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Why permitting reform could break the political alliance that produced America’s most significant climate law
The U.S. climate coalition is under serious strain.
The tension has been brought to a head by last month’s debt-ceiling compromise, which enacted a variety of reforms to the National Environmental Policy Act and exempted the long-debated Mountain Valley Pipeline from federal environmental review. While environmental groups have decried the concessions as “a colossal error … that sacrifices the climate,” clean-energy trade groups are praising them “an important down payment on much-needed reforms.” This gulf now threatens to disintegrate the political alliance that, less than a year ago, won the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), its most tangible accomplishment and by far the country’s most significant climate law.
The differences over permitting reform aren’t just a disagreement about tactics. Rather, they reflect fundamental changes within three of the most important factions within the climate coalition — the environmental movement, the clean energy industry, and the Washington-centric group I’ve termed the green growthers. Facing these changes and their implications is critical to preserving the political foundations of federal climate action.
Ever since passage of the IRA unlocked massive fiscal resources for decarbonization, the climate coalition has been split on how best to put that money to work. While nearly everyone recognizes the need to substantially increase the pace at which clean energy infrastructure gets deployed, division centers on the question of permitting reform. To even name the debate is to invoke a factional diagnosis: the view that environmental laws are hobbling decarbonization by preventing clean energy infrastructure from getting built quickly enough — or even at all. This perspective has rapidly gained momentum across a bipartisan community that includes self-styled centrists within the climate coalition.
Permitting reform is unraveling the climate coalition because it reawakens a fundamental, unresolved disagreement over how to decarbonize. Its timing adds to these tensions: bipartisan legislation to curtail national environmental law has arrived, not accidentally, just as the clean energy industry has become most capable of splitting from the broader climate coalition that helped create it.
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The oldest faction in today’s climate coalition, and the most diffuse, is the environmental movement. Its mainstream wing has roots in the principles of preservation, and its largest organizations have spent multiple generations fighting for clean air and water, and ecologically healthy lands and species.
Its environmental justice wing, by contrast, emerged as racial justice activists combined civil-rights and environmental-protection principles to address historically unequal pollution burdens that have concentrated health risks and environmental damages in disempowered communities of color. Only in the last few years, after decades of discoordination, disinterest, and exclusion, have preservationist institutions become more attentive to the legacy of environmental racism. The movement has now coalesced, however incompletely, around a broader and more inclusive environmental vision.
Though preservationist and environmental-justice approaches can still lead to different priorities, the new environmental movement is at its most unified when it opposes fossil fuel production. The movement’s history of civil disobedience and legal combat have taught it to keep fossil fuels in its crosshairs — not only because of the social and environmental harm fossil fuel projects cause, but also because fights against fossil fuels mobilize the public, clarify the stakes, and yield tangible improvements for local communities and environments.
Though both wings of the environmental movement fought hard for the IRA, the law does almost nothing to directly constrain fossil fuel production. Instead, the IRA largely aims to reduce greenhouse gas emissions not by preventing those emissions, but rather by boosting the production and use of low-carbon energy — along with generous subsidies for storing carbon dioxide, often in conjunction with oil production or fossil fuel combustion. Accordingly, the environmental movement has redoubled its efforts to pair the law’s clean energy subsidies with new fossil fuel restrictions.
The environmental movement’s discomfort with a subsidies-only approach to decarbonization is probably better known than the shifting politics of the clean energy industry. As the new environmental movement has coalesced, clean energy has matured into a fully-fledged industry, both in the U.S. and around the world. Until the past few years, the nascent clean energy industry wielded little political muscle, depending instead on the political support and lobbying assistance of environmental groups. Not that long ago, renewable energy was more expensive, less familiar to regulators, and supported by fewer subsidies than fossil energy systems. As a result, clean energy companies depended heavily on the environmental movement’s political support to survive and grow.
Over the past half a decade, technological progress and policy victories achieved in coalition with the environmental movement have vaulted key technologies like wind, solar, and batteries into commercial maturity. Those gains are now locked in. The IRA provides at least 10 years of new federal clean energy tax credits, ending the boom-and-bust cycle of short-term extensions that held the clean energy industry together for most of the previous two decades. With falling costs and fiscal tailwinds, the clean energy industry no longer relies on the environmental movement’s lobbying muscle for commercial success.
The clean energy industry’s maturation has led to more profound differences with the environmental movement that eclipse a simple re-alignment in relative power. As the clean energy industry has grown, it has come to share the fossil energy industry’s preference for more permissive regulatory regimes and fewer environmental protections. In the pre-commercial era, climate-conscious jurisdictions like California drove clean energy development through supportive environmental policy. In recent years, though, the clean energy industry has grown faster and profited more in places like Texas, and for the same reason the fossil fuel industry has: because Texas offers open markets and few restrictions on energy development. As the clean energy industry’s policy priorities have shifted, its growing lobbying apparatus has followed suit, leading groups like the American Clean Power Association to collaborate with fossil fuel companies in pursuit of environmental deregulation.
Activists and policymakers focused on rapid, massive clean energy development make up a third critical faction of the national climate movement. Many in this group work in and around the Biden administration and have come to the climate fight not from the environmental movement, but from other areas such as industrial policy, national defense, some strands of organized labor, and electoral politics. They have brought their prior priorities — job creation, domestic manufacturing, and stable energy prices — to their climate politics. In the wake of the IRA, they remain focused on lowering the remaining barriers to rapid clean energy development.
These often center-left climate actors have only cohered into a distinct faction in the past five years, as enthusiasm for so-called “supply-side progressivism” has given them a common language with which to articulate a set of climate solutions founded on proactive government support for private reindustrialization. For some green growthers, deregulation is a necessary precondition to decarbonization, and since many also believe that clean energy will — with the IRA’s help — outcompete fossil fuels, they see fewer risks to reforming environmental law than the environmental movement does.
In part, the conflict over permitting reform has grown bitter because the term gets used to refer to many different policy proposals. Depending on the speaker and the audience, it can mean sweeping changes to how environmental laws govern new infrastructure projects; tailored tweaks to environmental review; more resources to strengthen administrative capacity and expedite permitting reviews; or changes to the process for building transmission lines and connecting power plants to the grid. This tangle of meanings has undermined the climate coalition’s ability to negotiate its internal differences and prioritize consensus solutions to the challenge of rapid clean-energy development.
More fundamentally, though, the environmental movement, the clean energy industry, and the green growthers are clashing over permitting reform because it has forced them to confront their ongoing disagreement about how to achieve decarbonization.
To many in the environmental movement, and especially on the climate left, most permitting reform proposals double down on what they see as a worrying tenet of the IRA: its dependence on competition and market dynamics to slash fossil fuel production. The environmental movement is familiar from long experience with this kind of market thinking, which promises that present development and the damage it entails will eventually unlock future benefits. As the environmental movement as a whole has become more concerned with historical pollution burdens, that bargain looks worse, and less trustworthy, than ever.
Many permitting reform proposals, including the newly-enacted language of the debt-ceiling deal, exacerbate these concerns by targeting the environmental movement’s oldest and most effective legal tools for defeating fossil fuel projects. At the same time, these proposals still omit any of the constraints on fossil fuels that the environmental movement believes necessary for decarbonization.
The environmental movement has responded with deployment-focused proposals of its own that aim to speed clean energy development without weakening environmental law. However, even the most straightforward of these proposals — such as appointing a fifth commissioner to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission — have repeatedly been deprioritized by clean-energy groups and green growthers. In the wake of the debt ceiling deal, which included none of the environmental movement’s reform priorities but substantially weakened environmental review, the movement is mobilized and angry.
To the green growthers, by contrast, rapid decarbonization cannot happen without permitting reform. According to the IRA’s market-decarbonization logic, the best and most politically plausible way to drive fossil fuels out of American energy markets is to displace them with cheaper and more abundant clean energy. At the same time, events such as the gas-price shock of 2021 — and its damage to Biden’s popularity — has reinforced their existing belief that suppressing fossil fuel extraction without first creating massive new clean energy production will risk serious political backlash. This theory of change has led green growthers to be simultaneously sympathetic to the clean energy industry’s deregulatory wishlist, and skeptical of the environmental movement’s focus on constraining fossil fuel production.
These factions’ divergent theories of decarbonization have offered a wedge to those within the climate coalition who believe rapid, effective clean energy development has become incompatible with rigorous environmental and social protections. Anti-coalitional voices, especially within portions of the clean energy industry, increasingly see permitting reform as an opportunity to split the climate coalition, excising the environmental movement from the climate coalition and creating a new, climate-inflected industrial alliance.
Most green growthers understand that such a split would deprive the existing coalition of its popular wing at a critical moment, threatening the political viability of climate progress. Though the growthers believe that the IRA’s clean-energy manufacturing boom will build a powerful new political coalition in favor of decarbonization, that coalition does not yet exist.
Environmental protection, by contrast, is extremely popular across America today, and the environmental movement has repeatedly proven its ability to mobilize public support. Though the clean energy industry no longer needs the environmental movement’s political muscle to turn a profit, the climate coalition as a whole may struggle to maintain political support for decarbonization without it, especially as climate change destabilizes the country’s energy systems and the right continues to oppose rapid decarbonization.
To understand why, you don’t need to look farther than Texas, which is something of a proving ground for the three factions’ competing beliefs about how deregulation may shape decarbonization.
In recent years, Texas provided strong evidence for the clean energy industry’s assertions that, whatever the environmental and social costs, less regulation can speed the deployment of renewable energy. It likewise bolstered green growthers’ claims that cheap, plentiful renewables can displace fossil energy.
But suddenly, Texas is also proving the environmental movement’s counter-argument. The state’s legislature has just created a new set of generous rules and tax subsidies that support new gas-fired power plants while hampering clean energy development. Though state lawmakers are transparently motivated by gas-industry lobbying and culture-war fixations, they have justified the legislation by arguing that Texas’ increasingly unreliable grid needs more gas plants to keep the lights on.
Such claims, however dishonest, will only grow more plausible to many voters as climate-exacerbated disasters and the energy transition itself strain infrastructural systems in the years to come. Without permitting structures or robust state environmental laws, Texan climate activists are ill-equipped to fight a possible new wave of gas plants, and Texas’ future decarbonization is now in peril.
Whereas last year, Texas’ clean energy boom seemed likely to continue driving fossil fuels out of the market and emissions down, now Texas’ new IRA-style subsidies and weak environmental protections look more likely to leave the state with more energy production of all kinds. Though Texas will continue to add clean energy, its decarbonization remains in doubt.
Permitting reform is threatening the national climate coalition because it cuts to the heart of a longstanding philosophical disagreement about what it will take to actually achieve decarbonization. It has arrived as the climate coalition’s major factions are transforming in ways that themselves sharpen the conflict. Good-faith advocates of decarbonization in all camps should be concerned that, in the wake of the debt-ceiling deal, a new round of fractious permitting-reform fights will split the climate coalition into separate camps with irreconcilable theories of climate action.
The result, though ideologically purifying, would be politically disastrous.
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What if, instead of maintaining old pipelines, gas utilities paid for homes to electrify?
California just hit a critical climate milestone: On September 1, Pacific Gas and Electric, the biggest utility in the state, raised natural gas rates by close to $6 due to shrinking gas demand.
I didn’t say it was a milestone worth celebrating. But experts have long warned that gas rates would go up as customers started to use less of the fossil fuel. PG&E is now forecasting enough of a drop in demand, whether because homeowners are making efficiency improvements or switching to electric appliances, that it needs to charge everyone a bit more to keep up with the cost of maintaining its pipelines.
Shortly after the rate increase went into effect, however, Governor Gavin Newsom signed a bill aimed at addressing this exact problem. The new law gives PG&E and other utilities permission to use money they would have spent to replace aging, leaky pipelines to pay for the electrification of the homes served by those pipes — as long as electrifying the homes is cheaper. Instead of investing millions of ratepayer dollars into the gas system, utilities can start to decommission parts of it, shrinking gas use and fixed costs in tandem.
PG&E actually already has the freedom to do this, and has even completed a fair number of projects. But the utility has had limited success, mainly because of an anti-discrimination law that gives building owners the right to stick with natural gas. It only takes one gas stalwart to thwart a whole neighborhood’s prospects for free electric appliances, since in order to keep delivering gas to that one household, the utility has to invest in the entire section of pipeline serving the area. A 2023 report showed that while PG&E had completed more than 100 projects, it hadn’t been able to convince clusters of customers larger than five at a time to convert.
The new law doesn’t fundamentally change the anti-discrimination rule, known as a utility’s “duty to serve,” but it does relieve PG&E and others of this duty if at least two-thirds of the homeowners served by a given section of pipeline consent to getting off gas. For now, the legislation limits utilities to executing 30 such projects. But for those 30, as long as two-thirds consent, the utility can now tell the holdouts that it is retiring the pipeline, and that they have no choice but to get on the electric bandwagon.
“If a supermajority wants it, it can move forward,” Matt Vespa, a senior attorney from Earthjustice who worked on the legislation, told me. “Which I think is probably a good place to start from. You want to have a place where there’s significant buy-in.”
This strategy, sometimes called “zonal decarbonization” or “targeted electrification,” is one that many climate groups are advocating for as a way to achieve an orderly and equitable transition off of natural gas. The approach most states have taken so far — providing subsidies that gently prod consumers into going electric — results in a random pattern of adoption that can benefit some homeowners while harming others. It also does nothing to deter gas utilities from investing hundreds of millions of dollars in maintaining, replacing, or building new pipelines each year — investments that are set up to be recouped from ratepayers over the course of decades.
California isn’t the first place in the world to experiment with targeted electrification. The Swiss city of Zurich began systematically shutting down sections of its gas system in 2021, giving affected users about a decade of warning and offering partial compensation for the cost of new equipment. In Massachusetts, the utility Eversource is piloting a unique neighborhood-scale electrification project. The company hooked up 32 residential buildings and a few commercial businesses in the city of Framingham to a new underground network of pipes that carry water rather than natural gas, which in turn connect to geothermal heat pumps that use the water to heat or cool the air inside. There are more than a dozen such “thermal energy network” pilot projects in various stages in Massachusetts, New York, Colorado, Washington, Vermont, Maryland, and Minnesota.
But the new California program is unique in its scale and approach. For one thing, it applies to all gas utilities in the state. Beginning next summer, they will each need to submit maps to the utility commission that identify potential pipeline replacement projects; then, in 2026, regulators will use those maps to designate priority areas, giving precedence to low-income communities and households that lack heating or cooling. By July of that year, the commission must establish the rules of the pilot program, including a methodology for utilities to determine when electrification is more cost-effective than pipeline replacement, and rules for how utilities can pay for the projects and recover costs.
PG&E supported the bill and worked closely with its authors on the language. The utility declined an interview, but emailed me a statement saying the legislation “enables cost-effective, targeted electrification projects which will help avoid more expensive gas pipeline replacements, reducing gas system operating costs, and support the state’s and PG&E’s decarbonization goals.”
Utilities will still be spending ratepayer money on the electrification projects, but far less than they would have spent on pipeline infrastructure. For the remaining gas customers, it’s still possible rates will go up, though by less than they would have otherwise. Mike Henchen, a principal in the carbon-free buildings program at RMI, told me these pilot projects alone are not going to pull so many customers away from the gas system that it will put upward pressure on rates. The law caps the program at no more than 1% of a utility’s customers.
Vespa, the Earthjustice attorney, told me he originally worked on a more ambitious version of the bill that would have required utilities to avoid any new investments in the gas system when electrification was a cheaper alternative. But it was pared back and made voluntary in order to get it through the legislature. “The hope is that we'll get projects off the ground, we’ll get proof-of-concept,” he said. “I think there was a need to demonstrate some successful stories and then hopefully expand from there.”
While these pilots make sense, economically, for a dual gas and electric company like PG&E, one big question is whether the state’s gas-only utilities like Southern California Gas will take the initiative. (SoCalGas did not respond to my inquiry prior to publication, but the company did support the legislation.)
Looking ahead, even if lawmakers do expand the program to authorize every cost-effective project, this model can’t transition the entire state away from gas. These projects are more likely to pencil out in places with lower housing density, where a given section of pipeline is serving only a handful of homes. A fact sheet about the bill published by its lead sponsor, state senator David Min, says that “zero emissions alternatives” to pipeline replacement are only technically feasible and cost effective for about 5% of PG&E’s territory. “Gas customers won't be able to pay for the decommissioning of the whole gas system, or even 50% of it,” said Henchen.
In the meantime, however, there’s lots of low-hanging fruit to pluck. Targeted electrification of just 3% to 4% of gas customers across the state could reduce gas utility spending by $15 billion to $26 billion through 2045, according to an analysis by Energy and Environmental Economics.
“It’s a modest step,” said Vespa of the new law. “But I do think it’s meaningful to start moving forward and developing the frameworks for this.”
Revoy is already hitching its power packs to semis in one of America’s busiest shipping corridors.
Battery swaps used to be the future. To solve the unsolvable problem of long recharging times for electric vehicles, some innovators at the dawn of this EV age imagined roadside stops where drivers would trade their depleted battery for a fully charged one in a matter of minutes, then be on their merry way.
That vision didn’t work out for passenger EVs — the industry chose DC fast charging instead. If the startup Revoy has its way, however, this kind of idea might be exactly the thing that helps the trucking industry surmount its huge hurdles to using electric power.
Revoy’s creation is, essentially, a bonus battery pack on wheels that turns an ordinary semi into an EV for as long as the battery lasts. The rolling module carries a 525 kilowatt-hour lithium iron phosphate battery pack attaches to the back of the truck; then, the trailer full of cargo attaches to the module. The pack offers a typical truck 250 miles of electric driving. Founder Ian Rust told me that’s just enough energy to reach the next Revoy station, where the trucker could swap their depleted module for a fresh one. And if the battery hits zero charge, that's no problem because the truck reverts to its diesel engine. It’s a little like a plug-in hybrid vehicle, if the PHEV towed its battery pack like an Airstream and could drop it off at will.
“If you run out of battery with us, there's basically no range anxiety,” Rust said. “And we do it intentionally on our routes, run it down to as close to zero as possible before we hit the next Revoy swapping station. That way you can get the maximum value of the battery without having to worry about range.”
To start, a trucker in a normal, everyday semi pulls up to a Revoy station and drops their trailer. A worker attaches a fully charged Revoy unit to the truck and trailer—all in five minutes or less, Revoy promises. Once in place, the unit interfaces seamlessly with the truck’s drivetrain and controls.
“It basically takes over as the cruise control on the vehicle,” he said. “So the driver gets it up to speed, takes their foot off the gas, and then we actually become the primary powertrain on the vehicle. You really only have to burn diesel for the little bit that is getting onto the highway and then getting off the highway, and you get really extreme MPGs with that.”
The Revoy model is going through its real-world paces as we speak. Rust’s startup has partnered with Ryder trucking, whose drivers are powering their semis with Revoy EVs at battery-swap stops along a stretch of Interstate 30 in Texas and Arkansas, a major highway for auto parts and other supplies coming from Mexico. Rust hopes the next Revoy corridor will go into Washington State, where the ample hydropower could help supply clean energy to all those swappable batteries. Happily, he said, Revoy can expand piecemeal like this because its approach negates the chicken-and-egg problem of needing a whole nation of EV chargers to make the vehicles themselves viable. Once a truck leaves a Revoy corridor, it’s just a diesel-powered truck again.
Early data from the Ryder pilot shows that the EV unit slashed how much diesel fuel a truck needs to make it down the designated corridor. “This is a way we can reduce a path to reduce the emissions of our fleet without having to buy anything — and without having to have to worry about how much utilization we're going to have to get,” Mike Plasencia, group director of New Product Strategy at Ryder, told me.
Trucking represents one of the biggest opportunities for cutting the carbon emissions of the transportation sector. It’s also one of the most challenging. Heatmap has covered the problem of oversized SUV and pickup truck EVs, which need larger, more expensive batteries to propel them. The trucking problem is that issue on steroids: A semi can tow up to 80,000 pounds down an American highway.
There are companies building true EV semi trucks despite this tall order — Tesla’s has been road-testing one while hauling Pepsi around, and trucking mainstays like Peterbilt are trying their hand as well. Although the EV model that works for everyday cars — a built-in battery that requires recharging after a couple hundred miles — can work for short-haul trucks that move freight around a city, it is a difficult fit for long-haul trucking where a driver must cover vast distances on a strict timetable. That’s exactly where Revoy is trying to break in.
"We are really focused on long haul,” he told me. “The reason for that is, it's the bigger market. One of the big misconceptions in trucking is that it's dominated by short haul. It's very much the opposite. And it's the bigger emission source, it's the bigger fuel user."
Rust has a background in robotics and devised the Revoy system as a potential solution to both the high cost of EV semis and to the huge chunks of time lost to fueling during long-distance driving. Another part of the pitch is that the Revoy unit is more than a battery. By employing the regenerative braking common in EVs, the Revoy provides a redundancy beyond air brakes for slowing a big semi—that way, if the air brakes fail, a trucker has a better option than the runaway truck lane. The setup also provides power and active steering to the Revoy’s axle, which Rust told me makes the big rig easier to maneuver.
Plasencia agrees. “The feedback from the drivers has been positive,” he said. “You get feedback messages like, it felt like I was driving a car, or like I wasn't carrying anything.”
As it tries to expand to more trucking corridors across the nation, Revoy may face an uphill battle in trying to sell truckers and trucking companies on an entirely new way to think about electrifying their fleets. But Rust has one ace up his sleeve: With Revoy, they get to keep their trucks — no need to buy new ones.
On the DOE’s transmission projects, Cybertruck recalls, and Antarctic greening
Current conditions: Hurricane Kirk, now a Category 4 storm, could bring life-threatening surf and rip currents to the East Coast this weekend • The New Zealand city of Dunedin is flooded after its rainiest day in more than 100 years • Parts of the U.S. may be able to see the Northern Lights this weekend after the sun released its biggest solar flare since 2017.
The Energy Department yesterday announced $1.5 billion in investments toward four grid transmission projects. The selected projects will “enable nearly 1,000 miles of new transmission development and 7,100 MW of new capacity throughout Louisiana, Maine, Mississippi, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Texas, while creating nearly 9,000 good-paying jobs,” the DOE said in a statement. One of the projects, called Southern Spirit, will involve installing a 320-mile high-voltage direct current line across Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi that connects Texas’ ERCOT grid to the larger U.S. grid for the first time. This “will enhance reliability and prevent outages during extreme weather events,” the DOE said. “This is a REALLY. BIG. DEAL,” wrote Michelle Lewis at Electrek.
The DOE also released a study examining grid demands through 2050 and concluded that the U.S. will need to double or even triple transmission capacity by 2050 compared to 2020 to meet growing electricity demand.
Duke Energy, one of the country’s largest utilities, appears to be walking back its commitment to ditch coal by 2035. In a new plan released yesterday, Duke said it would not shut down the second-largest coal-fired power plant in the U.S., Gibson Station in Indiana, in 2035 as previously planned, but would instead run it through 2038. The company plans to retrofit the plant to run on natural gas as well as coal, with similar natural-gas conversions planned for other coal plants. The company also slashed projects for expanding renewables. According toBloomberg, a Duke spokeswoman cited increasing power demand for the changes. Electricity demand has seen a recent surge in part due to a boom in data centers. Ben Inskeep, program director at the Citizens Action Coalition of Indiana, a consumer and environmental advocacy group, noted that Duke’s modeling has Indiana customers paying 4% more each year through 2030 “as Duke continues to cling to its coal plants and wastes hundreds of millions on gasifying coal.”
The Edison Electric Institute issued its latest electric vehicle forecast, anticipating EV trends through 2035. Some key projections from the trade group’s report:
Tesla issued another recall for the Cybertruck yesterday, the fifth recall for the electric pickup since its launch at the end of last year. The new recall has to do with the rearview camera, which apparently is too slow to display an image to the driver when shifting into reverse. It applies to about 27,000 trucks (which is pretty much all of them), but an over-the-air software update to fix the problem has already been released. There were no reports of injuries or accidents from the defect.
A new study published in Nature found that vegetation is expanding across Antarctica’s northernmost region, known as the Antarctic Peninsula. As the planet warms, plants like mosses and lichen are growing on rocks where snow and ice used to be, resulting in “greening.” Examining satellite data, the researchers from the universities of Exeter and Hertfordshire, and the British Antarctic Survey, were shocked to discover that the peninsula has seen a tenfold increase in vegetation cover since 1986. And the rate of greening has accelerated by over 30% since 2016. This greening is “creating an area suitable for more advanced plant life or invasive species to get a foothold,” co-author Olly Bartlett, a University of Hertfordshire researcher, told Inside Climate News. “These rates of change we’re seeing made us think that perhaps we’ve captured the start of a more dramatic transformation.”
Moss on Ardley Island in the Antarctic. Dan Charman/Nature
Japan has a vast underground concrete tunnel system that was built to take on overflow from excess rain water and prevent Tokyo from flooding. It’s 50 meters underground, and nearly 4 miles long.
Carl Court/Getty Images