The Green Blueprint

A few weeks ago, TIME Magazine staff writer Alejandro de la Garza found himself on the floor of a hotel room in Nevada with two guys trying to cook sulfur dioxide out of a tin can.  Luke Iseman and Andrew Song are the co-founders of Make Sunsets, a startup claiming to be implementing solar geoengineering by launching weather balloons filled with SO2 into the stratosphere. Their first experimental...

Discarded is a series from Lemonada Media. If you like The Carbon Copy, then we think you’re going to enjoy Discarded. The shadow of Goliath is looming over St. James Parish, Louisiana, and it’s called The Sunshine Project. This $9.4 billion proposed petrochemical plant would sprawl across 2,400 acres, pushing up against the community that has lived and died there for generations. Our David is lif...

Come watch a live episode of The Carbon Copy! Canary Media and Post Script Media are hosting a live event at Greentown Labs in Somerville, Ma. on April 6. record a live episode of The Carbon Copy with some very special guests. Get your tickets today. In 2020, the top five Western oil & gas supermajors – ExxonMobil, BP, Shell, Chevron, and Total – saw combined losses of $76 billion. That was caused...

Come watch a live episode of The Carbon Copy! Canary Media and Post Script Media are hosting a live event at Greentown Labs in Somerville, Ma. on April 6. record a live episode of The Carbon Copy with some very special guests. Get your tickets today. Batteries are everywhere. In our electronics, our power tools, our electric grid, and in our cars. And almost all those batteries use a lithium-ion c...

For the last 12 years, coal generation in America has been in steady decline. In 2022, wind, solar, and hydro collectively generated more electricity than coal plants. There's no escaping it: the coal fleet is getting creaky. Despite this, hundreds of coal plants are still in operation nationwide. A team of analysts at Energy Innovation and the University of California, Berkeley, wanted to know ho...

Last month, new research showing that 12 percent of childhood asthma can be linked to gas stoves took over the news cycle. Suddenly, gas stoves were a hot topic on nightly news programs across America. The study ignited backlash from conservative pundits, especially after a commissioner from the US Consumer Product Safety Commission said stricter regulation of gas stoves was on the table. But ther...

Visions for the energy-smart home of the future haven’t panned out.  In the mid-2000s, the internet-enabled consumer dashboard was going to be the thing that revolutionized energy in the home. Even Google and Microsoft got in on the action – and then shut down their energy dashboards when no one was using them. Then came the smart thermostat, pioneered by Nest. Many hoped the rise of smart thermos...

Canary media senior reporter Maria Gallucci recently took a pretty unconventional road trip – shadowing a truck driver as he drove around New Jersey, sucking grease, beef tallow, and used cooking oil out of dumpsters behind airports and restaurant chains.  This grease will soon be turned into a sustainable aviation fuel known as hydroprocessed esters and fatty acids, or HEFA. With hydrogen and bat...

Five years ago, venture investors, tech companies and automakers were pouring tens of billions of dollars into driverless cars. Tesla, General Motors, Lyft, Uber, and Google's Waymo were promising large fleets of robotaxis with fully autonomous vehicles by the turn of the decade.  In 2017, Ford took a big swing. The company invested $1 billion in Argo AI, a startup developing level-four driverless...

America enters 2023 faced with two opposing realities: greenhouse gas emissions are going up, but the opportunity to slash those emissions has never been better. Heat-trapping gasses in the U.S. rose again last year, according to the Rhodium Group. Even though renewables outpaced coal on the grid, emissions climbed in the buildings, heavy industry, and transportation sectors. Passage of the Inflat...

To decarbonize our economy, we need to electrify everything. That means installing millions of heat pumps, EV chargers, electric water heaters, and rooftop solar panels.  But there’s one big problem: finding the electricians to make it happen. Electricians across the country are flooded with demand – and just as demand is skyrocketing, the field is also continuing to age out.  This week, in a spec...

This week, Stephen provides some end-of-year updates on the new focus of The Carbon Copy. We’ll be taking a pause until mid-January while we prepare to relaunch the show. In 2023, we’ll be focusing much more tightly on the business, tech, and policy forces that are shaping climate solutions. You asked, we listened! Thanks for listening. We’ll catch you in January.

This is the final week of our listener survey. Fill it out for a chance to win a $100 Patagonia gift card. And don’t forget to donate to Canary Media to support in-depth journalism on the energy transition! In the last year, venture investments in carbon removal have doubled. Top tech companies are buying credits or taking equity stakes in cutting-edge projects to pull carbon out of the air and oc...

We want your feedback! Fill out our listener survey for a chance to win a $100 Patagonia gift card. Join us on November 30 for a live, virtual episode of Climavores. Come ask a question about food, nutrition, and eating for the climate. The age of the electric vehicle is coming, and it’s going to transform more than just the auto industry. EVs are also set to remake the fueling industry. But who w...

We want your feedback! Fill out our listener survey for a chance to win a $100 Patagonia gift card. Join us on November 30 for a live, virtual episode of Climavores. Come ask a question about food, nutrition, and eating for the climate. There’s no doubt that corporations are thinking differently about climate risk and action. But are they making real progress? This week, we have two conversations...

As the cost of living with hurricanes grows, coastal cities across the country are starting to ask the trillion dollar question: what can we build to protect ourselves, and how much are we willing to pay? This week, producer Alexandria Herr takes us to Texas, where the largest civil engineering project in U.S. history may soon put those questions to the test. The Houston area is a sitting duck for...

New York has a puzzle that it needs to solve – fast. In less than a decade, the state is aiming to radically increase renewable electricity generation, all while helping New Yorkers electrify their homes and businesses.  The state's ambitious policy plan for 70% renewables by 2050 will succeed or fail based on how it can develop the supporting infrastructure, like transmission, ports, and batterie...

Michael Grunwald is an energy and climate journalist who lives in south Florida. He loves Florida. But he also loves to poke fun at Florida's poor planning. In 2017, he wrote a piece for POLITICO about Cape Coral -- the boomtown built on swampland that is uniquely vulnerable to hurricanes. Cape Coral is a city of 200,000 people in Southwest Florida. It's basically a wetland, nestled next to Fort M...

This week, producer Alexandria Herr takes a trip to Sunset Park, Brooklyn, and gets a peek into the future. What is now an empty stretch of concrete sandwiched between a Costco and the Upper New York Harbor will soon be transformed into a hub of green industry: a facility to assemble offshore wind turbines.  Norwegian energy giant Equinor has designated the South Brooklyn Marine Terminal as the fu...

In mid-September, the outdoor clothing company Patagonia posted a 10-second video on Instagram featuring Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard. The camera zooms in on Chouinard writing one sentence in a notebook: "Earth is now our only shareholder.” It was an understated clip unveiling an unprecedented move: Chouinard is giving away his company to an entity that will steer all profits into climate solu...

Don’t miss our live episode of Climavores in New York City on October 20! Sign up here for a night of live audio and networking with top voices in climate journalism. On September 18, almost exactly five years after Hurricane Maria wiped out Puerto Rico's electric grid, Hurricane Fiona once again pushed the island’s electric system to failure. Earlier this year, we brought Canary Media reporter Ma...

Don’t miss our live episode of Climavores in New York City on October 20! Sign up here for a night of live audio and networking with top voices in climate journalism.  One third of the world is currently facing water stress. The horn of Africa is in the middle of a devastating drought, putting millions at risk of famine. In China, low water levels are causing cuts to hydropower in Sichuan Province...

Don’t miss our live episode of Climavores in New York City on October 20! Sign up here for a night of live audio and networking with top voices in climate journalism. This week, we’re featuring an episode of Climavores. Climavores is a show for eaters who are trying to navigate the complex relationship between healthy food and a healthy planet. Journalists Tamar Haspel and Mike Grunwald are trying...

Years back, a major municipal utility in the U.S. rolled out a new time-of-use rate for commercial customers. At first, everything seemed fine. Then, customers in one category suddenly began seeing a huge spike in their bills: churches. “They were getting hit with a demand charge and their bills were four, five times what they” had previously been, explains GridX CEO Chris Black. The price of elec...

Over Labor Day weekend, California was blanketed by a record-breaking heatwave. Fresno reached 113 degrees Fahrenheit, Sacramento, 114 degrees Fahrenheit. The state asked residents to cut their power use, and only narrowly avoided blackouts.   Heatwaves are the deadliest weather event in the United States every year. Extreme heat is an environmental justice issue, as it affects low-income and comm...