RMI is an organization in the United States dedicated to research, publication, consulting, and lecturing in the general field of sustainability, with a special focus on profitable innovations for energy and resource efficiency. RMI was established in 1982 and has grown into a broad-based institution with 220+ staff and an annual budget of some $52 million. RMI's work is independent and non-adversarial, with a strong emphasis on market-based solutions. The institute, which includes the Carbon War Room (which was merged with RMI in December 2014), operates in a number of initiative areas: Electricity Platform, Renewables Solutions, Buildings, Reinventing Fire: China, Smart Island Economies, Mobility Transformation, Shipping Efficiency, Sunshine for Mines, Sustainable Aviation, and Trucking Efficiency. The work of RMI has benefited more than 80 Fortune 500 companies in a diverse range of sectors.[non-primary source needed] RMI is headquartered in Basalt, Colorado, and also maintains offices in Boulder, Colorado, New York City, Washington D.C., and Beijing, China.
Robust estimates of methane emissions are critical for understanding their impacts on atmospheric warming and air quality, and for assessing methane mitigation strategies. Gridded inventories, such as the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Greenhouse Gas Inventory (EPA GHGI), the Emissions Database for Global Atmospheric Research (EDGAR 2024), and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Fossil Fuel Oil and Gas inventory (NOAA FOG), are constructed to evaluate large-scale emission patterns and support identifying emission mitigation priorities and prioritizing future measurements. However, substantial differences across inventories complicate such assessments. We benchmark EPA GHGI, EDGAR 2024, and NOAA FOG against flux estimates from an atmospheric inversion of Greenhouse Gases Observing Satellite (GOSAT) data from 2012 to 2020 over the Contiguous United States (CONUS). A key technical challenge is the heterogeneous sensitivity of satellite-derived fluxes, which depends on measurement uncertainty, coverage, and inversion model configuration. We account for this heterogeneity by applying an inversion operator to each inventory prior to comparison with the GOSAT-based estimates. The GOSAT estimates are most sensitive to oil and gas and livestock emissions; oil and gas emissions are consistent with NOAA FOG (14.1 Tg CH4 yr1 in 2015), but exceed EPA GHGI and EDGAR, particularly across Texas, Oklahoma, and Louisiana. GOSAT-based livestock emissions exceed EPA GHGI and EDGAR by 1–2 Tg CH4 yr1, with the largest differences in the Midwest and California. Despite these discrepancies, both activity and satellite based estimates show no observable trends from 2012 to 2020 in fossil and livestock emissions.
Jointly analyzing the sightlines of arcsecond-localized fast radio bursts (FRBs) and UV-bright quasars (QSOs) nearby in projection has the potential to provide strong constraints on the phases, mass distributions, and magnetic structure of the diffuse universe. Each probe supplies what the other cannot: FRBs provide integrated electron columns (DM), line-of-sight magnetic field estimates (RM), and scattering constraints (τ_ scatt) that are independent of gas phase; QSOs provide the redshift- and phase-resolved column densities needed to interpret them. Today, there are only ∼100 arcsecond-localized FRBs at z < 1, making statistical FRB-QSO pair surveys impossible. By 2035, there will be ∼10^5. Using the most recent FRB localization forecasts and UV-bright QSO catalogs, we estimate that next-generation interferometers will yield thousands of FRB–QSO pairs at angular separations θ< 10', including ∼100 pairs at θ< 1', over a common 20,000 deg^2 footprint by 2035. We outline the science enabled by this sample: constraints on CGM ionization fractions and baryon masses; observational constraints on the role of magnetic fields and turbulence in the CGM and cosmic web; sightline-by-sightline partitioning of the cosmic DM budget; and three-dimensional mapping of the multiphase Milky Way and M31 halos. Together, these measurements directly address the physics of feedback, non-thermal pressure support, and energy balance in the diffuse gas that regulates galaxy growth. HST/COS is the only instrument that can carry out this program, and the 2030s are the only decade in which to do it before Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO) defines the next era of diffuse universe science.
