Who gets to decide whether we study solar geoengineering?
By Shannon Osaka
The experiment sounded innocuous. Early this summer, a group of researchers from Harvard University would fly to Kiruna, a small town of 22,000 in the northern reaches of Sweden. There, with the help of a Swedish space company, they would launch a balloon carrying an instrument-laden gondola into the stratosphere, some 12.5 miles above the Earth’s surface. They would run a few tests, pack up the instruments, and then return home.
That, at least, was the plan. But some saw the project — known as the Stratospheric Controlled Perturbation Experiment, or SCoPEx for short — as something…
“It was a living nightmare for everybody.”
By Alexandria Herr
At 3:30 in the afternoon on the first day of Texas’ winter freeze in February, the temperature plummeted to 20 degrees F inside Roxann Swoyer’s manufactured home — colloquially known as a mobile home — in the community of Hilltop, an unincorporated area outside of the Dallas-Fort Worth metropolitan area. The water she had been using to brush her teeth had frozen in its plastic bottles. The community’s water well had failed in an unrelated outage 10 days before the storm hit, and now her electricity was gone too.
For the first time in her 42 years…
The legacy of race-based housing rules continues to shape the landscape of big cities
By Nathanael Johnson
When Dorothy Walker was looking for a place to live in Berkeley, California, it didn’t take her very long to learn that half the city was off-limits to her family. It was 1950, and the rules were clear: “Because my husband was Japanese, we couldn’t live east of Grove Street, because no one not white was allowed to live there.”
The Supreme Court outlawed explicitly racist real estate covenants in 1968, and around a decade later, Berkeley changed the name of Grove Street, which divides the wealthier eastern half of the city from the west, to Martin…
Want to electrify your home? Good luck finding a contractor.
By Emily Pontecorvo
Adam James had been casually browsing the housing market for about a year when he came across a home that seemed like the perfect fit. The 31-year-old and his wife recently had their third child, and the 1960s split-level ranch house in Ossining, New York, a village on the Hudson River with ample green space and a commuter train station, was just what they were looking for. The house had only one downside: Its oil-based heating system was 35 years old and on the brink of sputtering out.
Except that wasn’t a downside for James, who works…
Electric cars require a lot of lithium. A showdown in Nevada shows that getting it won’t be easy.
By Maddie Stone
When Edward Bartell first learned that a lithium mine might be moving into his remote corner of northern Nevada, the longtime cattle rancher wasn’t upset.
“I was actually kind of excited about it,” Bartell said. He knew that lithium is a key metal used in batteries for electric vehicles and the power grid, and he knew the United States is going to need a lot of it to transition off fossil fuels.
But as Bartell started learning more about the proposed Thacker Pass mine — which would be the second, and by far the largest, lithium mine…
… and it’s just the beginning
By Emily Pontecorvo
During the final months of 2020, while a record number of Americans turned out to vote and the first essential workers were treated to jabs of the COVID-19 vaccine, another historic event was unfolding on the U.S. electricity grid. The amount of battery storage connected to the grid, capable of saving extra wind and solar energy and dispatching it when the wind dies or the sun goes down, shot up dramatically.
More batteries were powered up in the last three months of 2020 than in 2013 through 2019 combined, according to data collected by Wood Mackenzie, an…
Coal country can reinvent itself — if it gets the cash
By Emily Pontecorvo
Here are two tales of the energy transition unfolding in coal country, USA.
In late 2019, Pacificorp, an electric utility that operates in six Western states, told Wyoming regulators it wanted to shut down several of its coal-fired power plants early and replace them with wind and solar power and battery storage. It said this plan would save customers hundreds of millions of dollars on their electric bills and promised to work with local leaders on transition plans for workers and communities affected by the closures.
Wyoming, a state whose economy relies significantly on coal mining and…
A new initiative seeks to improve outdoor access for underrepresented youth
By Claire Elise Thompson
Gabe Vasquez first visited New Mexico when he was 8 years old, during a fishing trip to the Rio Grande with his father and older brother. They traveled from their home just south of the border in Ciudad Juárez and planned to camp in state parks along the river. Even now, Vasquez recalls the air of excitement in the car as he and his brother fought over who would get the Superman fishing rod and who would get Spiderman, both purchased for the occasion. (He wound up with Supe.) They had tossed their lines into the…
When the power went out in Texas, gas stoves became a lifeline
By Emily Pontecorvo
“Electrify everything” is a rallying cry for the climate movement. Renovate buildings and redesign cars to run entirely on electricity, power them with renewable energy from the sun and wind, and bing, bam, boom, you’ve just knocked out a majority of the carbon entering the atmosphere. Cities all over California, as well as in Washington, Colorado, Massachusetts, and New York, are heeding the call and passing or considering laws that limit gas-powered heating and cooking appliances in new buildings.
But last week, the energy crisis in Texas put the risks of electrifying everything in sharp relief. A…
The iconic scientist was way more than just the “Peanut Man.”
By Brianna Baker
In the aftermath of the Civil War, the Southeast needed a healer — someone to give back at least a little of what slavery had taken from the land and the people. Black scientist George Washington Carver stepped into that role and, in the process, revolutionized farming as we know it.
Most Americans remember him simply as the “Peanut Man,” summarizing his life’s work with what was, arguably, his least important accomplishment. Oh, sure, Carver did discover around 300 uses for peanuts, from soap to wood stains to cooking oil — but those things were almost beside…
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