Mark Harris explores the growing industry of upcycling carbon. His focus on the automobile is as ironic as it is illuminating. Harris takes you on a tour of car parts that now use (or will soon use) CO₂ as a feedstock. Cars clearly have accelerated our climate crisis. Harris ponders whether they might also show us a way out?

Dan Ferber offers a deep dive into the intriguing prospect of spreading crushed basalt over farmlands in a bid to lock carbon in the soil while simultaneously fertilizing crops. The idea is based on the natural process of chemical weathering. The problem is, that in nature it can take several thousand years. A team of biogeochemists is on a mission to give one of the world’s most underappreciated chemical reactions a giant boost.

Kim Stanley Robinson  kicks off our “Climate Parables” science fiction series with a  story that takes place in the mid-2030s. Carbon dioxide levels have hit 463 ppm, and climate refugees number in the millions. Dr. Griffen is in Antarctica to oversee a massive experiment to prevent catastrophic rise in sea levels. But things are not going well.

Elizabeth Rush, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, takes up the question of how and when people will retreat from low-lying coastal areas. The “if” is notably absent from her story. The only question left, Rush asserts, is whether retreat will be managed or chaotic.

Seema Jayachandran, an economics professor at Northwestern University, poses a bold question: Could nature reserves be more dynamic if they borrowed a page from the Airbnb business model? 

Emily Underwood notes that one of the great ironies of climate change is that as the planet warms, the technology that people need to stay cool will only make the climate hotter. Her article covers the race to reinvent room air conditioners.

David Quammen explores an epochal idea. What if evolution isn’t linear, as Charles Darwin proposed when he first sketched the tree of life? What if, instead of species’ passing their DNA to their offspring from one generation to the next, they are exchanging genes throughout their lifetimes?

Wayt Gibbs investigates how satellite surveillance technology is reframing our connection with nature in some of the same exhilarating and profoundly disturbing ways that social media reframed our connections with each other.

David Simpson asks, What if the key to saving wild biodiversity isn’t to show that it’s useful­—rather, it’s to make it “useless?”

Fred Pearce reports on how some economies may be quietly, and surprisingly approaching a phenomenon economists call “peak stuff.

Veronique Greenwood tells a whodunit tale of the rise of fast fashion, its crushing environmental toll, and the technology and habits that need to change to keep your clothes out of the garbage.

Nathanael Johnson tests out a provocative idea. Could personal food computers in which people grow their own fruits and vegetables be the harbingers of a massively distributed farming system that reduces fertilizers, pesticides, and waste?

Oliver Morton confronts the godlike powers of geoengineering, exploring its problems, its potential—and how it irrevocably changes human’s relationship with Planet Earth.

W. Wayt Gibbs unflinchingly asks (and answers) the question: How much energy will the world need? Any climate plan that doesn’t consider this question is bound to fail.

Mark Harris explores how new experiments are pushing artificial intelligence and sensor networks into the grid—and into factories, data centers, and transit systems—in order to pull fossil fuels out.

 Andrew Revkin traces both the roots and the potential trajectories of our momentous Anthropocene journey
Frances Cairncross considers the optimal rollout of carbon taxes and research subsidies to speed up the transition to a low-carbon economy

Vandana Singh muses on how a literary genre might constructively contribute to the human age