Robinson Meyer: SEAL Award Winner 2021

A selection of this year’s best environmental journalism

Electric Cars Have Hit an Inflection Point

“An electric car is an expensive, highly specialized piece of technology, but building one takes even more expensive, specialized technology — tools that tend to be custom-made, large and heavy, and spread across a factory or the world. And if you want those tools to produce a car in a few years, you have to start planning now.”
Source: The Atlantic (Approx. 6 minutes)

We’re Hitting the Limits of Hurricane Preparedness

“Climate change has a subtle influence on hurricanes: They seem to be getting wetter and more intense, but not necessarily more frequent. Scientists are confident that global warming is increasing rainfall from major tropical cyclones, just as it is increasing precipitation amounts from all types of storms. Scientists have observed that tropical cyclones are generally getting stronger worldwide as well. A growing share of hurricanes are Category 3 or greater, according to the most recent report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. But some researchers also believe that more hurricanes are following the pattern taken by Ida and getting significantly stronger in the hours before landfall.”
Source: The Atlantic (Approx. 5 minutes)

2050 Is Closer Than 1990

“Happily, DeConto and his colleagues found that rapid ice-cliff collapse is unlikely to happen if we keep global temperature rise below 1.5 or even 2 degrees Celsius. But if countries continue on their current path of 3 degrees Celsius, then ice cliffs could very well decay and abruptly bump the pace of sea-level rise after 2060. Sea levels would rise about an inch every five years by 2100 entirely because of Antarctica; ice melt from Greenland, mountain glaciers, and the expansion of warmer ocean water would contribute too. That pace is at least 10 times what Antarctica is contributing today.”
Source: The Atlantic (Approx. 7 minutes)

An Outdated Idea Is Still Shaping Climate Policy

“Climate change is a distributive-conflict problem... In essence, climate policy restructures the economy, creating new economic winners and losers. This is familiar enough: Coal mines suffer; electric utilities prosper. Because political leaders want, above all, to maintain the support of key constituencies, climate policy flows from a societal negotiation between potential winners and potential losers, a fight between climate reformers and climate obstructionists. The challenge of global climate action isn’t that other people will benefit from your emissions cuts; it’s that many interests actively oppose decarbonization.”
Source: The Atlantic (Approx. 10 minutes)

Why a Political Philosopher Is Thinking About Carbon Removal

“Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò is a political-philosophy professor at Georgetown University who studies environmental justice. He has warned of “climate colonialism” and called for some form of climate reparations to help the world’s most vulnerable people achieve self-determination in the face of climatic upheaval. He is also a very funny Twitter user. And in a tweet last month, he expressed frustration with how carbon removal is often discussed online, comparing the global North’s historic carbon pollution to a milk carton spilling on the floor. Some leftists, he implied, would rather talk about replacing the floor than just pick up a mop and start cleaning.”
Source: The Atlantic (Approx. 11 minutes)

Read the SEAL Awards 2021 Environmental Journalism Award Announcement