In a way, the story of American natural gas is a particularly American story, one of entrepreneurial hustle, booms and busts, and a will to find opportunity where nobody’s looked. Of resourceful self-preservation for the sake of self-preservation alone. Of supply needing demand, and of manufacturing that demand through the means at hand, even if the logic is sometimes tough to follow.
On Friday, November 17, 2023, the Earth appeared to have crossed a threshold into new climatic territory. That day was the first that the average air temperature near the surface of the Earth was 2 degrees Celsius warmer than preindustrial levels. Saturday was the second.The planet has been this hot before, but never in the era relevant to modern humanity.
You’d be forgiven for thinking that the fight against climate change is finally going well. The clean-energy revolution is well under way and exceeding expectations. Solar is set to become the cheapest form of energy in most places by 2030, and the remarkable efficiency of heat pumps is driving their own uptake now. Sales of electric vehicles could surpass those of gas-burning cars in the next six years.
In the hours before Hurricane Otis made landfall, everything aligned to birth a beast. The hurricane, which arrived near Acapulco, Mexico, early this morning, had an improbable combination of terrible traits. It was small and nimble, as tropical storms go, which reduced the amount of data points available to forecasters and made it harder to track. It came toward land at night, which is the least ideal time for a chaos-inducing event to hit a population center.
The giant chestnut tree, growing in place for hundreds of years, would have been impossible to miss. Its leaves were glossy and dark green, its bark riven like a mountain range seen from above. The fungi it relies on were harder to see.A fungi-hunter is not looking for an object so much as a system, brushing aside a layer of damp leaves to find the gossamer filaments that hold up the world.
Cameron Parish, Louisiana, used to be a nice collection of little coastal towns where the shrimping was good and the stars at night were better, James Hiatt told me. Hiatt lives just up the river, in Lake Charles, but he comes down to Cameron to be near the Gulf. He remembers when there were 1,500 people, a grocery store, and a Family Dollar in Cameron, the parish seat.
Since early this summer, Keith Poulsen, the director of the Wisconsin Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory, was worried about mink. Poulsen’s lab is part of a national network of veterinary labs that work on animal diseases, and they had “been watching COVID-19 very carefully,” Poulsen told me. In Europe, mink on fur farms were catching COVID-19. And they seemed to be able to pass it back to people.