Tabla de contenidos para April 2020 en WIRED

NOT LONG AGO, I WAS DRIVING WITH MY three sons back from trying to ski on a mountain that doesn’t really have snow anymore, and we were talking about climate change. They’re 11, 9, and 6, and they’re upset, as they should be. They know that their adult years will be spent in a world of raging fires, flash floods, and mass extinction. They love Greta and resent their elders. The future feels different and vaster when the actuarial tables give you 80 years to go, not 40. We talked about turning our thermostats down, eating less meat, and putting the cable box on a smart plug. I promised to install solar panels. I tried futilely to explain what capitalism is and why it was still a reasonable way to…

37% THE PART THAT “NATURAL CLIMATE SOLUTIONS” COULD PLAY BETWEEN NOW AND 2030 TO KEEP GLOBAL TEMPERATURE RISE BELOW 2 DEGREES C. KEN BIBLE STEPS OVER A CARPET OF bracken and vanilla leaf to get closer to the big Douglas fir. He gives its furrowed bark an affectionate slap, as if introducing a prize racehorse. “It’s about 70 meters tall and 2.6 meters in diameter,” Bible says, leaning back to take in the behemoth stretching above him. From way down here on the shady floor of the forest, he has no hope of seeing all the way to the tree’s top. But thanks to a 279-foot-high tower that rises above the trees, Bible, who helps manage this site on behalf of the US Forest Service, has had the chance to know…

CONCRETE DOMINATES CONSTRUCTION, BUT SOME ECO-FRIENDLY MATERIALS ARE TRYING TO CHIP AWAY AT THE EDGES. CROSS-LAMINATED TIMBER Made from lumber boards that are glued and layered on top of each other crosswise, CLT comes in giant panels that can replace concrete and steel as the backbone of a building. When produced with sustainable forestry practices, CLT is a green alternative. The material was used to construct what is currently the world’s tallest timber building: Norway’s 18-story Mjøstårnet tower. HEMP Combining the cannabis strain’s woody interior pulp with lime and water produces “hempcrete,” a drywall-like material that’s light and robust and has a low carbon output. Hempcrete isn’t load-bearing, so it won’t replace concrete and steel, but it’s already been used in residential projects for walls and insulation. MYCELIUM When the…

10% PORTION OF AGRICULTURE-RELATED GLOBAL HEATING CAUSED BY RICE CULTIVATION NEXT TIME YOU SIT DOWN TO A BOWL OF steaming rice, consider this: Of all the grains humans eat, rice has the biggest carbon footprint. Of course, rice is a staple for half of humanity, which partly explains the outsize footprint. The big problem, though, is that rice is usually grown in water, and there’s not much oxygen in the muddy bottom of a rice paddy. That low-oxygen muck is a happy place for a type of bacteria that produces methane. And each methane molecule can do far more harm to the climate than a carbon dioxide molecule, contributing nearly 30 times more warming over a 100-year span. In other words, when you grow rice, you also grow a lot…

Food giants Unilever, Mars, Danone, and Nestlé say their US operations will continue to invest in farm conservation efforts and climate-friendly innovation, despite the Trump administration’s decision to withdraw support for the Paris climate agreement. The nonprofit GreenWave has helped 50 seaweed and shellfish farms go underwater. This “regenerative ocean farming” helps replenish marine ecosystems and provide food—and sequester carbon and nitrogen from the atmosphere. New York City’s public school system the nation’s largest, with more than 1 million students—got a new cafeteria item last year: “Meatless Mondays.”…

LEVEL 1 PRIME AND CHILL Ordered today, arriving tomorrow: a single pair of socks in a giant cardboard box. Cut down on emissions and waste by ordering big and shipping slow. LEVEL 2 LEG UP If we have to travel more than a quarter of a mile, most of us drive. Extend your walking range to a full mile or two, getting your steps up and your carbon footprint down. LEVEL 3 BECOME A TRANSIT EVANGELIST Plan a car-free day in your neighborhood, write letters to the editor, and campaign for local pro-transit candidates—or run for office yourself.…

For help identifying the least terrible ways to take a plane, the International Council on Clean Transportation’s Dan Rutherford has devised a mnemonic: “Fly like a NERD.” N IS FOR NEW: Book your flight on newer, more efficient aircraft. E IS FOR ECONOMY: Economy-class cabins, with denser seating plans, produce fewer emissions per passenger. R IS FOR REGULAR: Average-size planes, as opposed to small or jumbo ones, tend to get the best mileage. D IS FOR DIRECT: Nonstop saves fuel. Airlines don’t always make it easy to follow this advice. You can’t filter flights by airplane age or size. But ICCT has tracked overall airline fuel efficiency in the US since 2010, and its latest ratings show there’s a pretty wide gap between the best and worst. (See chart on…

45% RATE OF GROWTH IN ENERGY STORAGE CONNECTED TO THE U.S. POWER GRID BETWEEN 2017 AND 2018 SOMETIMES THE SUN JUST SHINES TOO brightly on California. The state is such a glutton for solar energy—a million solar-paneled rooftops, hundreds of enormous solar stations—that it routinely harvests more megawatts than people can use or the grid can handle. During a couple of cloudless weeks in March 2017, California actually had to pay Arizona to siphon off the surplus. More often, though, the solution is to reduce the gush of solar to a trickle, a process called curtailment. And at night, when the sun isn’t shining? The state must make up the difference by burning fossil fuels. Right now, California gets about a third of its electricity from renewables. To banish all carbon…

LET’S BE CLEAR: TIME IS GETTING SHORT. Even as we race to build roads from carbon-sequestering concrete (page 32), breed drought-resistant crops (page 46), and perfect our battery tech (page 86), emissions keep rising. To avert the worst, we may need to turn to geoengineering—the deliberate, large-scale manipulation of the environment to counteract climate change. Technically, planting a lot of trees is a form of geoengineering. So is fertilizing the ocean with iron filings to stimulate plankton growth. So is using massive CO2 scrubbers to pull carbon directly from the air. (In theory, anyway—that particular technology is still in alpha.) But what if the planet could just put on a sun hat for a while? That way, at least, we could sop up the carbon mess in relative comfort. Scientists…

Turning off the heat and shivering under blankets for a week after an outrageous electric bill; AC Transit, BART, SF Muni, and my own feet; nine buds growing from ponderosa pine seedlings; refusing to replace the burned-out vanity light bulbs again; watching the Oscar contenders at home instead of Ubering to the movie theater; lying in the sunshine but claiming to be stretching; getting in those 10,000 steps; pickling vegetables in upcycled glass jars; closing Market Street to private vehicles; snuggling the cat for warmth; apartment-building radiators no longer set to “surface of the sun”; my overeager 70-pound coonhound pulling me up the steepest stretch of a Mount Diablo hike; gliding down Interstate 880 in neutral; reading by the dim evening light until my roommate asks if I’m OK; the…

THE FIRST HUGE RENEWABLE-ENERGY revolution—the one that dotted the US with hydroelectric dams and ultimately made power ubiquitous in every American home—started at a bankruptcy sale. In 1877, Jacob Schoellkopf went to an auction for a waterway owned by the Niagara Falls Canal Company. A succession of entrepreneurs had tried and failed to harness the ferocious power of the falling water. That night he told his wife, “Momma, I bought the ditch.” Two years later, Thomas Edison made a light bulb that glowed for 40 continuous hours in his lab. Three years after that, Schoellkopf installed a generator below the falls to power 16 electric lamps above it. Those first lights wowed tourists and gave people a sense of the powerful waterfall’s potential. But they didn’t reveal how to generate…

Oceans make up 71 percent of Earth, and give us food, work, and a habitable planet. They also absorb 90 percent of the excess heat trapped by greenhouse gases and about 30 percent of all CO2 released into the atmosphere. For that they get: acidification, less oxygen, dying sea life. Three things that could help: 1. According to Janis Searles Jones at Ocean Conservancy, we will lose nearly all coral reefs if temperatures rise by 2 degrees. At the Florida Aquarium in Tampa, scientists are working to make coral more resilient; they’ve successfully bred the endangered pillar coral for the first time in a lab. And the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission is preserving coral specimens to preserve biodiversity—like a seed bank for corals. 2. Warming waters are driving…

FOR DECADES, THE IDEA OF A CARBON tax has been stuck in the waiting room of American politics: Familiar to everyone who comes and goes, it has sat there long enough to grow cobwebs from its ears. For the vast majority of Republicans, the idea is anathema, and for Democrats it’s one among several policies that compete for the love of lawmakers and climate wonks. But politics, like the climate, is volatile these days. In the past couple of years, some Republicans have broken ranks with their party to support a tax on carbon emissions—perhaps because the climate is becoming more salient with voters, perhaps as a foil to the more radical Green New Deal, or perhaps to, you know, do something to stop global warming. Given that tiny bump…

Meat is murder—of Earth’s climate, at least. More than a quarter of the planet’s ice-free land is inefficiently used for grazing, a third of all farmland grows food for animals, and livestock are prodigious belchers of greenhouse gases. Global demand for meat is spiking at exactly the moment it’d be really good for all of us to eat less of it. Alas, meat is also freakin’ delicious. High-tech plant-based replacements aspire to replicate its proteinaceous umami yumminess and texture, but pea-based Beyond and soy-based Impossible face technical challenges. So maybe it’s time to look to a whole other kingdom of life for meaty not-meats: fungus. Fast-growing meshworks of mycelial filaments can replicate meat’s texture, and it’ll eat pretty much any carbon source, including waste from various industrial processes. Decades ago,…

Cars emit a huge chunk of cities’ greenhouse gases, but cities are doing something about it—and not just in New York, Paris, and San Francisco. It makes sense: Cities that don’t help destroy the planet are also nice places to live. CITY: SEOUL METHOD: UNBUILDING In 2003, Seoul shifted a freeway-building binge into reverse. City workers dismantled an expressway and turned its path into a popular park. Since then, Seoul has knocked down 15 more freeways and is building a transit network emphasizing bikes and trolleys. CITY: BARCELONA METHOD: SUPERBLOCKS The city’s basic plan was already a grid of wide boulevards threaded with smaller side streets. Barcelona made side streets narrower, greener, and more park-like—extremely unfriendly to cars, which now stick to the perimeters. These new superblocks are so popular,…

TESLA CYBERTRUCK Jokes abounded last fall when Elon Musk unveiled Tesla’s new “Blade Runner pickup,” but the Cybertruck can drive up to 500 miles on a single charge and is available with one, two, or three motors. With all three, Tesla claims, it can tow 14,000 pounds and bolt from 0 to 60 in 2.9 seconds. BOLLINGER B2 In 2021, Detroit-based startup Bollinger will begin offering a four-door, 614-horsepower pickup that seems designed exclusively for an eco-conscious Batman on safari. The charge lasts for some 200 miles, and the starting price is $125,000. ELECTRIC FORD F-150 Ford has stayed mum on specs, but electric F-150s are expected sometime in 2021. Last summer a prototype towed a million-pound freight train loaded with conventional F-150s. ATLIS XT Arizona-based Atlis is building an…

BLACKROCK “Climate risk is investment risk,” CEO Larry Fink warned in January. From now on, BlackRock, which manages $7 trillion in assets, will shun risky companies like coal producers in favor of more sustainable investments. AMAZON The world’s biggest retailer aims to be 100 percent renewable by 2030. It has ordered 100,000 electric delivery vans (see page 68) and invested in wind and solar farms to power its servers. CEO Jeff Bezos has also committed $10 billion of his own money to fight climate change. MICROSOFT In January, Microsoft pledged to become carbon negative by 2030. It’s borrowing from many playbooks—planting trees, opting for greener business travel, and investing in technology that pulls carbon directly from the air.…

51X INCREASE IN U.S. SOLAR POWER CAPACITY FROM 2009 TO 2018 GOOD NEWS HAS BEEN RARE THIS PAST decade, so here’s some: Since 2010, the cost of generating solar electric power has dropped by 80 percent, and gigantic photovoltaic plants, some spanning thousands of acres, are transforming the economics of green energy. “Even from five years ago, it’s a really different story than today,” says Gregory Nemet, an academic who last year published a book called How Solar Energy Became Cheap. “This isn’t just cheap. It’s dirt cheap. In sunny places, it’s the cheapest way humans have ever invented to make electricity.” If this cost collapse had occurred in a single year, it might have been hailed as the breakthrough of the century. But it happened gradually, and incremental improvements in…

ONE AFTERNOON IN DECEMBER, I TOOK THE 4 train from my home in the South Bronx to an apartment near Union Square. I had been invited to lead a conversation with a handful of artists about the climate crisis and their place in it. What I found was an intimate gathering of six or seven people. After some milling about over plates of cake and mugs of coffee, we started remembering Hurricane Sandy. We marveled at how much our experiences differed based on the borough or neighborhood we lived in. Sandy turned the Lower East Side—which was originally built for low-income communities but is now fairly affluent—into a place where police cars were submerged and electricity was scarce. Meanwhile, the South Bronx, originally built for the affluent but now the…

8% PORTION OF GLOBAL CARBON EMISSIONS PRODUCED BY THE CEMENT INDUSTRY IF YOU FIND YOURSELF AT THIS MOMENT in a city of any size, take a look out the window. Most of what you see is made with a single material, one that dominates our world: concrete. It makes up the bulk of virtually every office tower, shopping mall, highway, and airport on earth. We produce tens of billions of tons of the stuff every year—enough to build a 100-foot wall right around the equator. And that tonnage is certain to grow in coming years, as cities continue to mushroom in China, Nigeria, and other fast-developing nations. Concrete is wonderfully useful, but it comes at a steep cost: The industry that makes it eructs about 8 percent of all annual carbon…

17% PORTION OF GLOBAL ELECTRICITY USE THAT GOES TO REFRIGERATION BACK IN 2001, A MIDDLE-AGED MAN made a video of his car and sent it around to a few friends. So far, so predictable—but this video featured a dilapidated Vauxhall Nova whizzing around a junk-strewn yard in a cloud of fog. At the wheel was Peter Dearman, a rumpled-looking autodidact who had spent the better part of four decades imagining a way to build engineering’s ultimate vaporware: a motor powered only by air. Born in 1951 on an egg farm north of London, Dearman would seem an unlikely candidate to have solved the problem. He left school at age 15 and worked in the family business for a while, then took a job at a local sheet-metal factory. He spent his…

70% PORTION OF GLOBAL GREENHOUSE GAS EMISSIONS ATTRIBUTABLE TO CITIES FOR 30 YEARS, A 40-FOOT-HIGH SECTION of US Route 101 wove like a blackberry vine through a low, old neighborhood of Edwardian and Georgian buildings in San Francisco’s Hayes Valley. Then, in 1989, the Loma Prieta earthquake, magnitude 6.9, fractured the elevated roadway. Some people wanted to repair it, but the city decided to tear it down—a rare unbuilding in a nation connected by highways. Today it’s hard to imagine that anyone defended the spur. The highway formed a wall between neighborhoods, and the right-of-way beneath it was a dark, unloved space. With the freeway pruned away, the city styled the newly revealed surface street—Octavia—after a grand Parisian boulevard, with an inner couple of lanes separated from parallel side streets…

2-3% PORTION OF GLOBAL GREENHOUSE GAS EMISSIONS GENERATED BY CARGO SHIPS STEFAN EEFTING IS, AS HE PUTS IT, “a long-lasting guy” in the shipping industry. He started as an apprentice engineer in a German shipyard in 1984, and now he’s a senior vice president at MAN Energy Solutions, a firm whose engines power every second vessel on the deep seas. Over the course of Eefting’s career, he’s watched ship engines grow from massive steel contraptions to epically huge ones: The 100,000-horsepower monsters in today’s cargo ships are five or six times the size of a house. And for decades, the vast majority of them have ingested heavy fuel oil—the leftover dregs of petroleum distillation, a product so viscous it’s practically a solid at room temperature. “Like chewing gum,” Eefting says.…

2.5% PORTION OF GREENHOUSE GAS EMISSIONS GENERATED BY AIR TRAVEL—–A FIGURE THAT IS EXPECTED TO GROW “WE WILL NOT HAVE TO STOP AIR TRAVEL, BUT we will have to plan for it more carefully,” President Nixon told the nation in November 1973. Schedules would be reduced, loads increased, and the use of fuel for aviation cut by 15 percent. Then, as now, we faced a crisis over energy. Nixon’s speech followed the OPEC oil shock, but concerns about the climate were already growing. (Scientists would begin to reach consensus on the basic facts of global warming by decade’s end.) So an urgent problem came to Richard Whitcomb, a decorated NASA engineer at Langley Research Center in Virginia: Might there be some cheap and easy way to make flying more efficient? In…

THE FOUNDER OF MODERN SINGAPORE, Lee Kuan Yew, once credited his nation’s phenomenal economic growth to two factors: multiethnic tolerance and AC. “Air-conditioning was a most important invention for us,” he told an interviewer in 2009. “It changed the nature of civilization by making development possible in the tropics.” Today the tropics are projected to house around half of the world’s population by 2050, and burgeoning cities there often look to Singapore as a model. Some leaders in the island nation realize that this vast equatorial building boom poses certain risks: If AC systems hum all day long, cooling halfused rooms, that’s a recipe for climate disaster. Which is why Singapore has enlisted the help of Costas Spanos, a wiry, intense electrical engineering and computer science professor at UC Berkeley…