💰 Manchin’s Methane Money
The US waits with bated breath as Congressional Democrats tussle over funding for a massive infrastructure bill that Democrats have promised will contain significant parts of President Biden’s climate agenda.
The main holdout so far has been Democratic West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin, who opposes a measure that would impact power utilities that, it turns out, have donated more than $600,000 to his campaign re-election campaigns. The measure in question, known as the Clean Electricity Performance Program (CEPP), would offer cash to utilities that provide increasing amounts of clean energy, and potentially fine those that don’t. While some utilities have supported the plan, Manchin’s utility donors have publicly come out against it. Manchin is reportedly unwilling to vote for the plan unless natural gas is considered among the “clean” energy sources utilities will be promoted to adopt.
Natural gas is composed of 70%-90% methane, a powerful greenhouse gas that traps heat 28 times more effectively than carbon dioxide. A recent UN report has made it clear that reducing emissions of methane gas is a vital short-term measure for tackling climate change.
🇨🇦 Foreign Intervention
Records show that Canadian oil company Enbridge paid for local police efforts in Minnesota to crack down on protests against the controversial Line 3 oil pipeline from Alberta, Canada that opens this week.
In 2016, The Minnesota Public Utilities Commission ruled that police should not be forced to pay for their increased presence at protest sites along the pipeline, and ordered Enbridge to set up an escrow fund to compensate officers. That has resulted in the company directing more than two million dollars to local police for upgraded equipment, surveilling demonstrators and special training on counter-demonstration tactics.
The company says that the police are in charge of deciding when to intervene in protests, but the Guardian says it has uncovered documents showing daily communications between Enbridge and police discussing “gathering intelligence and patrols.” Among the receipts gathered by the Guardian were more than $26,000 in reimbursement to the Wright County Sheriff’s office during a three-day period when protestors were shot with rubber bullets at protest sites along the pipeline.
🏭 Carbon Capture Failure
Capturing carbon at the source still has a long way to go if it is going to deliver as a climate solution. That is the conclusion of a report published by Canary Media this week, which takes a look at the troubled state of carbon capture and storage (CCS) projects around the world. Chief among them is a CCS project run by Chevron in Australia that the company said met only 52% of its goal to capture 9.6 million tons of carbon dioxide.
Unlike direct air capture (DAC) technologies — which leverage mechanical and chemical processes to remove existing CO2 from the atmosphere — the CCS technologies employed by Chevron and other oil companies are designed to capture carbon emissions at the source before they reach the atmosphere.
Chevron’s results echo the findings one study that showed that more than 80% of CCS projects started in the United States have failed. Critics have noted that even if the Gorgon project worked it would also only capture 80 per cent of greenhouse gases coming from reservoirs, rather than the gases burnt to create energy to liquefy the gas for export. Even the International Energy Agency, long seen as a promoter of fossil fuel industries, has expressed skepticism of CCS and has done some modeling to show that a net-zero future is still possible without relying too heavily on CCS technologies.
🏙️ Cities vs. the States
American cities are increasingly finding their hands tied when making rules on greenhouse gas emissions due to a legal strategy called “preemption.”
According to a report published in Vox this week, more than 20 states have passed laws “preempting” their cities from enacting bans on natural gas, as officials have in places like Berkeley, CA. Florida passed a ban on banning natural gas earlier this year after officials in Miami suggested that they could not meet their emissions reductions targets without curbing the use of the fossil fuel.
The laws have been passed almost exclusively in states with Republican-controlled legislatures, many of whose largest cities are controlled by Democrats. The legal strategy of overriding city mandates with state law appears to be a yet another tactic adopted by fossil fuel interests from the tobacco industry, which lobbied for state laws that prohibited bans on smoking in public places enacted in the 1990s and 2000s.
🚫 EPA Cracks Down on Plastic
The EPA is taking a hard look at the yet-unregulated practice of “chemical recycling”, in which plastic is melted down into oil and gas to find a second life as fossil fuel.
Promoted as a circular economy scheme, chemical recycling has long been derided by activists for not only failing to recycle plastic into new plastic, but also for its contributions to greenhouse gas and hazardous chemical pollution emissions.
Normally, solid waste incineration is regulated under the Clean Air Act and is required to meet strict standards for air pollution. But the law, passed in 1963, makes an exception for waste treated in a “plastics/rubber recycling unit” in some cases. That clause has left room for plastics manufacturers to label the plastics-to-fuel process as “recycling”, while circumventing rules that apply to similar industries. While the EPA develops a framework for regulating chemical recycling, advocates say they want to see plastics recognized as solid waste.
New Climate Jobs
Check out some of the latest featured jobs below. If you don't see anything that speaks to you, you can always go to Climatebase to explore thousands of other opportunities.
Dispatch Goods - Dispatch Goods Inc. provides customers a simple and delightful circular system of reusable containers, helping to eliminate single-use foodware packaging, starting in San Francisco, with expansion plans nationally and worldwide.
- Restaurant Sales & Partnerships (Remote)
Actual - Climate change is the defining challenge of our time: a once-in-a-generation test that is rapidly reshaping the world around us. At ACTUAL we are building a software platform to help organizations of all kinds to break through climate paralysis and begin turning their sustainability goals into meaningful, measurable action.
- Platform Engineer: Front-End Systems (Remote)
- Platform Engineer: Back-End Systems (Remote)
- Business Development Associate (Remote)
- Industry and Ecosystem Initiatives Lead (Remote)
- Operations Associate (Remote)
Planet FWD - The Planet FWD software solution will allow brands to track their carbon footprint as well as find supplies and ingredients that can lower the carbon footprint of their products.
Heimdal - Heimdal builds machines that extract calcium and magnesium carbonate from the ocean to make carbon negative glass, concrete and other critical building materials. Concrete alone is responsible for 8% of global CO2 emissions, and we’ve created the world’s first carbon negative concrete. We use electricity to alkalinize seawater and extract precipitates of calcium and magnesium carbonates.
- Executive Assistant (Kailua-Kona, HI, USA)
- Principal Chemist (Kailua-Kona, HI, USA)
Sway - Sway combats pollution by replacing single-use plastics with home-compostable, carbon negative, seaweed-based packaging. We represent the next stage in the evolution of plastic, solving for the many social and ecological harms of petroleum-based packaging through regenerative design.
- Supply Operations Lead (Berkeley, CA, USA)
- Senior Polymer Scientist (Berkeley, CA, USA)
Optera - Optera is a sustainability software and consulting firm. Since 2006, Optera has been a leader in discovering, assessing and implementing sustainability strategies for world-class companies.
- Climate Data Analyst (Boulder, CO, USA)
- Team Lead, Climate Data Analysis (Boulder, CO, USA)
SHYFT Power Solutions - At SHYFT Power Solutions, we're on a mission to ensure that clean, reliable, and affordable energy solutions can scale and sustainably meet demand. We build IoT and integrated software solutions to optimize energy asset performance (that's solar, battery, grid, and/or generator systems) and help our customers, renewable energy companies, facility managers and real estate developers improve operational efficiency while at it.
FirstLight Power - FirstLight is a leading clean power producer and energy storage company with a portfolio that includes nearly 1.4GW of pumped-hydro storage (including Northfield Mountain, the largest energy storage facility in New England), battery storage, hydroelectric generation, and solar generation—the largest clean energy generation portfolio operating in New England today.
- NERC CIP Advisor / Engineer
- Manager, Engineering
- Senior HS&E Specilaist
- Manager, Project Development
Reefgen - Reefgen is bringing the power of technology and automation to the task of ocean habitat restoration. We build robotic systems to outplant corals and sea grasses at impactful scale.
- Underwater Robotics Engineer - Underwater Guidance, Navigation, and Control (San Francisco Bay Area, CA, USA)
- Underwater Robotics Engineer - Multidisciplinary (San Francisco Bay Area, CA, USA)
Union of Concerned Scientists - The Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) is an independent national nonprofit that uses science to protect our health, safety, and environment.
- Research Associate Intern (Washington, DC, USA)
- Coalitions Coordinator (Washington, DC, USA)
- Planned Giving Officer (Washington, DC, USA)
- Communications Intern (Cambridge, MA, USA)
- Administrative and Events Associate (Cambridge, MA, USA)
- Digital Marketing Manager (Cambridge, MA, USA)
Dashboard.Earth - Dashboard.earth is a technology start-up working to drive citizen engagement in climate change adaptation. We’re a small distributed team building our first fully fledged product for Los Angeles. We’ve just released our MVP and have six months of testing and partner pilots planned before our official release later this year.
- Product Marketing Manager (Remote)
Salient Predictions - Salient Predictions produces the world's most accurate weather forecasts from two weeks to a year ahead. In a changing climate, Salient Predictions allows businesses to make informed decisions about the weeks, months, and seasons ahead.
- Customer Solutions Architect (Remote / Boston, MA, USA)
Cambium Carbon - Cambium Carbon is a circular economy platform for trees in US cities. We are working to connect the broken supply chains in the urban forestry industry through tech, and are creating a new, highly desirable, class of wood called Carbon-Smart WoodTM.
- Senior Environmental Analyst (Washington, DC, USA)
- Director of Marketing and Communications (Washington, DC, USA)
Washington State Department of Ecology - The Department of Ecology is Washington's environmental protection agency. Our mission is to protect, preserve and enhance Washington's land, air and water for current and future generations.
- Climate Change: Climate Commitment Act Communications Consultant (Lacey, WA, USA)
- GHG Auction & Market Unit Supervisor (Environmental Planner 5) (Lacey, WA, USA)
City of Sedona - The mission of the City of Sedona government is to provide exemplary municipal services that are consistent with our values, history, culture and unique beauty.
- Sustainability Manager (Sedona, AZ, USA)
Electrochaea Corporation - Electrochaea is commercializing its power-to-gas technology in markets with greatest urgency to decarbonize the gas grid, to reduce the unnecessary emission of CO2, and to develop energy storage technologies to maximally utilize renewable energy sources such as from solar and wind.
- Sales Engineer - North America (Remote)
Activate - Activate empowers scientists to reinvent our world and address climate change by bringing their research to market. We partner with leading funders and research institutions to offer the Activate Fellowship, providing the funding, technical support, networking, community, and time that scientists need at the outset of their entrepreneurial journey.
- People and Culture Manager (Berkeley, CA, USA)
- Marketing Associate (Remote / Berkeley, CA, USA)
- Managing Director (Remote / New York, NY, USA)
- Fellowship Associate—Boston ( Boston, MA, USA)
- Data Solutions Architect (Remote / Berkeley, CA or Boston, MA)
- IT Systems Manager (Berkeley, CA or Boston, MA)
- Project Manager, Fellowship (Berkeley, CA or Boston, MA)
- Fellowship Associate - Berkeley (Berkeley, CA or Boston, MA)
VoltPost - Voltpost transforms lampposts into smart electric vehicle charging stations managed by a mobile application.
- Full Stack Engineer (Remote)
- Mobile UX/UI Designer (Remote)
Euclid Power - Euclid Power is a renewable energy company that helps renewables developers and investors develop, diligence, execute, and asset-manage renewables projects. Euclid provides a transformative data and project management platform alongside value-add services to guide developers and investors through execution on complex projects at all stages of the project lifecycle.
- Senior Software Engineer, Full-Stack / Back End (Remote / New York City, NY, United States)
Sunwealth - Sunwealth’s mission is to invest in the future of energy, generating financial, social and environmental returns for investors and communities. We are a team of industry experts who have built careers in solar development, structured finance and impact investing.
- Solar Developer (Cambridge, MA, USA)
- Senior Solar Developer (Cambridge, MA, USA)
OtherLab - Otherlab is an independent research & design lab pairing creativity with rigor to bring new solutions in renewable energy, decarbonization, and robotics to market. Similar to an accelerator or incubator, but with internally developed ideas, we nurture projects through the initial R&D phase. From here, we form internal entities, further develop the technology, and eventually, fundraise and spin these out into independently operating companies.
- Electrical Engineer (San Francisco, CA, USA)
Spoiler Alert - Spoiler Alert is a Boston-based software company helping perishable CPG brands manage excess and slow-moving inventory. Working exclusively at the manufacturing plant or distribution center level, Spoiler Alert offers a best-in-class B2B sales platform that enables food & beverage brands to manage their liquidation processes across a private network of discount retailers and nonprofit channels.
- Buyer Engagement Specialist (Remote)
Washington State Department of Ecology - The Department of Ecology is Washington's environmental protection agency. Our mission is to protect, preserve and enhance Washington's land, air and water for current and future generations. We support environmental work throughout Washington. Nearly 70 percent of our budget is passed through to local communities to pay for projects that benefit the environment.
- GHG Auction & Market Unit Supervisor (Lacey, WA, USA)
Ecochallenge - We believe in solutions. Through our Ecochallenge Platform and Discussion Courses, we connect you with research-backed actions and with fellow humans who want to take these actions with you. We show you how our collective behavior — and your personal transformation — connect with something big, shared, and better.
- Communication Engagement Manager (Remote)
- Programming & Learning Manager (Remote)
That's it for this week! Remember, you can always view thousands of more jobs on Climatebase.org.
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