David Roberts: SEAL Award Winner 2021

A selection of this year’s best environmental journalism

Don’t Look Up: the first good movie about climate change

“The movie is about having knowledge but being unable to make the knowledge matter, being unable to make anyone hear or act on it. By compressing the timeline to six months and making the threat a singular force, visible in the sky, it brings the absurdity of the situation to the surface. It’s hilarious, and if you’ve spent years banging your head against a wall trying to get people to pay attention to climate change, you will find a great deal of catharsis in the laughter.”
Source: Volts (Approx. 9 minutes to read; podcast runtime 12:21)

The long-term promise of 24/7 carbon-free electricity

“The model is premised on the idea that participating C&I customers aggregate their demand and pool their purchasing power, effectively acting as a miniature balancing authority. This may or may not be how things play out in the real world. Customers could act on their own, disaggregated and uncoordinated. The lab’s going to model that kind of scenario soon.”
Source: Volts (Approx. 11 minutes to read; runtime 17:47)

Illinois’ brilliant new climate, jobs, and justice bill

“Today, Illinois gets about 40 percent of its electricity from nuclear power and less than 10 percent from renewable energy. The new renewable portfolio standard (RPS) will raise renewables’ share to 40 percent by 2030 and 50 percent by 2040, with the goal of a zero-carbon electricity sector by 2045 — and beyond that, a net-zero-carbon state economy by 2050. This is extremely ambitious and a new benchmark for the Midwest.”
Source: Volts (Approx. 13 minutes to read; runtime 19:44)

Economists have quantified the economic risks of climate “tipping points.” It’s grim.

“The idea behind tipping points is fairly simple and familiar: as heat accumulates in the atmosphere, Earth’s geophysical systems may not simply adjust in linear fashion, alongside the incrementally rising temperature; in some cases, they may “tip over” some unpredictable threshold and enter a fundamentally new state, sometimes called a “phase shift.” Think of ice that has slowly cracked suddenly shattering, or “the straw that broke the camel’s back.””
Source: Volts (Approx. 11 minutes to read; runtime 16:04)

The many varieties of lithium-ion batteries battling for market share

“There are a few clear leaders — lithium nickel manganese cobalt oxide (NMC), lithium nickel cobalt aluminum (NCA), and lithium ferro phosphate (LFP) — that have achieved mass market scale and several others looking to get in on the action. The market prize is likely to exceed a trillion dollars within the next decade, so if any of these competitors can even carve out a substantial niche, it could be worth billions.”
Source: Volts (Approx. 15 minutes; runtime 24:07)

Read the SEAL Awards 2021 Environmental Journalism Award Announcement