What sustainability leaders are saying about SBTI’s new net-zero standard

Sustainability leaders have spent the past week digesting the 100-plus pages of Version 2 of the Corporate Net-Zero Standard from the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi), the most influential rulebook for setting and hitting emissions goals.

The feedback has been largely positive, with the SBTi earning praise for recognizing a broader suite of mechanisms that companies can use to act on climate. But the applause was not uniform. Some said the the expanded focus was based on shaky evidence, while others lamented that, for all the changes, SBTi remained an unreasonably powerful actor. 

“Version 2 quietly clarifies SBTi’s role,” said Alicia Seiger, director of climate at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and a visiting scholar at Stanford University, in her summary of the changes. “It’s becoming an evaluator and recognizer of corporate climate effort rather than a manager of the global carbon budget, and that’s a fit-for-purpose move.”

Here’s our round-up of the key points from a week of debate.

Avoiding the breaking point on Scope 3

For many companies, value-chain emissions are the single most troubling part of the current SBTi process, which offers a relatively restricted range of options for setting Scope 3 targets. So restricted, in fact, that many businesses in some sectors, including auto manufacturing, will likely not be able to continue to commit to them.

“The previous version set the bar, but with the best will in the world, companies could not deliver on commitments made,” said Bridget Wise, a sustainability analyst at Secaro, a supply-chain intelligence platform. “This meant that while it may have been ambitious, SBTi was on a path to becoming ineffective and less influential.”

SBTi listened to feedback from companies and greenlit several new approaches, including the use of environmental attribute certificates, such as credits for purchasing low-carbon steel, sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) and other cleaner commodities. This comes with risks, noted some nonprofits. There’s a “lack of an evidence base on whether these more flexible mechanisms will work,” warned the NewClimate Institute in its review of the standard. 

Some advocates saw it the other way, arguing that even more flexibility is needed to create a stronger market for the certificates. This includes looser rules on matching the timing of credit purchases to mitigation measures and allowing certificates to be traded, said Adam Klauber, chief sustainability officer at SAF producer World Energy. 

Going slow on carbon credits

SBTi’s attitude has always been that companies must focus first on their own emissions. That remains, but the nonprofit also clarified its stance on how carbon credits can complement this work. Companies can now earn voluntary recognition for credit purchases and, from 2035 onwards, will be required to use carbon removals to neutralize a steadily increasing fraction of their ongoing emissions.

That pace of change is too slow for some. “The few companies that want to and can afford to counterbalance their emissions with permanent carbon removal and credible environmental attribute certificates should be allowed to claim net zero fulfillment today, either for their full emissions, or a more narrow operational net zero claim,” said Robert Höglund, head of climate at Milkywire, a Swedish company that helps businesses meet climate and nature commitments.

Others chafed at both the SBTi’s decision and it’s ability to influence so many companies. “The latest guidance essentially says: Do your best for the next nine years, gold star for trying, and don’t worry yourself with ongoing emissions until 2035,” wrote Tommy Ricketts, CEO of carbon credits rating agency BeZero, on LinkedIn.

In a subsequent post, Ricketts mentioned SBTi’s “obsession” with value-chain abatement and referred to a group of Soviet-era approved decision-makers. “It is like the nomenklatura in the USSR deciding how many toothbrushes to manufacture each year. SBTi has now decided it’s also going to set industrial strategy for most global sectors.”

Splitting Scopes 1 and 2

The current standard permits combined goals for Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions, allowing companies to use gains in one area to make up for slower progress in the other. In one of the less-heralded changes, SBTi said that companies will now have to set separate targets for each scope. 

“The separation of Scope 1 and 2 targets will challenge many companies — but it’s the right call,” said Charlotte Bande, managing director at Quantis, a sustainability consultancy. ”Near-term targets have too often been met through Scope 2 reductions alone. Companies now have to look seriously at their own industrial processes, which is where a large part of the work they directly control actually lies.”

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CDP sells majority stake to private equity firm

After a quarter-century of nonprofit status, disclosure platform CDP will join the private sector later this year under a deal that will see a private equity firm assume majority ownership. 

The agreement, announced last week, will also see the creation of the CDP Foundation, a nonprofit that will continue to develop new disclosure methods.

Coming amid a period of turbulence at CDP, the move appears to be the most significant one undertaken by CEO Sherry Madera since she jumped from Mastercard in 2023. It has, however, prompted questions from sustainability leaders, not least because private equity firms are known for prioritizing short-term profits over long-term value. Trellis talked to Madera about the thinking behind the deal and what companies should expect.

The context for the switch

It has not been an easy few years for CDP. Technical glitches impacted the disclosure cycles for data from 2023 and, to a lesser extent, 2024. Renewal rates suffered and an expected increase in commercial revenue was delayed, CDP said in its 2025 report. The proliferation of mandatory disclosure requirements has also prompted some companies to reconsider the need to report to CDP, contributing to a fall in disclosures in 2025 — the first in the organization’s history.

The organization laid off around a fifth of its workforce a year ago, in part to channel funds into improving its technology. Selling a majority stake to Permira is meant to accelerate that work. The private equity firm has invested in several software-as-a-service companies, including Klarna, a payment provider, and Carta, a platform for managing company stock. Terms of the CDP deal were not disclosed, but Permira said it would provide a “significant capital injection to drive investment in people, technology and innovation.”

“What that market is telling us is that they need to be able to use [CDP’s] data in an even more efficient way,” said Madera. The way the organization is structured right now, she added, doesn’t allow for investment to meet those needs.

What will change for companies

CDP already follows a “write once, use many” approach designed to ensure that a single submission to the platform can be used by multiple stakeholders, including supply chain partners and investors. One immediate focus, said Madera, is improving the “write” part of the process so companies can upload documents they have already produced, such as annual sustainability reports and regulatory filings, then let the system automatically extract the relevant data.

Madera was less forthcoming on an area that has attracted complaints: fees charged to users, including those that access the platform to collect data from suppliers. The question of whether the platform will become more expensive was difficult to answer, she noted, because CDP’s offerings are likely to evolve. “Let’s discuss this in six months,” she said.

Approval for the restructuring from the Charity Commission, a U.K. regulatory body that oversees nonprofits, is expected within that same timeframe, CDP said. The next disclosure cycle, which begins this week, will operate as normal. Meanwhile, the organization will continue to provide scores to company, said Madera. Currently, CDP assesses companies on climate, forests and water, awarding grades from A to D-. 

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Anthropic joins Google, Stripe and others in $900 million carbon removal initiative

A pioneering carbon removal initiative has announced a second funding infusion and added Anthropic, creator of the Claude AI service, to its list of members. 

Frontier was launched in 2022 with a commitment from Google, Stripe and others to spend $1 billion on carbon removal by 2030. Since then, members have signed contracts worth almost $700 million for 1.8 million tons of removals from 53 projects. The initiative is based on an Advanced Market Commitment (AMC) model, which is designed to incentivize technological developments that would otherwise struggle to attract funding.

In this second phase, Frontier will focus on a smaller group of projects, those that have a clear path to government support once its own funding runs out. The group is calling the moment a “baton pass.” Members have committed $915 million to the “Growth AMC,” which will target offtake agreements spanning 8 to 10 years with 10 to 15 companies. Frontier will also continue to support “high-potential breakthrough ideas” through prepurchases of removal credits, small offtakes and research grants.

The funding will be welcome news for the carbon removal sector, which was roiled in April by reports that Microsoft, by far the largest purchaser of removals to date, was slowing its buying. The market got another boost last week when the Science Based Targets initiative said it will require companies to use removals to cover a small but steadily increasing proportion of their ongoing emissions from 2035 onwards.

Removal pathways

Frontier did not disclose details of the projects it is targeting for future funding, but it did share estimates of cost and removal potential of various mechanisms, based on recent learnings.

  • Top of the list is surficial mineralization, which involves grinding and exposing to air rocks that absorb carbon dioxide. The mining industry has already developed the necessary technology, and large amounts of mining waste are currently available. Frontier estimates that the approach could capture in excess of 10 gigatons (Gt) annually at a cost of $80-$120/ton. The approach is currently being tested in small-scale trials.
  • Crushed rocks can also be added to ocean waters to trigger reactions that draw down CO2. Frontier said the potential here also exceeds 10 Gt annually, with costs in the $100-$200/ton range. British Airways, Stripe and Shopify are among the companies that have backed early projects in this area.
  • Projects that store CO2 captured by plants could remove 1-5 Gt annually at a cost of $60-$200/ton, Frontier estimates. Microsoft is a backer of one of the largest projects in this area: Stockholm Exergi, a utility that burns forest residues and other organic waste to generate electricity while capturing the carbon produced in the process. 

Anthropic’s involvement is notable given that large AI model-builders have announced few sustainability initiatives to date. Neither Anthropic nor OpenAI, its most prominent rival, disclosed emissions to the Foundation Model Transparency Index, a research initiative that makes public information on AI safety, data use, environmental impacts and other issues.

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Next-gen fiber solutions emerge as forest supplies tighten

The opinions expressed here by Trellis expert contributors are their own, not those of Trellis or its editors.

The first half of 2026 has been challenging for those working in supply chains. Geopolitical shocks, ongoing tariff wars, the continuing dismantling of U.S. climate policy and the effects of climate-driven events have piled up in ways that have tested even the most resilient procurement professionals. For those sourcing forest-based inputs — wood pulp for paper packaging and viscose-type fabrics for fashion — the pressure is mounting in unprecedented ways.

The closure of the Strait of Hormuz, in particular, has sent a sharp reminder to businesses and governments, including those overseeing key producer regions such as China and India, that dependence on distant raw material inputs is a structural vulnerability, not merely an inconvenience. 

Put starkly: If you cannot get your feedstock, you cannot make your product and you cannot meet commitments further up the supply chain. Solving this challenge will require strategic rethinking beyond the current set of crises. 

Shrinking forests, tightening supplies

Wood pulp is the foundation of both the paper packaging and cellulosic textile supply chains. Producers have long treated forests as a reliable, essentially inexhaustible source, but that assumption is now being tested on multiple fronts simultaneously.

Deforestation regulations are tightening in the EU and elsewhere, narrowing the pool of certified forest-based inputs at the same time that demand is rising as companies shift from plastic to paper-based packaging, construction increasingly integrates wood instead of steel and concrete, and biofuel production surges. Intensifying wildfires are disrupting wood supply across producer regions in Canada, Australia, Brazil, Europe and Indonesia. Tariff shocks are adding cost and unpredictability to already strained budgets. The result is more expensive, less reliable and more legally exposed supply chains.

For procurement and sustainability professionals, this is not a distant risk to monitor. It is an immediate liability to manage.

What is fiber sovereignty?

Governments are beginning to respond in ways that will structurally reshape global fiber markets. China, aware of its dependence on wood imports, is moving to embed circularity in its textiles production strategy, looking to mobilize its vast reserves of waste textiles — estimated in the hundreds of millions of metric tons— as a domestic feedstock alternative. India, looking to address pollution from annual stubble-burning and a growing imperative to reduce deforestation-linked wood imports, is positioning to scale clean, straw-based packaging production that converts agricultural waste into a valuable feedstock.

These are not marginal policy shifts. They signal a reorientation around resource sovereignty — a recognition that over-reliance on offshore single-source inputs is a strategic risk that no government or business can afford to ignore anymore.

Next-gen fibers 

The good news for procurement and sustainability teams is that proven alternatives exist and are ready to scale. A new generation of materials — commonly called next-gen fibers — comes not from climate-critical forests but from waste streams that have damaging effects of their own: agricultural residues normally burned in open fields, causing air pollution, and discarded textiles normally destined for an already full landfill.

These materials can be processed into high-quality pulp and fiber suitable for paper boxes, cups and takeout containers, as well as fabrics like rayon, viscose and lyocell. The raw material is abundant, and the technology to make the fiber is coming online now. Examples: Chinese mills like Circulose, Yibin Grace and Jilin that convert textile waste into pulp for next season’s clothing, and North American innovators, such as Genera, that can turn agricultural residues into packaging. In the past year, the amount of agri-residue pulp produced in the world grew by 3 percent.

What the sector needs now is procurement commitment to bring costs down and secure investment to unlock reliable supply at scale.

The case for change

Continuing to rely on conventional wood pulp means accepting ongoing exposure to regulatory risk, price volatility and likely shortages. Investing now in next-gen fiber diversification offers a different set of outcomes.

Early movers stand to lock in steady access and lower-cost supply. Circular and waste-based inputs tend to attract lower tariff risk and supply disruption, as they can be more local, and they fall outside the deforestation-linked categories facing the greatest regulatory scrutiny. Companies that diversify their fiber supply now are better positioned to meet their Scope 3 targets, satisfy upcoming forest-based sourcing regulations and maintain market share as companies and governments raise the bar on credible sustainability claims.

Beyond procurement metrics, there is a broader value proposition. Next-gen supply chains create economic opportunity in rural and agricultural communities, reduce the air pollution of waste removal like stubble burning, and relieve sourcing pressure on forests — leaving them to perform their irreplaceable functions of carbon storage, biodiversity protection and climate regulation.

The strategic question is no longer whether forest-based supply chains face disruption. The question is whether your company is building the supply relationships, supporting supplier development capabilities and creating internal alignment to move toward next-gen materials before the window of early-mover advantage closes.

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ISO’s new net-zero standard is here: What to know

The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) has published the consultation draft of a new, independently verifiable standard for corporations that make net-zero emissions commitments.

The ISO Net Zero Aligned Organizations Standard (ISO 14060) started life as loose guidelines shaped by more than 1,200 stakeholders from civil society and the corporate world, including Amazon, FedEx,Google, Intel, Mars, McDonald’s and Meta. 

The 91-page draft outlines processes that companies should use to develop, implement and communicate their strategies for reducing their greenhouse gas emissions to net zero, as outlined in the Paris Agreement.  

The standard builds on ISO’s existing suite of rules for quantifying and reporting on emissions, many of which are referenced along with widely used standards and guidance from other organizations, including the Science Based Targets initiative’s new corporate net-zero recommendations. 

“The big proposition of ISO is scalability,” said Noelia Garcia Nebra, head of sustainability and partnerships at ISO. “The standard is for any organization, any size, any sector. In that sense, it is agnostic. Anyone can apply it.” 

The backstory

ISO is a respected organization that has produced more than 25,000 international standards that are used by companies for everything from food safety to information security. 

It’s also a close — and getting closer — partner of the carbon accounting rules maker Greenhouse Gas Protocol: The two standards organizations aim to combine their existing guidance into a new set of co-branded standards, a relationship disclosed in late 2025.    

ISO’s net-zero draft will be circulated for 12 weeks, during which its members — more than 170 national standards bodies — will collect feedback. The British Standards Institution, the UK National Standards and Colombia’s national standards body, ICONTEC, are responsible for the process.

ISO hopes to reach consensus by September, but the timeline is difficult to predict because member organizations will be obligated to address every comment, Garcia Nebra said.

What it is

The standard’s focus is the commitment and governance necessary to achieve net zero, and toward that end, it will require companies to publish a detailed transition plan within two years of setting a target. That roadmap must include, among other things:

  • “Reliable, quantified data” justifying the suggestions
  • Processes for integrating the strategy into the company’s core business model
  • Timelines for the actions the company plans to take
  • Information about how progress will be measured, reported and verified
  • Details about any planned use of carbon credits

The draft also includes a section specific to net-zero strategies for small and midsize enterprises, which is intended to simplify the process for them and reflect the unique challenges they face.

For example, smaller companies are more likely to grow significantly, making absolute carbon emissions cuts more difficult. They’re also less likely to have access to detailed data or the same reduction options as large companies, ISO’s standard suggests.

To reflect those obstacles, small and midsize enterprises can opt to concentrate on interim targets or on prioritizing their most significant emissions categories. They also can decide to report on progress every three years, rather than annually. 

“We do hope that through this ISO standard, we can reach out to other companies that have not been thinking about it yet,” Garcia Nebra said.

On the flip side, ISO encourages companies with “higher technical and economic capacity” to act more ambitiously. That might include phasing out products and services that could “lock-in the use of fossil fuels” or to aim for an operational state “in which the organization’s annual CO2 removals exceed its GHG emissions.” 

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What climate comedians can teach us about storytelling

“Can climate be funny?” asks Stuart Goldsmith before answering his own question. “Can grief be funny? Can war be funny? These are all the things that comics have spoken about since there have been comics.”

So, why not make the climate crisis funny?

That’s the challenge of the two guests that my co-host, Solitaire Townsend, and I talked with in the latest episode of our Two Steps Forward podcast. UK-based Goldsmith is a climate comedian, keynote speaker and podcaster known for getting corporate audiences (including those at our last few GreenBiz conferences) belly laughing about the fears, foibles and hypocrisies that are part of all sustainability professionals’ lives.

Joining him was Esteban Gast, a Colombian-American comedian and writer. Together, they appeared last month on Netflix Is a Joke’s “An Emergency Board Meeting Slumber Party” — “a stand-up comedy show for anyone coping with the slow collapse of everything” — along with Adam McKay, Robby Hoffman, Jimmy O. Yang and others.

Goldsmith and Gast work a genuinely difficult beat. Climate isn’t exactly a natural setup-punchline subject. It’s as serious as a heart attack. And yet both men have built careers using climate as a setup in comedy clubs, at corporate events and in front of audiences who likely had little idea what was coming.

A few things from the conversation stuck with me.

Hypocrisy is the material. Climate comedy works precisely because climate is soaked in ambiguity, guilt and contradiction. The more unspoken the truth, the more juice there is in it. Both comedians talk extensively about their own failures — Goldsmith doing a thermal survey of his house, then ignoring the results; Gast explaining how BP invented the concept of the personal carbon footprint, which regularly blows audiences’ minds.

The audience is smart; they just don’t have context. When a joke about greenwashing or carbon footprints lands wrong, it’s usually not because the audience is uninformed or indifferent. It’s because they lacked the context. The correct response isn’t to talk down to them. It’s to remember what it felt like to hear it for the first time.

Treat audiences like friends. Gast’s approach is to walk in thinking, “These are my friends, and I can’t wait to tell them this.” It sounds simple, but it’s a nifty reframe from how most sustainability professionals enter a room — pre-defensive, braced for skepticism, ready to justify the subject matter before they’ve even started. Goldsmith called it “grappling” — you have to be seen to be working through this alongside the audience, not delivering verdicts from on high.

Permission to feel. Goldsmith’s corporate pitch is essentially this: “I give them permission to feel joy even if they’re scared. I give them permission to have fun even if the subject matter is dry.” His goal: Make climate seem real and relatable and part of their lives rather than something on a spreadsheet.

This was one of the more useful climate communications conversations we’ve had. These aren’t just comedians talking about their craft. They’re practicing something most of us in sustainability struggle with: meeting people where they are. We can learn a lot from these funnymen. Seriously.

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Employee retirement plans are the next frontier for corporate decarbonization 

The opinions expressed here by Trellis expert contributors are their own, not those of Trellis or its editors.

Modern chief sustainability officers are tasked with decarbonizing scopes 1 and 2 and operational Scope 3 supply chains. While they’re making progress, sustainability teams remain siloed from corporate financial architecture. This creates a glaring “exposure gap”: While a company publicly celebrates its 100 percent renewable operations or ambitious net-zero targets, its employee 401(k) plan is quietly funneling billions into the extractive economy.

The result is a massive disconnect. Corporate retirement menus heavily rely on major asset managers’ target date funds. Because these default funds blindly track standard market-cap indexes, they are deeply exposed to systemic climate risk. For example, data from As You Sow’s Corporate 401(k) Sustainability Scorecard reveals that Microsoft’s 401(k) retirement plan has over $2 billion invested in high-carbon sectors  — despite Microsoft’s pioneering public pledge to become carbon negative by 2030.

This is not only an ethical contradiction; it also introduces severe long-term financial risk. High-carbon assets have introduced intense volatility and structural underperformance, trailing the S&P 500 in seven of the past 10 years.

The fossil fuel penalty 

A white paper by researchers at the University of Waterloo School of Environment, Enterprise and Development (SEED), in partnership with As You Sow, quantified this penalty across the tech sector. The 2024 study found that 2 million employees across 12 tech giants — including Alphabet, Amazon and Microsoft—missed out on an estimated $5.13 billion in returns had their companies moved to decarbonize their retirement plan holdings 10 years prior. A fossil-fuel-free portfolio would have yielded an additional 8.9 percent in cumulative returns, proving that high-carbon exposure actively penalizes employee life savings.

As workplace climate advocacy hits an inflection point, employees are recognizing that financed retirement emissions represent their largest personal carbon footprint and are leveraging internal networks to demand change.

Momentum is growing across major enterprises. Amazon shareholders have submitted proposals focusing on 401(k) carbon intensity, requesting that Amazon’s board publish a report “disclosing how the company is protecting plan beneficiaries with a longer investment time horizon from climate risk in the company’s default retirement options.” The Walt Disney Company employees mobilized around a shareholder vote requesting transparency on climate portfolio risks.

The tech sector has provided a blueprint for this movement. More than 1,200 Alphabet employees signed a directive urging executive leadership and Vanguard to offer a fossil-fuel-free index fund option. They amplified this demand in a public op-ed in the San Francisco Chronicle, outlining exactly how workers can take effective climate action through their benefits packages. In response, Google added the Parnassus Core Equity Fund to its plan menu — providing a sustainable option that avoids direct fossil fuel investments.

How to take action 

This advocacy isn’t isolated. Advocates now regularly share ideas and news through the Cross Company Alliance for Employee Climate Action, an informal peer network fostered by non-profit organization ClimateVoice. As part of the Alliance, advocates share insights from tools like the Invest Your Values 401(k) Scorecard and track their 401(k) investments on platforms like Fossil Free Funds. As one Google employee detailed in a recent Trellis analysis, these grassroots efforts treat sustainability teams as vital allies rather than adversaries.

These employee advocates are shifting away from purely values-based framing, instead approaching benefits teams through a rigorous risk-management lens, presenting data on cost parity, diversification and the fiduciary safety of index-based, passive exposure. They ask a fundamental question: “Does doing the right thing mean sacrificing your retirement security?” The data says no.

Meanwhile, regulatory clarity surrounding the Employee Retirement Income Security Act has dismantled the traditional compliance excuse for inaction. Historically, legal and benefits committees feared that integrating climate-conscious funds would violate their fiduciary obligations. The U.S. Department of Labor fundamentally shifted the landscape in late 2022, clarifying that a fiduciary’s duty of prudence permits — and sometimes requires — evaluating the economic effects of climate change and other environmental factors on an investment’s risk-and-return profile. Furthermore, the 2022 framework formally established that plan sponsors may take participants’ climate and ESG preferences into account when constructing a diversified retirement menu. 

For sustainability leaders searching for the next frontier of corporate decarbonization, addressing these employee demands isn’t just a benefit; it’s a fiduciary responsibility. 

What businesses can do 

While bottom-up employee courage is driving this conversation, solving the 401(k) blindspot requires top-down strategic action. CSOs should not treat corporate retirement benefits as outside their purview. Aligning a company’s financial footprint with its environmental goals is the next frontier of corporate decarbonization.

This expansion is a powerful operational asset. Extensive research, including the Deloitte CxO Sustainability Report, highlights that visible corporate climate action acts as a powerful lever for talent attraction and retention, particularly among highly competitive millennial and Gen Z cohorts. By building a unified climate strategy that spans from the supply chain to the retirement plan, leadership can eliminate a glaring reputational liability while deeply reinforcing workforce loyalty.

To seize this opportunity, sustainability executives must step out of their traditional comfort zones. An immediate first step is utilizing tools like As You Sow’s Corporate 401(k) Sustainability Scorecard to audit current portfolio exposure and quantify the exposure gap. Armed with that concrete internal data, CSOs can actively engage HR executives and retirement investment strategists, and move their companies to address both ethical contradictions and long-term financial risk. 

In the next part of this series, we’ll provide the definitive CSO playbook for greening the corporate retirement menu — from leveraging modern self-directed brokerage windows to deploying institutional, fossil-free passive indexes and climate-smart default funds.

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SBTi’s shift on electricity decarbonization attracts praise and criticism

The Science Based Targets initiative’s (SBTi’s) net-zero standard overhaul redefines how companies should approach electricity decarbonization, but it’s more flexible than the strict carbon accounting rules proposed by the Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Protocol. 

The new approach to Scope 2 — which covers purchased electricity — marks a major departure from the current standard, under which companies can set one goal to cover emissions reductions for energy and their own operations, which is defined as Scope 1. 

The two categories must now be handled separately, which is a wake-up call for some companies that have leaned on the practice of buying renewable energy certificates (RECs) to help with their combined target.

The SBTi update encourages companies to reduce electricity use and source low-carbon energy where possible through direct connections and contracts. They can “match” the rest of their load by supporting low-carbon energy projects in the same region. Companies can still do that by using existing market instruments such as power purchase agreements (PPAs) or RECs.

“We are encouraged to see SBTi explicitly call out that PPAs are still acceptable,” said John Powers, vice president of global renewable energy and carbon advisory for Schneider Electric, which has advised corporate buyers on more than 25 gigawatts of these transactions.

PPAs have been widely used by companies ranging from Amazon to Walmart to claim emissions reductions from electricity; they have helped add more than 100 gigawatts of clean energy to the U.S. grid since 2014.

Stricter geographic lens

The location focus is tougher than past requirements — and the definition of what qualifies as the same region is under debate — but SBTi offers room for exceptions, especially for organizations with distributed geographic footprints, such as retailers or franchisers. 

“This framework needs to stay focused on practical implementation and the recognition that entities are part of systems,” said Abby Davidson, managing director for U.S. with sustainability consulting firm Quantis.

No hourly matching, yet

Corporate energy strategists welcomed SBTi’s decision to let companies match energy consumption with low-carbon electricity sources on an annual basis when reporting on their progress, a change from an earlier proposal. 

That’s at odds with the strict hourly matching model favored under a proposed new accounting rule from the GHG Protocol, which many companies use to calculate emissions reductions across their operations, electricity consumption and supply chains. That proposal is opposed by many corporate energy buyers.

“We have heard from many clients that uncertainty about what is going to count is absolutely delaying action,” said Powers. “This should be a big sigh of relief.” 

Stay tuned, though. SBTi wants firms that buy more than 10 gigawatts annually — think big tech companies or utilities — to report on how they’re matching electricity consumption with low-carbon energy resources on an hourly basis. In the new standard, it has created an optional recognition path for companies that report hourly, while it studies how hourly matching should be considered in the future.

“SBTi’s decision to support voluntary, not mandatory, matching of clean energy purchases to the hour and location of a company’s buildings is the right signal to keep markets moving,” said Miranda Ballentine, senior advisor at sustainability consulting firm Green Strategies. 

Consistent rules needed

Not everyone is a fan of SBTi’s flexibility, adopted after the organization considered more than 1,400 comments submitted during its public consultation in late 2025. 

Some nongovernmental organizations, including Natural Resources Defense Council, Sierra Club and the Union of Concerned Scientists have urged SBTi and GHG Protocol to align on policies that embrace hourly matching. They criticized SBTi for bowing to corporate pressure with its changes. 

“These requirements will drive real decarbonization by aligning corporate emissions reduction claims with investments in renewable energy that credibly displace fossil fuels,” the NGOs said in a letter to SBTi CEO David Kennedy and technical council members. “Any reliance on status quo annual matching will result in non-impactful investments counting toward unscientific climate targets.”  

Likewise, corporate strategists expressed some concern over the potential misalignment between SBTi’s and GHG Protocol’s approaches on electricity. “Everyone is looking to push toward a consistent approach,” Davidson said. 

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Jet fuel made from captured carbon begins to flow from new plant

Employees of Microsoft and Shopify will soon be able to use a novel approach to lowering business-travel emissions thanks to the opening of a pioneering facility that uses renewable energy to transform carbon dioxide and water into low-carbon jet fuel.

The facility, in Moses Lake, Washington, is operated by Twelve, a startup that spent the past decade developing its approach to manufacturing sustainable aviation fuel (SAF). The fuel will be used by multiple carriers, including Alaska Airlines, which will sell the associated emissions credits to Microsoft and other partners.

First of a kind

Twelve’s plant, known as AirPlant One, will produce a relatively small amount of “eSAF”: 50,000 gallons annually, compared to the 1.1 million gallons Alaska’s planes burned in 2025. But the plant’s opening is a milestone nonetheless, argued Ryan Spies, managing director for sustainability at the airline. “It’s always so hard to get the first of anything built,” he said. “And in the fuel space probably 10 times harder.”

The technology inside AirPlant One uses renewable energy to transform CO2 and water into a synthetic crude oil that can then be refined to produce eSAF and other products. Twelve claims that the lifecycle emissions associated with its eSAF are up to 90 percent lower than conventional fossil-based jet fuel. It’s also considerably more expensive: Nicholas Flanders, Twelve’s CEO and co-founder, declined to share the cost, but industry estimates peg eSAF as five to 10 times more expensive than conventional fuel.

Cost curve

The premium is covered, at least at present, by companies that want to support the growth of eSAF and reduce business travel emissions. Under the agreement with Alaska and Twelve, Microsoft and other buyers will receive credits that can be netted against Scope 3 emissions. Spies did not specify a price for eSAF credits, but noted that credits on the broader SAF market, which includes fuel made from used cooking oil and other waste biomass, costs between $100 and $300 per ton of carbon dioxide equivalent. 

The eSAF industry will also soon have regulatory support. Under the European Union’s RefuelEU aviation program, airports in the bloc were required to use 2 percent SAF in 2025, rising to 70 percent in 2050. A separate sub-mandate for eSAF will begin at 1.2 percent in 2030 and reach 35 percent by 2050.

Scale will be critical if eSAF producers are to cut costs and become competitive with other forms of SAF. Flanders said that Twelve, which closed a $645 million funding round in 2024 and has a contract to supply five European airlines with 260 million gallons of eSAF, is planning an AirPlant Two facility that will produce tens of millions of gallons annually.

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How autonomous vehicles can move EV policy forward

The opinions expressed here by Trellis expert contributors are their own, not those of Trellis or its editors.

Autonomous vehicles, or AVs, are ushering in a new era of mobility in cities across the country. If you’ve used a driverless taxi in a big congested city like New York or San Francisco, you’ll know that they’re convenient and reasonably priced —  plus they promise to be safer than human drivers and reduce crashes, one of the leading causes of accidental death in the U.S.

Nearly all the AVs on our roads are electric. Although AVs remain a tiny fraction of the vehicles on the road, they represent an important part of the future of low-carbon urban transport — and they can help support the broader shift toward cleaner, more advanced and affordable transportation.

Newark, Calif.-based EV manufacturer Lucid, for example, is advancing both consumer and commercial autonomous cars, including a newly announced robotaxi partnership with Uber and Nuro slated to launch in the San Francisco Bay Area in late 2026. It has also been an important partner for Ceres in making the case on Capitol Hill that AVs and EVs will advance the American economy together.

Making the business case

That linkage further underscores that the business case for electrifying transportation remains strong, even amid recent federal policy headwinds.

Innovation, safety and efficiency can move forward together, reinforcing the long‑term shift toward electrification without relying on government mandates.

But right now, there’s no national policy framework governing autonomous vehicle deployment. AV manufacturers and operators are navigating a patchwork of inconsistent state and local rules. This fragmentation increases costs, slows deployment and creates uncertainty for AV manufacturers and developers investing in electric and automated vehicle technologies.  

That dynamic ultimately hurts the larger EV industry because autonomous cars could be a huge catalyst for electrification if they are deployed with clear, uniform rules more widely.

Electric robotaxis make perfect sense because they’re fleet vehicles that can be charged at a central location when they’re not in use. They’ll be cheaper to operate over the long term as self-driving technology matures, because they can rely on relatively steady electricity prices, rather than volatile global oil markets. It’s cheaper to fuel up an EV than a gas-powered car, even though electricity rates are generally on the rise.

Goldman Sachs projects AVs will make up 8 percent of the rideshare market by 2030. That’s still small, but the growth would be significant, to 35,000 AVs on the road from around 1,500 today. It’s also a huge number of vehicle trips, given that millions of Americans use rideshare services. A national framework is the best way to make sure that the growth trajectory continues and that electric AVs keep displacing pollution on the roads.

There’s a bipartisan opportunity here as Congress considers a major bill to revamp highway and transportation programs. Including a national framework for self-driving cars in that legislation would advance both AVs and EVs.

Countering China 

This policy appeals to both Republicans and Democrats: It’s a way to strengthen U.S. technological leadership, support domestic manufacturing and ensure that American companies remain competitive with rivals in China who face fewer restrictions on deployment.

China is increasingly dominating international EV markets, but the U.S. remains ahead of the curve in self-driving technology. The U.S. can’t cede its technological advantage here. In the current political environment, the fact that putting more AVs on the road will reduce pollution is almost a side-benefit.

The federal EV tax credit is gone, and the policy solutions for electrifying transportation today have dwindled in the last few years.

But Lucid is a clear example of the direction the auto industry is headed, as it shows to lawmakers through its support for Ceres’ advocacy work in D.C.

Advancing AV policy does not require compromising on safety. Given its resources, the federal government has an important role to play in ensuring AVs remain the safest vehicles on the road.

And the technology is advancing fast. The partnership with Uber, for example, will take advantage of Lucid’s fully redundant zonal architecture — a way to string wiring around an EV more efficiently — which was designed to support AV applications.

The company also offers a comprehensive suite of sensors, including LiDAR, radar, visible-light and surround-view cameras, an infrared driver monitoring camera, and ultrasonic sensors.

That all adds up to an incredibly safe roster of vehicles, and it’s a leading example of how America’s EV industry is setting the stage for a safer, cleaner transportation future.

Lucid is focused on moving the industry forward by championing innovation that delivers real-world results. Enlisting more companies to take action will build bipartisan engagement, leading to federal policy that will accelerate the EV revolution.

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