President Biden said Thursday his administration is deploying more U.S. firefighters to Canada to tackle more than 400 wildfires that have displaced tens of thousands of people.
Driving the news: "We already have 600 American firefighters on the ground, and have been there for a while in Canada, including hotshots and the smokejumper crews," Biden said at a news conference Thursday, one day after speaking with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to offer additional help.
The 2021 Marshall Fire — the most destructive wildfire in Colorado history — started off as two fires, which combined to create the massive flames, Boulder County officials said Thursday.
Details: Boulder County Sheriff Curtis Johnson said during a press conference the first fire started at a residential property on Dec. 30, by embers leftover from about a week earlier during an attempt to dispose scrap wood and tree branches.
Why it matters: Wildfire smoke, when present in high concentrations at ground level, can cause serious health complications, especially for elderly populations and people with heart ailments or asthma.
People in Washington, D.C., and Baltimore on Thursday are experiencing the worst air quality levels recorded in the cities in recent years, as smoke from Canadian wildfires lingered in the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast.
The latest: For the first time ever, the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments (COG) on Thursday issued a Code Purple air quality advisory for high concentrations of detrimental fine particulate matter, which is the primary component of wildfire smoke.
Why it matters: El Niño holds large sway over global weather patterns. It is likely to increase global average surface temperatures, leading to an all-time record warm year in 2023 or 2024, surpassing the El Niño year of 2016.
Smoke from hundreds of active wildfires continues to billow down from Canada this week, threatening air quality in major economic regions of the U.S.
Why it matters: States in the Northeast to mid-Atlantic are experiencing for the first time what many in the Western U.S. and the world have faced for years, and in some cases decades.
Chevron CEO Mike Wirth doesn't rule out getting into the lithium business but shows no interest in wind and solar.
Driving the news: Wirth noted lithium — a key EV battery input — can be extracted from brines produced through oil and gas development.
“We've looked at ... adjacencies to our business, and lithium could be one of those," he told Axios exclusively on Tuesday.
State of play: Wirth cautioned he didn't want to overstate the possibility of lithium ventures (Chevron previously sold its interest in a California effort).
But he contrasted it with wind and solar. "There's a lot of good developers out there in the U.S. and around the world that can do wind and solar projects better than we can."
Why it matters: Wirth's posture says plenty about the oil giant's wider approach to energy transition. The comments also crystallize a strategic split between Exxon and Chevron, compared with European peers like Shell and BP.
The big picture: European majors, which have been more aggressive on climate, include wind, solar and power services in their diversification efforts.
U.S. giants are focusing more narrowly on areas they see as adjacent to their fossil fuel business and expertise, such as carbon capture, hydrogen and renewable transport fuels.
Wirth also cited Chevron's investments in startups working on geothermal, which requires drilling and subsurface knowledge.
Here's more from Wirth, who spoke with Axios editors and reporters as smoke from Canada's wildfires drifted over the Washington, D.C., region...
🌍 UN summit: Wirth said he backs efforts by Sultan Ahmed al-Jaber, the UAE official leading this year's talks, to bring the oil and gas industry more deeply into the process — something climate activists and other critics fear will weaken the outcome.
He argued his sector brings needed knowledge and balance sheets for large-scale projects, but that Chevron is still evaluating its participation as summit planning proceeds.
Wirth discussed the oil and gas industry "Global Decarbonization Alliance" that's one of al-Jaber's COP28 initiatives.
Al-Jaber's goal is to expand climate commitments and other efforts that Western majors have made to small and state-owned players, Wirth said.
Meanwhile, he said the Washington, D.C.-based Atlantic Council is "quite involved."
🖥️ Artificial intelligence: Chevron's chief believes "there are going to be a lot of things in our industry that are going to be fundamentally changed through AI."
"We've been working with OpenAI for multiple years now on technologies that could work in our industry," Wirth said. He noted oil giants generate immense datasets on geological characteristics and more.
Wirth talked up AI and other advanced computing's ability to boost safety, asset reliability, geological understanding and carbon capture advances (to name a few!).
📝 Permitting: Wirth said he hopes Congress will take another swing at permitting following the "positive" but limited deal in the debt ceiling bill.
Goals include limits on judicial challenges to projects, and a better process for permitting injection wells used in carbon storage.
"Permitting used to be the way you build things" with proper consideration, but "permitting is now used to not build things in this country."
The other side: Activists fear that "permitting reform" will erode protections for communities next to fossil fuel projects.
Extreme weather and climate events across the globe continue to unfold simultaneously, breaking longstanding records from Siberia and China to Antarctica.
Between the lines: Notably, the record heat has been occurring ahead of the declaration of an El Niño event in the tropical Pacific Ocean.
These naturally occurring events will most likely boost global ocean temperatures even further.
The bottom line: It's become cliche for climate stories to say that we're in uncharted territory; but in this situation, it bears repeating.
We've never gone into an expected El Niño event with the oceans already so warm, making them prone to marine heat waves with their associated coral bleaching.
The unusual warmth is already contributing to heat waves on land before the hottest months of July and August, and will help fuel more intense tropical cyclones and precipitation extremes in the weeks and months ahead.
The bottom line: Expect more significant extreme events, many of them without modern precedent, to occur both at sea and on land during the coming year. (WaPo has more)
A new nonprofit group called the Carbon to Sea Initiative has raised over $50 million to back research and development into potentially accelerating carbon dioxide absorption into the world's oceans.
Driving the news: The philanthropy-backed group, spun out of Additional Ventures, is focused on better understanding the scaleability and safety of "ocean alkalinity enhancement" (OAE).
It aims to speed natural "weathering," in which alkaline minerals increase oceans' already mammoth CO2 uptake, while fighting ocean acidification.
What's next: The initiative will evaluate various OAE pathways, and "catalyze locally-owned and operated field research sites." The group also plans to "help develop responsible regulatory frameworks."
Zoom in: It has already committed $23 million in grants for four research projects, with recipients like the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and UC Santa Barbara.
It's also backing plans to build five "prototype solutions" and monitor them.
Funders include Additional Ventures, Astera, Builders Initiative, Catalyst for Impact, and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.
Reality check: OAE's emergence as a meaningful and safe climate tool is an "if," not a "when."
Why it matters: Carbon removal methods can compliment — but not replace —emissions-cutting tech like renewables to keep Paris Agreement temperature-limiting goals within reach, or help cool the world if they're overshot.
The bottom line: "If we find that OAE can be applied at scale, we can unlock one of the most efficient, cost-effective approaches to [carbon dioxide removal] for humanity," Mike Schroepfer, co-founder of Additional Ventures and the initiative's board chair, said in a statement.
Air quality across the northeastern U.S. and Canada has plummeted to unhealthy levels due to smoke from wildfires burning from Yukon to Nova Scotia, which caused a thick haze in New York and many other cities.
Why it matters: Because of the smoke that drifted over Tuesday and other forms of air pollution, New York City, Detroit and Toronto had among the worst air quality of all cities around the world overnight.
It's too late to stop summer Arctic sea ice melting — even in a low-emissions scenario that caps global warming at a 1.5°C target in line with the Paris Agreement, according to a new study.
Why it matters: The peer-reviewed findings on the effects of human-caused climate change in the region, published in Nature Communications, suggest the first ice-free summer could be in the 2030s. That's a decade sooner than previously projected.
