Happy Friday! We’ve got your weekly debrief of what went on in Washington, DC, amid the government shutdown. But first, sea otters. 

The endangered species are critical to ensuring California’s coastal waters sequester carbon. With the federal government stepping back from funding conservation, the private sector is stepping in. We’ve got the behind-the-scenes look at the program, and you can read the full story on Bloomberg.com.  

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Otters get a boost

By Todd Woody

Spend time around Monterey Bay in California, and you’d be forgiven for thinking that sea otters are as common as seagulls.

At one of my favorite surf spots in Santa Cruz, otters routinely join the lineup, but they’re more interested in floating on their backs munching clams than catching waves (though one did pop up near my board one time). Kayaking at nearby Elkhorn Slough, it’s difficult to maintain the required distance from the imperiled marine mammals as there’s so many otters lounging about the estuary.

Sea otters in Moss Landing, California. Photographer: Rachel Bujalski

In reality, there’s only about 3,000 sea otters in California. The playful predators’ voracious appetite for destructive species like green crabs and purple urchins has transformed Elkhorn Slough, the state’s second-largest estuary, into an aquatic Serengeti and makes the central coast’s carbon-sequestering kelp forests more resistant to climate change.

“We like to call otters ecosystem engineers, not just cute furry faces, because they have quite a remarkable impact,” Julie Packard, executive director of the Monterey Bay Aquarium, said at an event earlier this year in Carmel, California, to promote an ambitious plan to restore sea otters to their historic range along the West Coast.

The US government determined in 2022 that reintroducing sea otters on California’s North Coast and Oregon would be a boon to biodiversity and climate resilience, laying out a roadmap to restoration that would cost up to $43 million. But as the Trump administration moves to slash funding for wildlife programs, a nonprofit co-founded by a Silicon Valley entrepreneur is stepping in to raise almost that amount to finance and coordinate what would be a complicated, years-long effort to connect isolated populations of sea otters.

“We are coming in at a time when we've seen these dramatic cuts from the federal government and conservationists are facing major funding gaps,” said Paul Thomson, chief programs officer at the Wildlife Conservation Network, the San Francisco-based nonprofit that launched the Sea Otter Fund in April.

The initiative may be a harbinger of a future where private donors assume a more prominent role in financing and advancing wildlife restoration as climate impacts multiply. Indeed, the sea otter population has plateaued in recent years as a warming ocean lures more great white sharks to Monterey Bay.

The Carmel event attracted more than 700 people, including local luminary Clint Eastwood and leading academic and government sea otter researchers. But the star of the evening was conservation icon and scientist Jane Goodall, who died at 91 on Wednesday in Los Angeles while on a speaking tour.

Sipping a glass of whiskey on stage, Goodall recalled her first encounter with sea otters in Big Sur in the mid-1960s. A couple of days earlier, she had gone out on Elkhorn Slough for a closeup encounter with the critters, including a tagged sea otter researchers named after her. “We're going through very dark times politically, socially, environmentally, and we need to get together,” she said at a reception before the event.

The Sea Otter Fund is supporting critical research needed if reintroduction is to move ahead. “It feels like this wave has been building and building and with just the right resources could crest to surf sea otter restoration to success,” said Jen Miller, who left the US Fish and Wildlife Service in August to run the fund.

Read the full story. Please subscribe to bloomberg.com for more biodiversity news.

Betting big on nature

More than checking boxes

Washington diary

• The Trump administration is canceling billions of dollars of funding earmarked for hydrogen projects in California and the Pacific Northwest, Bloomberg News’ Ari Natter reports. It’s part of almost $8 billion in cuts to green energy projects largely in Democratic-leaning states. 
• After almost 4o years, the Arctic Research Consortium of the United States has shut down, citing a lack of viable future funding. The group relied heavily on funding from the National Science Foundation, which is facing significant proposed cuts under the Trump administration. This spring, a request for a proposal that might have unlocked new funds was archived by the NSF, Audrey Taylor, the group’s executive director, said in a video address. “That removed the primary chance for ARCUS to compete for multi-year funding at scale,” she said.
• An email obtained by Politico reportedly shows the US Department of Energy has added the word “green” to a growing list of words to avoid at its Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy. “Climate change,” “decarbonization,” “emissions” and “energy transition” also are reportedly on the list. A spokesperson for the DOE denied that the words have been banned and is looking into the validity of the email, Politico reported.

— Danielle Bochove

By Kit Chellel

The storm clouds rolled in again at 3 p.m. Dubai was already drenched from torrents of rain that had started the previous evening, flooding roads and subway stations. Now, on the afternoon of April 16, 2024, another weather front loomed. It appeared almost as a solid object—a gigantic disk, miles across, framed by greenish light like a Hollywood special effect. Social media users compared the scene to an alien spaceship breaking cover.

The downpour arrived moments later. Palm trees buckled in sideways rain, and thunder boomed overhead. By evening, it was clear that the United Arab Emirates was experiencing a once-in-a-generation storm. Dubai International, the world’s second-busiest airport, closed when its runways turned into rivers.

Images began to circulate online of the desert metropolis, famous for its sunny climate and extravagant displays of wealth, swamped by floodwater. “Crypto Bitlord,” a digital currency influencer, recorded himself steering a sports car through murky water, saying, “This Lamborghini is swimming, bro.” The cryptocurrency conference he’d been planning to attend was one of two washed out that day. A golfer posted a clip of someone paddleboarding down the fairway at the sprawling Dubai Sports City complex. The total damage across the UAE was estimated at $3 billion. At least four people were killed.

Highways flooded in Dubai Photographer: Christopher Pike/Bloomberg

Afterward, many experts attributed the storm’s violence to climate change. A warmer planet means more moisture in the air, which means more water for rainfall. In the darker corners of the internet, though, there was another explanation: geoengineering, the deliberate manipulation of climate by humans. The term gets used for both imaginary and real activities in the sky. Chemtrails — plane vapor streams supposedly loaded with dangerous chemicals — don’t exist. Cloud seeding, in which particles are introduced into the atmosphere to encourage rain, does.

Read the full investigation into what caused the Dubai floods in 2024 on Bloomberg.com.

The “Berlin Bear” holds up a gas turbine at the entrance of Siemens Energy’s plant  Photographer: Nicolo Lanfranchi

Rising power demand from data centers for artificial intelligence has led to a shortage of the gas turbines needed to generate electricity. This shortage might not seem the most obvious climate story, but it's having impacts across the entire energy sector. This week on Zero, Bloomberg’s Stephen Stapczynski joins Akshat Rathi to look at what’s causing the bottleneck in gas turbines, if the shortage will make companies look to renewables or coal, and whether natural gas is really a “bridge” fuel.

Listen now, and subscribe on Apple, Spotify or YouTube to get new episodes of Zero every Thursday.

A carbon-capture startup has moved its first commercial pilot project from the US to Canada due to what it sees as more stable government incentives and support.

CarbonCapture Inc. subsidiary True North Carbon is constructing a direct air capture (DAC) system in Alberta, Canada, that it expects to go online by the end of October. The project will have the ability to capture 2,000 tons of carbon dioxide per year at full capacity, making it the biggest system of its kind operating in the country.

In Canada, tax incentives and the regulatory landscape will make it easier for the carbon capture and storage industry to scale, CarbonCapture Chief Executive Officer Adrian Corless said. The company originally planned to build the project in Arizona and had components for it ready in a factory in the state. But earlier this year, when Energy Secretary Chris Wright terminated billions of awards issued by the Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations, the company made a quick decision to pivot, shipping all the equipment to a rural patch of farmland in Alberta in a matter of months, Corless said.

Crews work on the CarbonCapture Inc. direct air capture system in Innisfail, Alberta. Photographer: Amber Bracken/Amber Bracken

Brazil’s big forest fund is delayed as officials deliberate on how to structure the complex financial vehicle ahead of COP30 climate talks. The country hopes to raise as much as $125 billion to pay countries to protect swathes of tropical forest using investment returns from high yielding fixed-income assets.

Deutsche Bank AG sees an ESG leader exit. Claire Coustar, the bank’s global head of ESG and sustainable finance for fixed income, is leaving as the lender creates a new role with a broader focus.

Nuclear fuel-maker Urenco has received permission from regulators to make a new type of uranium fuel. The only US supplier of nuclear fuel for conventional reactors can make more highly concentrated uranium, which allows reactors to run for longer periods before they need to be refueled.

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