What can you say about Joe Manchin, perhaps the most important — and most complicated — American climate policy maker of the past decade? Let’s start here: Soon, he won’t be a senator any more. On Thursday, Manchin announced that he will not pursue re-election in West Virginia in … | Continue reading
When Manjula Martin was growing up in Northern California in the 1980s, wildfires weren’t something she thought about much. She knew about disaster — the magnitude 6.9 Loma Prieta earthquake of 1989, which killed 63 people and injured thousands, hit when she was a teenager — but … | Continue reading
Tonight, at approximately seven feet above sea level, the five leading Republican presidential candidates not named Trump assembled in a performing arts center in Miami to once again go through the motions of pretending this a normal election cycle. If you happened to be doing so … | Continue reading
My wife drove one of the last great little trucks. The 2000 Toyota Tacoma had no extended cab and no frills, just a bench seat and a short bed to shuttle her stuff back and forth from L.A. to Berkeley. To no one’s surprise, it still runs. We just moved a loveseat in it this weeke … | Continue reading
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, … | Continue reading
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 … | Continue reading
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 … | Continue reading
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 Pe … | Continue reading
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 … | Continue reading
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 … | Continue reading
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 … | Continue reading
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 one of t … | Continue reading
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 … | Continue reading
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 st … | Continue reading
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 conflic … | Continue reading
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 Da … | Continue reading
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 experienc … | Continue reading
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 s … | Continue reading
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 wonder … | Continue reading
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,” Newso … | Continue reading
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 ambit … | Continue reading
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 Clim … | Continue reading
“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 i … | Continue reading
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 195 … | Continue reading
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 Energ … | Continue reading
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 extr … | Continue reading
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 auto … | Continue reading
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 … | Continue reading
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 … | Continue reading
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 … | Continue reading
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, whi … | Continue reading
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 lengt … | Continue reading
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 … | Continue reading
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 Jo … | Continue reading
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 hurrican … | Continue reading
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 … | Continue reading
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 o … | Continue reading
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, Tropica … | Continue reading
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 … | Continue reading
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 … | Continue reading
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 i … | Continue reading
Thirteen miles isn’t very far: roughly the length of Manhattan or the distance you run in a half marathon. On a freeway, it takes less than 15 minutes to drive.Multiply 13 by 10, though, and it becomes 130 miles — more than the width of the state of Connecticut. Move the U.S. bor … | Continue reading
To say that concrete poses a decarbonization challenge would be an understatement. Cement production alone is responsible for somewhere between 5 and 10% of global CO2 emissions [0], roughly two to four times more than aviation, a fact that even the construction industry is final … | Continue reading
As unpredictable as world events have been recently, very few people would’ve put money on the humble Toyota Prius getting a stunning makeover for 2023. Somehow, that’s exactly what happened. Now the all-new, fifth-generation Prius hybrid boasts sleek, almost sports-car-like look … | Continue reading
Dr. Cliff Kapono sometimes still surfs the way his Indigenous Hawaiian ancestors did 1,000 years ago, on a traditional wooden board and all. But the professional surfer and molecular biologist fears his descendants might not have the same privilege. The reason is the looming scar … | Continue reading
Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has been a humanitarian catastrophe. Perhaps 100,000 Ukrainian soldiers have been killed or wounded, along with 30,000 dead civilians, many cruelly tortured and murdered by the invaders. Vast regions of eastern Ukraine have been utterly laid t … | Continue reading