Latest news with #Musk-funded
Vox
2 days ago
- Automotive
- Vox
The big reason why Republicans should worry about an angry Elon Musk
In the November 2026 midterm elections, Elon Musk could have much more impact for much less money. Allison Robbert/AFP via Getty Images How the Musk-Trump blowup ends, nobody knows. Most commentary gives President Donald Trump the advantage. But Elon Musk's willingness to spend his fortune on elections gives him one distinct advantage — the ability to drive a brittle party system into chaos and loosen Trump's hold on it. Thus far, Musk has raised two electoral threats. First, his opposition to Trump's One Big, Beautiful Bill has raised the specter of his funding primary challenges against Republicans who vote to support the legislation. Second, he has raised the possibility of starting a new political party. There are limits to how much Musk can actually reshape the political landscape — but the underlying conditions of our politics make it uniquely vulnerable to disruption. The threat of Musk-funded primaries might ring a little hollow. Trump will almost certainly still be beloved by core Republican voters in 2026. Musk can fund primary challengers, but in a low-information, low-turnout environment of mostly Trump-loving loyal partisans, he is unlikely to succeed. However, in the November 2026 midterm elections, Musk could have much more impact for much less money. All he needs to do is fund a few spoiler third-party candidates in a few key swing states and districts. In so doing, he would exploit the vulnerability that has been hiding in plain sight for a while — the wafer-thin closeness of national elections. The Logoff The email you need to stay informed about Trump — without letting the news take over your life, from senior editor Patrick Reis. Email (required) Sign Up By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Notice . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. In a straight-up battle for the soul of the Republican Party, Trump wins hands down. Not even close. Trump has been the party's leader and cult of personality for a decade. But in a battle for the balance of power, Musk might hold the cards. Currently, the US political system is 'calcified.' That's how the political scientists John Sides, Chris Tausanovitch, and Lynn Vavreck described it in their 2022 book, The Bitter End: The 2020 Presidential Campaign and the Challenge to American Democracy. Partisans keep voting for their side, seeing only the reality that makes them the heroes; events may change, but minds don't. In a 48-48 country, that means little opportunity for either party to make big gains. It also means a small disruption could have massive implications. Elon Musk doesn't have a winning coalition — but he may not need one to hurt Trump Let's imagine, for a moment, that Musk is serious about starting a new political party and running candidates. He will quickly find that despite his X poll, a party that 'actually represents the 80 percent in the middle' is a fantasy. That mythical center? Being generous here, that's maybe 15 percent of politically checked-out Americans. Realistically, the coalition for Musk's politics — techno-libertarian-futurist, anti-system, very online, Axe-level bro-vibes — would be small. But even so, a Musk-powered independent party — call it the 'Colonize Mars' Party — would almost certainly attract exactly the voters completely disenchanted with both parties, mostly the disillusioned young men who went to Trump in the 2024 election. Imagine Musk funds his Colonize Mars Party in every competitive race, recruiting energetic candidates. He gives disenchanted voters a chance to flip off the system: Vote for us, and you can throw the entire Washington establishment into a panic! Practically, not many seats in the midterms will be up for grabs. Realistically, about 40 or so House seats will be genuine swing seats. In the Senate, there are realistically only about seven competitive races. But that means a small party of disruption could multiply the targeted impact of a precision blast with a well-chosen 5 percent of the electorate in less than 10 percent of the seats. Quite a payoff. The short-term effect would be to help Democrats. Musk used to be a Democrat, so this is not so strange. If Musk and his tech allies care about immigration, trade, and investment in domestic science, supporting Democrats may make more sense. And if Musk mostly cares about disruption and sending Trump spiraling, this is how he would do it. Musk is an engineer at heart. His successes have emerged from him examining existing systems, finding their weak points, and asking, What if we do something totally different? From an engineer's perspective, the American political system has a unique vulnerability. Every election hangs on a narrow margin. The balance of power is tenuous. Since 1992, we've been in an extended period in which partisan control of the White House, Senate, and the House has continually oscillated between parties. National electoral margins remain wickedly tight (we haven't had a landslide national election since 1984). And as elections come to depend on fewer and fewer swing states and districts, a targeted strike on these pivotal elections could completely upend the system. A perfectly balanced and completely unstable system It's a system ripe for disruption. So why has nobody disrupted it? First, it takes money — and Musk has a lot of it. Money has its limits — Musk's claim that his money helped Trump win the election is dubious. Our elections are already saturated with money. In an era of high partisan loyalty, the vast majority of voters have made up their minds before the candidate is even announced. Most money is wasted. It hits decreasing marginal returns fast. The very thing that makes our politics feel so stuck is exactly what makes it so susceptible to Musk's threat. But where money can make a difference is in reaching angry voters disenchanted with both parties with a protest option. Money buys awareness more than anything else. For $300 million (roughly what Musk spent in 2024), a billionaire could have leverage in some close elections. For $3 billion (about 1 percent of Musk's fortune) the chance of success goes up considerably. Second, disruption is possible when there are enough voters who are indifferent to the final outcome. The reason Ross Perot did so well in 1992? Enough voters saw no difference between the parties that they felt fine casting a protest vote. Election after election, we've gone through the same pattern. Throw out the old bums, bring in the new bums — even if 90-plus percent of the electorate votes for the same bums, year in and year out. But in a 48-48 country, with only a few competitive states and districts, a rounding-error shift of 10,000 votes across a few states (far fewer than a typical Taylor Swift concert) can bestow full control of the government. Think of elections as anti-incumbent roulette. The system is indeed 'calcified,' as Sides, Tausanovitch, and Vavreck convincingly argue. Calcified can mean immovable. But it can also mean brittle. Indeed, the very thing that makes our politics feel so stuck is exactly what makes it so susceptible to Musk's threat.
Yahoo
23-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Elon Musk bankrolled a $100M climate contest. Now critics say it's ‘tainted.'
Time magazine selected Elon Musk as its "person of the year" in 2021 after the billionaire entrepreneur upended the car market, reinvigorated the space industry and funded a $100 million competition for climate technologies that would remove carbon dioxide from the air and sea. But Musk won't attend Time's event in New York City on Wednesday to fete the winners of that groundbreaking contest. The $50 million grand prize will go to Mati Carbon, a Houston-based startup founded three years ago that works with crushed rocks and subsistence farmers to soak up climate pollution. It's unclear why Musk — an environmental hero turned MAGA diehard — is skipping the capstone event for a climate contest bankrolled via his eponymous foundation. Neither he nor Time responded to requests for comment. The XPrize will be announced at the Time100 Summit, the magazine's annual event featuring 100 influential people. In addition to running electric-vehicle-maker Tesla and the aerospace firm SpaceX, Musk is leading President Donald Trump's effort to downsize the federal government. The Department of Government Efficiency has slashed climate funding for research, projects and agencies. "We live in very complicated times," said Nikki Batchelor, who led the Musk-funded carbon removal competition at the XPrize Foundation. Prior to joining the nonprofit, she worked as an innovation adviser for the U.S. Agency for International Development — the first federal bureau effectively shuttered by Musk. (Musk has no ties to the three-decade-old foundation aside from being a donor.) "He was one of the leading voices trying to push clean energy forward and think about innovative solutions to tackling climate change," she said of Musk, the world's richest person. "We've continued on with that." Batchelor spoke with POLITICO's E&E News before XPrize publicly announced the final carbon removal contest winners, each of which removed at least 1,000 tons of CO2 in a year and provided a business plan for how they'll reach 1 million tons annually. Since 2019, carbon removal companies have locked away about 650,000 tons in total — less than the annual emissions of two natural gas power plants. The runners-up were NetZero, Vaulted Deep and Undo Carbon, which netted prizes of $15 million, $8 million and $5 million respectively. Undo Carbon uses an enhanced rock weathering approach similar to Mati to remove CO2 from the air faster than the natural carbon cycle. NetZero and Vaulted Deep both lock away CO2 by preventing carbon-rich organic matter from biodegrading. Commercializing carbon removal technologies is important because the world is unlikely to reduce the burning of oil, gas and coal quickly enough to prevent the buildup of dangerous levels of heat-trapping carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and oceans. As a result, climate scientists have concluded that it will be necessary in the coming decades to increase the Earth's carbon removal capacity by billions of metric tons annually. During the course of the four-year XPrize competition, then-President Joe Biden signed legislation and oversaw the establishment of programs that sought to reduce the nation's dependence on fossil fuels and spur carbon removal innovation. Now the Trump administration — with help from Musk and a Republican-controlled Congress — is moving to undo many of those federal climate initiatives, which Trump has derided as a "green new scam." As a result, critics say Musk has gone from one of the carbon removal industry's earliest supporters to perhaps its biggest threat. "Musk sold himself out, and I think that's reprehensible," said Wil Burns, the co-director of the Institute for Responsible Carbon Removal at American University, who helped set up guidelines for the XPrize contest. Musk announced the contest four years ago with a cryptic tweet that seemed to conflate technologies to remove carbon that's already been emitted with ones that capture CO2 from smokestacks. "Am donating $100M towards a prize for best carbon capture technology," he wrote in January 2021. "Details next week." On Earth Day that year, XPrize founder Peter Diamandis joined Musk near Cape Canaveral, Florida, for a livestreamed conversation about the carbon removal contest. Musk, who wore a black T-shirt and no shoes, downplayed the risks of climate change and said he was more concerned about "super-advanced" artificial intelligence and "population collapse." At that point, carbon removal technologies were widely viewed as theoretically possible rather than scientifically sound. The consensus began to shift later in 2021 when the Swiss firm Climeworks opened the world's first commercial-scale carbon removal facility outside of Reykjavík, Iceland. In the U.S., lawmakers passed a bipartisan infrastructure bill that included $3.5 billion to establish four hubs capable of removing 1 million tons of CO2 per year using the direct air capture technology Climeworks had pioneered. The following year, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded that deploying tech to filter CO2 from the air and oceans would be necessary to avoid catastrophic global warming. The economic case for carbon removal got a boost in 2022 when a coalition of tech companies committed to purchasing $925 million for carbon removal by the end of the decade and U.S. lawmakers expanded subsidies for direct air capture. Musk helped set in motion a wave of support from big business and U.S. policymakers that led to a surge in carbon removal startups. Of the 1,300 teams that took part in the Musk-funded carbon removal competition, XPrize estimates that half were formed after the contest began. That includes Mati, the grand prize winner, which is a public benefit corporation owned by a nonprofit. The unusual legal structure allows the company to prioritize its mission to deploy carbon removal while benefiting subsistence farmers in the Global South, according to CEO Shantanu Agarwal. He is a former oil field services engineer and venture capitalist who previously founded the direct air capture firm Sustaera. "I saw the potential of enhanced rock weathering as a much more scalable pathway right now, in the current world, and the significant co-benefits, which it brings to the smallholder farmers," Agarwal said. Mati works with farmers in India, Zambia and Tanzania to spread locally sourced minerals on their fields. The crushed rocks soak up carbon and reduce runoff for the rain-dependent farms. The company also sells carbon removal credits and shares the revenue with the farmers, who are vulnerable to drought, extreme weather and other climate perils. "We have to create business models which add value to human life [and] at the same time solve for climate," Agarwal said. "You can't just do climate in isolation. It just doesn't work. It cannot be done because humans are not wired that way, to go and clean a common good." Mati's $50 million prize is five times more than the company had previously raised, Agarwal said. The infusion of cash should allow it to expand to several new countries faster than it had planned and reduce the cost of its removals to $100 per ton, down from nearly $400 today. But the potential good Mati can do for farmers and the climate pales in comparison to the work previously done by the federal government via agencies like USAID, which spent a combined $11 billion on humanitarian and agricultural assistance in fiscal 2024. Musk in February called USAID "a criminal organization" and said it was time for the agency "to die." The Trump administration's 2026 budget request is expected to complete the dismantling of the six-decade-old agency and roll its remaining programs into the State Department. Mati and other carbon removal companies have also benefited from collaborations with researchers in academia and the federal government. The Trump administration has canceled thousands of university research grants and purged the U.S. bureaucracy of much of its carbon removal know-how. "The funding cuts that Musk is effectuating, and lopping off expertise in government that's really critical to drive this development, certainly outweighs whatever benefits we get from the XPrize," said Burns, the carbon removal expert who is also an environmental policy professor at Northwestern University. Those efforts have "tainted it, to be associated with him." "That's unfortunate," Burns added, acknowledging the significance of the capital and publicity the competition has provided for the winners. "A lot of people are going to hear Musk and just walk away." XPrize, which previously collaborated with the divisive billionaire on a global education contest, seems ready to move past Musk. Batchelor, the group's executive director of carbon removal, said "there are no conversations" at this time with the Musk Foundation about supporting future competitions. XPrize hopes the announcement of the winners can be "a bright spot for folks in climate and the carbon removal industry, especially, to rally around how much progress we've made in four years," she said. "It can also be a jumping off point for others to build momentum around scaling, despite some of those distractions in the background."
Scientific American
23-04-2025
- Business
- Scientific American
Musk Funded the Carbon-Removal XPrize but Is Now Slashing Climate Research
CLIMATEWIRE | Time magazine selected Elon Musk as its "person of the year" in 2021 after the billionaire entrepreneur upended the car market, reinvigorated the space industry and funded a $100 million competition for climate technologies that would remove carbon dioxide from the air and sea. But Musk won't attend Time 's event in New York City on Wednesday to fete the winners of that groundbreaking contest. The $50 million grand prize will go to Mati Carbon, a Houston-based startup founded three years ago that works with crushed rocks and subsistence farmers to soak up climate pollution. It's unclear why Musk — an environmental hero turned MAGA diehard — is skipping the capstone event for a climate contest bankrolled via his eponymous foundation. Neither he nor Time responded to requests for comment. The XPrize will be announced at the Time100 Summit, the magazine's annual event featuring 100 influential people. On supporting science journalism If you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today. In addition to running electric-vehicle-maker Tesla and the aerospace firm SpaceX, Musk is leading President Donald Trump's effort to downsize the federal government. The Department of Government Efficiency has slashed climate funding for research, projects and agencies. "We live in very complicated times," said Nikki Batchelor, who led the Musk-funded carbon removal competition at the XPrize Foundation. Prior to joining the nonprofit, she worked as an innovation adviser for the U.S. Agency for International Development — the first federal bureau effectively shuttered by Musk. (Musk has no ties to the three-decade-old foundation aside from being a donor.) "He was one of the leading voices trying to push clean energy forward and think about innovative solutions to tackling climate change," she said of Musk, the world's richest person. "We've continued on with that." Batchelor spoke with POLITICO's E&E News before XPrize publicly announced the final carbon removal contest winners, each of which removed at least 1,000 tons of CO2 in a year and provided a business plan for how they'll reach 1 million tons annually. Since 2019, carbon removal companies have locked away about 650,000 tons in total — less than the annual emissions of two natural gas power plants. The runners-up were NetZero, Vaulted Deep and Undo Carbon, which netted prizes of $15 million, $8 million and $5 million respectively. Undo Carbon uses an enhanced rock weathering approach similar to Mati to remove CO2 from the air faster than the natural carbon cycle. NetZero and Vaulted Deep both lock away CO2 by preventing carbon-rich organic matter from biodegrading. Commercializing carbon removal technologies is important because the world is unlikely to reduce the burning of oil, gas and coal quickly enough to prevent the buildup of dangerous levels of heat-trapping carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and oceans. As a result, climate scientists have concluded that it will be necessary in the coming decades to increase the Earth's carbon removal capacity by billions of metric tons annually. During the course of the four-year XPrize competition, then-President Joe Biden signed legislation and oversaw the establishment of programs that sought to reduce the nation's dependence on fossil fuels and spur carbon removal innovation. Now the Trump administration — with help from Musk and a Republican-controlled Congress — is moving to undo many of those federal climate initiatives, which Trump has derided as a "green new scam." As a result, critics say Musk has gone from one of the carbon removal industry's earliest supporters to perhaps its biggest threat. "Musk sold himself out, and I think that's reprehensible," said Wil Burns, the co-director of the Institute for Responsible Carbon Removal at American University, who helped set up guidelines for the XPrize contest. Musk's $100M tweet Musk announced the contest four years ago with a cryptic tweet that seemed to conflate technologies to remove carbon that's already been emitted with ones that capture CO2 from smokestacks. "Am donating $100M towards a prize for best carbon capture technology," he wrote in January 2021. "Details next week." On Earth Day that year, XPrize founder Peter Diamandis joined Musk near Cape Canaveral, Florida, for a livestreamed conversation about the carbon removal contest. Musk, who wore a black T-shirt and no shoes, downplayed the risks of climate change and said he was more concerned about "super-advanced" artificial intelligence and "population collapse." At that point, carbon removal technologies were widely viewed as theoretically possible rather than scientifically sound. The consensus began to shift later in 2021 when the Swiss firm Climeworks opened the world's first commercial-scale carbon removal facility outside of Reykjavík, Iceland. In the U.S., lawmakers passed a bipartisan infrastructure bill that included $3.5 billion to establish four hubs capable of removing 1 million tons of CO2 per year using the direct air capture technology Climeworks had pioneered. The following year, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded that deploying tech to filter CO2 from the air and oceans would be necessary to avoid catastrophic global warming. The economic case for carbon removal got a boost in 2022 when a coalition of tech companies committed to purchasing $925 million for carbon removal by the end of the decade and U.S. lawmakers expanded subsidies for direct air capture. Crushed rock and small farms Musk helped set in motion a wave of support from big business and U.S. policymakers that led to a surge in carbon removal startups. Of the 1,300 teams that took part in the Musk-funded carbon removal competition, XPrize estimates that half were formed after the contest began. That includes Mati, the grand prize winner, which is a public benefit corporation owned by a nonprofit. The unusual legal structure allows the company to prioritize its mission to deploy carbon removal while benefiting subsistence farmers in the Global South, according to CEO Shantanu Agarwal. He is a former oil field services engineer and venture capitalist who previously founded the direct air capture firm Sustaera. 'The funding cuts that Musk is effectuating, and lopping off expertise in government that's really critical to drive this development, certainly outweighs whatever benefits we get from the XPrize.' —Wil Burns, co-director of the Institute for Responsible Carbon Removal at American University "I saw the potential of enhanced rock weathering as a much more scalable pathway right now, in the current world, and the significant co-benefits, which it brings to the smallholder farmers," Agarwal said. Mati works with farmers in India, Zambia and Tanzania to spread locally sourced minerals on their fields. The crushed rocks soak up carbon and reduce runoff for the rain-dependent farms. The company also sells carbon removal credits and shares the revenue with the farmers, who are vulnerable to drought, extreme weather and other climate perils. "We have to create business models which add value to human life [and] at the same time solve for climate," Agarwal said. "You can't just do climate in isolation. It just doesn't work. It cannot be done because humans are not wired that way, to go and clean a common good." Mati's $50 million prize is five times more than the company had previously raised, Agarwal said. The infusion of cash should allow it to expand to several new countries faster than it had planned and reduce the cost of its removals to $100 per ton, down from nearly $400 today. The Musk effect But the potential good Mati can do for farmers and the climate pales in comparison to the work previously done by the federal government via agencies like USAID, which spent a combined $11 billion on humanitarian and agricultural assistance in fiscal 2024. Musk in February called USAID"a criminal organization" and said it was time for the agency "to die." The Trump administration's 2026 budget request is expected to complete the dismantling of the six-decade-old agency and roll its remaining programs into the State Department. Mati and other carbon removal companies have also benefited from collaborations with researchers in academia and the federal government. The Trump administration has canceled thousands of university research grants and purged the U.S. bureaucracy of much of its carbon removal know-how. "The funding cuts that Musk is effectuating, and lopping off expertise in government that's really critical to drive this development, certainly outweighs whatever benefits we get from the XPrize," said Burns, the carbon removal expert who is also an environmental policy professor at Northwestern University. Those efforts have "tainted it, to be associated with him." "That's unfortunate," Burns added, acknowledging the significance of the capital and publicity the competition has provided for the winners. "A lot of people are going to hear Musk and just walk away." XPrize, which previously collaborated with the divisive billionaire on a global education contest, seems ready to move past Musk. Batchelor, the group's executive director of carbon removal, said "there are no conversations" at this time with the Musk Foundation about supporting future competitions. XPrize hopes the announcement of the winners can be "a bright spot for folks in climate and the carbon removal industry, especially, to rally around how much progress we've made in four years," she said. "It can also be a jumping off point for others to build momentum around scaling, despite some of those distractions in the background."
Politico
23-04-2025
- Business
- Politico
Elon Musk bankrolled a $100M climate contest. Now critics say it's ‘tainted.'
Time magazine selected Elon Musk as its 'person of the year' in 2021 after the billionaire entrepreneur upended the car market, reinvigorated the space industry and funded a $100 million competition for climate technologies that would remove carbon dioxide from the air and sea. But Musk won't attend Time's event in New York City on Wednesday to fete the winners of that groundbreaking contest. The $50 million grand prize will go to Mati Carbon, a Houston-based startup founded three years ago that works with crushed rocks and subsistence farmers to soak up climate pollution. It's unclear why Musk — an environmental hero turned MAGA diehard — is skipping the capstone event for a climate contest bankrolled via his eponymous foundation. Neither he nor Time responded to requests for comment. The XPrize will be announced at the Time100 Summit, the magazine's annual event featuring 100 influential people. In addition to running electric-vehicle-maker Tesla and the aerospace firm SpaceX, Musk is leading President Donald Trump's effort to downsize the federal government. The Department of Government Efficiency has slashed climate funding for research, projects and agencies. 'We live in very complicated times,' said Nikki Batchelor, who led the Musk-funded carbon removal competition at the XPrize Foundation. Prior to joining the nonprofit, she worked as an innovation adviser for the U.S. Agency for International Development — the first federal bureau effectively shuttered by Musk . (Musk has no ties to the three-decade-old foundation aside from being a donor.) 'He was one of the leading voices trying to push clean energy forward and think about innovative solutions to tackling climate change,' she said of Musk, the world's richest person. 'We've continued on with that.' Batchelor spoke with POLITICO's E&E News before XPrize publicly announced the final carbon removal contest winners, each of which removed at least 1,000 tons of CO2 in a year and provided a business plan for how they'll reach 1 million tons annually. Since 2019, carbon removal companies have locked away about 650,000 tons in total — less than the annual emissions of two natural gas power plants. The runners-up were NetZero, Vaulted Deep and Undo Carbon, which netted prizes of $15 million, $8 million and $5 million respectively. Undo Carbon uses an enhanced rock weathering approach similar to Mati to remove CO2 from the air faster than the natural carbon cycle. NetZero and Vaulted Deep both lock away CO2 by preventing carbon-rich organic matter from biodegrading. Commercializing carbon removal technologies is important because the world is unlikely to reduce the burning of oil, gas and coal quickly enough to prevent the buildup of dangerous levels of heat-trapping carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and oceans. As a result, climate scientists have concluded that it will be necessary in the coming decades to increase the Earth's carbon removal capacity by billions of metric tons annually. During the course of the four-year XPrize competition, then-President Joe Biden signed legislation and oversaw the establishment of programs that sought to reduce the nation's dependence on fossil fuels and spur carbon removal innovation. Now the Trump administration — with help from Musk and a Republican-controlled Congress — is moving to undo many of those federal climate initiatives, which Trump has derided as a 'green new scam.' As a result, critics say Musk has gone from one of the carbon removal industry's earliest supporters to perhaps its biggest threat. 'Musk sold himself out, and I think that's reprehensible,' said Wil Burns, the co-director of the Institute for Responsible Carbon Removal at American University, who helped set up guidelines for the XPrize contest. Musk announced the contest four years ago with a cryptic tweet that seemed to conflate technologies to remove carbon that's already been emitted with ones that capture CO2 from smokestacks. 'Am donating $100M towards a prize for best carbon capture technology,' he wrote in January 2021. 'Details next week.' On Earth Day that year, XPrize founder Peter Diamandis joined Musk near Cape Canaveral, Florida, for a livestreamed conversation about the carbon removal contest. Musk, who wore a black T-shirt and no shoes, downplayed the risks of climate change and said he was more concerned about 'super-advanced' artificial intelligence and 'population collapse.' At that point, carbon removal technologies were widely viewed as theoretically possible rather than scientifically sound. The consensus began to shift later in 2021 when the Swiss firm Climeworks opened the world's first commercial-scale carbon removal facility outside of Reykjavík, Iceland. In the U.S., lawmakers passed a bipartisan infrastructure bill that included $3.5 billion to establish four hubs capable of removing 1 million tons of CO2 per year using the direct air capture technology Climeworks had pioneered. The following year, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded that deploying tech to filter CO2 from the air and oceans would be necessary to avoid catastrophic global warming. The economic case for carbon removal got a boost in 2022 when a coalition of tech companies committed to purchasing $925 million for carbon removal by the end of the decade and U.S. lawmakers expanded subsidies for direct air capture . Musk helped set in motion a wave of support from big business and U.S. policymakers that led to a surge in carbon removal startups. Of the 1,300 teams that took part in the Musk-funded carbon removal competition, XPrize estimates that half were formed after the contest began. That includes Mati, the grand prize winner, which is a public benefit corporation owned by a nonprofit. The unusual legal structure allows the company to prioritize its mission to deploy carbon removal while benefiting subsistence farmers in the Global South, according to CEO Shantanu Agarwal. He is a former oil field services engineer and venture capitalist who previously founded the direct air capture firm Sustaera. 'I saw the potential of enhanced rock weathering as a much more scalable pathway right now, in the current world, and the significant co-benefits, which it brings to the smallholder farmers,' Agarwal said. Mati works with farmers in India, Zambia and Tanzania to spread locally sourced minerals on their fields. The crushed rocks soak up carbon and reduce runoff for the rain-dependent farms. The company also sells carbon removal credits and shares the revenue with the farmers, who are vulnerable to drought, extreme weather and other climate perils. 'We have to create business models which add value to human life [and] at the same time solve for climate,' Agarwal said. 'You can't just do climate in isolation. It just doesn't work. It cannot be done because humans are not wired that way, to go and clean a common good.' Mati's $50 million prize is five times more than the company had previously raised, Agarwal said. The infusion of cash should allow it to expand to several new countries faster than it had planned and reduce the cost of its removals to $100 per ton, down from nearly $400 today. But the potential good Mati can do for farmers and the climate pales in comparison to the work previously done by the federal government via agencies like USAID, which spent a combined $11 billion on humanitarian and agricultural assistance in fiscal 2024. Musk in February called USAID 'a criminal organization' and said it was time for the agency 'to die.' The Trump administration's 2026 budget request is expected to complete the dismantling of the six-decade-old agency and roll its remaining programs into the State Department. Mati and other carbon removal companies have also benefited from collaborations with researchers in academia and the federal government. The Trump administration has canceled thousands of university research grants and purged the U.S. bureaucracy of much of its carbon removal know-how. 'The funding cuts that Musk is effectuating, and lopping off expertise in government that's really critical to drive this development, certainly outweighs whatever benefits we get from the XPrize,' said Burns, the carbon removal expert who is also an environmental policy professor at Northwestern University. Those efforts have 'tainted it, to be associated with him.' 'That's unfortunate,' Burns added, acknowledging the significance of the capital and publicity the competition has provided for the winners. 'A lot of people are going to hear Musk and just walk away.' XPrize, which previously collaborated with the divisive billionaire on a global education contest, seems ready to move past Musk. Batchelor, the group's executive director of carbon removal, said 'there are no conversations' at this time with the Musk Foundation about supporting future competitions. XPrize hopes the announcement of the winners can be 'a bright spot for folks in climate and the carbon removal industry, especially, to rally around how much progress we've made in four years,' she said. 'It can also be a jumping off point for others to build momentum around scaling, despite some of those distractions in the background.'
USA Today
01-04-2025
- Politics
- USA Today
Wisconsin Supreme Court election comes with high stakes and huge spending: What to know
Wisconsin is no stranger to the national spotlight. A longstanding member on the list of swing states going back two decades, the Badger State is regularly scrutinized by campaigns and politicos in the lead up to presidential elections – including the 2024 contest won by President Donald Trump. This week, a Wisconsin race to control the balance of power on the state Supreme Court is shaping up to be a key temperature check on voters' moods about both national parties - as well as a referendum on President Donald Trump, Elon Musk and GOP dominance back in Washington. What to know: Wisconsin, Florida voters are up next in 2025 'It's really the first major election since Trump and Republicans took office in January,' said Barry Burden, a political science professor and director of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Elections Research Center. Wisconsin voters head to the polls Tuesday to decide whether conservative Brad Schimel or liberal Susan Crawford will fill the state Supreme Court's open seat. The outcome determines if the state's highest court will lean 4-3 ideologically left or right. And with issues from abortion to redistricting potentially on the line, the statewide face-off is garnering national attention from both sides of the aisle. On the right, Trump and his billionaire adviser Elon Musk have gone all in, throwing their political and monetary weight behind Schimel's campaign. Overall spending in this race has already surpassed the previous record for the country's most expensive court race, which was set two years ago also in Wisconsin. This year's number could exceed $100 million. Here's what to know about Tuesday's election in Wisconsin and the possible reverberations. Who is running in Wisconsin's supreme court election? Schimel, a Waukesha County judge, entered the Supreme Court race after losing his 2018 bid for reelection as the state's attorney general. He faces Susan Crawford, a circuit court judge in Dane County, which includes the city of Madison. Both have received backing from big names on the left and right. Former vice presidential candidate and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz has campaigned for Crawford, while Trump has called on voters to turn out for Schimel. Big dollar donors shell out, including Musk Ahead of the president, Trump's billionaire ally jumped with two feet and eight figures into the Wisconsin race. By far the largest contributor, Musk has spent around $20 million to help Schimel. Most recently, the world's richest man handed out a series of $1 million checks to voters who signed his 'Petition In Opposition To Activist Judges.' Musk's political action committee, America PAC, had announced the petition on X earlier in March and promised $100 in cash to each person who signs, but made no mention of any grand prizes. America PAC and a Musk-funded political nonprofit, Building America's Future, have together spent more than $15 million in Wisconsin. Though nowhere near Musk's spending levels, Democratic donors, including billionaire investor George Soros, have also made hefty contributions in hopes of seeing Crawford victorious. No obvious leader in Wisconsin court election polls There is no clear-cut leader between Crawford and Schimel heading into Tuesday. A poll published last week by the nonpartisan group SoCal Strategies found Crawford with a 50-42 lead over Schimel. In a Marquette Law School Poll survey from March, 29% of voters interviewed said they view Schimel favorably, compared to 32% who saw him unfavorably. Asked about Crawford, 19% said they think of her favorably, while 23% said unfavorably. Momentum for Democrats? There is broad consensus that this race is a big one for both sides. Echoing Burden, Vice President of political for the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee Jeremy Jansen said, 'This is the first I'd say major election since the 2024 general.' Democrats are on the hunt for a comeback after a disappointing last November. Their wins in a handful of special elections so far this year have given them a much-needed charge, but Wisconsin is expected to be the best benchmark to date. Democrat Kelly Hafermann, who lives in Madison, Wisconsin, said there is a high level of anxiety for voters paying close attention, adding that progressive voters such as herself are hyper aware of the national stakes orbiting the state Supreme Court race. "This is do or die,' the 47-year-old higher education administrator told USA TODAY. "If we win this, this gives us the momentum to move forward. If we lose this, they're going to be a lot of really dejected people. I have not seen a joyful voter yet." Knowing the importance of this particular race, Jansen said state and local elections often give the best insight into current conditions. 'Our districts are small. The folks who represent these districts, our members there, are embedded in their community in the way that maybe a U.S. Senator or U.S. Senate race is not,' he said. 'And so,' Jansen added, 'I think they're a really great barometer of where voters are at, and I think can be a really key resource for the party.' Report card for the Trump administration The stakes are there for Republicans, too. The GOP enjoys a slim margin of control in Congress, with a three-seat majority in the Senate and five seats up in the House. Trump is back in the White House, having won the popular vote in November by 1.5 percentage points. 'But the party is behaving as if it has a mandate for really dramatic action,' Burden told USA TODAY. 'A loss by conservatives in the Wisconsin Supreme Court race would be a big symbolic setback,' he continued. 'It would suggest the public is tired of that and wants the administration to stop and go in a different direction.' Abortion among the issues on the line Since Wisconsin has a Democratic governor and a Republican-controlled legislature, Burden said, 'they're not doing much productive lawmaking.' This often leaves the state's Supreme Court to be the deciding voice on policy. One hot-button issue up before the bench is a decision on a nineteenth-century abortion ban that criminalizes 'the willful killing of an unborn quick child' and includes no exceptions for rape or incest. Crawford, Democrats' preferred candidate, has made having a pro-abortion access stance a cornerstone of her campaign. Schimel said previously he believes there is no "constitutional right to abortion." Abortion loomed over Wisconsin's Supreme Court race in 2023, in the immediate wake of the U.S. Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade and longstanding national abortion precedent. The outcome of that state race two years ago flipped the Wisconsin court from a conservative to liberal majority. Besides abortion, other issues on voters' minds and in candidates' campaign materials include redistricting. Democrats and Republicans are each trying to raise alarms that if their opponents win, they will have control over whether the state and federal district maps are redrawn. "Democrats are making their intentions crystal clear: the Wisconsin Supreme Court race is their pathway to reclaiming the House majority in 2026," Mason Di Palma, communications director for the Republican State Leadership Committee, said in a statement. "They plan to wield the court's influence to manipulate the redistricting process in their favor and we are determined not to let that happen." The liberal majority court in 2023 approved changes to the state legislative map, making Wisconsin races more competitive for Democrats. But they declined a request at the time to reconsider the state's congressional map
