Net Zero

1. Harris leans into drilling
2. Killed for activism
3. Bigger, if not better, market
4. DAC price milestone
5. Europe’s green anxiety

Grammy-nominated performer Antonique Smith on her new climate advocacy campaign targeting Black churchgoers.

Climate Week NYC is always hectic, exhausting, and super fun. This year I’m especially excited for it, because Semafor is hosting four live events that all promise to be amazing, and I invite you to join:

• On Monday, Sep. 23, I’ll host an intimate evening conversation at a restaurant in Midtown about the future of the US energy transition and electric grid with David Hardy, CEO Americas at wind farm developer Ørsted, and Kathleen Barrón, chief strategy officer for Constellation, the leading US operator of nuclear power plants. RSVP here.
• On Tuesday, Sep. 24, all day at the Pierre Hotel, colleagues and I will explore a wide range of challenges and opportunities facing emerging economies during our Next 3 Billion summit, which will feature such top-level speakers as Aliko Dangote and Microsoft’s Brad Smith. RSVP here.
• On Wednesday, Sep. 25, I’ll host another intimate evening chat about the future of energy transition finance with legendary investor Tom Steyer, as well as Heather Zichal, global head of sustainability at JP Morgan, and Kara Mangone, head of the sustainable finance group at Goldman Sachs. Mary de Wysocki, CSO of Cisco, will also be there to share her insights about how to sustainably power the AI and data center boom. RSVP here.
• Finally, on the evening of Thursday, Sep. 26, Prashant Rao and I will round out the week with a casual happy hour for our readers. We’d love to meet you and hear what you’re working on, so please join us for a drink. The location is still TBD, but you can RSVP here and I’ll keep you posted.

Hope to see you all there!

How Harris wants to outflank Trump on fossil fuels

Vice President Kamala Harris leaned into the Biden administration’s record on fossil fuel production in her debate Tuesday night with Donald Trump. To parry the accusation that she flip-flopped on whether she would seek to ban fracking, she introduced an unexpected new line of argument: That Biden’s signature climate legislation was actually a handout to Big Oil.

“I was the tie-breaking vote on the Inflation Reduction Act, which opened new leases for fracking,” she said. “We’ve invested $1 trillion in the clean energy economy while also increasing domestic gas production to historic levels. We have to invest in diverse sources of energy so we reduce our reliance on foreign oil.”

Climate activists have been begging the Harris campaign for more details about her climate strategy. They didn’t get them in a roundup of policy positions the campaign published this week, and didn’t get them at the debate, apart from a passing mention of how climate impacts have “jacked up” home insurance rates.

Instead, Harris made clear that she considers climate voters already locked in, and that there’s only electoral upside in foregrounding a much more pro-drilling posture than she has taken publicly in the past. Closing the distance between herself and Trump on oil production undermines his attempts to frame her as a dangerous eco-activist, and seems calculated to reassure moderate voters that she won’t take steps to cut emissions that will result in lost jobs or higher energy prices.

“Kamala Harris owned the center,” said Josh Freed, senior vice president for climate and energy at the think tank Third Way. “I’m honestly not sure what Trump was trying to achieve.”

The threat to environmental activism

Colombia is by far the world’s most dangerous country for environmental activists, a report by the humanitarian advocacy group Global Witness found.

Almost 200 environmental activists and land defenders, nearly half from Indigenous peoples groups, were killed globally in 2023, the report found. That’s 10% more than the previous year, and above the average of the last decade. Of these, 79 were killed in Colombia, the highest annual toll for a single country since Global Witness began tracking such cases in 2012. About half of those deaths were linked to organized crime, as activists working to protect the countries’ natural areas often cross paths with drug traffickers. Other countries with high rainforest cover, especially Brazil, Honduras, and the Philippines, also saw more than a dozen killings each.

China’s bigger carbon market

China is putting more industries under its mandatory carbon market, but that may do little to drive down emissions in the near term. By the end of this year, companies in the steel, aluminum, and cement industries will join electricity producers as being required to match their emissions with a limited number of carbon credits. The expanded cap-and-trade system will cover about 60% of China’s total emissions, up from 40% now, a move that is designed in part to help Chinese commodity exporters avoid getting hit with steep carbon tariffs by the EU. But for the first few years of the program, the government plans to hand out enough free credits to cover the industries’ current carbon footprint, effectively negating any financial incentive to cut emissions. Free allowances will fall, and the price of credits will rise, over time. Whether that pressure will be enough remains unclear — so far, credit prices in China’s power sector have been much lower than in the EU, and too low to drive behavior change.

Google’s market making

Price Google will pay per ton of CO2 to be removed from the atmosphere in the company’s largest, and cheapest, carbon removal deal to date. The purchase agreement, made with the direct air capture (DAC) startup Heirloom, is for 100,000 tons of CO2, and hits a benchmark price that analysts say is a prerequisite for carbon removal to scale up — typical DAC prices today are around $700 per ton. The trick is in the timing: Google isn’t asking Heirloom to “deliver” the tons until 2032, effectively making a $1 million bet that early investment will help drive down future pricing.

Europe’s energy transition challenge

Europe’s clean energy transition is at risk without wide-reaching economic reforms, the former European Central Bank President Mario Draghi warned.

Europe is poised to fall behind China and the US both in adopting and selling clean energy, a threat to both its climate targets and economic prospects, Draghi warned in a new report on European competitiveness. Among the solutions he prescribes are greater investment in research and early-stage commercialization, streamlining the barrage of bureaucracy related to infrastructure building and corporate climate impact reporting, fragmented power markets that keep prices unnecessarily high, and subsidies for clean tech that are much lower than those in the US and China.

A case in point of Draghi’s warning is the Stockholm EV battery manufacturer Northvolt, which said this week it will cut jobs and shutter one facility amid low EV demand and high operating costs. But overall, Europe’s economy is still decarbonizing: In the 12 months preceding this August, wind and solar generated more power in the EU than fossil fuels for the first time, according to an analysis by Nat Bullard.

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New Energy

• US solar manufacturing capacity has increased four-fold since the IRA passed. But US solar companies still rely on China for much of the supply chain.
• Chinese companies won a contract to build what will be the biggest solar power plant in Namibia.
• Brookfield Asset Management will invest $1.1 billion in the synthetic aviation fuel startup Infinium, the firm’s first investment in SAF. Infinium makes fuel using renewable energy and waste CO2.
• After a two-year lull, Chinese state financing for clean energy projects in Africa rebounded to $500 million last year, but is still below pre-pandemic levels.

Fossil Fuels

• The largest public power utility in the US is coming under fire for prioritizing large gas-fired power plants over renewables.
• Big Oil’s payouts to its shareholders are about to drop, which could cause many of its Wall Street backers to jump ship.
• India has a new solution to emissions in its massive trucking industry: Liquified natural gas.

Tech

• The world’s largest heat pump is coming online in Helsinki, and will keep about 30,000 homes warm this winter.

Minerals & Mining

• Entrepreneurs want to use new technology to turn Texas, long an oil drilling capital of the US, into a major hub for lithium mining.

EVs

• The EU will marginally reduce the tariffs it planned to impose on EVs imported from China by Tesla and other automakers after they provided more information about the cars’ components.

Politics & Policy

• Many large companies lack the skilled workers they need to meet their climate goals, Microsoft CEO Brad Smith said: “Few generations have needed to do as much in as little time as we must do now.”
• The UN’s Green Climate Fund is making progress in reducing the amount of time it takes for projects in developing countries to access its finances.

Antonique Smith, actress, singer, and CEO and cofounder of the new advocacy group Climate Revival, which aims to educate Black faith communities about climate justice.

• Donald Trump’s unconventional ground game is making Republicans nervous.
• Can the US defeat Google in court?
• Chinese roots deepen in Africa’s last Taiwan holdout.