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Maine’s Historic Public Power Push Goes Down in Flames
An unprecedented “public power takeover” campaign in Maine failed on Tuesday, according to a projection by The New York Times.The Maine ballot had asked voters if they wanted to create the Pine Tree Power Company, a nonprofit electric utility governed by a publicly-elected board, which would purchase and acquire all of the investor-owned transmission and distribution utilities in Maine. When the Times made its call, voters had rejected the initiative 71% to 29%, with over a third of precincts reporting.The ballot question was the culmination of a multi-year campaign by a group called Our Power, which initially brought the...
Canada Wants U.S. Offshore Wind Too
The Northeast has a mismatch between its climate ambitions — some of the most aggressive decarbonization targets in the country — and its resources for renewable energy. While the Pacific Northwest has rivers and gorges, the Southwest and Southeast have lots of sun, and the Great Plains has lots of wind, the major renewable resource in the Northeast lies on the Atlantic Ocean, where plans for billions of dollars in offshore wind investment are being delayed or even outright canceled as high costs take its toll on the industry.But what the Northeast does have is a long border with...
A Clean Energy Scandal Brings Down Portugal’s Prime Minister
As investment in renewable energy rises globally, so too does the potential for massive corruption. This proved true on Tuesday, when Portuguese Prime Minister António Costa resigned amid an explosive investigation into his administration’s handling of lithium mining and hydrogen projects. “The dignity of the functions of prime minister is not compatible with any suspicion about his integrity, his good conduct, and even less with the suspicion of the practice of any criminal act,” Costa said in a tearful televised announcement on Tuesday. While Costa assured viewers that he would be cooperating with authorities in their investigation, he maintained...
Prince William Announces the Earthshot Prize Winners
The Earthshot Prize, an annual award by Prince William’s Royal Foundation, was given to five climate-focused startups on Tuesday. The winners — each of which will receive $1.2 million and “tailored support” from the prize’s “global alliance of partners” — were Acción Andina, a Peruvian initiative to protect Andean forests; GRST, a Hong Kong builder and recycler of lithium-ion batteries; S4S Technologies, an Indian project to combat food waste and reduce rural poverty; WildAid, a global nonprofit dedicated to improving ocean health; and Boomitra, a multinational company working to create a soil carbon marketplace. “I choose to believe that...
What Would You Spend to Save San Francisco’s Ferry Building?
When San Francisco’s Ferry Plaza Farmers Market is in full Saturday swing, one way to dodge the determined foodies and casual browsers is to retreat to the plaza just 30 steps south of the Ferry Building. It sits atop three tiers of dark-veined granite, accessible by two flights of nine stairs or a ramp that ascends along the water to a trio of ferry gates that, like the plaza, were completed in 2021.The chosen height hints at what someday might be the norm — the elevation where San Francisco’s constructed shoreline will need to be to serve as a...
Michigan Is About to Have the Best Climate Policies of Any Battleground State
Michigan looks likely to pass an aggressive package of climate laws this week, as the state’s Democrats are set to capitalize on their first governing trifecta in nearly four decades. The climate laws would require that 100% of Michigan’s electricity come from carbon-free sources by 2040, putting the state on par with the fastest state-level decarbonization deadlines nationwide. New York, Connecticut, Minnesota, and Oregon also aim to achieve zero-carbon electricity by 2040. The bills would also open a new Just Transition Office within the Michigan Department of Labor and strengthen the state’s energy-efficiency and utility laws. While other states have passed...
Gaza Has Never Had Enough Water
Home to two million people, the Gaza Strip sits squeezed between Israel and the Mediterranean Sea on a bit of land just twice the size of Washington, D.C. Gaza is the smaller part of Palestine’s two territories; you could walk the length of its southern border with Egypt in under three hours. But land is not the only thing that’s long been in short supply in Gaza. As the war between Israel and Hamas, the Palestinian militant group that rules the region, has made clear, Gaza is also increasingly bereft of water. Over the course of the tragic war,...
The NYC Marathon Was Unseasonably Warm Again. That Spells Trouble.
The buzzy topic of conversation among New York City Marathon race volunteers in the predawn hours of Sunday morning wasn’t if a course record was going to be broken or Peres Jepchirchir’s pre-race withdrawal, but how we decided what we were going to wear. This year, I was...
Republicans Propose One of the Year’s Most Interesting Climate Bills
One of the year’s most interesting climate policies was just proposed … by a Republican. Two, actually.On Thursday, Senators Bill Cassidy and Lindsey Graham released a bill that would establish a “foreign pollution fee,” a new type of tariff that would raise the cost of products imported from countries with substantially higher emissions than the United States. If that sounds suspiciously like a carbon price, you’re not wrong: Both policies aim to make dirtier products more expensive. But unlike a carbon price, the foreign pollution fee would apply only to imported products, not to anything made within the United...
‘Planet Earth III’ Is a Poignant Reminder of What We’re Fighting For
David Attenborough is not mad, he’s just disappointed. At 97 years old, the narrator of the Planet Earth series returns to guide us through the nature docuseries’ third installment, which becomes available for U.S. audiences this weekend. Maybe I’d just forgotten how harrowing stories of animal survival can be in the seven years since the release of Planet Earth II, but other reviewers seem to agree: Planet Earth III has an especially melancholic edge. You can hear it in Attenborough’s narration: “Since Darwin’s time, [Earth] has changed beyond recognition, transformed by a powerful force,” he says in the show’s intro....
The Oil Market Is Chilling Out About Hezbollah
The global energy market breathed a sigh of relief after Hassan Nasrallah, the secretary general of the Lebanese militia Hezbollah, gave a widely anticipated speech that indicated the group would not escalate its current skirmishes with the Israeli military into a full-on conflict. Hezbollah maintains a large force on Lebanon’s border with Israel.Ever since Hamas’s attack on southern Israel and the subsequent Israeli bombardment of Gaza, a lurking question has been whether other regional powers — specifically Iran, which supports Hamas as well as Hezbollah — would get involved.“Nasrallah sent a pretty strong signal — Hezbollah won’t enter the...
It Sure Looks Like a Rivian Was Too Much Truck for Alan Ruck
It is just as the prophets (John Hughes) of old (1986) foretold. On Tuesday, actor Alan Ruck allegedly crashed his Rivian into a Los Angeles pizza shop, an accident that drew immediate comparisons to the famous scene in which he “kills” his father’s Ferrari in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. Just like Cameron Frye, Ruck was reportedly a class act after the scary incident and “appeared more concerned about the well-being of others than his own,” one witness told the Los Angeles Times. (Though to be fair, even a Rivian is less expensive than a fake 1961 Ferrari 250 GT California...
Mercedes’ Vision for Luxury EV Charging
Gas stations aren’t fancy. There are a few quirky or pretty refueling stations scatted around the world, but the typical roadside stops amounts to a few pumps that reek of gasoline, the air pump that only takes quarters, and a convenience store stocked with Zingers. The experience is more or less the same whether you drive a new BMW or a 1980s Dodge Caravan. Nobody at the Chevron is coming out to your car with a hot towel and a glass of cucumber water. A lot about the car ownership experience will change in a country of EVs, though, and...
People Will Stop Eating Meat for the Planet’s Health If Not Their Own
When I was a teen in the late aughts, the Washington Department of Health inflicted permanent damage to my psyche by airing intensely nightmarish anti-smoking commercials late at night on Adult Swim. (No really, you’ve been warned). The fact that a maggoty stop-motion sewer rat still flashes into my head when I think about smoking is a testament to the power of graphic visual dissuasion — even as the U.S. continues to use text-heavy warning labels on cigarette packs compared to the disturbing photographic labels affixed by most other countries.In a new paper published in the journal Appetite on...
My 37 Minutes with Honda’s Rideable Attaché Case
Ever since moving back to New York City a year ago, I’ve gotten really into e-biking. The city upped the number and quality of e-bikes in its bikeshare program, and I’ve been taking full advantage. But the e-bikes are so popular, they aren’t always available, and I’ve been wondering if it might be time to invest in my own ride. Enter the Motocompacto. Honda’s new whimsical, seated e-scooter immediately caught my eye when I saw a story announcing its pending arrival in September. I live on the third floor of a building with no bike storage, so I was intrigued...
Gavin Newsom Is Weaker on Climate When the Cameras Aren’t Rolling
As governor of California, Gavin Newsom has cultivated a reputation as a climate crusader who holds powerful polluters accountable for delay tactics. “The climate crisis is, after all, a fossil fuel crisis. Period, full stop. And these guys have been playing us for fools,” Newsom told a crowd at New York’s Climate Week in September. He praised the state’s attorney general for accusing the oil industry of misleading the public on climate change. California may not be able to solve the problem on its own, Newsom argued, but when it comes to the oil companies, the Golden State “can illuminate...
Everyone’s Mad at Offshore Wind Developers
The Danish energy company Orsted pulled the plug on two big offshore wind projects in New Jersey on Tuesday, taking a $4 billion write-down in the process. Orsted’s decision is just the latest example of the trouble facing the offshore wind industry in the United States, as ambitious goals from both Northeastern states and the Biden administration run into a buzzsaw of rising costs, high interest rates, and construction delays. The two canceled projects, Ocean Wind 1 and 2, would have generated just over two gigawatts of electricity, or about 6% of the Biden administration’s target of 30 gigawatts by...
Let’s Not Coat Our Roads in Toxic Wastewater
Betteridge’s law of headlines, as defined by the journalist Ian Betteridge, states that any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word “no.” This is probably especially true of a headline like the one that ran on Jake Bolster’s recent story for Inside Climate News, which read “Should Toxic Wastewater From Gas Drilling Be Spread on Pennsylvania Roads as a Dust and Snow Suppressant?” There are many red flags here, starting with “toxic” and “wastewater.” But it also speaks to a larger problem: Most of the fluid that comes out of the ground during...
Is Deep-Sea Mining Really Necessary?
“To say, ‘Don’t harm the ocean’ — it is the easiest message in the world, right? You just have to show a photo of a turtle with a straw in its nose,” Michael Lodge, the secretary general of the U.N.’s International Seabed Authority, told The New York Times last year. “Everybody in Brooklyn can then say, ‘I don’t want to harm the ocean.’ But they sure want their Teslas.” Canadian filmmaker Matthieu Rytz apparently didn’t get the memo. Deep Rising, his new documentary narrated by Jason Momoa, aims at one of the great contradictions of the energy transition: that...
The Panama Canal Is Drying Up
The Panama Canal is in trouble. In an advisory dated Monday, the Panama Canal Authority said it will cut the number of ships allowed to pass through the waterway on a typical day in half due to a drought afflicting the region. This year has been the area’s second driest since 1950, according to the authority, with no relief forecast for the rest of 2023. The authority said “unprecedented” levels at an artificial lake feeding into the canal are forcing it to cut the number of ships making the crossing every day from 32 in October to 25 at the beginning...
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