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Steve Capanna is policy director and Owen Zinaman is senior advisor for Crux Alliance.
Just a few years ago, green hydrogen looked set to become a central pillar of the global energy transition. Governments across the world rolled out sweeping hydrogen strategies, while companies pitched billion-dollar projects to use clean hydrogen throughout the economy.
But the realities of green hydrogen costs, exacerbated by high interest rates and supply chain constraints, have undermined these plans.
Meanwhile, the US – which had among the most ambitious suites of hydrogen policies under the Biden Administration – has reversed course, scaling back its clean hydrogen production incentive, freezing funds for green hydrogen hubs, and cutting the vast majority of federal hydrogen research and development funding. As a result, a number of planned projects have now been canceled.
Clean hydrogen is experiencing growing pains elsewhere too, with several major production projects in Australia and Europe scrapped or indefinitely postponed. Demand for green hydrogen is increasingly uncertain as well, with manufacturers like steel giant ArcelorMittal backing away from plans to use green hydrogen.
Some ‘no-regrets’ uses remain
Reading the headlines, it can seem like hydrogen has no future as a climate solution.
And yet, while green hydrogen may not be an emissions panacea, climate and energy experts are clear: it remains a crucial tool to cut carbon in some key areas of the economy.
“It’s critical to not throw the baby out with the bathwater,” says Nikita Pavlenko, programs director for fuels and aviation at the International Council on Clean Transportation. “Now is the time for sober consideration of projects that supply the no-regrets uses of hydrogen necessary for long-term decarbonization, whether for the handful of industries with few alternatives or in long-haul shipping and aviation.”
And for those countries that invest in green hydrogen development now, there could be economic as well as environmental rewards.
Not all hydrogen is created equal
Hydrogen currently plays a niche but important role in the global economy. Nearly 100 million metric tons of hydrogen are produced worldwide each year, largely for use in oil refining and to make ammonia and methanol – feedstocks for fertilizers and industrial chemicals. And most of this hydrogen is produced using methane gas, contributing roughly 2% of global greenhouse gas emissions.
But there are other, cleaner ways to produce hydrogen.
“Blue” hydrogen still relies on natural gas but includes equipment to capture some of the carbon emissions released at the production facility. This could significantly lower on-site emissions – although not entirely.
However, it would do nothing to reduce methane and CO2 leaks from natural gas fields or pipelines, which an established body of evidence suggests have been systematically underestimated and are often not accounted for in many existing regulations anyway. Put together, this means blue hydrogen is likely much more polluting than is often claimed.
That’s why clean energy experts view “green” hydrogen as the best option for cutting emissions.
Green hydrogen is produced via a process called electrolysis, in which electricity is used to split hydrogen from water, leaving only oxygen as a byproduct. This process can be emissions free – but only if the electrolysis is powered by new clean electricity resources that are physically deliverable on an hourly basis to the hydrogen production facility.
A narrow but necessary path for green hydrogen
Still, scaling green hydrogen is easier said than done. Green hydrogen remains a nascent technology and costs roughly two to three times more than conventional hydrogen produced from natural gas. Costs are expected to decline as production scales, but only if electricity costs and interest rates are kept in check – which, recently, has not been the case.
But there is good news: experts argue that green hydrogen will only be needed in a few specific parts of the economy.
“Given the heavy energy losses in making hydrogen, it will almost always be cheaper and smarter to use electricity directly,” says Katherine Dixon, executive director of the Regulatory Assistance Project (RAP). “Heat pumps are the best example: they cut energy demand dramatically compared to gas, while hydrogen for heating would multiply it.”
And as other technologies get cheaper, the number of applications where green hydrogen is a necessary decarbonization tool will only shrink.
‘Hard-to-abate’ sectors need hydrogen
Still, in a net-zero economy, absent unforeseen technology innovations, we are going to need a lot more green hydrogen in the future – roughly four to six times more than all of the hydrogen used today, and many orders of magnitude more than current green hydrogen production.
Why? Because there remain many non-electrifiable sectors of the economy where no other viable decarbonization tool exists besides hydrogen, such as steel production, where hydrogen serves as a clean alternative to coal-based coke for processing iron ore.
“Green hydrogen will be critical for decarbonizing applications that have thus far been referred to as ‘hard-to-abate’, such as in the chemicals or steel industries,” says Julia Metz, director of Agora Industry.
Additionally, experts don’t yet foresee a path for battery technology to work for long-distance shipping or long-haul flights, both highly polluting industries, so green hydrogen and fuels made from green hydrogen will likely be necessary for those uses too.
Boosting demand to support long-term investment
Given the cost premium of green hydrogen, strong incentives will be needed to make using it in industry, aviation or shipping an economically viable choice while driving down costs for the future.
To date, countries have largely focused on policies like tax credits that encourage production of clean hydrogen or government investments in green hydrogen production and equipment manufacturing facilities.
EU backs North Africa hydrogen pipeline, but is it a green dream?
But scaling hydrogen requires demand-side policies as well. Indeed, we’re seeing planned projects and investments stall for lack of committed buyers. Stable demand-side policies, which can include contracts for differences (government financing for the higher cost of green hydrogen), requirements for a set percentage of hydrogen consumption to be green for certain sectors, and sectoral emissions limits, can help provide that long-term investment certainty.
Absent such policies, new clean hydrogen production projects have largely proven too risky.
How green is green enough?
Policymakers must also ensure they are only incentivizing truly clean hydrogen. Hydrogen produced with electricity largely generated by coal, for instance, can be considerably dirtier than conventional hydrogen production.
How to measure hydrogen emissions has been the source of robust debate in the European Union (EU), US, and elsewhere. Fossil fuel companies have argued for more lenient standards about what counts as clean. They have also supported using hydrogen in parts of the economy that could be more easily and cheaply electrified, distracting from efforts to electrify quickly.
For a region like the EU, which is poised to be an importer as well as a producer of green hydrogen, stricter standards can help ensure truly low-carbon hydrogen production around the world.
China, for instance, has developed its clean hydrogen production with an eye towards meeting the EU standards. China is also placing major bets on the green hydrogen market, as it represents roughly 60% of global electrolyzer production.
This investment is beginning to drive down equipment costs, which could help make green hydrogen more commercially viable. It could also give China a long-term competitive edge in the global market.
Smart policies create economic opportunity
However, other countries with abundant, low-cost renewable energy resources are also recognizing the potential of green hydrogen as both an export opportunity and a way to reduce reliance on volatile natural gas imports.
For instance, India’s Green Hydrogen Mission targets the production of 5 million tonnes of green hydrogen by 2030, and Brazil has an official goal to be the most competitive low-carbon hydrogen producer by that same year.
To fully capture the economic opportunity, new hydrogen producers will need to ensure their output meets international environmental standards while building up those domestic industries that require green hydrogen to cut emissions, ensuring more economic benefits are realized domestically.
“Governments play a key role in driving innovation that creates economic opportunities across the value chain,” says Metz of Agora Industry. “By supporting green hydrogen investment and adopting targeted industrial policies, they can strengthen resilience while advancing climate and industrial progress.”
It’s time for hydrogen sobriety
The hydrogen bubble has burst. But despite the dire headlines, we cannot achieve global climate goals without some amount of truly clean hydrogen.
If the last few years were dominated by hydrogen hype, we need the future to be dominated neither by hype nor nihilism, but by a sober focus on designing policy to build demand for green hydrogen in the few, important sectors where it’s really needed.
Let’s hope the era of hydrogen sobriety has finally arrived.
The post Hydrogen beyond the hype: The green fuel’s narrow but crucial role in a decarbonized economy appeared first on Climate Home News.
Hydrogen beyond the hype: The green fuel’s narrow but crucial role in a decarbonized economy
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An older teaching about land acknowledgement
As I have come to understand the spirit and intention of land acknowledgement, I often return to fond memories of my grandmother and her words of wisdom. She taught that the health of the places we call home comes first, because the wellbeing of the people depends on it.
In her teaching, land acknowledgement began with the land. Long before it became a paragraph read at the start of a meeting, it was a way of recognizing a homeland: its waters, its species, its seasons, and the spirit that revealed whether the place was well.
Her teaching echoes a practice found across many Indigenous Nations. Haudenosaunee gatherings, for example, have long opened with the Ohén:ton Karihwatéhkwen, the Thanksgiving Address, often translated as “the words that come before all else.” The speaker greets and gives thanks to the people, the earth, the waters, the plants, the animals, the winds, the sun, the moon and the stars. Only after everything that sustains life has been acknowledged does the gathering turn to its own business.
That order changes what an acknowledgement is for. Its purpose was to share the story of a place with neighbours and to draw them into the work of tending it. People entered the story second, as the ones responsible for what had just been named.
Understood this way, an acknowledgement does more than open a meeting. It asks us to reconsider where we stand, and what we owe the ground beneath us.
Nations among nations
In her teaching, people are one nation among many. The salmon are a nation. So are the cedars, the bison, the medicine plants, and the pollinators. Each belongs to a place, carries its own responsibilities, and offers gifts no other nation can give.
This idea of kinship runs through many Indigenous philosophies. The phrase “all my relations,” heard in ceremonies and gatherings across Turtle Island, is a reminder that family extends beyond people to the animals, plants, waters and lands that make life possible. Some Indigenous languages carry the same understanding in their grammar, speaking of many plants, animals and natural forces as living beings rather than objects.
Sovereignty, understood through this relationship, is a kind of standing more than a form of control. Each nation belongs fully to its place and carries its share of that place’s life. No nation thrives alone, and none thrives by taking over the whole.
The land is also the source of instruction. Over generations, people watched how a river valley or a stretch of prairie kept itself well: who arrived when, who fed whom, and how much could be taken before the giving stopped. In my grandmother’s telling, those observations became instructions, and those instructions helped shape law and protocol. They guided when to harvest, where to camp, how to enter a neighbour’s territory, and what was owed in return.
Indigenous legal scholars today often describe this as law that comes from the land itself, learned by watching how living systems sustain one another. A plainer name for it is knowing how to live somewhere.
The host and the guest
One of the clearest teachings in this understanding of the world is the relationship between host and guest. My grandmother invited us to recognize that relationship in the lives of plants and animals.
A host prepares the place before anyone arrives. A beaver family dams a stream, and the pond becomes a home for fish, frogs, birds and plants. A fallen tree becomes a nurse log, feeding the next generation of seedlings as it returns to the soil.
A host offers first. A flowering plant sets out nectar. A berry bush ripens fruit. These provisions come in their own season, not whenever a visitor happens to want them.
A host also makes its presence known. Birdsong, scent and the marks left along a trail tell newcomers that a place is already inhabited. The visitor does not arrive in an empty world.
The guest has responsibilities too. A guest attends to the season and to what the place can offer. A guest does not assume that everything within reach is theirs to take. A guest leaves something that helps sustain the relationship.
A bee takes nectar and carries pollen. Read through this teaching, that exchange offers an image of visiting well: receiving a gift while helping the host continue its life.
Many Indigenous harvesting protocols carry the same ethic into daily practice: ask before taking, take only what is needed, offer thanks, and leave enough for others and for the plant or animal to recover.
None of this suggests that every relationship in nature is peaceful or generous. These are ways of seeing responsibilities that people can learn to carry.
Everyone is both
No being is only a host or only a guest.
A tree makes room for other life while depending on soil, water, sunlight, fungi, and relationships beyond itself. People, too, may welcome others into their homes while remaining dependent on the larger homeland that sustains them.
The distinction between host and guest is therefore about roles, not ranks. Everyone receives. Everyone has something to give.
The question is whether the exchange sustains the place.
A visitor who takes without restraint leaves less for those who come next. A host who neglects the place has less to offer. Both have responsibilities, and neither can fulfil them alone.
This is the heart of reciprocity, a principle found across Indigenous philosophies: relationships stay healthy when gifts move in both directions. The Haudenosaunee teaching of the seventh generation extends that exchange across time, asking that decisions made today leave the place well for those not yet born.
Mutual benefit begins here, with the recognition that different beings carry different gifts and obligations.
What people carry forward
My grandmother’s teaching connects these relationships to the ways people meet their neighbours.
The host prepares a place, offers food and rest, and explains where the visitor has arrived. The guest makes themselves known, explains why they have come, listens to the terms of the visit, and brings something in return. The gift may be material. It may also be labour, knowledge, news, or a commitment to help.
Nations around the Great Lakes carried this ethic into treaty. The Dish with One Spoon, an agreement among the Haudenosaunee, Anishinaabe and allied Nations, describes shared hunting grounds as a single dish. Everyone eats from it with one spoon, takes only what they need, leaves enough for others, and keeps the dish clean. The Two Row Wampum, between the Haudenosaunee and European newcomers, shows two vessels travelling side by side on the same river, each keeping its own ways and neither steering the other.
In this understanding, acknowledgement is more than naming the people associated with a territory. It is learning enough about a homeland to behave responsibly within it.
Whose home is this? What sustains it? What laws and agreements guide our presence? What can we receive, and what must we return?
These questions make acknowledgement a relationship rather than a recital.
They also make it diplomatic. A guest who recognizes the host’s homeland recognizes that they have entered a place with its own relationships and responsibilities. A host who welcomes the guest makes room for an encounter governed by those relationships.
Neither arrives without standing. Neither arrives without obligations.
Beginning with place
I write from the shores of the Bay of Quinte. Here, the teaching asks me to begin with the water, the shoreline, and the life they sustain. Before I describe myself, I must attend to where I am.
That does not make people or history less important. It places them within the homeland that gives them meaning. The people, their laws, their agreements, and their responsibilities all belong to the place.
In a time of longer fire seasons, troubled waters, and uncertainty about what the next season will bring, this teaching asks something difficult and useful of us: pay attention before you speak.
An acknowledgement cannot tell the story of a place if the speaker has stopped noticing it.
The land came first. Beginning there again means learning to name what sustains us, and accepting that what sustains us also asks something of us.
By Rye Karonhiowanen Barberstock
Photo by Andrik Langfield on Unsplash
The post The Land Came First appeared first on Indigenous Climate Hub.
Carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from fossil fuels and cement are projected to fall by around 0.4% in 2026 to 38.2bn tonnes of CO2 (GtCO2), according to new figures from the Global Carbon Project.
This guest post is by:
- Dr Zeke Hausfather, Carbon Brief’s climate science contributor
- Prof Pierre Friedlingstein, chair of mathematical modelling of climate systems at the University of Exeter and part of the Global Carbon Project team.
Carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from fossil fuels and cement are projected to fall by around 0.4% in 2026 to 38.2bn tonnes of CO2 (GtCO2), according to new figures from the Global Carbon Project.
The 21st edition of the annual “global carbon budget” report, published today, says that this small decline is largely due to a 1.9% drop in emissions from oil and the energy shock triggered by the Iran conflict and the closure of the strait of Hormuz.
Emissions from coal continue to increase slightly.
The Global Carbon Project’s projections for fossil fuel and cement CO2 emissions in 2026 are preliminary, with a range that spans a fall of -1.5% to a rise of +0.6%.
This means a small increase in emissions can not be ruled out.
Emissions from land-use change, such as deforestation, are projected to rise in 2026.
This is primarily driven by peat fires and forest degradation in south-east Asia and is linked to the development of a strong El Niño event this year.
As a result, total CO2 emissions from fossil fuels and land use are projected to reach a record high of 43.3GtCO2 in 2026 – marginally above 42.8GtCO2 in 2025.
Research published alongside the report by the same team in Nature Climate Change finds that the growth in solar, wind and electric vehicles (EVs) now offsets around two-thirds of the emissions that would otherwise come from rising energy demand.
However, the deployment of these technologies is not yet enough to push global emissions into a sustained decline, according to the study.
The 2026 global carbon budget report also estimates that:
- Fossil emissions are projected to fall in China (-0.9%), the US (-1.3%) and the EU (-1.5%) in 2026, but rise by 4.4% in India.
- Oil emissions are projected to fall in every major region, with the largest drop in China (-4.6%).
- Land-use emissions averaged 4.9GtCO2 per year over 2016-25, around 21% lower than the decade before.
- Total CO2 emissions (fossil and land-use) grew by an average 0.3% per year over the past decade (2016-25), compared with 1.7% per year over the decade before.
- The remaining carbon budget to limit warming to 1.5C is 150GtCO2, or less than four years of current emissions.
- The land sink in 2025 was the highest on record, rebounding after being weakened during the 2023-24 El Niño. The current El Niño is expected to weaken the land sink in 2027.
- The concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere is set to reach 427.7 parts per million (ppm) in 2026, 54% above pre-industrial levels.
(For more on previous editions of the Global Carbon Project’s annual report, see Carbon Brief’s coverage in 2025, 2024, 2023 and 2022.)
Total emissions edge up as land-use emissions rise
Total global CO2 emissions, which combines fossil fuels and land-use change, are projected to reach a record high of 43.3GtCO2 in 2026, up from 42.8GtCO2 in 2025.
The increase in 2026 comes entirely from a projected rise in land-use emissions, which are more challenging to estimate than fossil emissions.
(The global carbon budget groups emissions from fossil fuels and cement production as “fossil emissions”. Carbon Brief follows this convention throughout this piece.)
If land-use emissions had stayed at 2025 levels, total emissions would have fallen slightly in 2026 to around 42.6GtCO2.
Each edition of the global carbon budget updates the historical record as new data and methods become available. The chart below shows total emissions in this year’s budget compared with the five previous editions.
This year’s estimates of historical fossil emissions are around 0.3GtCO2 per year higher than in last year’s budget.
This is largely because the report now estimates a smaller “cement carbonation” sink in the wake of research published this year in Communications Sustainability. In other words, it estimates that cement is able to slowly reabsorb less CO2 over its lifetime than previously thought.
Estimates of land-use emissions have also been revised, including a spike in 2018 – visible in the chart above – linked to updated cropland data for Colombia.
The updated numbers show that total emissions have grown by 0.3% per year over the past decade (2016-25), compared with 1.7% per year over 2006-15.
Fossil emissions grew about 0.9% per year in the past decade, compared with 1.9% the decade before. Over the same period, land-use emissions have declined.
While the slowdown reflects real progress, a plateau in emissions is still a long way from the rapid declines needed to reach net-zero emissions and stabilise global temperatures.
With human-caused warming reaching 1.37C above pre-industrial levels (1850-1900) in 2025, the report estimates that the remaining carbon budget to limit warming to 1.5C, with a 50% chance, is 150GtCO2 from the start of 2027. That is less than four years of 2026 emissions.
Meanwhile, the budgets for 1.7C and 2C are 510GtCO2 and 1,035GtCO2, respectively – or around 12 and 24 years of current