As a climate reporter for nearly two decades, I’ve seen enough clean energy projects and emission-reduction pledges fall by the wayside to develop a healthy skepticism. Yet, at a meeting at the White House in the summer of 2024, I found myself oddly credulous.
The backstory: In March 2020, I wrote about Ascend Performance Materials, a nylon plant in Florida. Its emissions of nitrous oxide—a greenhouse gas 300 times worse than carbon dioxide—were equal to the annual climate pollution of 2.1 million automobiles. Why was the company letting those emissions enter the atmosphere, given that they could be easily incinerated at little cost?
It turned out the pollution from Ascend was just the tip of the iceberg of a global opportunity. Several months later, with help from Inside Climate News interns Lili Pike (now at Bloomberg), and Katrina Northrop (most recently at The Washington Post), I wrote about 11 similar nylon plants in China. By my calculation, their nitrous oxide emissions were equal to the annual climate pollution of almost 30 million cars.
From 2020 through 2024, I kept writing about this easily and cheaply abated pollution, but no one seemed to notice. Then, my articles in Inside Climate News caught the attention of an official at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing, and I was invited to speak about the issue at the Wilson Center in Washington. Still the emissions continued unabated.
Later in 2024, I received some cryptic emails about a possible White House summit on nitrous oxide emissions. Four days later, I was standing in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building in Washington next to the CEO of Ascend Performance Materials. I’d been “very critical” of his company’s nitrous oxide pollution, he told me, but he was pleased to report that Ascend had recently eliminated the last of its N2O emissions. That was as close to “thank you” as I would hear.
It turned out that this “summit” was a soft-power play by the State Department. It wanted nylon plants in China to do the same. A researcher from Peking University, on Zoom, told the summit that emissions were now even worse than four years ago: If China eliminated N2O emissions from its 11 nylon plants, it would be the greenhouse gas equivalent of taking 50 million cars off the road.
I realized that the U.S. government, led by climate envoy John Podesta, was trying to force China’s hand with ICN facts. When the former U.S. Embassy official told me our work was some of the “best reporting on climate in China,” and that “it was useful, it was influential,” even this skeptical climate reporter was glad to believe him.
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