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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...
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...
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