Sam Calisch has electrification bona fides. There’s the MIT engineering degree, the years spent in a lab tinkering with electromagnetic devices and his time on Capitol Hill as a scientist-turned-advocate, successfully campaigning for the inclusion of historic climate measures in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act. So why is his new gig all about the humble
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Philadelphia’s built environment is responsible for about 70% of its carbon footprint, making it a key sector to tackle in order to meet climate goals. Building new, efficient buildings is part of the solution, but experts say there’s a practical need to work with buildings that already exist, a large percentage of which are individual
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The challenges of climate change can seem overwhelming, but the city can take clear steps to protect the most vulnerable renters and homeowners while enforcing existing development standards. To do this, we need to look inside and outside of the home. When construction or demolition is taking place, dangerous substances like asbestos and lead can
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On January 3, 2022, the Philadelphia Department of Licenses and Inspections (L&I) told the Union League of Philadelphia that it had to wait to cut down 43 large, native trees at its golf club at Torresdale. The private member’s only club had sought to clear the trees in order to expand their golf course and
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February is environmental Justice Month, a fitting time for Philadelphia to launch its Environmental Justice Advisory Commission. According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, “environmental justice is the fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all people regardless of race, color, national origin or income, with respect to the development, implementation and enforcement of environmental laws,
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Sometimes a forest can feel like a time machine. A walk in the quiet, shaded woods takes you back to a world before there were crowded streets and computer screens. But in early January, as I walked through the Haddington Woods section of Cobbs Creek, I took a trip to what might be our future.
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Recently I slid a few dozen times down the curvy slide at Henry C. Lea School, as demanded by my daughter Gilda, who slid on the adjacent straight slide. She is almost three years old and thus has a bottomless appetite for repetitive fun. Her older sister, Magnolia, is in the fourth grade at Lea.
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By Nic Esposito After the credits rolled on Adam McKay’s new film “Don’t Look Up.”, I lay in bed for the next two hours, heart and mind racing as I tried to process the film. It could have been an allegory for the pandemic, plastic pollution or a number of other global crises that scientists
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When the remnants of Hurricane Ida arrived in the Philadelphia region last month, it brought with it the kinds of chaos we used to just hear about: flooding, property destruction, mudslides and at least one dude back flipping into the sewage pit formerly known as I-676 in Center City. “I definitely thought about the water
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I’m dying for a cup of coffee today. Not just a regular black cup, the kind I used to drink daily for decades. No, I want one of those towering concoctions with billowing clouds of milk and mountains of sugar that are topped off with swirls of whipped cream. A milkshake disguised as coffee. I’ve
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Here’s a nugget from The New York Times story “Extreme Summer,” published on July 20, 2021: “Summers in Boston have come to resemble 20th-century summers in New York. New York, similarly, has come to resemble Philadelphia, which in turn has become hotter than Washington, D.C., or Atlanta were only a few decades ago.” Climate change
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