Robinson Meyer

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.President Joe Biden’s legislative climate agenda has kind of fallen out of the news. Lawmakers are focused on what the Biden administration calls the “economic-rescue bill,” the one with the $1,400 checks.

How could this have happened? For four days, millions of people in Texas—the so-called energy capital of the world—shivered in the dark, unable to turn the lights on or run their heaters during some of the coldest days in decades. At least 30 Texans have died so far, including a 75-year-old man whose oxygen machine lost power and an 11-year-old boy who may have perished of hypothermia.

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. This explainer from The Texas Tribune describes how the architects of the Texas grid made sure it avoided crossing state lines in order to prevent the federal government from regulating it.2. A talking point has developed that the Texas grid shut down because wind turbines iced over.

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. that it would no longer insure hundreds of midwestern car dealerships because of “catastrophic” hail damage.Second, I’m intrigued by who the study’s authors are. Kubicek and his colleagues have scientific credentials, but they’re not academics.

1. Here is what happens in the ad that General Motors will air during the Super Bowl: Standing in a garage inspired half by the storage unit in True Detective and half by the It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia conspiracy meme, Will Ferrell announces that the United States has not adopted electric cars as quickly as Norway. He punches a globe. He fetches his friends Kenan Thompson and Awkwafina (he is on a first-name basis with both, as celebrities always are); they set off for Norway.

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.In January 2020, Boris Khentov attended a climate protest in Washington, D.C., led by Jane Fonda. (She was, at its climax, arrested.

Is the United States past the worst of the pandemic? Cases and hospitalizations have fallen in most states in the past few days, and vaccination news has brightened. Johnson & Johnson published trial data showing that its one-dose vaccine is safe and effective, and the Biden administration has bought 200 million additional vaccine doses from Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna, which already have approved vaccines.

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.The U.S. federal government owns 645,047 motor vehicles, according to its most recent report on the matter.

In the past week, a new picture has emerged in COVID-19 data: The pandemic seems to be receding from its high-water mark in the United States. The most dependable metric of COVID-19’s spread—the number of people currently in the hospital with the disease—is in its first sustained, week-over-week decline since September, according to the COVID Tracking Project at The Atlantic. Hospitalizations fell in the past week in every state but Vermont.

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.Tomorrow, pending calamity or misfortune, Joe Biden will take the oath of office and become president of the United States. In that moment, the United States’ approach to climate change will invert.

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. 1. I tend to think modern climate politics began in the U.S. when James Hansen, then NASA’s chief climate scientist, warned a Senate panel that “the greenhouse effect is here” on June 23, 1988. The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was established the same year.

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.It’s been an enormous month and a half for climate-change news in the United States.First, and most obvious, Joe Biden won the presidential election on a vow to put climate policy at the center of his domestic and foreign policy.

There aren’t many good ideas about how to solve the climate problem of aviation.Or, well, let me rephrase that: There are a lot of ideas. Some companies argue that business commuters of the 2040s will take short hops, such as from D.C., to Philly, on six-seater electric vehicles that take off and land vertically.

Every Tuesday morning, our lead climate reporter brings you the big ideas, expert analysis, and vital guidance that will help you flourish on a changing planet.
Suits, Matteson, and MoyerThis type of chart is called a Sankey diagram, which shows the relative size of flows in and out of a system. This particular Sankey diagram shows the inputs and outputs for the U.S. energy system, measured in watts per capita.

Editor’s Note: The Atlantic is making vital coverage of the coronavirus available to all readers. Find the collection here. Since the beginning of the pandemic, public-health experts have warned of one particular nightmare. It is possible, they said, for the number of coronavirus patients to exceed the capacity of hospitals in a state or city to take care of them.

Every Tuesday morning, 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.Stripe is one of those technology companies that controls the internet’s plumbing. It makes payments-processing software that hustles money from your debit or credit card to someone else’s bank account.

Editor’s Note: The Atlantic is making vital coverage of the coronavirus available to all readers. Find the collection here. Understanding the pandemic this week requires grasping two thoughts at once. First, the United States has never been closer to defeating the pandemic. Second, some of the country’s most agonizing days still lie ahead.Long term, the view has never looked brighter.

Every Tuesday morning, our lead climate reporter brings you the big ideas, expert analysis, and vital guidance that will help you flourish on a changing planet.
CreditPlease watch the first 60 seconds of the new Hummer EV ad, okay? (Yes, that is LeBron James doing the opening voice-over.)Now, to a lot of people—including, perhaps, some readers of this newsletter—a Hummer EV may seem like the last thing we need. But that instinct, I think, misses the context.

Editor’s Note: The Atlantic is making vital coverage of the coronavirus available to all readers. Find the collection here. Updated at 9:20 p.m. ET on October 22, 2020The United States is sleepwalking into what could become the largest coronavirus outbreak of the pandemic so far. In the past week alone, as voters prepare to go to the ballot box, about one in every 1,000 Americans has tested positive for the virus, and about two in every 100,000 Americans have died of it.

Every Tuesday morning, our lead climate reporter brings you the big ideas, expert analysis, and vital guidance that will help you flourish on a changing planet.
Umg / BMI / umpg publishing / Warner ChappellOil companies are struggling. American fracking output has plunged this year; Exxon Mobil is laying off staff and cutting back on benefits to preserve its payout to investors. But has the broader culture realized that oil is in trouble?I guess it has.

The painting style of Jackson Pollock is called “gestural abstraction,” but before last night’s debate, I never knew that it was also a governing philosophy. The debate featured many decisions from President Donald Trump that were puzzling, to put it mildly. The president constantly interrupted the moderator, Chris Wallace, and he all but jeered his opponent, former Vice President Joe Biden, even as Biden discussed the death toll of the coronavirus pandemic.

In New York, the decisive moment came in March. In Arizona and other Sun Belt states, it struck as the spring turned to summer. In every state that has so far seen a large spike of COVID-19 cases, there has been a moment when the early signs of an uptick are detectable—but a monstrous outbreak is not yet assured. Can a state realize what’s happening, and stop a surge in time? Wisconsin is about to find out.

Updated at 7:07 p.m. ET on Sept. 15, 2020.To understand the ravenous wildfire season in the American West this year, boil some ravioli. Put the heat on high. After about 10 minutes, the pasta will go limp and start to break apart. Keep boiling. When the pot holds a shallow puddle of water and a pile of soggy debris, keep going. Don’t turn down the heat until the last bubbles of water sizzle and vanish.

Why has the United States done so little politically to combat climate change?Blame the Senate. For the past quarter century, the world’s greatest deliberative body has killed virtually any bill that would ensure the continued habitability of the world. Through its slow process, excessive use of the filibuster, and scheme of allotting votes without regard to a state’s population, the Senate has smothered even the meekest climate policies that arrive on its floor.

Editor’s Note: The Atlantic is making vital coverage of the coronavirus available to all readers. Find the collection here. Michael Mina is a professor of epidemiology at Harvard, where he studies the diagnostic testing of infectious diseases. He has watched, with disgust and disbelief, as the United States has struggled for months to obtain enough tests to fight the coronavirus.

The project began, in one telling, five years ago, in a castle that overlooks the Bavarian Alps, where three dozen of the world’s most successful and rivalrous earth scientists came together for a week of cloistered meetings.They gathered, in part, out of embarrassment. For the past four decades, their field—the study of Earth’s natural phenomena, including its land, ocean, and climate—had boomed.

The project began, in one telling, five years ago, in a castle that overlooks the Bavarian Alps, where three dozen of the world’s most successful and rivalrous earth scientists came together for a week of cloistered meetings.They gathered, in part, out of embarrassment. For the past four decades, their field—the study of Earth’s natural phenomena, including its land, ocean, and climate—had boomed.

The American pandemic is careening out of control. Yesterday, the United States reported more than 52,000 new cases of the coronavirus, setting a new all-time daily record, according to the COVID Tracking Project at The Atlantic. The surge has put the country’s supply of coronavirus tests under strain, especially in some of the worst-hit states, such as Arizona, Texas, Florida, and California.