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Psychologist Kari Leibowitz’ book How to Winter has tools to help you survive — even thrive — through a season with no glistening snow.
It is the darkest week of the year. For the lucky folks in Miami, the day still lasts a little over 10 hours; in Anchorage, it lasts less than six. In Utqiagvik, Alaska — the economic center of the North Slope’s oil operations — there is no day at all; the sun last set on Nov. 16 and won’t rise again until mid-January.
When there is no snow, that night feels even more endless. As temperatures warm around the globe, snowfall is noticeably declining, which actually makes winters in northern climates darker since snow reflects so much light. With some parts of the U.S. set to lose 10% to 20% of their snowpack per decade due to climate change, darker and rainier winters are likely in store for millions of us.
If that news fills you with horror and despair (as it does me) then I’ve got the book for you: Kari Leibowitz’s How to Winter, a guide to “harnessing your mindset to thrive on cold, dark, or difficult days.” Leibowitz is a Stanford-trained health researcher and psychologist specializing in “the winter blues.” She and I first spoke in January when she thoroughly debunked the claim that warmer winters will make people happier.
Leibowitz certainly doesn’t think the loss of snow is good news. (In addition to her mindset research, she is on the Science Alliance team at Protect Our Winters, a nonprofit that mobilizes outdoor recreators to take action on environmental issues.) But if warmer winters are a part of our reality going forward, then she also believes we should learn to adapt to them rather than merely endure them.
Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
When we spoke in January, I was working on a piece about the common misconception that global warming and warmer winters will make people happier. Though few Americans actually look forward to darker and colder days, what do we lose when we lose winter?
We lose a lot. If you live somewhere that gets below freezing or that gets snow in the winter, that opens up a huge world of winter recreation possibilities — skiing, snowshoeing, ice skating — and also a world of beauty and fascination. Even people who don’t love winter tend to think of a White Christmas and snowy cabins when they picture a winter that they would love. Ice and frost can be really beautiful.
In my personal experience, and in the experiences of many people I’ve spoken to throughout Scandinavia, a few degrees or more below freezing is much better than a few degrees above freezing because then you get that humidity, and that cold soaks into your bones. There are a lot of places in the U.S. that are really on the border, where a few degrees makes a really big difference between a colder, snowier winter and a warmer, rainier winter. Snow also reflects light; it makes it brighter during the darkest days of the year.
I’m glad you brought that up! One of the things I learned last time we spoke was that climate change is making the world darker in the sense that snow is what reflects light in the wintertime, so warmer and drizzlier winters are potentially more difficult for us to tolerate than very cold ones. What would you recommend people who live in these transitional or rapidly changing climates do to combat the winter blues?
Working with the darkness is key wherever you live, whether it’s somewhere snowier or less snowy. In Scandinavia, you will not see big, bright overhead lights on in people’s houses during the night or the evening in the winter. It’s almost counterintuitive because you think, “Oh, it’s dark outside, let me make it as bright as possible in here.” But that creates a really strong contrast that is tiring for our eyes and our bodies.
Lower lights — using candlelight — turn the darkness into an asset. You can only eat dinner by candlelight when the sun sets early; it makes the darkness part of the vibe and it also reduces the big contrast with the outdoors. That might make it easier to get outside and do things, too, because it doesn’t look as dark out compared to inside. On a gray, rainy morning, I will light candles for 15 minutes when I eat my breakfast. In the U.S., this sort of lighting is usually reserved for special occasions, but I think making it part of the everyday is really valuable.
You also write in the book about rebranding Christmas lights as “winter lights” and leaving them up all season long.
This is something they did in Edmonton, Canada, when they were working on their winter city strategy. It kind of kills me when the Christmas lights come down in the second week of January! We have so much winter darkness left to go and we need that light. Even at home, using twinkly lights in our living rooms makes such a difference in the vibe.
You can only enjoy Christmas lights or winter lights when it’s dark out, and acknowledging that darkness brings something special also helps reframe our feelings about winter.
You wrote this book because many people struggle with the winter. But as I was reading it, I was thinking about how much I dread summer and the inescapable heat of August. Do you think the mindset strategies you suggest for winter could apply to “summering” as well?
They are really different challenges. My theory about winter is that the cold is not as big a problem as the darkness. There is research that backs this up: Evidence shows that light makes us feel awake and that it makes us feel good, and darkness makes us feel tired and can have a mild depressant effect. But the larger message of the book, and the larger approach to the winter mindset, is to find the opportunity in the challenge that you’re facing. And that can help us with anything — including really hot summers.
So, what’s the opportunity? Maybe the opportunity is that you can do more things at night when the temperature is really nice; there is something really lovely about being outside at night when it’s warm! Or maybe you can spend time resting during the hottest parts of the day, like they do in places like Spain. I’ve been to other places in the Mediterranean where they have metal blackout shades that are great for sleeping and keeping it cool. We should think, “What are the opportunities here to work with the climate, to build houses differently that have better cross breezes or have atriums?” We need to work with this reality.We need to adapt.
When did you start thinking about climate change in your winter mindset work?
It really came from my experiences in the Arctic. I’d talk to people there and they would be like, “It’s raining in January. That’s very unusual.” When I was living in Norway [between 2014 and 2015], I went to Svalbard, and there was a bunch of stuff that I couldn’t do because it had been too warm. It had rained, and then the rain freezes on the mountain tops, and it snows on top of that, and then there’s avalanche risk. We were going to go to some ice caves and it wasn’t safe at that time. I was talking to people in Svalbard who were like, “Normally, this fjord freezes over, and we can snowmobile from place to place in the winter, but this year, we can’t.”
Being [in Tromsø, Norway], living there, talking to those people, and really caring about that community, and staying plugged in from afar — it’s really personal. A lot of the things that I was learning about in my research that people in Tromsø look forward to, and that make winter great, are not things that they can always count on. And I think that’s true everywhere you go.
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It would have delivered a gargantuan 6.2 gigawatts of power.
The Bureau of Land Management says the largest solar project in Nevada has been canceled amidst the Trump administration’s federal permitting freeze.
Esmeralda 7 was supposed to produce a gargantuan 6.2 gigawatts of power – equal to nearly all the power supplied to southern Nevada by the state’s primary public utility. It would do so with a sprawling web of solar panels and batteries across the western Nevada desert. Backed by NextEra Energy, Invenergy, ConnectGen and other renewables developers, the project was moving forward at a relatively smooth pace under the Biden administration, albeit with significant concerns raised by environmentalists about its impacts on wildlife and fauna. And Esmeralda 7 even received a rare procedural win in the early days of the Trump administration when the Bureau of Land Management released the draft environmental impact statement for the project.
When Esmeralda 7’s environmental review was released, BLM said the record of decision would arrive in July. But that never happened. Instead, Donald Trump issued an executive order as part of a deal with conservative hardliners in Congress to pass his tax megabill, which also effectively repealed the Inflation Reduction Act’s renewable electricity tax credits. This led to subsequent actions by Interior Secretary Doug Burgum to freeze all federal permitting decisions for solar energy.
Flash forward to today, when BLM quietly updated its website for Esmeralda 7 permitting to explicitly say the project’s status is “cancelled.” Normally when the agency says this, it means developers pulled the plug.
I’ve reached out to some of the companies behind Esmeralda 7 but was unable to reach them in time for publication. If I hear from them confirming the project is canceled – or that BLM is wrong in some way – I will let you know.
It’s not perfect, but pretty soon, it’ll be available for under $30,000.
Here’s what you need to know about the rejuvenated Chevrolet Bolt: It’s back, it’s better, and it starts at under $30,000.
Although the revived 2027 Bolt doesn’t officially hit the market until January 2026, GM revealed the new version of the iconic affordable EV at a Wednesday evening event at the Universal Studios backlot in Los Angeles. The assembled Bolt owners and media members drove the new cars past Amity Island from Jaws and around the Old West and New York sets that have served as the backdrops of so many television shows and movies. It was star treatment for a car that, like its predecessor, isn’t the fanciest EV around. But given the giveaway patches that read “Chevy Bolt: Back by popular demand,” it’s clear that GM heard the cries of people who missed having the plucky electric hatchback on the market.
The Bolt died at the height of its powers. The original Bolt EV and Bolt EUV sold in big numbers in the late 2010s and early 2020s, powered by a surprisingly affordable price compared to competitor EVs and an interior that didn’t feel cramped despite its size as a smallish hatchback. In 2023, the year Chevy stopped selling it, the Bolt was the third-best-selling EV in America after Tesla’s top two models.
Yet the original had a few major deficiencies that reflected the previous era of EVs. The most egregious of which was its charging speed that topped out at around 50 kilowatts. Given that today’s high-speed chargers can reach 250 to 350 kilowatts — and an even faster future could be on the way — the Bolt’s pit stops on a road trip were a slog that didn’t live up to its peppy name.
Thankfully, Chevy fixed it. Charging speed now reaches 150 kilowatts. While that figure isn’t anywhere near the 350 kilowatts that’s possible in something like the Hyundai Ioniq 9, it’s a threefold improvement for the Bolt that lets it go from 10% to 80% charged in a respectable 26 minutes. The engineers said they drove a quartet of the new cars down old Route 66 from the Kansas City area, where the Bolt is made, to Los Angeles to demonstrate that the EV was finally ready for such an adventure.
From the outside, the 2027 Bolt is virtually indistinguishable from the old car, but what’s inside is a welcome leap forward. New Bolt has a lithium-ion-phosphate, or LFP battery that holds 65 kilowatt-hours of energy, but still delivers 255 miles of max range because of the EV’s relatively light weight. Whereas older EVs encourage drivers to stop refueling at around 80%, the LFP battery can be charged to 100% regularly without the worry of long-term damage to the battery.
The Bolt is GM’s first EV with the NACS charging standard, the former Tesla proprietary plug, which would allow the little Chevy to visit Tesla Superchargers without an adapter (though its port placement on the front of the driver’s side is backwards from the way older Supercharger stations are built). Now built on GM’s Ultium platform, the Bolt shares its 210-horsepower electric motor with the Chevy Equinox EV and gets vehicle-to-load capability, meaning you’ll be able to tap into its battery energy for other uses such as powering your home.
But it’s the price that’s the real wow factor. Bolt will launch with an RS version that gets the fancier visual accents and starts at $32,000. The Bolt LT that will be available a little later will eventually start as low as $28,995, a figure that includes the destination charge that’s typically slapped on top of a car’s price, to the tune of an extra $1,000 to $2,000 on delivery. Perhaps it’s no surprise that GM revealed this car just a week after the end of the $7,500 federal tax credit for EV purchases (and just a day after Tesla announced its budget versions of the Model Y and Model 3). Bringing in a pretty decent EV at under $30,000 without the help of a big tax break is a pretty big deal.
The car is not without compromises. Plenty of Bolt fans are aghast that Chevy abandoned the Apple CarPlay and Android Auto integrations that worked with the first Bolt in favor of GM’s own built-in infotainment system as the only option. Although the new Bolt was based on the longer, “EUV” version of the original, this is still a pretty compact car without a ton of storage space behind the back seats. Still, for those who truly need a bigger vehicle, there’s the Chevy Equinox EV.
For as much time as I’ve spent clamoring for truly affordable EVs that could compete with entry-level gas cars on prices, the Bolt’s faults are minor. At $29,000 for an electric vehicle in the U.S., there is practically zero competition until the new Nissan Leaf arrives. The biggest threats to the Bolt are America’s aversion to small cars and the rapid rates of depreciation that could allow someone to buy a much larger, gently used EV for the price of the new Chevy. But the original Bolt found a steady footing among drivers who wanted that somewhat counter-cultural car — and this one is a lot better.
“Old economy” companies like Caterpillar and Williams are cashing in by selling smaller, less-efficient turbines to impatient developers.
From the perspective of the stock market, you’re either in the AI business or you’re not. If you build the large language models pushing out the frontiers of artificial intelligence, investors love it. If you rent out the chips the large language models train on, investors love it. If you supply the servers that go in the data centers that power the large language models, investors love it. And, of course, if you design the chips themselves, investors love it.
But companies far from the software and semiconductor industry are profiting from this boom as well. One example that’s caught the market’s fancy is Caterpillar, better known for its scale-defying mining and construction equipment, which has become a “secular winner” in the AI boom, writes Bloomberg’s Joe Weisenthal.
Typically construction businesses do well when the overall economy is doing well — that is, they don’t typically take off with a major technological shift like AI. Now, however, Caterpillar has joined the ranks of the “picks and shovels” businesses capitalizing on the AI boom thanks to its gas turbine business, which is helping power OpenAI’s Stargate data center project in Abilene, Texas.
Just one link up the chain is another classic “old economy” business: Williams Companies, the natural gas infrastructure company that controls or has an interest in over 33,000 miles of pipeline and has been around in some form or another since the early 20th century.
Gas pipeline companies are not supposed to be particularly exciting, either. They build large-scale infrastructure. Their ratemaking is overseen by federal regulators. They pay dividends. The last gas pipeline company that got really into digital technology, well, uh, it was Enron.
But Williams’ shares are up around 28% in the past year — more than Caterpillar. That’s in part, due to its investing billions in powering data centers with behind the meter natural gas.
Last week, Williams announced that it would funnel over $3 billion into two data center projects, bringing its total investments in powering AI to $5 billion. This latest bet, the company said, is “to continue to deliver speed-to-market solutions in grid-constrained markets.”
If we stipulate that the turbines made by Caterpillar are powering the AI boom in a way analogous to the chips designed by Nvidia or AMD and fabricated by TSMC, then Williams, by developing behind the meter gas-fired power plants, is something more like a cloud computing provider or data center developer like CoreWeave, except that its facilities house gas turbines, not semiconductors.
The company has “seen the rapid emergence of the need for speed with respect to energy,” Williams Chief Executive Chad Zamarin said on an August earnings call.
And while Williams is not a traditional power plant developer or utility, it knows its way around natural gas. “We understand pipeline capacity,” Zamarin said on a May earnings call. “We obviously build a lot of pipeline and turbine facilities. And so, bringing all the different pieces together into a solution that is ready-made for a customer, I think, has been truly a differentiator.”
Williams is already behind the Socrates project for Meta in Ohio, described in a securities filing as a $1.6 billion project that will provide 400 megawatts of gas-fired power. That project has been “upsized” to $2 billion and 750 megawatts, according to Morgan Stanley analysts.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said that “energy constraints” are a more pressing issue for artificial intelligence development than whether the marginal dollar invested is worth it. In other words, Zuckerberg expects to run out of energy before he runs out of projects that are worth pursuing.
That’s great news for anyone in the business of providing power to data centers quickly. The fact that developers seem to have found their answer in the Williamses and Caterpillars of the world, however, calls into question a key pillar of the renewable industry’s case for itself in a time of energy scarcity — that the fastest and cheapest way to get power for data centers is a mix of solar and batteries.
Just about every renewable developer or clean energy expert I’ve spoken to in the past year has pointed to renewables’ fast timeline and low cost to deploy compared to building new gas-fired, grid-scale generation as a reason why utilities and data centers should prefer them, even absent any concerns around greenhouse gas emissions.
“Renewables and battery storage are the lowest-cost form of power generation and capacity,” Next Era chief executive John Ketchum said on an April earnings call. “We can build these projects and get new electrons on the grid in 12 to 18 months.” Ketchum also said that the price of a gas-fired power plant had tripled, meanwhile lead times for turbines are stretching to the early 2030s.
The gas turbine shortage, however, is most severe for large turbines that are built into combined cycle systems for new power plants that serve the grid.
GE Vernova is discussing delivering turbines in 2029 and 2030. While one manufacturer of gas turbines, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, has announced that it plans to expand its capacity, the industry overall remains capacity constrained.
But according to Morgan Stanley, Williams can set up behind the meter power plants in 18 months. xAI’s Colossus data center in Memphis, which was initially powered by on-site gas turbines, went from signing a lease to training a large language model in about six months.
These behind the meter plants often rely on cheaper, smaller, simple cycle turbines, which generate electricity just from the burning of natural gas, compared to combined cycle systems, which use the waste heat from the gas turbines to run steam turbines and generate more energy. The GE Vernova 7HA combined cycle turbines that utility Duke Energy buys, for instance, range in output from 290 to 430 megawatts. The simple cycle turbines being placed in Ohio for the Meta data center range in output from about 14 megawatts to 23 megawatts.
Simple cycle turbines also tend to be less efficient than the large combined cycle system used for grid-scale natural gas, according to energy analysts at BloombergNEF. The BNEF analysts put the emissions difference at almost 1,400 pounds of carbon per megawatt-hour for the single turbines, compared to just over 800 pounds for combined cycle.
Overall, Williams is under contract to install 6 gigawatts of behind-the-meter power, to be completed by the first half of 2027, Morgan Stanley analysts write. By comparison, a joint venture between GE Vernova, the independent power producer NRG, and the construction company Kiewit to develop combined cycle gas-fired power plants has a timeline that could stretch into 2032.
The Williams projects will pencil out on their own, the company says, but they have an obvious auxiliary benefit: more demand for natural gas.
Williams’ former chief executive, Alan Armstrong, told investors in a May earnings call that he was “encouraged” by the “indirect business we are seeing on our gas transmission systems,” i.e. how increased natural gas consumption benefits the company’s traditional pipeline business.
Wall Street has duly rewarded Williams for its aggressive moves.
Morgan Stanley analysts boosted their price target for the stock from $70 to $83 after last week’s $3 billion announcement, saying in a note to clients that the company has “shifted from an underappreciated value (impaired terminal value of existing assets) to underappreciated growth (accelerating project pipeline) story.” Mizuho Securities also boosted its price target from $67 to $72, with analyst Gabriel Moreen telling clients that Williams “continues to raise the bar on the scope and potential benefits.”
But at the same time, Moreen notes, “the announcement also likely enhances some investor skepticism around WMB pushing further into direct power generation and, to a lesser extent, prioritizing growth (and growth capex) at the expense of near-term free cash flow and balance sheet.”
In other words, the pipeline business is just like everyone else — torn between prudence in a time of vertiginous economic shifts and wanting to go all-in on the AI boom.
Williams seems to have decided on the latter. “We will be a big beneficiary of the fast rising data center power load,” Armstrong said.