re:wired green

In 2011, DTE Energy Company removed 1,200 streetlights from the city of Highland Park, Michigan. A Black working-class suburb of Detroit that was once a boom town for the automotive industry, Highland Park was on the verge of bankruptcy. Unable to pay DTE the $4 million it was owed, the city went dark.The streetlights were removed as part of an agreement between DTE and city leaders to pay the debt. Literally without light, residents were left to find a solution. In the weeks and months following the decision,…

As the Re:WIRED GREEN event on addressing climate change drew to a close yesterday, the weather underlined the urgency in the most horrific way possible.While climate activist and lawyer Colette Pichon Battle spoke from a stage in blue-skied San Francisco, Hurricane Ian continued its destructive path across southwest Florida, underscoring her already-urgent call to action. “I just want to make sure that you’re paying attention to what’s happening in the Gulf of Mexico right now,” Pichon Battle said. She encouraged the…

When it comes to changing minds, nothing beats an experience. That’s how Sylvia Earle sees it. The scientist has spent years trying to get people to understand the impacts of climate change, and has found that showing them can be the best way to tell them about the problems the planet is facing. Problem is, you can’t take millions of people to the bottom of the ocean, or, for that matter, make them read a boring climate report. The solution? Actually, it might be TikTok.At this week’s RE:WIRED Green, Earle talked with…

Stephen Palumbi, a scientist at Stanford University’s Hopkins Marine Station, is on the hunt for what he calls “super reefs.” These are regions of the ocean that are home to unusual sets of coral. When the ocean heats up, coral species get stressed. That leads to a phenomenon called coral bleaching, where these invertebrates begin to expel the algal communities that typically live harmoniously within them. As a result, the coral lose their brilliant hues and turn white.But in “super reefs” the coral appear to have evolved…

The United States’ power grid is in trouble. Much of the country’s energy comes from nonrenewable resources that contribute to climate change. And as the resulting climate crisis brings more frequent heat waves, wildfires, and freezes, demand on the grid becomes greater and more erratic. The strain is heavy, but Patricia Hidalgo-Gonzalez has ideas for how to relieve the burden on the grid.Hidalgo-Gonzalez directs the Renewable Energy and Advanced Mathematics (REAM) lab at UC San Diego. Her work focuses on finding new ways…

“We need nuclear energy to fight climate change,” says Alan Ahn, a senior fellow at Third Way, a think tank that advocates for the industry. But he acknowledges you might not share his opinion. Especially, he says, if you’re around his age and grew up watching Homer Simpson, a rather infamous member of the nuclear workforce, rolling around on top of a barrel “leaking something green and glowing.” (Maybe add to that Chernobyl and Fukushima, plus the rockets currently sailing over Zaporizhzhia in Ukraine.)But nuclear…

Work towards those kinds of alternative futures is already happening. “No community is waiting for people to save them,” said Sarah Shanley Hope, a vice president at the Solutions Project. She described a concept called “multi-solving”—how technologies like solar panels can offer not just green power, but also jobs and energy savings. Those combined benefits allow climate projects to become a catalyst, sparking grassroots organizing for policies that make green projects more accessible to communities on the frontlines of…

How can we feed the world sustainably? Right now, 325 million people are acutely hungry. 35 million Americans don’t know where their next meal will come from. The world’s food systems are uneven, fragile, and only becoming more fragile with the climate crisis.“When we talk about from farm-to-fork, we need to transform the food system in a way that, yes, it supports our environment, yes, it supports our health, but also that it provides the economic return to all of the stakeholders across the food system,” says Ertharin…

Earth's atmosphere, as it exists, is both a profound statistical anomaly and the very thing that makes human life possible. Human activity is upsetting that natural balance, but there's hope—and everyone needs to pitch in.That's what leading voices in the world of climate science, art, and activism told us during the first session of RE:WIRED Green, coming together to tell the same basic story: We're lucky to exist, and we're messing it up, but all is not lost.Earth existed for billions of years and experienced multiple…

Today, every issue is a climate issue. It's no longer just higher temperatures, wildfires, and rising sea levels, but issues we previously thought had nothing to do with climate change—like the severity of the seasonal flu or invasive species in our farmlands. The way we prepare for annual hurricane seasons or flooding in certain parts of the world will all have to change. Problems formerly considered purely social or economic are now climate problems, and how we deal with them will resonate for generations. This is…