Even if they don’t hit their design limits and avoid being fully overwhelmed, more severe weather means that infrastructural systems will be operating closer and closer to the edge of capacity and are likely to need more maintenance to keep them in good repair.

Glassmaking might use energy in an especially glamorous way, but a similar calculus applies to the fabrication of every object, as flimsy and disposable as a tissue or as immovable and permanent as a highway interchange.

Flush toilets had already begun to catch on in London in the middle of the nineteenth century, so when Joseph Bazalgette designed and oversaw2 the construction of London’s sewage system, he made the decision to base it on the strategy of using water to dilute waste and rinse it into sewers, to flow downhill and downstream, into the estuary of the

Heavy trucks are 1 percent of vehicles but account for 25 percent of emissions. Converting trucking fleets to electric vehicles does mean addressing all the same issues as passenger vehicles, including range anxiety and standardizing charging infrastructure. But as these networks get built out, the utility of electric freight vehicles7 will

This misalignment of incentives also means that no amount of regulation and oversight can fully compensate for the continuous pressure, insidious if not obvious, to prioritize activities that will provide profits for investors and to minimize costs that don’t have an obvious return, which includes maintenance.

This rapid response is possible because Electric Mountain is a pumped-storage hydroelectric station. From the outside, the installation consists of Elidir Fawr and two placid, slate-bottomed lakes: Marchlyn Mawr, high on the flank of the mountain, and Llyn Peris, nestled in the valley between Elidir Fawr and Mount Snowdon near the visitor center.

On all three continents, mapping was a means of increasing legibility—knowing what was on the ground, and where—as a way of increasing control and access to resources.

When demand is low, there’s surplus capacity available because of baseload power generators, like nuclear plants, that supply a near-constant amount of electricity. After all those television-watching Brits go to bed, the generators are run backward. Instead of the falling water spinning the turbines to generate electricity, power is fed into the

Economic growth cannot sensibly be treated as an end in itself. Development has to be more concerned with enhancing the lives we lead and the freedoms we enjoy. Expanding the freedoms that we have reason to value not only makes our lives richer and more unfettered, but also allows us to be fuller social persons, exercising our own volitions and