is a senior science reporter covering energy and the environment with more than a decade of experience. She is also the host of Hell or High Water: When Disaster Hits Home , a podcast from Vox Media and Audible Originals.
The tech industry has championed the development of new technologies that filter carbon dioxide out of the air as a way to try to undo the damage caused by planet-heating emissions. Over the past several years, they’ve made a slew of splashy announcements to fund these kinds of projects, called direct air capture (DAC).
That dovetailed with the Joe Biden administration’s attempt to fight climate change by funneling federal dollars into regional hubs for DAC. Now there’s a new president in town, one who calls climate change a hoax and wants to “drill, baby, drill.” The Donald Trump administration’s latest attempts to kill clean energy and climate initiatives include slashing federal funding last week for at least 10 DAC hubs.
It comes at an inflection point for American tech companies as their obsession with AI creates more carbon pollution. And it raises questions about how much they’ll still be able to rely on carbon removal projects in the US to meet their sustainability goals as the Trump administration tries to make the country as inhospitable to climate startups as possible.
Big names including Microsoft and Amazon have already made significant commitments to carbon removal projects in the US. “I would imagine they’re going to spend that money, that they are at minimum already committed to this,” Erin Burns, executive director at the nonprofit Carbon180, which advocates for carbon removal, tells The Verge. “The question is are they going to spend it on projects that are built here in the United States? Or are they going to spend it somewhere else?”
Big names including Amazon and Microsoft have already made significant commitments to carbon removal projects
The US Department of Energy announced last week that it would terminate about $7.5 billion worth of financial awards for 223 clean energy and climate projects. A spreadsheet listing the names of grantees who lost funding, which the agency shared with lawmakers and was obtained by The Verge and other media outlets, confirms that awards for at least 10 DAC hubs were terminated.
That includes a grant that California-based startup CarbonCapture received to conduct an engineering study for a new DAC plant in Louisiana. Microsoft inked an agreement with CarbonCapture in 2023 to draw down carbon pollution as part of the tech giant’s goal of eventually becoming carbon negative.
CarbonCapture announced in Bloomberg last week that it would move its first commercial pilot project from Arizona to Alberta, Canada. That decision has been months in the making, CarbonCapture CEO Adrian Corless tells The Verge, after they started to see the writing on the wall for DAC in the US post-election. Trump’s FY2026 budget proposal released in May called for ending funding for removing carbon dioxide out of the air, calling it part of a “Green New Scam.”
When The Verge spoke with Corless late Friday, the company hadn’t yet received confirmation from the DOE that its grant had been cut beyond the spreadsheet released to some lawmakers and lobbyists. But following the news, he says, “We’re not on track any longer to do a project in Louisiana” if there’s an absence of funding. CarbonCapture was also a partner in similar DAC projects proposed in California and Illinois that had their grants terminated, as well as another project in Arizona that was not on the list to lose funding,
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