James' World 2

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For decades, Keith Krehbiel took high doses of medications with a debilitating side effect—severe nausea—following his diagnosis with early-onset Parkinson’s disease at age 42 in 1997. When each dose wore off, he experienced dyskinesia—involuntary, repetitive muscle movements. In his case, this consisted of head bobbing and weaving. Krehbiel is among one million Americans who live with this progressive neurological disorder, which causes slowed movements, tremors, and balance problems.

But soon after surgery to implant electrodes into specific areas of his brain in 2020, his life dramatically improved. “My tremor went away almost entirely,” says Krehbiel, now age 70 and a professor emeritus of political science at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, whose Parkinson’s symptoms began at age 40 and were initially misdiagnosed as repetitive stress injury from computer use. “I reduced my Parkinson’s meds by more than two thirds,” he adds. “And I no longer have a sensation of a foggy brain, nor nausea or dyskinesia.”

Krehbiel was the first participant to enroll in a clinical trial testing a new form of deep-brain stimulation (DBS), a technology that gained approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for Parkinson’s tremor and essential tremor in 1997 (it was later approved for other symptoms and conditions). The new adaptive system adjusts stimulation levels automatically based on the person’s individual brain signals. In late February it received FDA approval for Parkinson’s disease ‘based on results of the international multicenter trial, which involved participants at 10 sites across a total of four countries—the U.S., the Netherlands, Canada, and France.

This technology is suitable for anyone with Parkinson’s, not just individuals in clinical trials, says Helen Bronte-Stewart, the recent trial’s global lead investigator and a neurologist specializing in movement disorders at Stanford Medicine. “Like a cardiac pacemaker that responds to the rhythms of the heart, adaptive deep-brain stimulation uses a person’s individual brain signals to control the electric pulses it delivers,” Bronte-Stewart says. “This makes it more personalized, precise, and efficient than older DBS methods.”

“Traditional DBS delivers constant stimulation, which doesn’t always match the fluctuating symptoms of Parkinson’s disease,” adds neurologist Todd Herrington, another of the trial’s investigators and director of the deep-brain stimulation program at Massachusetts General Hospital. With adaptive DBS, “the goal is to adjust stimulation in real-time to provide more effective symptom control, fewer side effects and improved patient quality of life.”

Current FDA approval of this adaptive system is for the treatment of Parkinson’s only, not essential tremor, dystonia (a neurological disorder that causes excessive, repetitive, and involuntary muscle contractions) or epilepsy, which still rely on traditional, continuous DBS, Herrington says.

“Our personalized treatment can control debilitating tremors for a person living with Parkinson’s,” says Ashwini Sharan, chief medical officer of the neuromodulation operating unit at Medtronic, the Minneapolis-based medical device company that manufactures this technology. Placed under the skin of the chest, a DBS device transports electrical signals through very thin wires to an area in the brain that controls movement.

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CLIMATEWIRE | How can projects that scrub carbon dioxide from the atmosphere reduce their sky-high costs?

For a planned development in Texas, one answer is to draw power directly from a wind farm.

The innovative project, announced Monday by three European companies, could be the world’s first direct air capture development to rely primarily on so-called behind the meter electricity. That means the DAC facility would run mainly with low-cost clean power that’s generated on site, not metered out from the grid.

The facility is slated to come online in 2028 and is intended to eventually remove up to 500,000 metric tons of carbon from the atmosphere per year — more than the average annual emissions of a natural gas plant, according to EPA data. The planned facility is larger than any other direct air capture plant currently in operation, although several DAC projects under development are similarly sized.

The new Texas project is being led by Return Carbon, a Dutch project development and investment company, and Skytree, a direct air capture technology firm also based in the Netherlands, with wind power from the North American renewables subsidiary of EDF, the state-owned French utility. Carbon dioxide the facility pulls from the sky would be stored permanently underground by the Texas firm Verified Carbon.

“It is a new framework, which we have agreed with EDF,” said Martijn Verwoerd, the co-founder and managing director of Return Carbon, said in an interview before publicly revealing the deal. “That’s why we’re announcing it.”

The novel agreement would ensure that Return Carbon, which plans to own and operate the direct air capture facility, has access to consistent supply of low-cost clean energy from Texas’s windy gulf coast. Verwoerd declined to say the price per kilowatt-hour Return Carbon has locked in and said the consortium would decide on a precise location later this year.

For EDF, the deal would reduce the likelihood that it has to sell its electricity at a loss or even pay to add it to the grid, Verwoerd explained. Utilities can suffer so called negative power prices when electricity production exceeds the demand for power.

The agreement also allows EDF to redirect its electricity from Return Carbon onto the grid when there is “peak pricing in the market,” he said. In that scenario, the direct air capture facility could operate using renewable energy from a separate agreement Return Carbon has struck with other power providers or go offline until electricity prices fall to an acceptable level.

It’s a “win-win for all parties,” Verwoerd said.

To avoid the worst impacts of climate change, scientists say the world needs to immediately reduce its emissions of carbon dioxide, the main source of which is the burning of oil, gas and coal. At the same time, countries and companies need to begin deploying carbon dioxide removal technologies such as direct air capture to reduce the amount of carbon that’s already been spewed into the atmosphere.

Neither are happening quickly enough, with President Donald Trump promising to double down on oil drilling while slashing federal support for climate-related initiatives.

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