Before you begin your journey toward electrification, you need to find out where your home is losing energy. A skilled energy auditor doesn’t just inspect — they diagnose, prioritize and recommend solutions tailored to your home’s unique needs. Selecting the right person can make all the difference. Ask these questions to help determine whether a
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The dream is to electrify everything, and to do it now. The reality is that Philadelphia Gas Works (PGW) serves 500,000 households, and shifting from one energy source to another is going to take time. So for those of us who can’t yet leave gas behind, PGW has EnergySense, a program designed to help customers
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On a treeless sidewalk on a day in May that feels much hotter than its 75 degrees, there’s an ice cream truck serving a long line of people, while several plastic machines are cranking out a flurry of bubbles. Some of the bubbles hurtle toward 440 North Broad Street, the headquarters of the School District
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For two decades, author Jeff Goodell has been working the climate beat for Rolling Stone magazine. He says it was while writing his first book about the coal industry and witnessing mountaintop removal mining that he understood the peril the planet is in. He’s given countless more readers that same dreadful understanding in his back-to-back
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It seems that, regardless of age, economic status or political beliefs, everyone is apprehensive about the future. Renowned author, filmmaker and organizer Astra Taylor captures the zeitgeist of our times in “The Age of Insecurity: Coming Together as Things Fall Apart,” published last year. Taylor explores the pervasive sense of dread that defines modern life,
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I used to have a neighbor across our alley who worked for the Philadelphia Water Department (PWD). He was a friendly, likable guy, but there was evidence, like his big SUV, that he wasn’t in lockstep with the street’s green-minded residents. He grew tomatoes and peppers on his deck, like many of us do, but
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It would be nice to imagine that all the clothes in our closets and dressers — let alone the endless items lining the shelves of countless retail shops — spring forth fully formed. Or, if that fantasy goes too far, to at least believe that our clothing is manufactured with some level of respect for
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Over the course of a decade, Shireen Qadri learned the intricacies of Indian cooking from her mom, Safia. But when she started a family, she found that preparing the cuisine was too elaborate for everyday meals. Her mom had a solution: when Qadri and her husband, J.D. Walsh, visited Safia in Maryland, she would send
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Skeptics of the green energy movement have always asked: What do you do when there’s no sun for the solar panels and no breeze to stir the blades of the windmill, but you still need power? Batteries can store excess energy created when the conditions are favorable to be used for precisely those times —
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What are we doing to this planet, and what are we doing about what we’re doing to this planet? No writer’s body of work surpasses Elizabeth Kolbert’s to answer these questions. Kolbert has been a staff writer for The New Yorker for 25 years, documenting climate change with an unflinching eye. Her first book on
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