Cautionary Expose of GEP research
Paul Wapner
Hi Gepers,
In 2004, Stephen Pacala and Robert Socolow of Princeton University, published the article, “Stabilization wedges: Solving the climate problem for the next 50 years with current technologies,” Science, 305(5686), 968–972. Many of us used it in our classes to help students strategize paths toward a sustainable energy future. ProPublica just published a seemingly devastating critique of the study showing that the research was not only funded by BP and Ford but that those companies had a direct hand in ensuring that the article guaranteed continued use of fossil fuels in the future. To the degree that the expose is accurate, it serves as a reminder that academic research is never value-free and that many of us may be subscribing to scholarly studies that have agendas of which we are unaware. The critique is especially relevant for researchers of climate capture technologies.
Here is a link to the ProPublica article: https://www.propublica.org/article/wedges-climate-research-bp-fossil-fuel-princeton
Below is a summary of the article by author, Bill McKibben. The summary is from Bill’s newsletter so please read beyond the first two paragraphs.
Princeton, BP, and a sad but extremely revealing chapter in the climate fight
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"You're paying the bills, buddy."Princeton, BP, and a sad but extremely revealing chapter in the climate fight
I spent the last few days in Altadena, interviewing survivors of the horrific fires in January of 2025 (just 18 months ago, though a lot has happened since); brave people told me about brothers, sisters, fathers that died. I stopped in Boulder on the way home to talk with climate scientists—an orange cloud from the wildfire that yesterday killed three firefighters near the Utah border obscured the sky. So I’m not in the best mood to talk coolly and clinically about where we stand right now. And that bad mood was deepened by some truly remarkable reporting that began dropping late last week, from a combined team at Pro Publica and Drilled that included the truly vital freelance reporter Amy Westervelt. It concerned a paper by two Princeton professors, Robert Socolow and Stephen Pacala, from the summer of 2004, 22 years ago. A two-decade-old academic paper does not seem all that crucial—but it played a huge role in setting the terms of the climate and energy debate, one that endures to this day. And it illustrates exactly how wasteful much of our current federal effort has become. So—even though it’s infuriating—it’s a story very much worth recounting. Settle in. Apologies for my anger here; it comes, perhaps, from having watched this whole climate story play out over such a long stretch. Thanks to those who make this free newsletter possible by taking out a voluntary and modestly priced subscription This paper quickly became known as “Wedges.” It emerged at one of the low points in the climate cycle that I referred to last week, the post-Kyoto pre-Inconvenient Truth period when Dick Cheney was driving federal energy policy and not much was happening, and so people were grateful for the assertion from these two climate academics that
They went on to outline a series of fifteen “wedges”—everything from substituting natural gas for coal to inreasing fuel efficiency for cars—that they said would add up to enough emissions reductions to stabilize global temperatures. And crucially they said that that none of this was pie-in-the-sky.
Because it told people what they very much hoped to hear, it became an instant sensation—when Al Gore’s remarkable movie came out in 2006, for instance, it ended on a positive note.
I remember hoping that much of this paper would turn out to be true—at least it gave people something to work on. And hey, it was coming from respected, independent researchers, right? Why not give them the respect they seemed to deserve. But the paper’s scientific validity began to erode pretty fast. For one thing, they’d picked a comparatively easy baseline, plotting to hold atmospheric concentrations of co2 to 550 parts per million, or double the level before the Industrial Revolution. Already by 2004 that number was seriously in question; by then more and more scientists were murmuring about 450 ppm, and in 2008 Jim Hansen published a landmark paper putting the safe maximum at 350 ppm. (I remember this well, because we built the planet’s first big global grassroots climate campaign on the back of that number). There were plenty of other things that seemed unlikely, and that turned out to be wrong. For instance, they were big on biomass (and when I mean big, I mean they proposed using one sixth of the planet’s cropland to grow stuff you would then burn). They wanted to produce massive amounts of hydrogen for use in fuel cell cars, a technology that’s gone nowhere. The word “batteries” goes unmentioned. But these are mistakes—they couldn’t have known then how these technologies would develop, though their guesses were staggeringly wrong, despite being delivered with absolute Ivy League assurance. Their biggest “mistake” was to advocate replacing much of the world’s coal-fired power with natural gas—indeed they wanted to quadruple the amount of natural gas. It was a few years later that scientists led by Bob Howarth at Cornell began to explain exactly what folly this was—that you were simply trading reductions in heat-trapping carbon dioxide for increases in heat-trapping methane—but by then it was too late, and we were deep into the fracking era whose final chapter (overseas export of liquefied natural gas) is now the main goal of the fossil fuel industry. If you’ve been paying attention, most of these mistakes pointed in the direction of continuing to burn stuff. And it turns out that was no mere mistake—it was pretty much the goal. Because as Westervelt and the Pro Publica team have now uncovered, the tiny-print final footnote to the paper was the most misleading thing in it
In fact, BP was no footnote to this study—the paper had been a joint production of its authors and British Petroleum, whose chairman, John Browne, literally came up with the phrase (“wedges”) that would define the paper.
The enterprising reporters have tracked down the voluminous correspondence between the oil company and the scientists, and god it’s damning. Here’s a note from a BP executive to the researchers, for instance
The pro-fossil fuel slant of the Wedges paper was no accident. Princeton’s Carbon Mitigation Initiative was funded by BP, and the reasons were quite explicit. Here’s the most damning exchange the reporters uncovered, in my opinion
This commitment was unblushing in ways that blow my mind.
And of course if your plan for dealing with global warming was to keep burning lots of fossil fuel, you were going to have to figure out how to deal with all the carbon that would therefore pour into the atmosphere. By default, one—or really, three—of the wedges would have to be carbon capture and sequestration. And in order to make the case that this was a viable technology, the authors had to—well, they had to massage the truth way past the point where they should have.
The effect of this paper can be felt today. When the Inflation Reduction Act was passed in the Biden years, it contained desperately needed funding for sun, wind, and batteries. But Joe Manchin, who had taken more money from the fossil fuel industry than anyone else in DC (including from BP’s North American Political Action Committee) traded his decisive vote for a grab bag of gifts for the fossil fuel industry—including huge amounts of federal money for carbon capture and sequestration. I remember a conversation with Mark Jacobson—the unbought Stanford researcher who figured out that sun, wind, and batteries were the wedges that would count—shortly after the IRA passed. Jacobson (who had been attacked by a committee of 21 luminaries for insisting that renewable energy was the best way out of the climate mess) was lamenting the waste of money on carbon capture, and I was dutifully explaining that it was the pound of flesh that had been necessary to get the money for the actual energy transition. Jacobson, as it turns out, had the last bitter laugh—when the Republican congress gutted the IRA last year, the carbon capture part was one of the few things they left intact. It’s an ongoing pointless effort whose only purpose is to continue providing some kind of cover for burning more fossil fuel. A government that doesn’t believe in global warming is nonetheless paying the oil industry incredible sums to pretend to capture carbon. And when I say pretend, that’s what I mean. The Pro Publica crew simultaneously published another piece demonstrating quite conclusively that two decades later Socolow’s “enthusiasm” for CCS was a dead end. As they write, “right now, globally, we’re permanently burying less CO2 than a single large power plant can emit in a year.” Here’s the key chart from that paper
If you look at it closely, the blue lines show the projections made by the various groups that followed Socolow and Pacala for how much carbon we’d capture, compared with the brown line at the bottom, which shows how much we actually do capture. Which is, to a rounding error, none. The second chart shows all the projections for how much solar power we’d generate, none of which came even close to capturing how fast this technology would explode. Give Jacobson the last laugh here. As he pointed out last week, “replacing gas with renewables for California’s electricity has reduced twice the carbon as all the world’s carbon capture projects.” That is, a few years work in one of the fifty states in one of the 200 countries on earth has done more than the thing that the fossil fuel industry has based its whole climate rationale on. A couple of final footnotes here, which really get at the perfidy of all of this. In the same year that BP was rewriting the Princeton paper, they were also using one of the world’s biggest ad agencies, Ogilvy and Mather, to spread the idea of the “carbon footprint,” which is to say the idea that it’s all your fault, not BP’s. (Read Rebecca Solnit’s account. It’s a hard call but I’d say their pollution of the world’s information system outranks even their pollution of the Gulf of Mexico). And last month Princeton became the first of the Ivies to renege on their pledge to divest from fossil fuels. Why? Because according to their investment manager, fossil fuel companies “will necessarily play a significant role in the clean-energy transition we want for our nation and for the Earth.” Hey, put a Tiger in your tank. At intellectually corrupt Princeton, and among the nation’s intellectually corrupt elites, too little ever changes. In other energy and climate news: +One of the better accounts of Europe’s extreme heat came from the Wall Street Journal, which interviewed lots of Americans and expats
But if you want a real, sweaty feel, you need to read Sarah Wilson’s Parisian chronicle in her This is Precious substack.
There has been much pointless social media back-and-forth about air conditioning in Europe, which of course we need now. (We need it even more desperately in Asia, South America, and Africa). And the good news is that it comes most easily and efficiently from the device—the heat pump—that we’ve been advocating for nonstop since this newsletter started. (Thanks again to all of you, who spearheaded our successful effort to get a quarter billion dollars from the Defense Production Act under Biden for boosting their production). My only addition to this debate would be to point out that on an overheating world we might be better off calling them ‘cold pumps.’ In fact, Dan McCarthy reported over the weekend that whatever you call them, these devices are about to surpass air conditioners in total American sales +Boy oh boy do they work fast in China, where in a matter of months sodium batteries have gone from cool new innovation to being tested—successfully—in long-haul 18-wheelers. As Jo Borrás reports:
Meanwhile, Chinese carmaker BYD froze one of its luxury EVs at -22F for 24 hours just to show it wouldn’t matter. And as Iulian Dnistran reports, when they plugged it in the “car’s state of charge went from 20% to 97% in 12 minutes, just like BYD claimed when it debuted its latest battery tech, making the range meter read nearly 626 miles (1,009 kilometers).” I know you well enough to know that you would like a picture
. +What happens when you pretend climate change doesn’t exist? In Corpus Christi, as Dylan Baddour describes, they’re finding out:
As a result, the city very nearly ran out of water this spring. +A Pakistani dentist, Zain Ashar, was noticing huge levels of tooth decay in many of his patients who were outdoor laborers. And he figured out why, in a story that gives you some deep sense of just how much we’re pushing the limits of the planet and of ourselves.
+An Italian windfarm took down its older generation of windmills, replacing them with newer models—and as Reuters reports, even though the number of turbines fell by 73 percent, the farm is now producing two and half times as much electricity.
+Dan Gearino has a cheery account of the dawn of the plug-in solar era in America where (and huge shout out here to Michael Richardson and his Third Act crew) ten states have now approved the new technology this spring. He talks with Craig Morris, head of Germany’s plug-in solar association:
+Interesting new book from Will Hackman, who makes the case that we need to be using different language
+This is disgusting: Kylie Mohr documents the upsurge in betting on wildfires in prediction markets like Polymarket
Aside from the moral problem, as Mohr points out this creates a lucrative incentive for arson. +Sudarshan Varadhan, Ruth Chai and Adrian Portugal bring the good news that the Philippines may be the new Pakistan when it comes to ultra-rapid solar deployment. In the wake of the Iran war,
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Wil Burns
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In many places in the pieces, the authors conflate carbon capture and sequestration, i.e., capture of carbon dioxide emissions at point sources, with the field I work in, carbon dioxide removal (CDR), i.e., removing legacy carbon emissions from the atmosphere. Beyond the fact that this undermines their credibility from my perspective, there's a big difference in how some of these pathways address the concerns expressed in the piece, especially regarding the transportation of carbon dioxide and storage (see more below). Moreover, the International Energy Agency has regularly ratcheted down the projected need for CCS in the climate intervention mix in its net zero scenarios, acknowledging a likely growing role for CDR, so the six gigatons annually figure is bogus in terms of CCS;
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While the article argues that "carbon capture" would require a tremendous ramp-up in construction of pipelines for conveyance, and a large expansion of geological storage capacity, this isn't pertinent for an array of CDR approaches. This includes a number of biological- and chemical-based CDR options, such as enhanced rock weathering, biochar, afforestation/reforestation, enhanced soil sequestration, and marine-based approaches (e.g., ocean alkalinity enhancement and seaweed harvesting), none of which would require transporting or storing carbon dioxide geologically. The piece also doesn't acknowledge that both in situ and ex situ carbon mineralization processes could ameliorate storage concerns by facilitating permanent conversion of carbon dioxide into carbonates, and to some degree, transportation issues also for CCS (as well as some CDR options, e.g. Direct Air Capture and bioenergy with carbon capture and sequestration (BECCS)). The estimates of storage needs also wholly ignore the role of offshore CO2 storage, which countries, e.g., Norway are currently (see the Northern Lights Project, for example);
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The characterization of the performance of CCS plants to date either reflects a lack of understanding of how nascent technologies operate, or is disingenuous. As has been the case for virtually any new technology, including wind and solar, early-stage facilities often fall short in terms of performance (some of the CCS plants also failed to capture projected levels of carbon dioxide due to the collapse of natural gas markets and not due to technological problems). However, in the case of CCS, we've seen substantial improvements in terms of capture rates through learning by doing and innovation, much like we saw with solar, where efficiencies in early days were pretty low). This is particularly the case in China, where CCS capture costs are only about $30-40/ton for some newer projects, and China plans to export these technologies in the future. Does that mean that CCS technologies can reach the efficiency and economic levels that make them viable at very large scales? I don't know, the jury is out, but the piece is pretty blithe and loose with the facts in my opinion;
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The fact that solar power has thrived over the past few decades, while CCS has not, is a bit irrelevant. As the IPCC concluded in its Sixth Assessment Report (and probably more so in the upcoming 7th Assessment), our burgeoning emissions trajectories, and our legacy emissions, means that we're not in an "either/or" scenario at this point in terms of decarbonization and deployment of carbon management approaches such as CCS and CDR. Integrated assessment modeling under any conceivable scenario tells us we need both far more aggressive decarbonization and very large scales of carbon removal/capture, perhaps as much as 20 gigatons of capture by 2100 to meet the Paris Agreement's objectives). The bottom line is that there's a number of "hard-to-abate" sectors, e.g. aviation, aviation, steel, cement, where it will be nearly impossible to reach the Paris Agreement's "net zero" objectives without substantial CDR; hence the Paris Agreement's careful use of the term "net zero," which acknowledges sources and sinks, including approaches to enhance sinks. This is especially true in burgeoning emissions sectors such as steel and cement, where a large percentage of the emissions are "process emissions," i.e., carbon dioxide produced by the processes of production rather than the energy inputs into the processes. Even if you get to ZERO emissions in terms of the energy feedstocks you use in these plants, you'll still have large residual process emissions. All of the stuff we've seen in the CMIP modeling that will inform a lot of the projections in the upcoming 7th Assessment Report support this proposition also;
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While the piece emphasizes the substantial cost of CCS (which it pegs at half a trillion dollars), one must also weigh this against losses in GDP associated with temperatures exceeding 1.5C (which now appears inevitable, with CDR identified as critical in such "overshoot" scenarios to bring temperatures back down) of between 2.6-4.2% of GDP, potentially more than $4 trillion/year. Energy sources e.g. solar and wind produce a product that folks want, i.e. energy, and once their costs dropped precipitously, the market embraced them. By contrast, CCS/CDR is a public good, which means it's not as "attractive" in the market, which means we need to pay for it as a waste disposal strategy through public funds, or impose obligations on major polluters (e.g. via carbon takeback obligations). The ProPublica piece made no effort to address any of these issues.
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Subject: [gep-ed] Cautionary Expose of GEP research
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Paul Wapner
Hi Wil,
I appreciate your thoughtful comments. For years I have admired your work on carbon removal and thus am grateful for your response.
One of your main criticisms is that ProPublica conflates carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) and carbon dioxide removal (CDR). You are right. I wonder, however, how significant this is. As I see it, whatever the real differences between CCS and CDR, both function politically the same way. Both let the fossil fuel industry argue for continued fossil fuel use because carbon can (theoretically) be captured or removed. This was precisely the intent of BP and perhaps Pacala and Socolow in the Wedges article.
We need carbon removal; but this doesn’t mean that it is possible. The technological, economic, and political hurdles are enormous (especially given carbon removal’s track record to date [although, as you note, new technologies take time]). Also enormous, however, is the moral hazard involved with pursuing arguably unrealizable aspirations. The more we believe that we can continue using fossil fuels and stabilize the climate, the less willing we will be to fully decarbonize our economies. Such a moral hazard is exactly what the fossil fuel industry counts on. That is the lesson I drew from ProPublica’s exposé and McKibben’s critique.
The fossil fuel industry denied climate change for years (despite its own research to the contrary). When public pressure forced it to admit climate reality it then sowed scientific uncertainty. That uncertainty defanged efforts to transition to renewables. Over the past twenty years, the industry has argued that, even if climate science is indisputable, carbon removal (especially CCS) ensures that fossil fuels can remain part of the global energy mix.
ProPublica has pulled back the curtain and allowed us to see how determined this strategy has been. In so doing, it explained how the fossil fuel industry colonized (or at least instrumentalized) our own, dear sphere of teaching and scholarship. As I think back on the years that I uncritically taught the Wedges article, I feel sad.
Thanks to those who responded to me privately and thanks, Wil, for doing so publicly.
All best, Paul
Princeton, BP, and a sad but extremely revealing chapter in the climate fight
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"You're paying the bills, buddy."Princeton, BP, and a sad but extremely revealing chapter in the climate fight |
I spent the last few days in Altadena, interviewing survivors of the horrific fires in January of 2025 (just 18 months ago, though a lot has happened since); brave people told me about brothers, sisters, fathers that died. I stopped in Boulder on the way home to talk with climate scientists—an orange cloud from the wildfire that yesterday killed three firefighters near the Utah border obscured the sky. So I’m not in the best mood to talk coolly and clinically about where we stand right now. And that bad mood was deepened by some truly remarkable reporting that began dropping late last week, from a combined team at Pro Publica and Drilled that included the truly vital freelance reporter Amy Westervelt. It concerned a paper by two Princeton professors, Robert Socolow and Stephen Pacala, from the summer of 2004, 22 years ago. A two-decade-old academic paper does not seem all that crucial—but it played a huge role in setting the terms of the climate and energy debate, one that endures to this day. And it illustrates exactly how wasteful much of our current federal effort has become. So—even though it’s infuriating—it’s a story very much worth recounting. Settle in. |
Apologies for my anger here; it comes, perhaps, from having watched this whole climate story play out over such a long stretch. Thanks to those who make this free newsletter possible by taking out a voluntary and modestly priced subscription |
This paper quickly became known as “Wedges.” It emerged at one of the low points in the climate cycle that I referred to last week, the post-Kyoto pre-Inconvenient Truth period when Dick Cheney was driving federal energy policy and not much was happening, and so people were grateful for the assertion from these two climate academics that
They went on to outline a series of fifteen “wedges”—everything from substituting natural gas for coal to inreasing fuel efficiency for cars—that they said would add up to enough emissions reductions to stabilize global temperatures. And crucially they said that that none of this was pie-in-the-sky.
Because it told people what they very much hoped to hear, it became an instant sensation—when Al Gore’s remarkable movie came out in 2006, for instance, it ended on a positive note.
I remember hoping that much of this paper would turn out to be true—at least it gave people something to work on. And hey, it was coming from respected, independent researchers, right? Why not give them the respect they seemed to deserve. But the paper’s scientific validity began to erode pretty fast. For one thing, they’d picked a comparatively easy baseline, plotting to hold atmospheric concentrations of co2 to 550 parts per million, or double the level before the Industrial Revolution. Already by 2004 that number was seriously in question; by then more and more scientists were murmuring about 450 ppm, and in 2008 Jim Hansen published a landmark paper putting the safe maximum at 350 ppm. (I remember this well, because we built the planet’s first big global grassroots climate campaign on the back of that number). There were plenty of other things that seemed unlikely, and that turned out to be wrong. For instance, they were big on biomass (and when I mean big, I mean they proposed using one sixth of the planet’s cropland to grow stuff you would then burn). They wanted to produce massive amounts of hydrogen for use in fuel cell cars, a technology that’s gone nowhere. The word “batteries” goes unmentioned. But these are mistakes—they couldn’t have known then how these technologies would develop, though their guesses were staggeringly wrong, despite being delivered with absolute Ivy League assurance. Their biggest “mistake” was to advocate replacing much of the world’s coal-fired power with natural gas—indeed they wanted to quadruple the amount of natural gas. It was a few years later that scientists led by Bob Howarth at Cornell began to explain exactly what folly this was—that you were simply trading reductions in heat-trapping carbon dioxide for increases in heat-trapping methane—but by then it was too late, and we were deep into the fracking era whose final chapter (overseas export of liquefied natural gas) is now the main goal of the fossil fuel industry. If you’ve been paying attention, most of these mistakes pointed in the direction of continuing to burn stuff. And it turns out that was no mere mistake—it was pretty much the goal. Because as Westervelt and the Pro Publica team have now uncovered, the tiny-print final footnote to the paper was the most misleading thing in it
In fact, BP was no footnote to this study—the paper had been a joint production of its authors and British Petroleum, whose chairman, John Browne, literally came up with the phrase (“wedges”) that would define the paper.
The enterprising reporters have tracked down the voluminous correspondence between the oil company and the scientists, and god it’s damning. Here’s a note from a BP executive to the researchers, for instance |
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The pro-fossil fuel slant of the Wedges paper was no accident. Princeton’s Carbon Mitigation Initiative was funded by BP, and the reasons were quite explicit. Here’s the most damning exchange the reporters uncovered, in my opinion
This commitment was unblushing in ways that blow my mind.
And of course if your plan for dealing with global warming was to keep burning lots of fossil fuel, you were going to have to figure out how to deal with all the carbon that would therefore pour into the atmosphere. By default, one—or really, three—of the wedges would have to be carbon capture and sequestration. And in order to make the case that this was a viable technology, the authors had to—well, they had to massage the truth way past the point where they should have.
The effect of this paper can be felt today. When the Inflation Reduction Act was passed in the Biden years, it contained desperately needed funding for sun, wind, and batteries. But Joe Manchin, who had taken more money from the fossil fuel industry than anyone else in DC (including from BP’s North American Political Action Committee) traded his decisive vote for a grab bag of gifts for the fossil fuel industry—including huge amounts of federal money for carbon capture and sequestration. I remember a conversation with Mark Jacobson—the unbought Stanford researcher who figured out that sun, wind, and batteries were the wedges that would count—shortly after the IRA passed. Jacobson (who had been attacked by a committee of 21 luminaries for insisting that renewable energy was the best way out of the climate mess) was lamenting the waste of money on carbon capture, and I was dutifully explaining that it was the pound of flesh that had been necessary to get the money for the actual energy transition. Jacobson, as it turns out, had the last bitter laugh—when the Republican congress gutted the IRA last year, the carbon capture part was one of the few things they left intact. It’s an ongoing pointless effort whose only purpose is to continue providing some kind of cover for burning more fossil fuel. A government that doesn’t believe in global warming is nonetheless paying the oil industry incredible sums to pretend to capture carbon. And when I say pretend, that’s what I mean. The Pro Publica crew simultaneously published another piece demonstrating quite conclusively that two decades later Socolow’s “enthusiasm” for CCS was a dead end. As they write, “right now, globally, we’re permanently burying less CO2 than a single large power plant can emit in a year.” Here’s the key chart from that paper |
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If you look at it closely, the blue lines show the projections made by the various groups that followed Socolow and Pacala for how much carbon we’d capture, compared with the brown line at the bottom, which shows how much we actually do capture. Which is, to a rounding error, none. The second chart shows all the projections for how much solar power we’d generate, none of which came even close to capturing how fast this technology would explode. Give Jacobson the last laugh here. As he pointed out last week, “replacing gas with renewables for California’s electricity has reduced twice the carbon as all the world’s carbon capture projects.” That is, a few years work in one of the fifty states in one of the 200 countries on earth has done more than the thing that the fossil fuel industry has based its whole climate rationale on. A couple of final footnotes here, which really get at the perfidy of all of this. In the same year that BP was rewriting the Princeton paper, they were also using one of the world’s biggest ad agencies, Ogilvy and Mather, to spread the idea of the “carbon footprint,” which is to say the idea that it’s all your fault, not BP’s. (Read Rebecca Solnit’s account. It’s a hard call but I’d say their pollution of the world’s information system outranks even their pollution of the Gulf of Mexico). And last month Princeton became the first of the Ivies to renege on their pledge to divest from fossil fuels. Why? Because according to their investment manager, fossil fuel companies “will necessarily play a significant role in the clean-energy transition we want for our nation and for the Earth.” Hey, put a Tiger in your tank. At intellectually corrupt Princeton, and among the nation’s intellectually corrupt elites, too little ever changes. In other energy and climate news: +One of the better accounts of Europe’s extreme heat came from the Wall Street Journal, which interviewed lots of Americans and expats
But if you want a real, sweaty feel, you need to read Sarah Wilson’s Parisian chronicle in her This is Precious substack.
There has been much pointless social media back-and-forth about air conditioning in Europe, which of course we need now. (We need it even more desperately in Asia, South America, and Africa). And the good news is that it comes most easily and efficiently from the device—the heat pump—that we’ve been advocating for nonstop since this newsletter started. (Thanks again to all of you, who spearheaded our successful effort to get a quarter billion dollars from the Defense Production Act under Biden for boosting their production). My only addition to this debate would be to point out that on an overheating world we might be better off calling them ‘cold pumps.’ In fact, Dan McCarthy reported over the weekend that whatever you call them, these devices are about to surpass air conditioners in total American sales +Boy oh boy do they work fast in China, where in a matter of months sodium batteries have gone from cool new innovation to being tested—successfully—in long-haul 18-wheelers. As Jo Borrás reports:
Meanwhile, Chinese carmaker BYD froze one of its luxury EVs at -22F for 24 hours just to show it wouldn’t matter. And as Iulian Dnistran reports, when they plugged it in the “car’s state of charge went from 20% to 97% in 12 minutes, just like BYD claimed when it debuted its latest battery tech, making the range meter read nearly 626 miles (1,009 kilometers).” I know you well enough to know that you would like a picture |
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Wil Burns
Sent: Wednesday, July 1, 2026 7:40 PM
To: Wil Burns <w...@feronia.org>; Gepers <gep...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: [gep-ed] Re: Cautionary Expose of GEP research