| With the help of AI, we can limit heat-trapping contrails. |
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| | BLUE SKIES AHEAD: A British-based consortium is taking aim at a major source of aviation’s warming impact: contrails (short for condensation trails), those wispy cirrus clouds we see in the wake of an occasional jet aircraft. Contrails form when hot, moist air from a plane’s engine collides with cold, humid air at high altitudes. Water vapor in the atmosphere condenses around particles of jet soot and freezes into lines of ice crystals. Like all clouds, contrails trap heat. Their net warming power is greatest at night, when there’s no countervailing benefit of sunlight reflection. All in all, they account for around 35 percent of civil aviation’s climate impact–equivalent to an additional ~600 megatons of CO2e emissions per year.
The encouraging news is that a contrail solution–or at least a partial one–may be within reach. In a trial initiative with American Airlines, Google used tens of thousands of satellite images to train an AI vision model. Pilots followed the model’s predictions to avoid “persistent” contrails, often by flying slightly lower to skirt icier regions of the atmosphere. (They made these adjustments in real time, much as they would to dodge turbulence.) The result was an impressive proof point: a 54 percent reduction in contrails at a cost of just 0.3 percent more fuel across the airline’s fleet.
The next step is Operation Blue Skies, where Google is working with the British air traffic control service to scale the initiative to around 10,000 flights in the North Atlantic corridor over the next two winters, when much of contrail warming is concentrated. If the project confirms the trial’s success, it will be a verifiable stride toward net zero.
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| | | 🚗 1.0 – Electrify Transportation Plane Electric: Heart Aerospace’s 30-seat X1, the largest battery-powered plane yet to leave the ground, flew 27 minutes on batteries alone over upstate New York. Its pure-electric range tops out around 125 miles, but the next model (coming in 2031) will add a combustion range extender to approach 500 miles, at a projected operating cost 40 percent less than a traditional regional aircraft (Popular Science). Kick-Start: Electric two-wheeler sales in Pakistan rose 173 percent in the first half of 2026, a jump attributed to higher oil prices and government subsidies. Over 80 companies now sell in a market that scarcely existed three years ago–a welcome development in Pakistan, a place that’s acutely vulnerable to climate change (New York Times).
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| | CHINA TAKES THE WHEEL: China’s EV market offers an exhilarating glimpse of where the global auto industry may be headed. China now makes roughly 75% of the world’s EVs. A recent ABC report pulls back the curtain on what that scale and investment have produced: standard features that would be luxury items or unavailable elsewhere, including massage seats, huge screens, onboard refrigerators, and ultra-fast, five-minute charging. The latest commercial innovations range from battery swapping stations to autonomous flying cars. The even bigger story is how quickly China has moved from imitator to innovator. Ezra Klein and Kevin Rudd describe an industrial ecosystem that can now build EVs at a scale, speed, and cost the U.S. and Europe will be hard-pressed to match. Klein notes that Chinese EVs are being kept out of the U.S. not because they are inferior, but because they are so competitive they could overwhelm U.S. manufacturers. Given China’s flat domestic market, Rudd says that the country’s next best step is to deploy their surplus production on the global market–and in particular in Europe. |
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| | 💡 2.0 – Decarbonize the Grid Load and Behold: The average U.S. monthly electricity bill spiked to an all-time high of $217 in July. In Virginia, the epicenter of the data center boom, bills for Dominion customers rose to an average of $259. Much of the increase was due to a “fuel charge rider” to help recover about $1 billion in additional generation costs claimed by Dominion (Heatmap News). Windfall: The Trump administration has spent close to $4 billion to buy out offshore wind development rights, including $1.2 billion to the German energy company RWE to abandon three projects. Marking the end of the first U.S. offshore wind boom, the payouts amount to bailouts for projects already failing on capital costs and interest rates (Heatmap News).
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| 🐄 3.0 – Fix Food Crop Shock: After a withering heat wave summer, European agriculture is in crisis. France’s maize harvest is projected to fall 35 percent from 2025, to the lowest level since 1980. Crop yields in Italy have been clobbered by drought, intense storms, and wildfires, while cereal harvests in the Madrid region in Spain are down by nearly half. Egg production has been hit by a “catastrophic” mortality rate in poultry houses, and livestock farmers are grappling with reduced milk yields and a looming shortage of winter cattle forage (The Guardian). Heme Grown: Researchers at Imperial College London inserted the gene for myoglobin, the iron-rich protein that gives beef its red color and savory flavor, into the chloroplasts of tobacco and lettuce. While still in a proof-of-concept phase, this discovery could improve plant-based meat’s color and might even make it taste better (Food & Wine).
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| 🌳 4.0 – Protect Nature
Rules Unraveled: After developing more ambitious wildfire safety regulations over the past several years, legislators in Washington state have backtracked amid public pushback. A number of Western states now lack statewide wildfire rules and codes, or even maps of high-risk areas to address a growing threat (NPR). Drone Danger: As a raging wildfire advanced toward homes in Spokane County, Washington, a privately owned drone forced officials to ground firefighting aircraft for nearly two hours to avoid a potential collision. It wasn’t an isolated circumstance; drones have been spotted over fires in the county nearly 40 times this year. In 2025, more than 200 drones were sighted nationally above wildfires, against just 125 in the previous seven years combined (New York Times).
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| 🧱 5.0 – Clean Up Industry Trash Talk: After more than two years of continuous tracking at a major New Jersey landfill, it appears that methane emissions may be severely undercounted by typical fair-weather aircraft surveys. The New Jersey study determined that actual 2023 methane emissions ran five times higher than the previous estimate by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. It found that emissions peak in early winter, when methane-generating bacteria stay active below the surface (Columbia Climate School). Wrap Sheet: On August 12, the EU’s Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation replaced rules written in the 1990s and will set limits on “forever chemicals” (PFAS) in pizza boxes, popcorn bags, and other food contact packaging. The new regulation also mandates a 5 percent reduction in packaging waste against 2018 levels (Reuters).
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| 🧹 6.0 – Remove Carbon Drain Gain: Microsoft agreed to buy up to 23,602 carbon removal units from Crew Carbon, a Yale spinout that adds alkaline minerals to wastewater treatment streams to accelerate mineral weathering. Crew says the approach bolts onto existing infrastructure while sidestepping the extensive permitting and federal support other carbon removal methods require (ESG Today). Fizzy Math: AirMyne, a Bay Area direct air capture startup, is selling a lychee soda carbonated in part by CO2 pulled from the atmosphere through direct air capture (DAC). With limited demand for DAC at current prices, the soda could be a gateway to sell people on the technology (Heatmap News).
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| 🏛️ 7.0 – Win Politics And Policy Pay Dirt: In two national surveys of 4,000 respondents, people were on average willing to pay far more for climate adaptation policies (up to $300 a year) than for mitigation policies such as waste management ($54) or tree planting ($52) (Urban Affairs Review).
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| 🏃 8.0 – Turn Movements Into Action Future at Work: Nearly 60 percent of British teenagers say that green jobs are more valuable than traditional careers, while 45 percent would consider taking a green job instead of pursuing higher education. The survey also found strong demand for clearer pathways into the green workforce (Business Green). Radio Silence: In contrast to the incumbent hyperscalers, OpenAI, Anthropic, and SpaceX have yet to publish any emissions data, net-zero targets, or sustainability reports. Investors by and large seem indifferent; funds focused on ESG or environmental themes lost $82 billion last year (Bloomberg).
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| ⚡ 9.0 – Innovate! We Have Liftoff: American Airlines flew the first U.S. commercial flight powered by electro-sustainable aviation fuel, made from clean energy, water, and captured carbon dioxide. The eSAF, from Infinium’s Pathfinder plant, is claimed to cut lifecycle emissions more than 90 percent as compared to standard petroleum jet fuel. There’s a long way to go; though SAF production nearly doubled in 2025, it accounted for just 0.6 percent of airline fuel consumption (ESG Today). Critical Mass: After decades of stalled nuclear development, three next-generation, smaller-footprint nuclear reactors reached major testing milestones this summer at Idaho National Laboratory and a Utah site. The projects are advancing as the Trump administration speeds up reactor permitting, though critics warn that reduced oversight and staffing cuts could weaken nuclear safety reviews (NPR).
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| 💰 10.0 – Invest! Rule of Three: The All Aboard Coalition closed its first fund at $133 million to back climate technologies in the “missing middle,” the capital-intensive stretch between early venture rounds and infrastructure finance. Capital deploys when three or more member investors commit meaningful capital to the same financing round, with three deals done so far (ESG Today). Surge Protection: U.S. clean energy and transportation investment hit $75 billion in the second quarter, the second-highest quarterly total on record and up 22 percent from Q1. Residential battery storage doubled the prior quarter’s total at $12 billion, while manufacturing investment rose 4 percent to break a streak of six straight quarters of decline (Semafor).
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