Varun Sivaram, Senior Director for Clean Energy and Innovation for US Special Presidential Envoy for Climate - MIT Technology Review
Stephan:
Synchronistically, two readers over the last two days sent me the same article, one telling me, “I am sending this to you because it confirms your commentary that new technologies that foster wellbeing will have to be developed if we are to get through climate change with a minimum of misery.” I couldn’t agree more and apparently, this reality is beginning to become recognized. We need to develop technologies that don’t pollute, and don’t destroy the earth’s matrix of life. I was glad to get these two referrals because I consider this good news.
Illustration by Chad Hagen
We’re living in a pivotal decade. By 2030, global emissions must fall by half, mostly through massive deployment of commercial solutions such as wind turbines, solar panels, and electric vehicles. But emerging climate technologies must come to market during this decade too, even if they don’t make much of a dent in emissions right away. The International Energy Agency forecasts that roughly half the reductions needed to cut emissions to nearly zero by 2050 must come from technologies that are not ready for the market today because they’re too expensive to manufacture, haven’t been tested at scale, or both.
Only a handful of clean technologies, such as silicon solar panels, onshore wind turbines, light- emitting diodes (LEDs), and lithium-ion batteries, have graduated from scientific laboratories to mass deployment. And it took decades for them to reach a scale where they could significantly reduce global emissions. Those timelines must be compressed for the world to have a chance of limiting global warming to 1.5 °C above preindustrial levels, which world leaders agreed at last […]
Every day, day after day, I see or read stories that leave me depressed and amazed at the willful ignorance and fantasy in which about a third of Americans seem to stew. A world of grievance, hate, racism, and resentment, which really took off with the Covid pandemic, and the Great Barrington Declaration. I confess I cannot understand how seemingly functional people remain enthrall to this nonsense, but they do as this article describes.
When COVID-19 broke out across the world in 2020, it produced widespread support for expanded public health measures, including “lockdowns,” that are estimated to have saved up to a million lives in the U.S. and millions more worldwide. As tragic as the pandemic has been, as many mistakes were made, we should be grateful to the health care workers, public health officials and vaccine researchers who have prevented it from being far worse. And we should be very concerned at how their work continues to be undermined by the right-wing ideology of “herd immunity,” which claims that the biggest danger comes not from the virus but from these very efforts to stop its spread.
From the start of the pandemic, a vocal minority argued for letting COVID-19 rip through most of the population. These views were most famously put forward in the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD), organized by the libertarian free market think tank American Institute for Economic Research and authored by Jay Bhattacharya, Martin Kulldorff and Sunetra Gupta. The GBD called for a “focused protection” strategy, advocating lifting all pandemic […]
I am becoming increasingly alarmed that MAGAt world, as this article describes, including even Black MAGAt officials, and yes there are a few, are in various ways promoting fear, disorder, and violence. We are, in my view, already engaged in a kind of slow marginally violent civil war, and I fear it is only going to get worse when Trump is convicted which I think is inevitable. We are becoming two countries painfully living as one nation.
Michigan Republican Party chair Kristina Karamo Credit: Andrew Roth | Michigan Advance
Michigan Republican Party chair Kristina Karamo called on supporters of former President Donald Trump to put “the fear of God” into state Attorney General Dana Nessel.
Karamo made the remarks on Thursday after 16 Republicans pleaded not guilty to a scheme to replace lawful Democratic electors with a fake slate claiming Trump had won the 2020 election in Michigan.
The GOP chair told podcast host Charlie Kirk that MAGA voters needed to get involved.
“We need everyone to get involved with the Michigan Republican Party in this state and share this information with your friends,” she said. “One of the reasons why the individuals like Dana Nessel is able to get away with what she’s doing [is] because average people are allowing it to occur.”
“If more people knew what was going on and [were] deeply involved within our government,” she continued, “then we could actually fight back and put the fear of God in the people like Dana Nessel, that if she does it, […]
I was asked by a reader today whether I thought the American economy was healthy I said that the economy is doing much better based on the social outcome data. Anyone who says otherwise is not telling the truth. There is one big problem. The one big problem is housing because there is not enough, and because the Federal Reserve has raised the interest rates again and again. Mortgages are now running about 6.5%. This article describes the issue well.
I see three trends coming together. One, The conversion of office buildings into apartments. Two, The collapse of coastal real estate across the country, which will have enormous economic effects. The alarm will be insurance companies ceasing to offer insurance. Fourteen companies have already left Florida, Farmers most recently. Unless you pay full price one cannot buy a property and get a mortgage if you can’t get insurance. Added to that will be the disasters. Three, The decline of the real estate in cities in the Southwest like Phoenix, because of high temperatures and lack of water. Four, the increase of real estate prices in the Northern states as climate change intensifies and people migrate into those Blue states.
Homes in Rialto, California. Credit: Kyle Grillot / Bloomberg
Buying a home in California slipped further out of reach as interest rates climbed and scarce inventory bolstered prices.
Only 16% of households could qualify to purchase a median-priced single-family home in the second quarter, the California Association of Realtors reported Friday. That’s down from 19% in the first quarter and 17% a year earlier.
The state faces an affordability crisis that threatens to hamper growth in the economy and population. People and companies have left California, or chosen not to move there, because housing is so much more expensive than in most of the US.
“In the long run — three or four years — we’ll see tight supply and lower affordability will trim the competitiveness of California if nothing is done to increase the supply of housing,” Oscar Wei, deputy chief economist for the state Realtors group, said in an interview. Nationally, more than a third of households could afford to purchase a $402,600 median-priced home, according to the report.
For an existing single-family home at California’s […]
This article describes what I see as one of the greatest acts of willful ignorance, in history. The Republican Party in Arizona just will not face the objectively verifiable facts. Arizona is going to go into crisis brought on by poor governance by Republicans, absurd temperatures for longer periods of the year, and growing water scarcity that will make water increasingly expensive. What ought to be going on in Arizona is a emergency massive conversion to solar electricity kept at a low price to power the air conditioners you won’t be able to live without. They should also convert their roads to power EVs.
The campaign account for Kari Lake accused Gov. Katie Hobbs and Rep. Ruben Gallego of “pushing mass hysteria in an effort to declare a climate emergency.” Crsedit: LM Otero / AP Photo
PHOENIX, ARIZONA — When Arizona lawmakers returned to the state Capitol here earlier this month, they started their day with a prayer to ease the scorching heat.
“We pray, Father, for solutions to end suffering and for our temperatures to trend downwards to provide relief for so many in harm’s way,” the legislative chaplain said as sweaty heads bowed in the state Senate.
Meanwhile, the air conditioning was out in the state House of Representatives. Heat seeped through the western-facing wall as the state’s 60 representatives piled into the squat cinderblock building. Fans set up to cool the hallways were too loud for staff to work, so they were on only intermittently. Extension cords ran through the hallways, tripping up lobbyists passing through.
It was the first day back in session after a six-week hiatus, and the heat was impossible to ignore.
