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The World’s Biggest Carbon Removal Plant Just Turned 2. So, Uh, Is It Working?
In the spring of 2021, the world’s leading authority on energy published a “roadmap” for preventing the most catastrophic climate change scenarios. One of its conclusions was particularly daunting. Getting energy-related emissions down to net zero by 2050, the International Energy Agency said, would require “huge leaps in innovation.”Existing technologies would be mostly sufficient to carry us down the carbon curve over the next decade. But after that, nearly half of the remaining work would have to come from solutions that, for all intents and purposes, did not exist yet. Some would only require retooling existing industries, like developing...
The Electric Vehicle Revolution Is Still Non-Union
The United Auto Workers’ six-week strike has won large concessions from the Big Three American automakers, including substantial wage hikes.But in order to win the war over the future of unionized labor in the auto industry, the UAW will need to do something even harder than extracting raises from Ford, Stellantis, and GM: It will have to grow the union by bringing foreign automaker and non-union workforces into the UAW, something it has largely failed to accomplish. Today, it only represents around 15% of the roughly one million autoworkers in the United States.The UAW leadership had tread a narrow...
The UAW Strike Is Probably Over
The largest, longest strike among American autoworkers in decades is probably over. On Monday, the United Auto Workers reached a tentative agreement with General Motors, according to multiple outlets, meaning that the union now has a deal with all of the “Big Three” American automakers. While the terms of the GM deal haven’t been released, they will likely resemble those in the UAW’s tentative contracts with Ford and Stellantis, which owns Chrysler, Dodge, Jeep, and Ram. Those two deals saw many union members get a 25% pay bump, and they eliminated a two-tier wage system at some factories that...
How Older People Got Left Out of Climate Planning
When we talk about climate solutions, we often hear the word resilience. It’s the catch-all term for all the things we’re doing to prepare for the impacts of climate change — things like building seawalls and hardening homes and switching to renewable energy sources. But planning for the future is a tricky thing, and, argues Danielle Arigoni, author of the new book Climate Resilience for an Aging Nation (Island Press), there’s one section of American society that is left out of resilience as we think of it today: older adults. Arigoni spent much of her career working as an urban...
The National Weather Service’s Smart Experiment with AI
Yesterday, the National Weather Service (NWS) announced that it, like seemingly everyone else in the world, is experimenting with AI. Specifically, it’s using AI to translate its weather forecasts and warnings into Spanish and Chinese, with a plan to expand into more languages in the future, starting with Samoan and Vietnamese. I am cautiously optimistic about this. It’s well-known that climate change will disproportionately impact communities of color, many of which consist of immigrants whose first language is not English. The NWS has been manually translating its forecasts into Spanish for 30 years, but this program represents an expansion...
New York’s Offshore Wind Future Is Being Dragged Down By Its Past
This hasn't been a good month for the offshore wind industry in New York, but the state is pushing ahead to try to reach its aggressive decarbonization goals. Governor Kathy Hochul announced on Tuesday contracts for three big offshore wind projects slated to go into operation in 2030 and bring four gigawatts of renewable energy to the grid.As evidenced by the attendance of a senior White House official, Ali Zaidi, at the announcement, both the Hochul and Biden administrations are excited about New York’s offshore wind plan — or at least committed to making it work, despite the challenges...
It’s the Doldrums for Wind Turbine Makers
Two of the biggest companies in the wind turbine industry, General Electric and Siemens Energy, both shared disquieting news about their businesses this week. GE disclosed in its third quarter earnings that its offshore wind business had $1 billion in losses so far this year, while Siemens had to respond to reports it was seeking a bailout from the German government. Both GE and Siemens Energy sell turbines, while the latter also services wind farms.The news adds up to a bleak picture for the wind industry, especially offshore, where developers are having problems keeping existing projects on budget and...
Chickens Might Be Self-Aware. Yikes!
Like the question of what lies beyond the universe and what happens when we die, thinking too long or too hard about the implications of what it means if the things we eat have self-awareness can drive you a little mad. Certainly, it’s deeply uncomfortable to contemplate at length.Take it from me: Earlier this year, I tried to weigh the ethical dilemma of eating more chicken — which would be vastly better for the planet, short of the impossibility of everyone becoming a vegetarian — and the fact that replacing beef and pork in our diets with more poultry...
How to Make Sense of Electric Cars’ Month of Disarray
This has not been a good week for the electric-vehicle transition. On Wednesday, General Motors scrapped a self-imposed plan of building 400,000 electric vehicles by the middle of next year. Then it jettisoned plans with Honda to build a sub-$30,000 EV. On Thursday, Mercedes Benz announced that its profits had fallen in part due to turbulence in the EV market, and Hertz ditched a plan to have EVs make up 25% of its fleet by 2024. Nor has the past month been much better. Ford has slowed down its EV factory build-out. Elon Musk announced that Tesla was taking a...
The New House Speaker Once Helped Force the Government to Pay for a Noah’s Ark Theme Park
It is perhaps less surprising who the House elected as its new speaker than the fact that they managed to actually elect someone at all. After 22 days, 14 failed candidates, and in mounting desperation and embarrassment, Republicans finally rallied — unanimously! — around Mike Johnson, a northern Louisiana lawmaker who’s been described as “obscure” and “largely unknown” even by his home-state newspaper. Given that Johnson is the least experienced speaker in 140 years, that obscurity is understandable. With only four terms in the House under his belt, he doesn’t have much of a track record for the media to...
She Warned Us that Hurricanes Were Getting Sneakier. Six Days Later, Otis Hit.
Last week, I spoke with researcher Andra Garner about how hurricanes are increasingly sneaking up on us. She had recently published a new study in Scientific Reports, 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.” In her comments to me, Garner had stressed that “when storms intensify quickly, they can become more difficult to forecast and to plan for in terms of emergency action plans for coastal residents.” Less...
Marco Rubio Used to Champion Energy-Saving Buildings. Now He Fights Them.
Earlier this week, I reported on how Marco Rubio, the Republican senator from Florida, is trying to thwart the Biden administration’s plans to tighten energy efficiency standards for new buildings. But today I learned that before Rubio became an adversary of energy efficiency, he was a champion of it.Longtime Florida journalist and Heatmap contributor Michael Grunwald recalled that back in 2006, Rubio published a book called 100 Innovative Ideas for Florida’s Future. The book is apparently the result of an outreach campaign Rubio initiated in 2005 to ask regular Floridians what they wanted the legislature to accomplish. In the...
The Tesla Cybertruck Isn’t a Pickup. It’s a Low-Priced Hummer.
The debut of the Tesla Cybertruck in November 2019 was less a car show-and-tell and more a screaming, all-caps metaphor. The meme-able moment when Tesla design chief Franz von Holzhausen flung a metal orb at the war rig’s windows, shattering the shatterproof glass, felt like an open invitation to belittle the hubris of it all.That’s exactly what happened. Gleeful tweets ridiculed the Cybertruck’s stainless steel body, awkward proportions, and poorly rendered pointy shape. Some mocked the steel monstrosity for being useless for the things trucks are supposed to do — actual work and off-road driving — or for having...
5 Meteorologists Illustrate the ‘Nightmare Scenario’ of Hurricane Otis
Monsters don’t only sneak up on you in horror movies. In the dark of Monday night, a storm system brewing in the Eastern Pacific still looked as if it would make landfall near Acapulco, Mexico, as nothing greater than a tropical storm. But within just 12 hours on Tuesday, Tropical Storm Otis intensified by 80 mph into a full-blown hurricane; when it made landfall just after midnight on Wednesday morning, it had exploded into an unprecedented Category 5 storm. Eric Blake, a forecaster with the National Hurricane Center, called the event nothing short of a “nightmare scenario.” Hurricane Otis is...
New York’s Offshore Wind Future Is Being Dragged Down By Its Past
This hasn’t been a good month for the offshore wind industry in New York, but the state is pushing ahead to try to reach its aggressive decarbonization goals. Governor Kathy Hochul announced on Tuesday contracts for three big offshore wind projects slated to go into operation in 2030 and bring four gigawatts of renewable energy to the grid. As evidenced by the attendance of a senior White House official, Ali Zaidi, at the announcement, both the Hochul and Biden administrations are excited about New York’s offshore wind plan — or at least committed to making it work, despite the challenges...
Electric Cars’ Partisanship Problem
Sales of electric cars have reached what some researchers believe is a “tipping point.” Now that the share of cars sold that are EVs has barreled past the 5% mark, the theory goes, they will rapidly take over the entire market. In the first quarter of this year, the Tesla Model Y became the best selling car in the world.But new research shows that the escalating interest in electric vehicles has been highly partisan, calling into question the tipping point theory and threatening the widespread adoption needed to accomplish U.S. climate goals.In the decade between 2012 and 2022, about...
Poland Spring’s Water Wars
BlueTriton, the company that produces Poland Spring bottled water, is quietly trying to gut a Maine bill that would limit the number of years that such businesses can ship its water out of state, The New York Times reports. The proposed legislation would reduce the length of such contracts to seven years, far short of the 45 years sought by BlueTriton. The seven-year cap would give Maine greater flexibility to, in effect, turn off BlueTriton's spigot if climate change and drought affect the state's future water supply. “We’re seeing our communities get locked into these contracts that are going...
America’s Trade War With China Spills Into Clean Energy
America and China’s increasingly acrimonious rivalry over national security is now spilling over into clean energy. On Friday, China imposed export restrictions on three high-purity forms of graphite, a mineral that is essential to making semiconductors, electronics, and — most importantly — electric vehicle batteries. Under the new rules, Chinese companies cannot export any of these especially valuable types of graphite without getting a waiver from the government. For now, these new restrictions exist in a curious quantum state: They could be a big deal, permanently reshaping the global clean-energy economy, or they could quickly fizzle into a bureaucratic wrinkle. Yet...
Marco Rubio vs. the Unsung Hero of Climate Policy
I apologize in advance for what I’m about to say, but if you care about the transition to clean energy, it’s high time to pay attention to building energy codes.The Senate will soon debate an amendment to a must-pass federal budget bill submitted by Marco Rubio, the Republican senator from Florida, that would allow the developers of hundreds of thousands of new homes to eschew modern building standards and instead follow an energy code over a decade old. I get it. Words like “standards” and “codes” might not excite you the way a new climate policy or techno fix...
If You Eat Sea Bugs, You Can Eat Land Bugs
Last week, CNN reported that “Tyson Foods, one of the biggest meat producers, is investing in insect protein.” Nothing about this headline is, strictly speaking, misleading: Tyson produces about a fifth of all American beef, pork, and chicken, and it has indeed acquired a minority stake in the Dutch insect protein startup Protix. But the black soldier flies Tyson has invested in will only be used in pet, livestock, and fish food — they’re not “going into human food,” CNN clarifies, adding ominously, “at this point.”Still, “the climate people want you to eat bugs!” is a media trope that...
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