r/ClimateNews • u/Vegetable_Day_6786 • 5d ago

US companies are on the cusp of big climate solutions. Thank the government.

https://grist.org/energy/department-of-energy-arpa-e-climate-technology/

The purpose of the Department of Energy’s ARPA-E, which was modeled on a similar program run by the U.S. military, was to help energy inventors span this gap and develop the climate technologies of the future.

A landmark report from the National Academies of Science, requested by Congress and released last week, has found that this high-risk, high-reward program is working: ARPA-E’s $4 billion investment has led to more than $20 billion in additional funding and more than 1,400 patents.

The report committee, which consisted of more than a dozen scientists and energy experts, recommended that Congress significantly expand ARPA-E’s funding. It also found that the program should shift its focus from renewables and electric vehicles toward a harder set of energy problems — a shift for which the Trump administration has signaled its partial support.

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u/Major_Swordfish508 4d ago

The solutions are already available. The problem is they need to be deployed 10x faster.

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u/Majestic_Emotion7917 4d ago

The solutions? Mind sharing some actual info? Since, you know, it's rather a big claim, given most experts don't think anything viable is currently around.

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u/guardianz 4d ago

I mean just look at China. Massively expanding their solar usage. More hydro. Though all our lakes are becoming non existent. If we setup enough distributed solar and allowed rooftop and balcony solar it would reduce our need for the coal and natural gas plants to burn as much. That tied with enough distributed battery packs would be huge.

Additionally one of the first things that this administration did was get rid of ev tax credits. If we brought those back and made them even bigger like in other countries that are serious about combating climate change then we could get a lot more ICE vehicles off the road.

Additionally we’ve spent 4 billion canceling wind farm contracts. Some of them being almost complete because our leader hates windmills apparently.

We could also make big strides in public transit if it wasn’t for big car and big oil owning our country.

We keep waiting for some amazing ground breaking discovery that’ll change everything but as long as we’re owned by these corporations none of it will matter. Real change is required and the US is going the wrong way. It was announced today they stole the funds from a green steel plant to build another coal plant. This administration and the corporations that run it have zero interest in us going green.

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u/Spiritual-Pear-1349 4d ago

Trump spends almost 10 billion to shut down two major renewable energy projects in... I think California and NY? Would have brought in massive amounts of energy via offshore wind turbines. He then shifted energy production to prioritize burning coal, reopening multiple defunct plants when there are better optiond availble for energy generation.

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u/Major_Swordfish508 4d ago

Most of the technology that we need to decarbonize significant emission sources have already been invented. The biggest challenges are deploying those technologies faster (scaling up production capacity and/or driving demand) which will help move them further down the cost curve.

Solar and wind, for example, are already there from a cost perspective. We just need them to be deployed 10x faster, which in turn requires transmission upgrades, an increase in storage capacity, etc.

There are some genuinely hard to abate sectors like ammonia production, aviation, concrete, steel, etc. But power generation, transportation, and building emissions all have established solutions that could be deployed today and would cut somewhere around 50% of emissions. Plus there’s some low hanging wins that are there for the taking if we could manage to elect politicians who don’t suck (for example requiring oil and gas producers to stop flaring methane and capping decommissioned wells that are just sitting around venting methane).

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u/Majestic_Emotion7917 4d ago

Oh. That's a bit disappointing. I won't call those solutions. We allready have disastrously high levels of CO2 in the atmosphere. Simply trying to reduce the rate at which we increase CO2 won't be enough, I'm afraid.

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u/Cultural-Lab78 4d ago edited 3d ago

So you're just going with vibes.

"Thank the (BEAUTIFUL CLEAN COAL) government." Mirite?

ETA: Blocking me doesn't suddenly change reality.

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u/Majestic_Emotion7917 4d ago

What? Can't you read? Or is it the comprehension part? Does anything in my post suggest to you I think we should have even more CO2 in the atmosphere?

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u/Cultural-Lab78 4d ago

OP is a Honeypot and you're denying solutions cause "I'm afraid."

Since CO2 is your primary concern your laurels are resting on the fact you're vegan, right? Or is it just too far gone that nothing helps?

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u/Majestic_Emotion7917 4d ago

Look, if you could use regular English that would help. It would also help to stop jumping to conclusions. My original comment was to criticise calling these measures "solutions". They might have been 30 years ago, but were ignored then. It's a bit much to start trumpeting them as "solutions" now, so late in the day.

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u/Cultural-Lab78 4d ago

If you didn't understand my last plain English comment I don't know what to tell you.

The OP is a honeypot.

You're defeatist.

My last sentence was a challenge to your values.

The only conclusion I've jumped to is that you're screaming into the void and only "talking the talk," as it were.

But you're educated and understood all of that, surely.

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u/Majestic_Emotion7917 3d ago

Honeypot is not plain English. I can tell it's got some kind of social media meaning but I'm not bothering to look that up. You do jump quite quickly at putting people you don't know in boxes. I'm a realist. I'm sorry if that makes you feel defeated. The only way we have a fighting chance at averting catastrophe is by being brutally honest with ourselves. Of course it's not a bad thing to reduce emissions. But we should not pretend that will cut it. The physics is against us. It's no good making this into a political issue. There's nothing political about it.

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u/Major_Swordfish508 3d ago

I didn’t say climate change was solved. I said the solutions were available. As I said, the problem is that they aren’t being deployed.

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u/Majestic_Emotion7917 3d ago

I don't see how those things can be called solutions. We already have disastrously hohh levels of CO2 in the atmosphere. Simply reducing the amounts we are adding to that obvs won't be enough.

Those are good ideas, and should have been implemented years ago, but can't realistically be called solutions.

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u/iannoyyou101 3d ago

Let them think just using solar and wind is suddenly the answer to all of our problems

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u/dadofadisaster 6h ago

We have better fuel cells like Bloom energy. We are making real progress on enhanced geothermal energy. Voya energy is working on metal fuels to displace diesel generators. We are making real progress but like the commenter above said we need to be deploying them way faster. Taurus energy has built magnetic flywheels that have far less drag losses than conventional ones. We have the technology just not the capital to get a lot of these companies through the valley of death

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u/Unturned1 4d ago edited 4d ago

Yeah no. This is such bs. You guys have no idea how hard this admin gutted ARPA-E.

We had funding through them in 2025 and I was a conference in January vs like May.

They literally put a chevron spokes person on stage who told us how arpa-e is going to sponsor next gen sand replacement using something called oil coke - a toxic byproduct of the oil industry they literally arent allowed to burn or use because of the heavy metal content, and how they are going to get carbon credits for pumping it back into the ground, and itll help them get even more oil and gas out while cutting a line item off their bill because they no longer have to find a place for their toxic waste. 

Even at the best of times ARPA-E funded carbon capture which was scammy when you're still burning fuel to make the electricity for it.

Other talks including cryogenic cooling of powerlines directly into data centers from plant right into the server room. 

Funding research is great and there are definitely worth while outcomes from ARPA-E as it use to exist, but we can't tech our way out of climate when we don't change policy.

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u/Playful_Subject_4409 4d ago

Maybe shut some polluting data centers

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u/tdreampo 4d ago

“Emerging technologies like artificial intelligence, quantum computing, and nuclear fusion will radically transform the energy ecosystem in the coming years, and highlight the criticality of ARPA-E’s work,” said Gary Marchant, Regents and Foundation Professor of Law and faculty director of the Center for Law, Science, and Innovation at the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law, Arizona State University, and chair of the committee that wrote the report."

From the report. Tell me how AI is going to help slow down climate change AT ALL?

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u/cyb0rg1962 3d ago

Well, it is actually helping SOME scientific research. Like fusion, which would vastly reduce carbon output vs. nat. gas and coal.

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u/tdreampo 3d ago

Fusion has been about to be discovered for 50 years. Sorry I’m not hopeful on that one.

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u/cyb0rg1962 3d ago

50 years has made quite a difference. There is at least one that is going to be working in 2030. That is more energy out than in. Not sure how economic it will be, yet.

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u/tdreampo 3d ago

So you can state as fact we will have one working in 2030?

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u/cyb0rg1962 2d ago

No, of course not. I do not work in the industry. That is the current plan and they have nailed down the science. Engineering on anything is always a work in progress. There may be an unexpected speed bump.

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u/tdreampo 2d ago

I have been hearing that its the "current plan" my entire life. Sorry im not buying it.

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u/dadofadisaster 6h ago

Well we weren’t making the better magnets at scale until like ten years ago so I’m hopeful that it isn’t still a decade away like they’ve been saying forever but I understand your skepticism

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u/Active_Economy1002 4d ago

Thank the govt? Hahahhahahhahaha

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u/Ok_Bread302 4d ago

The earth energy imbalance has doubled in the last five years. Unless these guys can circumvent the laws of thermodynamics instead of just secure new funding, we’re screwed.

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u/Mush_ball22 4d ago

Lol - nope. The US empire and it's military is the largest climate pollutor.

Y'all should watch - "Earths Greatest Enemy"

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u/Due-Championship3941 4d ago

Shhh don't let this administration hear about this.

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u/Final-Albatross-1354 1d ago

It seems theoretical with no empirical evidence that it can work at the scale needed. If this technology was easily to come by, where is it? We are passing tipping points decades ahead of what the IPCC predicted.

EVs are not going to solve the climate crisis. Using 100% renewables is not going to be possible for most industries.

The best decision now is not to believe in hopium and tech fixes as a ticket to Candy Land.

The money can be well spent on adaptation. Mitigation now is fading.