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Welcome back to Current Climate. As U.S. president, Donald Trump hasn’t been a friend of clean energy, pushing federal agencies to prioritize oil, gas and coal projects, kill or stall offshore wind farms and slow-walk approvals of solar and wind installations on public land. But as his war in Iran stretches on and oil and gas shipments through the Strait of Hormuz remain stalled, he’s inadvertently accelerated a global shift away from fossil fuels.

With global energy prices spiking, the first-ever international Conference on Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels convened last week in Santa Marta, Colombia, to begin charting a path toward making that a reality. Nearly 60 countries, as well as NGOs, trade unions, representatives of Indigenous Peoples and people of African descent, private companies, development banks, social movements and subnational governments participated. The U.S. government, which pulled out of the United Nations Climate Accords last year with an executive order from Trump, wasn’t there.

The week-long event highlighted the rapid growth of renewable energy worldwide, up 50% from 2023. But the bad news is that carbon emissions, overwhelmingly caused by the burning of fossil fuels, continue to grow. At the same time, the war in the Middle East has highlighted the economic and national security danger of overreliance on carbon-based energy.

The conference identified the need for financial and technical assistance, especially for at-risk developing nations, to get off oil as soon as possible, and the scale of the challenge ahead.

“Transitioning away from fossil fuels is more than replacing one energy source with another. It requires broad economic transformation to overcome structural dependencies, overcome debt constraints, expand reliable energy access, and support diversified, resilient economies,” the organizers said in a summary statement.

“The transition itself is complex, requiring time and careful management. It needs to ensure that communities and economies dependent on fossil fuel production and consumption can move to new economic models, while global energy access continues to expand as well. Above all, however, it is clear that decarbonizing our economic, trade and energy systems is the best path towards equitable, stable and resilient societies.”

The Big Read

This Tesla Veteran Is Running A Copper Mine With AI-Powered Robots

Mariana Minerals CEO and cofounder Turner Caldwell is betting that the next big use for AI won’t be another chatbot—it’ll be a copper mine.

His startup, Mariana Minerals, is launching the world’s first autonomous mining operation today at its Copper One mine in remote southeast Utah: automated drills do the digging, giant robotic haul trucks move ore for processing, and an AI-enabled platform called MarianaOS will track and direct the entire operation. The company is even using Boston Dynamics’ Spot robot dog, packed with sensors, to patrol the 10,000-acre site and inspect conditions.

If it works, Mariana could help boost both U.S. copper supply and U.S. copper refining as demand for the metal climbs and the politics around “critical minerals” grows louder. In a few years, the company could be generating hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue from both the Utah copper mine and a separate lithium refining operation it’s setting up in Texas, recovering the mineral from wastewater from oil and gas fields.

“This will be the first mine operating with end-to-end autonomy,” Caldwell told Forbes. “When we look at the opportunity of autonomous mining and autonomous refining, we see the potential for a 30% reduction in refining costs and a 40% to 50% reduction in mining costs.”

Read more here

Hot Topic

Paul Mikesell, founder of Carbon Robotics, on replacing chemicals with weed-killing lasers for healthier farming

If I’m a farmer, what are the benefits of using lasers for weeding?

We're keeping herbicides out of the field, out of the food supply, out of your body, out of the farmer's body. The farmers are reporting and university studies have proven 30% yield increases. So you get 30% more crops out of the same acreage.

What that means is not only are you getting more food out of the land, but the amount of water and the amount of fertilizer used per ton of crops goes down, because you're getting more out of every acre. You're not beating up the crops. What that means is it's all good growing time for the crops. And it also means farmers are able to get to market earlier, which is a real competitive advantage. That product's doing really well. We're in 15 countries around the world with the laser weeder and have hundreds of laser weeders out there – several hundred.

Is demand concentrated in places like California or is it spread across the U.S.?

All across the U.S. We're in 20 states. Everywhere from Washington to New York and California to Florida. We’ve got laser weeders kind of everywhere that somebody's growing food.

Is using your laser system a more time-consuming process compared to spraying?

It's slower than just running a bar through the field and dumping chemicals on the ground, dumping herbicide. But farmers are justifying it because of the yield increases and they're getting more value. They're getting more dollars for their crops, too, in places where they compete on quality. So that's why it's penciling for them.

Also, depending on the location and what's happening, different amounts of herbicides are getting pulled off the market in different places. And there's also a bunch of weeds that are becoming herbicide-resistant. So if the herbicides stopped working, they're going to continue to have trouble.

Are farmers growing organic produce particularly interested in the laser weeder?

Less than half of our customers are organic at this point. We're like 60% conventional at this point. The organic growers love it. It's just not a huge percentage of the market.

Most of the units are going to farmers growing produce, vegetables. We do a lot of onions and carrots. We do a lot of lettuce, kale and spinach, that type of thing. It’s over a hundred different crops. There are people using it for corn, mostly organic corn, though. So on the corn side, it is all organic.

How do you explain farmers getting up to a 30% increase in crop yield using lasers to burn weeds away instead of herbicides?

Every time you spray that stuff, it beats up the plants. The reason why there are things like “Roundup-ready” corn, but not “Roundup-ready” onions, for example, is because they could make GMO versions of corn that nobody cared about eating or having taste or quality or nutrients.

Most corn is targeted toward things like high fructose corn syrup and corn-based ethanol. It’s basically all starch and it’s Roundup-resistant. But in anything that you eat, they don't have resistant forms of these crops because they want to make them taste healthy. So what happens is you're just battling the field and trying to beat the weeds down before you kill your crops. It really is that simple. And so that's why farmers will also supplement this with people out there pulling weeds in cases where they can't beat up the crops too much because they’ll die.

If you compare us to using people to do this, we're about 80% cheaper. So it makes a huge difference. When you look at the whole weeding program–chemicals plus people, plus yield improvement–it really pencils.

The unit uses cameras and AI to identify weeds versus crops and then hits them precisely with a laser?

Yes. Every module has a forward camera that's finding the weeds. There's a lighting system that's tied in. Every time the shutter trigger goes off, the lights flash. We get really good, high-accuracy pictures that way. There are two lasers behind the prediction camera, towards the back of the machine. They are assigned the targets that the prediction camera saw, and then they shoot the weeds.

We'll do about 20 weeds a second when it's really moving. … It's extremely accurate. I mean, we're hitting 98% of the weeds with less than 1% of crops.

What Else We’re Reading

Iran War Is ‘Supercharging’ the Energy Transition, UNFCCC Says (Bloomberg)

Your climate impact doesn’t end when you die. More people are considering ‘greener’ death options (Associated Press)

Could a massive pipeline from the East solve Arizona's water woes? (Arizona Republic)

Floods and landslides kill at least 18 in Kenya (Al Jazeera)

The big impacts of small dust particles (KQED)

More From Forbes

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