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Why Did Chevron Covet Hess? Because of Guyana.
The much-predicted wave of oil consolidation is happening. The oil giant Chevron announced on Monday it was acquiring rival Hess in a deal worth $53 billion. This comes weeks after ExxonMobil announced a merger with Pioneer Natural Resources in a similarly sized deal. While that tie-up was largely interpreted as ExxonMobil trying to consolidate its position in West Texas’s immensely productive Permian Basin, this latest deal is about Chevron getting in on another prize: the massive offshore oil resources of Guyana. From 2014 to 2022, the South American nation has seen its gross domestic product grow from just over $4...
Israel Is Beefing with Greta Thunberg on X
Israel is fighting with the Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg on X. Earlier today, Thunberg used her weekly Fridays for the Future post to share that she was striking “in solidarity with Palestine and Gaza,” adding that “the world needs to speak up and call for an immediate ceasefire, justice, and freedom for Palestinians and all civilians affected.” Her post included a photo of herself holding up a sign reading "Stand with Gaza," along with others carrying signs saying "Free Palestine" and "Climate Justice Now!". Her post followed the horrifying massacre and kidnappings of hundreds of Israelis by Hamas militants...
Another Bad Day for the Renewables Industry
It’s another bad day for the renewable energy business.The ill tidings started early Friday morning with SolarEdge, a company that primarily sells inverters, which convert the electricity produced by a solar panel into the kind that can be used in homes. In an unexpected announcement, SolarEdge’s chief executive Zvi Lando said that, in the third quarter, the company had “experienced substantial unexpected cancellations and pushouts of existing backlog from our European distributors.” Many of its core financial metrics, including revenue and operating income, would fall below the low end of the range it had projected earlier, SolarEdge warned. The...
‘Killers of the Flower Moon’ is a Fossil-Fueled Gangster Movie
The mafia honorific “don,” meaning “boss” — as in Don Corleone or the Quiet Don Russell Bufalino — derives from an older Italian usage of the word as a title for male nobility, like a prince or a duke. You might, in a stretch, even manage to get away with translating it as “king.” Martin Scorsese’s newest film, Killers of the Flower Moon, doesn’t have a don, or even, as far as I could tell, any Italians, which might prevent its ready categorization as a gangster film in the vein of the director’s most memorable work, like Goodfellas, Mean...
The Climate Economy’s Rough Patch, Explained
Shares in climate-related companies — green hydrogen, residential solar, renewables developers — have been flagging in the past few months, and it seems like the damage may have spread to the private markets as well, where fledgling companies seek funding from individual venture capital firms. The S&P Clean Energy Index — a group of 100 “global clean energy-related businesses from both developed and emerging markets” — has declined around 30% so far this year, compared to the broader stock market going up 12%. While there are many different types of clean energy companies, the widespread malaise across the sector’s shares can...
Hurricanes Are Strengthening Much Faster Than They Did in the 1980s
It is thanks to researchers like Andra Garner that your creeping suspicion that things are getting worse can be statistically confirmed — and quantified. On Thursday, Scientific Reports published Garner’s new study, which found that Atlantic hurricanes are “more than twice as likely to strengthen from a weak Category 1 hurricane to a major Category 3 or stronger hurricane in a 24-hour period than they were between 1970 and 1990.” She also found that for hurricanes off the East Coast, that intensification is more likely than ever to happen quickly.“Most of these findings have served to better quantify and...
The Race to Spend the I.R.A.’s $100 Billion in Grants Has Begun
All across the United States, grant money from the Inflation Reduction Act has begun to flow. There’s more than $100 million for protecting the Pacific Ocean’s salmon and steelhead fisheries. Hundreds of millions more to plant urban canopies in Atlanta, Phoenix, and dozens of other cities. $1 billion for two new weather research ships for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and tens of millions for mapping the best “fuel breaks” — roads, rivers, and other natural features that will slow wildfires in Colorado, Wyoming, and other states. The Biden administration has begun the gargantuan work of spending down the more than $110...
Can Plankton Ferry Carbon to the Bottom of the Ocean?
Scientists at England’s University of Exeter believe that masses of drifting crustaceans “may help to store enormous amounts of carbon in the ocean,” at once sucking CO2 from the atmosphere and slowing climate change, the BBC reports. Britain’s Natural Environment Research Council has funded three projects to investigate the idea that the small, H.R. Giger-looking creatures, known as copepods or zooplankton, can absorb significant amounts of carbon.“Don’t be fooled by their size,” said University of Exeter professor Daniel Mayor. “These tiny but mighty life forms play a crucial role in regulating Earth’s climate by moving carbon out of the...
Tesla Finally Gives a Cybertruck Release Date: November 30
Tesla’s electric Cybertruck might actually hit the roads before the end of the year.The automaker will deliver its first pickup trucks on November 30, it announced today, amid a disappointing set of financial earnings that saw its sales rise but profits fall.“I’ve driven the car — it’s an amazing product,” Elon Musk said on Wednesday evening. “But I do want to temper expectations for Cybertruck,” he added, warning that production of the vehicle will take at least 18 months to scale. “While I think this is potentially our best product ever, I think this is going to require immense...
America Is Starting a Vault of Endangered Species DNA
When times are bleak, ice is seductive. Just look at the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, that frozen bunker in the middle of a mountain in Norway which is essentially our planet’s backup supply of seeds. When it opened in 2008, it came with the promise of biblical redemption. The vault, Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg told delegates, was “the Noah's Ark for securing biological diversity for future generations." Science fiction is full of similar stories. The idea of cryonics is, by now, an old trope: to cheat death, freeze yourself so you can be revived in the future. This...
The Texas Economy Took a Hit This Summer from Record-Breaking Heat
What happens to the economy when it gets hot and stays hot?That’s the question a group of economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas tried to answer, looking at Texas’s record-breaking heat this summer, which strained the state’s electrical grid.“The impact of the sometimes relentless summer 2023 heat appears to have depressed the ability of some industries to supply goods and damped consumer demand, especially for certain services,” the group said in the slightly bloodless language of economists.Looking at a broader range of summers, in this case from 2000 to 2022, the economists found that “for every 1-degree...
The Air Quality Revolution Brewing on Our Roads
The electric car push is about carbon. You know the logic: If we all switch to EVs, and if we power those EV with mostly renewable energy, then the world could slash the amount of carbon dioxide emitted by the transportation sector. The electrification effort is so centered on fighting climate change that it’s easy to forget there’s another big, shiny benefit of switching from gas engines to battery power: cleaner air.CO2 isn’t the only thing that comes out of a tailpipe, after all. Cars also spew volatile organic compounds (VOCs), nitrous oxides (NOx), and fine particulate matter into...
How an Architect Built a House to Withstand Mudslides
Dan Nelson has inadvertently become an expert in resilient design because of where he lives and builds houses: Washington state. His architecture firm, Designs Northwest Architects, specializes in complex residential projects in and around the Puget Sound where earthquake risk runs high. With strict seismic codes and geological restrictions for building near FEMA flood zones, Nelson and his firm have become quite skilled in designing homes to withstand the extreme conditions specific to the Pacific Northwest.Nelson gained international renown for the Tsunami House, a family home built in a high velocity flood zone that would potentially need to withstand...
Europe Is Facing a Different Type of Wildfire
With late-season fires on Portuguese Madeira and Spanish Tenerife recently brought under control, European nations can finally begin to relax after a historic and deadly wildfire season. The mainland continent experienced “far more fires and a larger burned area [in 2023] than in an average fire season,” The New York Times reports, including the single largest wildfire in the EU since record-keeping began in 2000, in Greece.In the United States, we’re used to words like “historic” and “deadly” when it comes to our wildfires. American fire researchers often point to the U.S. Forest Service’s long history of wildfire suppression...
Automakers Are Quietly Slowing Down Their Plans for Electric Pickups
General Motors is pushing back plans to convert its Orion assembly plant in Lake Orion, Michigan. Instead of completing its transition from producing electric cars to electric pickup trucks by 2024, the updated factory won’t be ready till late 2025. In a statement, a spokesperson for GM told me the delay was “to better manage capital investment while aligning with evolving EV demand.”It’s another indication that there’s a mismatch between the types of electric vehicles that Americans want to buy and the types of EVs — or, really, electric trucks — that American automakers, with ample encouragement and subsidies,...
Volvo to Release an Electric Minivan — But Only In China
Volvo, a company that has never in its nearly 100 years of existence manufactured a minivan, is among the first automakers bringing an electric model to market.The Swedish automaker, which was acquired by the Chinese company Geely in 2010, began teasing its first-ever minivan, the EM90, on social media in late September with images that looked like screenshots from Mad Men. In one, the silhouette of the van is barely visible outside the curtains of a shag-carpeted, wood-paneled living room, where a man sits with his feet up in an Eames chair. In another, the front bumper is peaking...
Can an Advertising Blitz Teach Americans What’s In Biden’s Climate Law?
A climate advocacy group is planning to spend $80 million on advertising in an effort to boost President Biden’s environmental bona fides ahead of next year’s election, The New York Times reports. Climate Power will use television and digital ads to remind — or, in many cases, educate — voters of Biden’s green credentials. “There is a huge swath of people who just don’t know anything,” Climate Power’s executive director, Lori Lodes, told the Times. “We need to make sure that the Biden coalition, the folks who got him into office in 2020, sees that he’s delivered on his...
Bad Weather Is Reportedly Delaying the Israeli Ground Invasion of Gaza
All wars are weather stories, as much as that fact might be to the chagrin of modern militaries. “It will be a matter of days before Israeli forces launch a ground invasion of Gaza,” Intelligencer reported a matter of days ago, after Israel notified the UN that the 1.1 million Palestinians living to the north of Wadi Gaza had 24 hours to get out. But 24 hours have come and gone, a delay that has allowed more time for frantic evacuations from the area — but also, it appears, might be due simply to the region’s overcast skies. According...
The Most Interesting EVs Are the Weird Ones
The Shogo’s front end shouts fast, and its steering yoke could’ve come off a race car — no surprise, since Honda motorsport engineers designed and hand-assembled it. Sure, the little electric vehicle tops out at 5 miles per hour. But sometimes it’s not about raw speed. It's about who gets to feel the glee of driving. Developed as part of Honda’s “ Project Courage,” Shogo is a battery-powered ride built to let 4-to-9-year-old children’s hospital patients find a little extra joy as they drive themselves around the hallways. The kid EV comes with a tall mount at the back to hold...
Help! Will My Electric Boat or Car Electrocute Me If It Sinks?
As someone on the “will this thing kill me” beat, I was paying close attention when the former president of the United States recently expressed concern about electric-powered boats — apparently, the new aquatic twist on his electric car rant. “Let’s say your boat goes down and I’m sitting on top of this big powerful battery and the boat’s going down,” Donald Trump mused to a group of supporters in the landlocked state of Iowa. “Do I get electrocuted?” Trump then dramatically upped the stakes by imagining the sinking electric boat was also being circled by a shark. “So I...
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