This is an excerpt from The Atlantic’s climate newsletter, The Weekly Planet. Subscribe today.One theme of this newsletter is that the world’s physical infrastructure will have to massively change if we want to decarbonize the economy by 2050, which the United Nations has said is necessary to avoid the worst effects of the climate crisis.
This is an excerpt from The Atlantic’s climate newsletter, The Weekly Planet. Subscribe today.I’m starting to become concerned about President Joe Biden’s ability to pass a climate bill. They’re speaking sotto voce, but still: In the past few days, Democrats on the party’s left and right flanks have started to hint that, well, in some circumstances, given some contingencies, they might prefer no bill to a negotiated compromise with the rival flank.
This is an excerpt from The Atlantic’s climate newsletter, The Weekly Planet. Subscribe today.The climate scientist Ken Caldeira recently tweeted a joke meant to charm carbon-tax advocates. “If we don’t want people to drink so much alcohol, rather than taxing alcohol, we can subsidize everything that is not alcohol,” he wrote. His point, if I may ruin the punch line, is that the United States’ approach to combatting climate change is kind of silly.
Every week, our lead climate reporter brings you the big ideas, expert analysis, and vital guidance that will help you flourish on a changing planet. Sign up to get The Weekly Planet, our guide to living through climate change, in your inbox.In retrospect, last week was an interlude.
In recent weeks, the climate movement has become caught in the middle of a fight that seemingly has nothing to do with the environment: Should President Joe Biden renominate Jerome Powell to lead the Federal Reserve?The choice of who should run the country’s central bank has historically not captivated climate advocates—or many Americans, for that matter—yet it has carved the left into two opposing camps, each claiming to fight for a greener economy.
Seventy-four hours.That’s roughly how much time separated the moment that Tropical Depression Nine formed in the Caribbean from the moment that the storm, transformed into a ruthless Category 4 hurricane named Ida, made landfall at Port Fourchon, Louisiana.
President Joe Biden has been giving climate advocates heartburn.In April, soon after rejoining the Paris Agreement, he set a goal: The United States would cut its greenhouse-gas pollution by 50 percent from 2005 levels by 2030. The White House promised that “a careful interagency process” had produced that goal, and at least a dozen reports from outside scholars and nonprofits argued that such an ambitious cut could be done.
On paper, Cadenza Innovation is everything a modern American start-up is supposed to be.The Connecticut-based company was founded by an award-winning Swedish chemist who first came to the United States to work at MIT. It promised a major breakthrough: lithium-ion batteries that were far less likely to explode than conventional designs. It soon found R&D support from the federal government, eager to promote an industry as essential to smartphones as to addressing climate change.
A new United Nations–led report from hundreds of climate scientists around the world makes it clear: The human-driven climate crisis is now well under way. Earth is likely hotter now than it has been at any moment since the beginning of the last Ice Age, 125,000 years ago, and the world has warmed 1.1 degrees Celsius, or nearly 2 degrees Fahrenheit, since the Industrial Revolution began—an “unprecedented” and “rapid” change with no parallel in the Common Era.
Last week, Senate negotiators released the text of the $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure deal. For the first time since the deal was announced in June, we can actually see what’s in it.On its face, this isn’t a climate bill. It invests significantly in a federal road and highway system that encourages fossil-fuel-based travel in private cars and trucks.
President Joe Biden campaigned as America’s pandemic fighter. So it will be strange, to say the least, if his infrastructure bill fails to significantly increase the country’s pandemic-preparedness budget.But it could happen. Biden proposed $30 billion to address the issue, which advocates say could permanently mitigate the risks of future outbreaks.
Every week, our lead climate reporter brings you the big ideas, expert analysis, and vital guidance that will help you flourish on a changing planet. Sign up to get The Weekly Planet, our guide to living through climate change, in your inbox.A terrible thing happened to me recently. I started to care about electricity-transmission policy.In energy circles, the people who work on transmission are feared and respected in the same way a shriveled and reputable local mage might be.
The American carbon tax, an alluringly simple policy once hailed by environmentalists, scholars, and politicians as a cure-all for climate change that, for all its elegance in economic models, could not overcome its enduring unpopularity with the American public, died last month at its home in Washington, D.C. It was 47.The death was confirmed by President Joe Biden’s utter lack of interest in passing it.
Every week, our lead climate reporter brings you the big ideas, expert analysis, and vital guidance that will help you flourish on a changing planet. Sign up to get The Weekly Planet, our guide to living through climate change, in your inbox.Since its ascension in 2018, the Green New Deal has defined the terms of the global climate debate. Perhaps no other climate policy in history has been as successful. Democrats and Republicans alike have been judged by how closely they seem to hew to it.
Yesterday, the oil-producers cartel OPEC—which is now somewhat cheekily called “OPEC+,” because Russia joined in 2016—failed to reach an agreement on increasing oil production. Stick with me for a second, because this may not seem like it has much to do with climate change, but in fact it reveals how decarbonization is already shifting how money is spent and how geopolitical power is exercised.
Every week, our lead climate reporter brings you the big ideas, expert analysis, and vital guidance that will help you flourish on a changing planet. Sign up to get The Weekly Planet, our guide to living through climate change, in your inbox.Last month, a tiny hedge fund called Engine No. 1 staged a coup of sorts at ExxonMobil—a shareholders’ revolt that unseated three members of the oil company’s board of directors and replaced them with more climate-concerned candidates.
Here, at least, is the standard story: The past decade has been abysmal for climate-change policy in the United States. In 2009, a handsome new president took office pledging to pass a comprehensive climate bill in Congress. He did not. The Environmental Protection Agency sought to meaningfully reduce carbon pollution from power plants. It did not. The United States joined the Paris Agreement. Then we elected President Donald Trump, and we left.
Every week, our lead climate reporter brings you the big ideas, expert analysis, and vital guidance that will help you flourish on a changing planet. Sign up to get The Weekly Planet, our guide to living through climate change, in your inbox.You wouldn’t know it today, but the silicon photovoltaic solar cell—the standard, black-and-copper solar panel you can find on suburban rooftops and solar farms—was born and raised in America.The technology was invented here.
Every week, our lead climate reporter brings you the big ideas, expert analysis, and vital guidance that will help you flourish on a changing planet. Sign up to get The Weekly Planet, our guide to living through climate change, in your inbox.Here’s a question that has recently become surprisingly important in the battle against climate change: What is a company?There’s a legal answer, of course.
1. Start with the price—how could you not? The Ford F-150 Lightning, the new electric version of the ur–American pickup truck, will go on sale next spring for $39,974. Because Ford vehicles still qualify for the federal EV tax credit, most Americans will pay a little less than $32,500 for this truck.Thirty-two grand after subsidies—an astonishing price.
Every week, our lead climate reporter brings you the big ideas, expert analysis, and vital guidance that will help you flourish on a changing planet. Sign up to get The Weekly Planet, our guide to living through climate change, in your inbox.In February 2020, I traveled to New York to celebrate a zeroth birthday and an 80th birthday. First, I saw a close friend’s baby, who had been born only a month earlier.
Every week, our lead climate reporter brings you the big ideas, expert analysis, and vital guidance that will help you flourish on a changing planet. Sign up to get The Weekly Planet, our guide to living through climate change, in your inbox.The Ford Mustang Mach-E is, at first glance, what a new car is supposed to be in 2021. On the outside, it borrows iconic Mustang styling for a family-friendly but sporty crossover, the fastest-growing car segment in the United States.
Tunulliarfik Fjord has always played an outsize role in global history. One thousand years ago, the Viking Erik the Red settled there, the last outpost in the Norse expansion into North America. When the United States established a protectorate over Greenland during World War II, it built one of its first airports in what is now Narsarsuaq, a large town on the fjord. And now Tunulliarfik is the site of a mining project that has overturned politics on Greenland.
Every week, our lead climate reporter brings you the big ideas, expert analysis, and vital guidance that will help you flourish on a changing planet. Sign up to get The Weekly Planet, our guide to living through climate change, in your inbox.The moderate Democratic president wanted the United States to tackle climate change, and he had pledged to get serious about it during the recent campaign. On the president’s desk sat a memorandum laying out two options.
Every week, our lead climate reporter brings you the big ideas, expert analysis, and vital guidance that will help you flourish on a changing planet. Sign up to get The Weekly Planet, our guide to living through climate change, in your inbox.One of the core ideas of this newsletter is that you can’t fight climate change without altering the stuff of the world.
Every week, our lead climate reporter brings you the big ideas, expert analysis, and vital guidance that will help you flourish on a changing planet. Sign up to get The Weekly Planet, our guide to living through climate change, in your inbox.The think tank Carbon180 is, as far as I know, the only American nonprofit dedicated to studying the removal of carbon-dioxide pollution from the atmosphere. It is not a very large organization.
Every week, our lead climate reporter brings you the big ideas, expert analysis, and vital guidance that will help you flourish on a changing planet. Sign up to get The Weekly Planet, our guide to living through climate change, in your inbox.Last week, China released the draft summary of its next five-year plan, its comprehensive economic planning document for 2021 to 2025. It’s an important document, a kind of “plan of plans” for the country’s provinces and agencies.
A few minutes before midnight on March 4, 2020, the two of us emailed every U.S. state and the District of Columbia with a simple question: How many people have been tested in your state, total, for the coronavirus?By then, about 150 people had been diagnosed with COVID-19 in the United States, and 11 had died of the disease. Yet the CDC had stopped publicly reporting the number of Americans tested for the virus.
Every week, our lead climate reporter brings you the big ideas, expert analysis, and vital guidance that will help you flourish on a changing planet. Sign up to get The Weekly Planet, our guide to living through climate change, in your inbox.Over the weekend, the Senate passed the American Rescue Plan Act, a $1.9 trillion economic stimulus package. The House of Representatives is poised to pass it today, and then it will go to President Joe Biden’s desk.
Jared Rodriguez
Every Tuesday, our lead climate reporter brings you the big ideas, expert analysis, and vital guidance that will help you flourish on a changing planet. Sign up to get The Weekly Planet, our guide to living through climate change, in your inbox.Until a few years ago, the idea that humanity could suck carbon pollution out of the atmosphere at an industrial scale was deemed implausible, if not impossible.