The Atlantic
This is the only climate bill coming. Also: Why methane levels surged last year.
April 13, 2021
The $100 billion high-speed rail line from San Francisco to Los Angeles remains unfinished.Jim Wilson / The New York Times / Redux
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.
There are some real numerical humdingers in President Joe Biden’s $2 trillion infrastructure plan. It pledges to fix 10,000 bridges and repair 20,000 miles of road. It would buy 96,000 electric school buses and 230,000 electric U.S. Postal Service vans. Even the numbers about the numbers are big: The word
The Atlantic
Rich countries should mop up their climate pollution, the Georgetown professor Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò argues.
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.
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. The technology didn’t exist to do it, and even if it did, scrubbing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere posed such huge thermodynamic problems that the endeavor seemed prohibitively expensive.
The Atlantic
The game before the game has started.
These transmission lines near Houston aren’t connected to the national grid.Justin Sullivan / Getty
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
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. The climate content will come in the second, “economic-recovery” package.
Yet this lull has concealed quite a bit of activity.
The Atlantic
Call it the “Gates Rule.”
Jamie McCarthy / Getty Images for Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
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
Lately, Bill Gates has been thinking about what he calls the “hard stuff” of climate change. He isn’t talking about the challenges that we usually discuss in this newsletter, such as how to generate zero-carbon electricity (use wind, solar, and some nuclear). Nor does he mean the associated
political challenges of overcoming partisan opposition. No, he means
The Atlantic
If you’re retiring in the 2060s, you should make sure you can enjoy the 2060s.
Greg Smith/CORBIS/Corbis/Getty
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
In January 2020, Boris Khentov attended a climate protest in Washington, D.C., led by Jane Fonda. (She was, at its climax, arrested.) Its theme was the role of financial institutions in the climate crisis, and the speakers who included Joaquin Phoenix, Martin Sheen, and the environmental author Bill McKibben stressed one idea over and over again: divestment.