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As we report on climate change, it’s all too easy to get caught up in the often troubling news.
Ferocious storms wreak havoc around the globe. Planet warming-emissions keep rising. Scientists warn of catastrophic tipping points.
Yet those headlines, crucially important as they are, often overshadow a different, equally important narrative: In recent years, the world has begun making rapid strides toward a cleaner, more resilient future, one in which modern society is powered with renewable energy, and the challenges of a hotter planet are not quite so perilous. This year alone, investments in clean energy will hit $2 trillion, according to the International Energy Agency.
Today, in an effort to highlight some of the progress underway, we’re introducing a new regular feature in our coverage, The Climate Fix.
Each Thursday, as part of this newsletter, we’ll focus on at least one new solution that has the potential to make a meaningful difference.
Sometimes, this might be a new technology that is making our energy system more efficient. Other weeks, it could be a policy change that is reshaping how people think about allocating money to climate adaptation. We also plan to cover nature-based solutions, emissions reductions plans, scientific breakthroughs and legal developments.
There’s no shortage of material for us to write about. On every continent and in every conceivable industry, there are projects making our energy systems cleaner, our transportation systems more efficient and our agricultural systems more resilient. And our reporters are already in the field, tracking developments in geothermal energy, electric vehicles, rice farming, tree planting and much more. Just in the last few weeks, we’ve covered efforts to support nuclear energy, mine critical minerals and the impact of individual actions.
Beyond simply highlighting potentially game-changing solutions, The Climate Fix will bring a critical eye to them, evaluating what stands in the way of their widespread adoption, and peering ahead to understand what comes next.
Thanks for reading, and welcome to The Climate Fix.
THE CLIMATE FIX
The fund that wants to pay billions to protect forests — and generate returns
The problem: Every year over the last two decades, countries have been losing about nine million acres of tropical forest that are crucial to curbing climate change. Markets for selling carbon credits and other financial mechanisms have not significantly changed that trend globally.
The fix: Officials from Brazil are finalizing a proposal for a new financial product called the Tropical Forests Forever Facility, which aims to raise $125 billion from investors, countries and philanthropic organizations.
Its structure is unique: investors would loan the fund money, which would be paid back with interest. That money would then be invested in a diversified portfolio that would generate a return. Those excess returns would be used to pay roughly 70 developing countries $4 for every hectare of tropic forest they protect — including for forests that are not under immediate threat and which have historically received very little funding.
The structure means T.F.F.F. is more like a return-generating investment than traditional foreign aid, which the fund’s creators think could help make it more palatable for countries and philanthropies.
“We have long talked about the advantages of conservation, but haven’t been able to, let’s say, translate that into concrete things people can feel,” said Marina Silva, Brazil’s environment minister.
The obstacles: Getting $125 billion in investments is an enormous challenge to say the least. If the T.F.F.F. were to raise $125 billion it would be, by some measures, the biggest climate fund in the world. There are also concerns about who would — or could — govern such a large financial portfolio. And then there’s the risk of a financial crash, which could hurt the fund’s abilities to pay countries for forest protection.
What’s next: Officials in the U.S., Norway, France and other wealthy nations are evaluating the idea, as is the World Bank. The project, first presented at the global climate summit in Dubai, last November, is now in its final stages of design.Under the plan’s terms, countries with a lot of forest could get a significant boost in their budgets. Brazil, for example, would have been paid around $600 million this year if the fund was operational. — Manuela Andreoni
Turning rivers and oceans into giant sponges for carbon dioxide
The problem: To keep climate change at tolerable levels, countries will probably have to do more than just slash emissions — they’ll also need to remove hundreds of billions of tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere this century.
The fix: In Nova Scotia, a startup called CarbonRun is grinding up limestone and sprinkling it into rivers poisoned by acid rain. Not only does this technique help local salmon populations, it also helps pull greenhouse gases from the sky.
Typically, rivers contain carbon dioxide that is constantly escaping into the air, where it traps heat and warms the planet. But adding limestone converts some of that carbon dioxide into a stable molecule that instead stays underwater and washes into the sea, where it should remain trapped for thousands of years.
The potential: There are hundreds of acidified rivers worldwide, and CarbonRun estimates that this process, known as river liming, could remove hundreds of millions of tons of carbon each year.
That might just be a start. If similar techniques could be done in the ocean — adding an alkaline substance like limestone or magnesium oxide to seawater, for example — humanity could potentially remove billions of tons each year.
So far, oceans have been tougher to work in. It’s tricky to prove that adding alkalinity actually removes carbon in the turbulent high seas, and early research efforts have faced public backlash. Some scientists hope CarbonRun can be a pioneer, because it’s easier to verify carbon removal happens in rivers, and river liming has been highly popular with local communities, since it can help revive devastated fisheries.
The obstacles: CarbonRun needs to cut costs, which means figuring out how to inexpensively mine and transport limestone. The company needs about two tons of rock for every ton of carbon it removes.
The company also needs buyers. Right now, only a handful of wealthy tech companies, like Microsoft and Stripe, are willing to pay startups to remove carbon from the air. Some experts say carbon removal should be considered a public good and governments should pay for it, but it’s still early days.
One policy twist: Congress offers a generous tax credit — worth $180 per ton — for companies that remove carbon from the air using complex direct air capture machines, but that subsidy does not cover techniques that involve oceans or rivers.
What’s next: CarbonRun has received $25 million to remove an initial 55,442 tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and is starting to scale up. Elsewhere, researchers in Halifax and Massachusetts are studying whether alkalinity enhancement can work in the oceans. — Brad Plumer
3 Things to Read on Hurricane Helene
How the North Carolina Legislature Left Homes Vulnerable to Helene: “Over the past 15 years, North Carolina lawmakers have rejected limits on construction on steep slopes, which might have reduced the number of homes lost to landslides; blocked a rule requiring homes to be elevated above the height of an expected flood; weakened protections for wetlands, increasing the risk of dangerous storm water runoff; and slowed the adoption of updated building codes, making it harder for the state to qualify for federal climate-resilience grants.” — Christopher Flavelle
After Flooding, FEMA Aid Is Arriving. But Some Are Still on Their Own: “In the western mountains of North Carolina outside of Asheville, the small communities of Cruso and Canton, wrecked by Hurricane Helene, were not waiting for help from the state or the federal government.”
Local restaurants were dispatching food deliveries to homes each evening. Some residents were driving excavators and tractors to clear debris from roads, while others were checking on who had power and who did not. No one was sure whether any disaster relief was coming anytime soon.” — Emily Cochrane, J. David Goodman, Edgar Sandoval and Christopher Flavelle
After Helene, Lawyers Gear Up for Battles Over Who Should Pay: “As the colossal scale of damage wrought by Hurricane Helene becomes clear, legal aid groups are steeling themselves for yearslong battles to help people rebuild their lives and homes.
“It’s going to be a massive effort,” said Alicia Edwards, who directs the Disaster Relief Project for Legal Aid of North Carolina, which serves low-income clients.
They’re mobilizing to help people navigate a maze of post-disaster bureaucracy — fights with landlords, insurers, contractors and even federal relief agencies themselves. But first, legal groups in the area need to account for their own people.” — Karen Zraick
More Climate News:
After pressure from several countries, the European Union offered to delay for a year the introduction of rules to stop imports of products linked to deforestation, The Associated Press reported.
About 40 million people in portions of California, Arizona and Nevada are under heat alerts, according to The Washington Post.
In a photo essay, Reuters showed how Tokyo is expanding an underground chamber called the “cathedral” to cope with flooding intensified by climate change.
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