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Culture

2024 movies.
Culture

2024 Was the Year the Climate Movie Grew Up

Whether you agree probably depends on how you define “climate movie” to begin with.

Culture

The Complicated Case for Pollotarianism

America should eat more chicken. But how many is too many?

Green
Culture

Where Are All the Fictional Movies About Climate Change?

Climate shouldn’t be only a story for documentaries.

Lego’s New Plan to Ditch Fossil Fuels

AM Briefing: Can Lego Ditch Fossil Fuels?

On climate-friendly toys, the Sunrise Movement, and solar-powered schools

Yellow
Tropical Storm Ernesto is Headed Toward Puerto Rico

AM Briefing: Ernesto Approaches

On the storm’s trajectory, solar cell tariffs, and adapting to extreme heat

Yellow
Culture

The Energy Mascot that Electrified America

An animation historian on Reddy Kilowatt, the cartoon charged with electrifying everything in the early 20th century.

Reddy Kilowatt.
<p>Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images, National Museum of American History</p>

With all the attention paid to electric vehicles and heat pumps, the 2020s might seem like the decade of home electrification — but nothing might ever rival the boom of the original Roaring Twenties. By 1929, 70% of all American homes had access to electricity, double the figure from the beginning of the decade – bringing home electrification from minority to majority.

Home electrification was so big back then, it even had a mascot: Reddy Kilowatt. Invented by a marketer at the Alabama Power Company in 1926, this cheery spokescharacter with a lightning-bolt body and a lightbulb nose was licensed to hundreds of utility companies throughout the greater part of the 20th century to promote electricity – and more specifically investor–owned utilities. Reddy was even used as a tool to link government-owned utilities to socialism or communism in years following World War II.

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Culture

How a Top Climate Scientist Learned to Speak Up

Stanford’s Rob Jackson discusses methane, the “my-ocene,” and his new book, Into the Clear Blue Sky.

Earth in the clouds.
<p>Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images</p>

Mornings are my time for thinking about Rob Jackson — specifically, when I am making coffee. Every time I reach for the knob on my gas stove to heat my water kettle, I remember something he told me during our discussion of his new book, Into the Clear Blue Sky: The Path to Restoring Our Atmosphere: “We would never willingly stand over the tailpipe of a car breathing in the exhaust, yet we willingly stand over a stove, breathing the exact same pollutants.”

Mornings, incidentally, are also my time for practicing holding my breath.

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