A few weeks ago, TIME Magazine staff writer Alejandro de la Garza found himself on the floor of a hotel room in Nevada with two guys trying to cook sulfur dioxide out of a tin can. Luke Iseman and Andrew Song are the co-founders of Make Sunsets, a startup claiming to be implementing solar geoengineering by launching weather balloons filled with SO2 into the stratosphere.Their first experimental launch in the Mexican state of Baja resulted in a swift regulatory response from the Mexican government. But when they ran another test launch a few weeks ago just outside of Reno, Nevada, Luke invited Alejandro to meet them. This week, we speak with Alejandro about his TIME profile of the risky startup. Plus, we talk with geoengineering experts, Dr. Holly Buck and Dr. Kevin Surprise.“Any single person you talk to in solar geoengineering research, whether they're bullish or against it, they all think that what makes Sunsets doing is a bad idea,” explains Alejandro.Make Sunsets represents a turning point for the field of geoengineering, when rogue actors are pushing it from academic debate into the real world. Is the company’s recent balloon launch an act of performance art – or an open door to an uncontrolled climate experiment?Click here for a full transcriptCome watch a live episode of The Carbon Copy! Canary Media and Post Script Media are hosting a live event at Greentown Labs in Somerville, Ma. on April 6. record a live episode of The Carbon Copy with some very special guests. Get your tickets today.The Carbon Copy is supported by FischTank PR, a public relations, strategic messaging, and social media agency dedicated to elevating the work of climate and clean energy companies. Learn more about FischTank’s approach to cleantech and their services: fischtankpr.com.The Carbon Copy is supported by Scale Microgrids, the distributed energy company dedicated to transforming the way modern energy infrastructure is designed, constructed, and financed. Distributed generation can be complex. Scale makes it easy. Learn more: scalemicrogrids.com.

Discarded is a series from Lemonada Media. If you like The Carbon Copy, then we think you’re going to enjoy Discarded.The shadow of Goliath is looming over St. James Parish, Louisiana, and it’s called The Sunshine Project. This $9.4 billion proposed petrochemical plant would sprawl across 2,400 acres, pushing up against the community that has lived and died there for generations. Our David is lifelong resident Sharon Lavigne. After teaching special education at the local school for over 30 years, Sharon becomes an accidental activist trying to save her community and its history.This series is presented in partnership with Only One, the action platform for the planet. Only One is on a mission to restore ocean health and tackle the climate crisis in this generation — with your help. Visit only.one to learn more and get involved.

Come watch a live episode of The Carbon Copy! Canary Media and Post Script Media are hosting a live event at Greentown Labs in Somerville, Ma. on April 6. record a live episode of The Carbon Copy with some very special guests. Get your tickets today.In 2020, the top five Western oil & gas supermajors – ExxonMobil, BP, Shell, Chevron, and Total – saw combined losses of $76 billion. That was caused by the radical drop in energy consumption when Covid shut down the global economy.That year, BP CEO Bernard Looney called for a 40% cut in oil & gas production in a decade, and promised to invest billions of dollars each year into renewables.Two years later, thanks to a war waged by Russia that disrupted supply and a bounceback in global oil demand, high prices brought $200 billion in profits for those companies.BP just decided that it would invest billions more in oil & gas production, rather than make the drastic cuts it initially proposed. Shell is doing the same, expanding fossil fuel extraction while keeping clean energy investments flat. And even with windfall profits, clean energy only accounts for 5% of oil company capital expenditures globally.At one point, it seemed like there was a real shift happening in the sector. And now, with the global appetite for oil still growing, the allure of high profits is shifting investments back into extraction. This week: how will this new boom time for oil and gas companies impact investments in clean energy?Plus, we’ll take stock of some of the hottest emerging sectors, like hydrogen, virtual power plants, and critical minerals recycling.Jigar Shah and Katherine Hamilton are back on the show this week to dissect all of it.Click here for a full transcript.The Carbon Copy is supported by FischTank PR, a public relations, strategic messaging, and social media agency dedicated to elevating the work of climate and clean energy companies. Learn more about FischTank’s approach to cleantech and their services: fischtankpr.com.The Carbon Copy is supported by Scale Microgrids, the distributed energy company dedicated to transforming the way modern energy infrastructure is designed, constructed, and financed. Distributed generation can be complex. Scale makes it easy. Learn more: scalemicrogrids.com.

Come watch a live episode of The Carbon Copy! Canary Media and Post Script Media are hosting a live event at Greentown Labs in Somerville, Ma. on April 6. record a live episode of The Carbon Copy with some very special guests. Get your tickets today.Batteries are everywhere. In our electronics, our power tools, our electric grid, and in our cars. And almost all those batteries use a lithium-ion chemistry.To make an all-electric world possible, we're going to need a lot of lithium. Prices are up 400 percent over 2021. And demand is expected to increase fivefold over the next decade.The Imperial Valley in southern California is home to the Salton Sea, a land-locked body of water that contains vast reserves of lithium. California Governor Gavin Newsom called the region the "Saudi Arabia of Lithium." If mined, it could completely reshape the global supply chain.But locals who live near the Salton Sea – a region plagued by unemployment and pollution – worry that the rush to extract the resource won't benefit the people living there.This week on The Carbon Copy: California has ambitious plans to fuel the global EV boom with the Salton Sea’s lithium. But will the people who need it most get left behind?Guests: Independent reporter Aaron Cantú, who wrote about the Salton Sea’s Lithium industry here. And Luis Olmedo, executive director of Comité Cívico del Valle.The Carbon Copy is a co-production of Post Script Media and Canary Media.The Carbon Copy is supported by FischTank PR, a public relations, strategic messaging, and social media agency dedicated to elevating the work of climate and clean energy companies. Learn more about FischTank’s approach to cleantech and their services: fischtankpr.com.The Carbon Copy is supported by Scale Microgrids, the distributed energy company dedicated to transforming the way modern energy infrastructure is designed, constructed, and financed. Distributed generation can be complex. Scale makes it easy. Learn more: scalemicrogrids.com.

For the last 12 years, coal generation in America has been in steady decline. In 2022, wind, solar, and hydro collectively generated more electricity than coal plants. There's no escaping it: the coal fleet is getting creaky.Despite this, hundreds of coal plants are still in operation nationwide. A team of analysts at Energy Innovation and the University of California, Berkeley, wanted to know how many of those aging coal plants are more expensive to run than wind and solar. The results were stunning.Only one coal plant in America is cheaper to operate than building new renewables. So with 99 percent of coal plants being the more expensive option, it begs the question: why haven’t utilities ditched coal?This week, we'll speak with Mike O’Boyle, senior director for electricity policy at Energy Innovation, about the nuances of the transition away from coal – and why economics alone aren't enough to push the oldest, dirtiest plants into retirement.The Carbon Copy is supported by FischTank PR, a public relations, strategic messaging, and social media agency dedicated to elevating the work of climate and clean energy companies. Learn more about FischTank’s approach to cleantech and their services: fischtankpr.com.The Carbon Copy is supported by Scale Microgrids, the distributed energy company dedicated to transforming the way modern energy infrastructure is designed, constructed, and financed. Distributed generation can be complex. Scale makes it easy. Learn more: scalemicrogrids.com.

Last month, new research showing that 12 percent of childhood asthma can be linked to gas stoves took over the news cycle. Suddenly, gas stoves were a hot topic on nightly news programs across America.The study ignited backlash from conservative pundits, especially after a commissioner from the US Consumer Product Safety Commission said stricter regulation of gas stoves was on the table.But there’s nothing new about the connection between gas stoves and health. The latest findings build off decades of public health research, which most people have never heard of – in part due to a powerful marketing effort by the gas industry.This week, we dive beyond the outrage cycle and into the data. Guest Brady Seals talks about what 50 years of research tells us about the impact of gas stoves, and how the latest findings will influence the policy push to get gas out of buildings.Click here for a full transcript.The Carbon Copy is supported by FischTank PR, a public relations, strategic messaging, and social media agency dedicated to elevating the work of climate and clean energy companies. Learn more about FischTank’s approach to cleantech and their services: fischtankpr.com.The Carbon Copy is supported by Scale Microgrids, the distributed energy company dedicated to transforming the way modern energy infrastructure is designed, constructed, and financed. Distributed generation can be complex. Scale makes it easy. Learn more: scalemicrogrids.com.

Visions for the energy-smart home of the future haven’t panned out. In the mid-2000s, the internet-enabled consumer dashboard was going to be the thing that revolutionized energy in the home. Even Google and Microsoft got in on the action – and then shut down their energy dashboards when no one was using them.Then came the smart thermostat, pioneered by Nest. Many hoped the rise of smart thermostats marked the start of a wave of technology adoption that would enable millions of energy-aware homes. They have been helpful for demand response programs, but the gadget-centric model hasn't yet unlocked a smart home revolution.But today, there's a new backdrop that is creating more urgency for the grid-interactive home: electrification. As we electrify the economy and build more variable renewables, we need buildings to help balance the grid. And after decades of futuristic visions that never materialized, are we finally at a moment when the smart, grid-interactive home is emerging in a meaningful form?This week, we dug into that question with Canary Media Senior Reporter Julian Spector. Read Julian’s piece on grid-interactive homes here as part of Canary Media’s week-long coverage of the smart home space.For a full transcript, click here. The Carbon Copy is supported by FischTank PR, a public relations, strategic messaging, and social media agency dedicated to elevating the work of climate and clean energy companies. Learn more about FischTank’s approach to cleantech and their services: fischtankpr.com.The Carbon Copy is supported by Scale Microgrids, the distributed energy company dedicated to transforming the way modern energy infrastructure is designed, constructed, and financed. Distributed generation can be complex. Scale makes it easy. Learn more: scalemicrogrids.com.

Canary media senior reporter Maria Gallucci recently took a pretty unconventional road trip – shadowing a truck driver as he drove around New Jersey, sucking grease, beef tallow, and used cooking oil out of dumpsters behind airports and restaurant chains. This grease will soon be turned into a sustainable aviation fuel known as hydroprocessed esters and fatty acids, or HEFA. With hydrogen and batteries still not ready to move our airplanes, the airline industry is relying on cooking grease to decarbonize. How clean – and how scalable – is it? Maria Gallucci joins us to explain. You can find her feature story for Canary media here.Click here for a full transcript of this episode.The Carbon Copy is supported by FischTank PR, a public relations, strategic messaging, and social media agency dedicated to elevating the work of climate and clean energy companies. Learn more about FischTank’s approach to cleantech and their services: fischtankpr.com.The Carbon Copy is supported by Scale Microgrids, the distributed energy company dedicated to transforming the way modern energy infrastructure is designed, constructed, and financed. Distributed generation can be complex. Scale makes it easy. Learn more: scalemicrogrids.com.

Five years ago, venture investors, tech companies and automakers were pouring tens of billions of dollars into driverless cars. Tesla, General Motors, Lyft, Uber, and Google's Waymo were promising large fleets of robotaxis with fully autonomous vehicles by the turn of the decade. In 2017, Ford took a big swing. The company invested $1 billion in Argo AI, a startup developing level-four driverless systems. Later, VW entered the partnership. The automakers promised to make a fully autonomous car by 2021. But in October of last year, VW pulled out of the partnership. Ford said it would shut down the driverless car program, taking a $2.7 billion loss. So how did we get to a point where a promising startup valued at $7 billion is being written off by automakers? And what does it say about the viability of fully-autonomous cars?Journalist Ed Neidermeyer says Ford's shutdown of Argo AI was due to inflated expectations – which exposed a mismatch in business models.“I think it's very easy to look at this and say, ‘shutting down Argo AI was an admission that this technology doesn't work…or was a scam. And you look out on social media and people are taking that lesson away – and I think that's the wrong lesson.”This week, we speak with Ed about the real lessons behind the setbacks for autonomous cars: the mismatch between our fantasies and the reality of the technology.Full transcript hereThe Carbon Copy is supported by FischTank PR, a public relations, strategic messaging, and social media agency dedicated to elevating the work of climate and clean energy companies. Learn more about FischTank’s approach to cleantech and their services: fischtankpr.com.The Carbon Copy is supported by Scale Microgrids, the distributed energy company dedicated to transforming the way modern energy infrastructure is designed, constructed, and financed. Distributed generation can be complex. Scale makes it easy. Learn more: scalemicrogrids.com.

America enters 2023 faced with two opposing realities: greenhouse gas emissions are going up, but the opportunity to slash those emissions has never been better.Heat-trapping gasses in the U.S. rose again last year, according to the Rhodium Group. Even though renewables outpaced coal on the grid, emissions climbed in the buildings, heavy industry, and transportation sectors.Passage of the Inflation Reduction Act could reverse that trend over the next decade. The law, which was the result of years of political pressure and behind-the-scenes dealmaking, devotes nearly $370 billion to domestic clean energy deployment. It could cut emissions by 40% by 2030.But now the real work begins.On this week’s episode of The Carbon Copy, Jigar Shah and Katherine Hamilton join host Stephen Lacey to talk about the new era for climate solutions deployment in America. The three former co-hosts reunite for some real-talk about the stakes ahead for implementing the IRA.The Carbon Copy is supported by FischTank PR, a public relations, strategic messaging, and social media agency dedicated to elevating the work of climate and clean energy companies. Learn more about FischTank’s approach to cleantech and their services: fischtankpr.com.The Carbon Copy is supported by Scale Microgrids, the distributed energy company dedicated to transforming the way modern energy infrastructure is designed, constructed, and financed. Distributed generation can be complex. Scale makes it easy. Learn more: scalemicrogrids.com.