cutting into the Bar Crenn tasting portion showed some fibrous-looking structure. And while the bites I slowly chewed and considered were still softer than a chicken breast, they were definitely more chicken-like than other alternatives I’ve tried. 

Washing up

The thing is, just because lab-grown meat has reached a few plates doesn’t mean it’ll make it to everyone anytime soon. 

One of the biggest challenges facing the industry is scaling up production: growing huge amounts of products in massive reactors. Upside has started work to get to these large scales. It has a pilot facility built in California, which it says has the capacity to produce 50,000 pounds of meat per year.

But for the products I tasted, things are much more small-scale right now. The Upside Foods products served at Bar Crenn are grown in small two-liter vessels, according to the company. A recent deep dive about the process from Wired described it as producing meat “almost by hand,” in a labor-intensive set of steps. 

Part of the difficulty is the decision to make a whole-cut product. In a blog post from September, Upside CEO Uma Valeti said, “We know that the whole-cut filet won’t be our first mass-market product.” The company will be working to scale easier-to-produce options over the next several years. So it’s not clear when, if ever, the chicken I tried will be widely available. 

I’ll be talking with Valeti about the road ahead for the company and the rest of the industry in a panel discussion next week at EmTech MIT, our signature event covering technology in business. We’ll also be joined by Shannon Cosentino-Roush, chief strategy officer for Finless Foods, another startup working to bring new versions of meat—in this case tuna—to our plates. 

There’s still time to register to join us on MIT’s campus or online, and we’ve got a special discount for newsletter readers at this link. Hope to see you there! 

Related reading

A green light from regulators is just the beginning. Read more about the milestone and what’s coming next for Upside Foods and Good Meat in this news story from earlier this year.

For more details on my first lab-grown meat tasting, check out this newsletter.

Finally, I took a close look at the data on just how much lab-grown meat could help climate change. It basically all comes down to scale.

Another thing

If you missed the last few editions of this newsletter, you should go back and give them a read! While I was away for a couple weeks, my colleagues on the climate desk took on some fascinating topics. 

June Kim, our editorial fellow, dug into the potential for heat batteries and shared some news from startup Antora Energy in her first appearance in The Spark. And James Temple, our senior editor for energy, took the opportunity to dive into one of his favorite topics, carbon offsets. What are you waiting for? Go read them! 

Keeping up with climate  

This startup took its electric plane from Vermont to Florida. Here’s what it might mean for the future of flight. (New York Times)

→ The runway for battery-powered planes might still be a long one. (MIT Technology Review)

There’s been lots of talk over the last few weeks about a slowdown in EV sales from legacy automakers like Ford and GM. Battery makers are grateful for the reprieve. (E&E News)

Meanwhile, the industry is still waiting for more details on EV tax credits, specifically related to China’s involvement in the supply chain. It’s a niche bit of rule-making that could have massive implications for the affordability of electric vehicles in the US. (Politico)

The US offshore wind industry is facing a moment of reckoning as rising costs and stalled supply chains put projects in jeopardy. (Canary Media)

Climate-change-fueled droughts and rising temperatures are messing with the fish, too. Smallmouth bass could soon wreak havoc on native fish in the Grand Canyon. (High Country News)

I loved this column on 10 controversial food truths from Tamar Haspel. (Washington Post)

→ Number five reminded me of this story that my colleague James Temple wrote a few years ago, which points out that unfortunately, organic farming is actually worse for climate change than the conventional route. (MIT Technology Review)

Hoboken, New Jersey, is something of a success story when it comes to managing flooding. But it’s nearly impossible to prepare for every storm. (New York Times)

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