By Meg McGuire and Katherine Rapin In December 2023, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency made a bold move for the Delaware River, proposing to raise the water quality standards in the estuary for the first time since the Clean Water Act of 1972. This upgrade would increase requirements for dissolved oxygen levels among the foundational
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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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In a scene from the PBS docuseries “NOVA: Chasing Carbon Zero,” Chef Chris Galarza removes an ice cold frying pan from a freezer and places it on an induction burner. Only a moment later, he tosses some chopped peppers in the pan, which immediately start to sizzle. This impossible-seeming trick is one that Galaraza has
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Hydrogen as an element is simple. Each atom has one electron and one proton. It’s first on the periodic table — the most abundant chemical substance in the universe. But hydrogen as a potential climate-friendly energy source is anything but simple. Hydrogen has long been used in dirty industries: cleaved from fossil fuels, it can
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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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When he first saw workers changing out the streetlights on his block in Chestnut Hill, Timothy Breslin didn’t think much of it. He went to bed that night in the summer of 2022 without issue. In the daylight, he still didn’t register the changes. But when night fell, his street full of modest rowhomes was
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By age 5, Philadelphia native Tatyana Woodard knew she was different. Born with a male body, she felt like a girl. She preferred girls’ clothes and loved White Diamonds, her grandmother’s perfume. Over time, Woodard’s conviction and hidden stash of feminine outfits grew. “At 16, I was put out of my house due to my
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If anything defines us as modern humans it is the degree to which we apply scientific knowledge to accomplish our goals. Long gone are the days when we chipped away at flint blocks to make hand axes, and it has been a couple centuries since we wrote important documents on parchment with quill pens. Technology
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Soft-spoken Ray Daly, the founding owner of Ray’s Reusables, is on a zero-waste mission. But her approach is more supportive sherpa than zealous missionary. While noting on her website that only 9% of the 8.3 billion pounds of plastic produced before 2019 have been recycled — leaving billions in landfills or the oceans — Daly’s
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“My life,” says Julie Slavet, “is all about tires.” Slavet is exaggerating — but only slightly. As the executive director of the Tookany/Tacony-Frankford Watershed Partnership, part of her job is to help improve Tacony Creek Park, a 300-acre preserve in Northeast Philadelphia. And for the last couple years, that’s meant dealing with illegally dumped tires.
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