When school facilities closed for in-person learning in early March 2020, the assumption was that the shutdown and pandemic would be temporary blips in the memory of our students. Some 16 months later, school facilities are finally preparing to re-open for in-person learning. We could go about business as usual, but after the devastation of the pandemic, and the increasingly widespread climate-change-linked weather disasters, it’s obvious we should not. Emerging from the crisis of COVID-19 gives us an opportunity to rethink our public schools, to simultaneously the structural inequalities that pervade the system, and prepare it for the climate emergency ahead.
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Lawmakers have had difficulty grappling with the layering of immediate and longer-lasting crises. That’s where we think the Green New Deal for Public Schools, introduced to Congress by Representative Jamaal Bowman (NY) on July 16, comes in. Building on the research of our climate + community project, its basic premise is that we have to tackle our society’s gravest problems not one by one, but in their entirety, through ambitious physical and social investments that lift up the workers and communities that have suffered the most disinvestment throughout American history. We want to fight systemic racism, poverty, and environmental breakdown with comprehensive, holistic policies.
The legislation authorizes $1.4 trillion in spending over the next decade to upgrade and decarbonize every public school in the U.S. with new solar panels, batteries, and green retrofits, while also investing in adequate staffing levels for every vulnerable school in the country. By greening schools, we can create centers of climate resilience infrastructure in every community and help to address the legacy of educational inequity that creates an uneven landscape of public schools.
The bill would cut annual carbon pollution by the amount equivalent to taking 17 million cars off the road, eliminate health toxins (like mold and lead) in school facilities, and provide decent staff-to-student ratios in every school. We estimate that this would create over 1.3 million jobs per year, including 272 million skilled construction and maintenance jobs. With this level of public green investment, the government would provide a massive boost to the workers and businesses who will green the entire country’s building stock in the decades ahead. Every American would benefit from lower costs and technological improvements.
For years, educational advocates at the local, state, and federal level, have been pushing the federal government and other leaders to improve school facility conditions. In 2020, nearly 25 years after the last census of school facility conditions, the Government Accountability Office issued a report estimating that about 54% of public school districts need to update or replace multiple building systems in their schools. An estimated 41% of districts need to update or replace heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) systems in at least half of their schools. The American Society of Civil Engineers has estimated that schools need nearly $400 billion dollars in investment over the next decade just to operate at a decent level, without even accounting for the climate crisis.
The shortcomings affect educational outcomes. Research demonstrates that extreme heat and ineffective cooling systems directly contribute to poorer educational outcomes. In recent years, millions of K-12 students have missed school due to extreme temperatures and inadequate heating and cooling systems; research suggests investment in centralized air conditioning could mitigate the disparity in educational performance between schools with adequate HVAC systems and those without by up to 73%. School cancellations have disproportionately impacted school facilities in the least affluent and least white communities, due to the country’s documented redlining practices.
The pandemic exposed an intersectional crisis of care as low-income, nonwhite women and their households experienced the highest rates of fatalities, unemployment, disability, exposure, and isolation. They also bore the brunt of COVID-19 public school closures due to decades of underinvestment in their children’s public schools. Educators and their unions, who clearly understood the risks of in-person learning in substandard school facilities, rightfully challenged plans to reopen school buildings as COVID-19 surged last winter. The teachers’ efforts were not in vain: many parents are now reconsidering sending their children back into school facilities until these aging HVAC systems are repaired.
Meanwhile, our research suggests that many educators across the country are reconsidering their careers given the stress of this past year as they had to react to ever-changing school district directives, care for their students even more than usual, all while being blamed for the downsides of remote learning. This is especially true in less affluent and less white communities, where paltry spending and underinvestment in public education has had a profound effect on labor conditions for teachers and staff. The reopening of schools today is an opportunity to alleviate this potential crisis of care.
Using the CDC’s Social Vulnerability Index and national student-to-teacher ratios, The Green New Deal for K-12 Schools directs resources to public schools and communities that federal, state, and local officials have overlooked for decades. Indeed, the $1.4 trillion dollars that the bill calls for over the next decade would use grants to fund schools in the bottom third of those rankings to retrofit their school facilities, with $250 billion earmarked to shore up the leaky teacher pipeline, improve local curriculum and program development, and to instill the needed mental and physical health professionals in our K-12 facilities.
Each year, the country’s K-12 public schools educate over 50 million students. We cannot continue to teach them, and to force educators to labor in outdated facilities with unreliable systems that produce substandard economic, educational, and health outcomes. We cannot abandon schools to toxic building systems while the rest of the economy is greened. And we cannot continue to perpetuate inequality in our schools, with only affluent, and mostly white, communities benefiting from adequate investment. The Green New Deal for Public Schools is, we believe, the best way forward for our public schools, that transforms how we conceive, design, and use this critical neighborhood infrastructure of care for a healthy and green future.
The best way to appreciate the planet fully is to leave the planet entirely. To inhabit a world is to get awfully used to it. The sky is up there—big as ever. The ground is down there—solid as ever. The ocean is over that way. Canada is up the other way. There are happy places—Paris, Bora Bora. There are parts of the world—North Korea, Afghanistan—where people suffer tremendously. Our own place in all of that determines who we become. We’re like wine grapes; we have a terroir, a home soil that flavors us and changes us, and once we’ve become one thing it’s hard to become—or even understand—something else.
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But for a tiny handful of us—fewer than 600 in all of human history—there’s been a way outside of all of that, and it’s by flying above all of that. Ever since Yuri Gagarin became the first human being in space, 60 years ago this April, astronauts have come home to describe what they call the Overview Effect: the change that occurs when they see the world from above, as a place where borders are invisible, where racial, religious and economic strife are nowhere to be seen. The blue and green Earth appears alive, and yet denuded of people. The atmosphere reveals itself to be what it is: an impossibly thin onion skin that protects us from the killing void of space and yet appears penetrable, destructible.
The further you get from the Earth, the more the Overview Effect asserts itself. In 1968, the crew of Apollo 8 became the first humans to orbit the moon and the first to move far enough away from Earth to be able to see it in full—a fragile, glassy sphere, hanging alone in black space. When Frank Borman, the commander of the mission, first saw that sight, the cockpit voice recorder captured him exclaiming, “What a view!” When he spoke of the experience afterwards, he recalled that what he was really thinking was, “This must be what God sees.”
In his book Floating in Darkness, retired astronaut Ron Garan reports a touch of the Overview Effect when he was on the nighttime side of the Earth, where the blazingly bright cities attest to the high—if flawed—intelligence that dominates the planet. Gazing down on Shanghai after dark, he observes, “The whole scene looks somehow biological. The city has glowing tentacles reaching out in all directions to other radiant cities. The scene looks like a microscopic photograph of a nerve cell. Every city is like a giant nerve cell in the brain of the superorganism called humanity.” If as tough and mercantile a place as Shanghai can make an astronaut go dreamy, any spot on the planet—when seen from high enough—can too. But those extreme feelings can swing the other way, when the Overview Effect reveals the depredations of the world.
In my new novel, Holdout, the lead character, Walli Beckwith, is driven to an extreme act by the power of the Overview Effect. When an emergency forces the evacuation of the space station, she refuses to leave, staying aboard alone, explaining opaquely that she will not come home because she “would prefer not to.” Only later do we learn her reason: She is remaining aloft to protest widespread burning of the Amazon and the dispersal and killing of the Indigenous tribes. She chooses to stay where she is and lead a global movement demanding international intervention to stop the devastation.
“I will come home,” she tells the world, “when we have put an end to the project that is causing damage so great it’s visible from space.”
Of course, Walli Beckwith is not real. But Ron Garan is real. Yuri Gagarin was real. The near-600 people who have flown into space as well are all real. And so too are uncounted others who will follow them as the commercial space industry continues to develop.
Still, not everyone will go. But that doesn’t mean some measure of the Overview Effect is not available to us as well. Spend a little time gazing out at the ocean and try not to be moved by the grandeur of what you see. Spend a little time at the rim of the Grand Canyon and try not to fall in love with the planet. In a 2013 study, researchers administered to two different groups of people a survey designed to measure an individual’s level of spirituality: One group first looked at pictures intended to inspire awe: a sunset, a galaxy, mountains, canyons; the other group was shown no such pictures. Repeatedly, those who had seen something of the magnificence of the universe first scored spiritually higher than those who had not.
Spirituality need not mean religion—though it can. It may simply mean something transcendent, something beyond the quotidian—something like, well, the feeling the Overview Effect elicits. Going to space may provide a full dose of awe mainlined straight to our emotional center. But it’s available in smaller doses too—ones available without ever leaving the ground.
It’s an unalloyed good that spacemen and spacewomen can travel from the Earth and come home with pictures and experiences that remind us of the fragile, breakable, beautiful whole that is our world and only home. But it’s an unalloyed good too that if we make the effort, we can find some of that feeling for ourselves. The overwhelming majority of us will never leave the planet; but that doesn’t mean we can’t find powerful ways to love the planet.
A version of this story first appeared in the Climate is Everything newsletter. If you’d like sign up to receive this free once-a-week email, click here.
As the U.S. approached a coronavirus peak last July, a noticeably eerie Disney World reopening advertisement began making the rounds online. Cases were rising, driven by a false sense of security in much of the country and bad faith arguments around masking and social distancing. But at Disney World, the sun was shining, and rides were open. Low-paid service workers waved while wearing surgical masks, apparently thrilled (or at least willing) to come in contact with crowds of tourists braving the pandemic for a spot on the Pirates of the Caribbean ride.
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Often, rather than reassuring us, such mass recreations of normalcy in the midst of a disaster can deepen our sense of unease, because they reveal an unsettling truth: the people who should take responsibility either don’t understand how bad things are, or do not care.
Watching the Olympics this year amid endless, compounding climate disasters has given me pangs of that pandemic-at-Disney-World feeling. It’s not that the Olympic organizers aren’t trying, at least in some sense. They’ve made great strides to conduct this summer’s Games sustainably, using renewable energy to light their arenas, for instance, and offsetting the event’s emissions with carbon credits, while a lack of international spectators (and reduced team staffing) eliminates the climate toll of jetting hundreds of thousands of people to Tokyo. One could say that this year’s Olympics offers a measure of hope from a climate perspective, demonstrating how huge, inspiring events might be conducted sustainably in the years ahead.
But then there’s that gut feeling that, following once-in-a-thousand-year floods in China’s interior, unprecedented wildfires raging in Siberia, and a heatwave in the Pacific Northwest so intense as to nearly defy scientific understanding, something about the international spectacle playing out in Tokyo isn’t right.
For one thing, it’s clear that climate change will make it increasingly difficult to host such events. Expected conditions in Tokyo were hot enough that organizers moved the Olympic marathon almost 500 miles north to avoid televised scenes of world-class runners collapsing from heat exhaustion. As the climate warms in the years ahead, we might find ourselves doing a lot more such reshuffling. Three decades out, a dwindling number of cities in the world will even be able to host summer athletic events without putting the health of participants and spectators in jeopardy. By 2050, no more than six of 45 large East Asian cities will be cool enough to safely hold an August summer Olympics, according to Japanese newspaper Nikkei Asia. In Southeast Asia, none will be.
Then there’s the question of what, exactly, this all is for. That’s not to say all athletic competitions necessarily need to have a point over and above athletics. But the Olympics have always gestured toward some grander purpose, a sense of participation in a unique, human project—smelting, in these fires of competition, a transnational camaraderie and understanding that will somehow help make the world a better place.
Judging by the past few years of climate action, all that supposed camaraderie hasn’t amounted to much. Every year, as the world slips ever closer to irrecoverable climate tipping points, our national leaders attend international conferences and repeat the same old arguments, attempting to preserve the interests of their own fossil fuel conglomerates and shift the burden of cutting emissions onto others’ shoulders. Just last week, my colleague Justin Worland attended the G20 summit in Naples, Italy, where the same tired sticking points were brought out and hashed over again, despite the lateness of the hour. “It was hard,” he wrote, after yet another round of inconclusive negotiations, “not to feel a sense of existential dread.” Maybe then, as the seas rise, ice sheets melt and disasters-of-a-millennia crowd up like Space Mountain thrill-seekers, it’s time to cut the crap. We’re watching the Olympics because it’s fun, and because we like to see our team win. But as industrialized nations continue to bicker ahead of global climate talks at COP26 in November, is that really enough?
We plan out more Olympic Games, 2032 in Brisbane, and then 2036, and all the way out to 2052 and beyond, as if we can live a future that’s really just more of the past—as if, with a modicum of pledges and minor adjustments, our world might remain much the same as the one that brought us to the brink of disaster in the first place. Perhaps we can also pretend it’s ok for Exxon and Shell to keep opening new drilling sites for just a few more years, that green investment and radical rethinking of transportation, agriculture and concrete production can wait another decade or so, even as an escalating series of climate disasters, from famine in Madagascar to another summer of West Coast fires , make unmistakably clear that everything is not ok. Olympians have a right to compete, and people have a right to watch. We all need inspiration and meaning, especially in trying times. But let us at least acknowledge that at this stage of the crisis, with massive climate disasters upon us and the future on the line, attempts at business-as-usual are beyond unsettling. In fact, they can be downright terrifying.
One of the greatest lessons of the pandemic is that we can meet the challenges of existential threats when we combine the collective power of our creativity, innovation and industry. As the climate crisis worsens, we need to address protecting and preserving water with the same urgency that we put into creating vaccines. We need to act like lives are hanging in the balance—because they are.
Water is already shaping our politics, our economy and our national security too. Whether it’s floods or droughts, storms or wildfires—too much water, or too little—water shapes lives in the United States and around the world. We are currently seeing this play out in real time in the West, which in many ways is ground zero for climate change, as we see the intersection between mega-drought and fire season colliding with one another.
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Back in 2012, the intelligence community prepared a report on global water security, forecasting that within a decade water shortages and floods in many countries would “risk instability and state failure, increase regional tensions, and distract them from working with the United States.” The same report predicted that before 2040, the world’s demand for fresh water would not keep up with the supply, unless we managed our water far better than we do today.
Just this year, World Central Kitchen worked closely with the World Food Programme to deliver 27,000 food kits to Guatemalan families in the months after intense hurricanes ripped the country apart. The crops that sustained them were destroyed, and in some places it’s taken months for the waters to subside.
It’s clear from this example and too many others that water shortages and mega storms fueled by climate change are already endangering peace and prosperity in different parts of the world. If we’re being honest, we can see that potential here at home too. But the truth is, it doesn’t have to be this way. Water can and should be a source of cooperation, innovation, and generosity.
From the source to the sink, we need to be much smarter about how we manage water—and share our knowhow, technology and investment—so that nature and people can thrive together.
Let’s start with the biggest use of water: our food. Agriculture accounts for roughly 70 percent of water use worldwide. Our planet is groaning under the weight of our demands for more, as the population of the world grows while rising temperatures make fresh water harder to find.
We need to ask critical questions about how we can do more with less. Where can we farm smarter, using cover crops or more efficient irrigation to protect soil and water? What is the balance of having enough fish in the oceans to keep a thriving food chain, while also providing enough seafood to sustainably feed people and support fishing jobs?
The good news is that if we take the time to think and act collectively, there are solutions that will allow us to feed more people while also protecting our water.
We can apply innovations in technology like electronic monitors that help farmers and ranchers precisely manage the nutrients they put in the soil, so they don’t become pollutants in our water; or satellite navigation that help lower the costs of sustainable fishing for businesses around the world, so that the seafood industry is both environmentally and economically sustainable.
We also need to ask big questions about how we can best work with nature to mitigate some of the worst water impacts of climate change? Where can we support natural infrastructure to protect communities from water shortages, or floods, or storm surge?
We need to stop damaging the resources that we have, conserve what is left, and find ways to live differently. We need to farm on land and harvest from the sea with new methods that build a better future. Most importantly, we need to invest in one another—in communities that care for each other before disaster strikes, not just after the storm or the fire.
It is all too easy to take water for granted. But water is ever-present in the disasters we are enduring at home and around the world. It needs to be present in our thinking, our planning, and in our policies, so that we can plan for our future, too.
Visitors entering a code-locked central control room at Green Mountain Power (GMP)’s Colchester, Vt., headquarters instinctively lower their voices, whispering in deference to operators relaying orders from behind semicircular clusters of screens. It’s an intimidating space; one side of the black-walled room is taken up by a display showing a sprawling, yellow-lit maze of connections and symbols: a map of electricity flowing across the local grid. Technicians here have the daunting job of managing that vast, interconnected network; controlling hundreds of breaker switches; monitoring solar and hydroelectric electrical output; and anticipating energy demand spikes to keep Vermont’s lights on. When there’s an outage, these operators help coordinate the painstaking work of bringing the system back online.
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“It’s basically like a puzzle,” says Jeff Lawrence, a seven-year control-room veteran. “When a storm comes through, the puzzle falls apart. You’ve got to put it back together, one piece at a time.”
In Vermont and around the country, those puzzle pieces have been falling apart more often as climate change makes extreme weather events more frequent and severe. Last month, extreme high temperatures pushed power grids in the Pacific Northwest to their limits, while around 700 people were killed during Texas’ massive power outages this past winter. “It’s heartbreaking to see weather events come through, and to see the impacts of climate change happening all over the country,” says Green Mountain Power CEO Mari McClure, sitting in a conference room at company headquarters.
Hilary Swift for TIMEGMP engineers spent two years modeling electrical scenarios and testing components to make sure the system would work safely. “I can come up with 10,000 reasons why you wouldn’t pursue this,” says Josh Castonguay, VP of engineering and innovation, photographed at the solar farm on June 23. “This won’t work. That won’t work. They’re all things that you’ve just gotta engineer through.”
McClure speaks in measured tones, drawing shapes with her hands as she explains that, in part to mitigate the threat of climate change, GMP is in the process of transforming its grid. It’s moving away, she says, from large generator plants and long transmission lines, and toward a more decentralized approach premised on technologies like networks of utility-connected devices and new, cheaper battery storage, in a system meant to protect against massive power outages and hasten a transition away from fossil fuels. McClure, onetime MVP of the University of Buffalo’s women’s basketball team, is fond of sports metaphors. “You play hard, and winning takes care of itself,” she says. “That’s the analogy to our transformation work.” But just as in a basketball game, when it comes to the gargantuan task of remaking the nation’s power grid to avoid climate catastrophe, the clock is running out.
Decarbonizing the U.S. electrical system is not as simple as replacing every fossil-fuel-burning power station with a wind farm or a solar field. Unlike coal and natural gas, renewable resources are intermittent—meaning they don’t work when the wind doesn’t blow or the sun doesn’t shine. A major shift to renewables will require electric grids to be reconstructed to account for those limitations, a massive and costly undertaking. National leaders have made plenty of pledges to address both emissions and resilience, but have been slow to implement real-world solutions. Lately, GMP and other forward-thinking power companies have begun bridging that gap, piloting the complex systemwide reconstruction and engineering workarounds necessary to create a reliable, carbon-free power grid before it’s too late.
Hilary Swift for TIMEGMP’s headquarters in Colchester, Vt. When activated this month, the Panton system will become the first U.S. utility-built community microgrid able to run on renewable energy without a fossil-fuel backup.
Rural Panton, Vt., is home to GMP’s newest effort to remake the electric system: a “microgrid” attached to a solar power plant, which can distribute its electricity to parts of the nearby community in case they get cut off from the main energy network due to falling trees or heavy snows, common occurrences in this isolated New England town. GMP engineers spent two years modeling electrical scenarios and testing components to make sure the system would work safely. “I can come up with 10,000 reasons why you wouldn’t pursue this,” says Josh Castonguay, VP of engineering and innovation at GMP, standing near a 4.9-megawatt storage battery that helps power the grid when the sun isn’t shining, and which doubles as a local energy supply for the town in an emergency. “This won’t work. That won’t work. They’re all things that you’ve just gotta engineer through.” When activated this month, the Panton system will become the first U.S. utility-built community microgrid able to run on renewable energy without a fossil-fuel backup.
Getting a system like this up and running isn’t easy. For one thing, power-line circuit breakers—which cut off electricity if, say, a tree knocks down a utility pole—weren’t designed to operate with only a single battery pumping power through their lines. GMP’s solution is a novel use of a type of transformer known as a grounding bank to increase the voltage of Panton’s microgrid high enough to make sure its breakers trip if electrical wires are damaged.
Another of GMP’s grid-modernization projects is to lease Tesla Powerwall battery backup systems to homeowners at below-market rates—and then use them, with homeowners’ permission, to help cover a community’s electricity needs during peak times (it promised to leave plenty of charge prior to snowstorms or other weather events that could bring down transmission lines). When the program began back in 2017, it was the first suchutility-sponsored initiative in the U.S.; nearly 1,000 Vermonters had signed up within a year. State regulators approved it as a permanent program in late 2020. It offers huge climate benefits: utilities often tap their dirtiest electricity generation resources during the most intense periods of high demand a few times a year, either by purchasing power from fossil-fuel plants in far-off states or spinning up dormant natural gas-fired “peaker plants.” With its Powerwall program, GMP can offset some of that peak demand, dumping stored electricity onto the grid from garages and basements around the state, a type of setup known as a “virtual power plant” (VPP). (The term also refers to networks of other devices, like water heaters, that utilities can control remotely to manage the grid.)
Hilary Swift for TIME“Utilities across the country are getting better at seeing that we’ve run out of time with fossil fuels,” says Green Mountain Power CEO Mari McClure. “On the other hand, we have to move faster as an industry.”
Other U.S. utilities have since started similar battery grid programs, many with advice from GMP. New Hampshire’s Liberty Utilities started a battery VPP program in 2018; Rocky Mountain Power of Utah, Wyoming and Idaho did so in 2019; and Portland General Electric and Southern California Edison launched programs last year. Battery-making firms and installers like Sonnen and Sunrun have partnered with utilities, participated in utility programs that allowed multiple installers to contribute batteries, or, in Sonnen’s case, networked their own U.S. home battery communities. (The U.S. is playing catchup here to some extent; such initiatives have existed outside the country since 2015.) Meanwhile, GMP has expanded its own VPP initiative, investing about $30 million to sign up more than 2,000 homes in one of the largest utility-coordinated home battery programs in the country.
Graphic by Lon Tweeten for TIME
Energy experts say VPP systems are essential in the near term, in part because they can help prevent overloads like the one that crippled Texas earlier this year. In the longer term, transitioning to renewable energy will require accounting for intermittency, which means building a huge amount of energy storage so power is available on cloudy or windless days. Exactly how much energy storage the U.S. will need depends on factors like how much the country chooses to invest in new transmission lines—which can reduce the need for batteries by moving energy from wind farms and solar fields that are producing power to areas where renewables are idle—but projections range from around 150 to 450 gigawatts of capacity, or total potential power output, to make a fully renewable, national system work. (The Hoover Dam, for context, has a 2-gigawatt capacity.) Utility-scale batteries like the one in Panton could account for much of that new storage, along with hydropower pumped into reserve reservoirs. But rolling out VPP battery systems as well could make the job easier and cheaper than building utility-scale batteries alone, as VPPs will be more cost-effective in many cases, reduce the need for new transmission wires to connect large batteries to the grid and provide the additional benefit of home backup power in case the electricity goes out.
When it comes to systemic change in the power system, local opposition has a reputation for derailing even the best-laid green-energy plans. Some of GMP’s wind-turbine projects, for instance, have gotten pushback from residents concerned about noise and marred hilltop views. In Panton, the company started selling the community on a solar field and microgrid back in 2015, scheduling calls with town board members and bringing delegations to council meetings. “I think they were just trying to feel us out,” says Howard Hall, chairman of the town’s select board, in the 18th century former church that serves as town hall for the Lake Champlain community of less than 700 residents. GMP ended up upgrading that 150-year-old building with new LED lights and electric heat pumps, and installing the community’s first and only streetlight at a nearby intersection. The charm offensive worked—aside from a few grumbles, Hall says locals have been happy to work with GMP to test the company’s new microgrid project. “My residents can get reliable power no matter what the conditions are, and it doesn’t cost us anything,” says Hall. “Why wouldn’t we do it?”
The desire for backup power in snowstorm-prone Vermont motivated some participation in GMP’s VPP program as well, but many residents also joined out of concern for a warming climate—a weighty issue in the broadly liberal-leaning state (69% of Vermonters think climate change is affecting the weather, 5 percentage points above the national average). Many locals have noticed winter snows disappearing, summers growing hotter and springs seeming to come sooner every year. “I’ve just been so alarmed by what we’re dumping into the atmosphere, and the global effect it’s having on ecosystems,” says VPP participant Gerry Hawkes, 71. He and his wife Karen Hawkes, 73, showed me a GMP-connected battery in the basement of their log house, which Gerry built decades ago on a hilltop in Woodstock, Vt., 50 miles southeast of Panton.
Gerry spent his career working as a forester and inventor, developing innovations like a modular bicycle-path system and a wheelbarrow-like tool for clearing earthquake rubble. Now he runs a business mitigating local invasive plants without herbicides, using a jerry-rigged flamethrower and a self-designed tractor-mulcher he calls the “Forest Saver.” He’s affable, smiling as he speaks, but his tone turns somber when the topic turns to environmental issues—particularly the threat that climate change and other environmental stressors pose to New England’s famed forests. “We don’t know how fast things are unfolding, but we’re not going in the right direction,” Gerry says. He points out a stand of trees with yellowed and thinning leaves. “See, there’s plenty of room for them,” he says. “They shouldn’t be dying like that.”
Hilary Swift for TIMEA Tesla Powerwall battery backup system in a home in Guilford, Vt. When the grid-modernization program began in 2017, it was the first such utility-sponsored initiative in the U.S. Nearly 1,000 Vermonters had signed up within a year. In late 2020, state regulators approved it as a permanent program.
Mari McClure’s tenure as chief of GMP has coincided with a renewed national focus on climate change and grid resilience that goes up to the highest levels of government. “As we’ve seen more hurricanes, and more challenging environmental issues from severe weather, we want to have a resilient system,” says Patricia Hoffman, acting assistant secretary at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Electricity. Still, energy experts say the country’s grids aren’t being modernized fast enough. Some large utilities, like North Carolina–based Duke Energy, have proposed “pathways” to zero out their emissions that still rely on building new natural gas plants, even as consensus grows that such projects are impossible to justify from a climate perspective. Other utilities are making slow headway on new grid initiatives. Orange and Rockland Utilities, a subsidiary of New York–based Consolidated Edison that services parts of northern New Jersey and southeastern New York, launched a solar battery VPP project last June, but a year later had not yet brought any home batteries online. (The utility says COVID-19 slowed their plans, because they weren’t able to do direct door-to-door marketing.) Meanwhile, some new transmission lines, another essential component of a green transition, have been mired by local legal challenges, a bad sign as the Biden Administration prepares to expand such infrastructure. Battery storage, meanwhile, may be too expensive to build at the multihundred-gigawatt scale needed for decarbonization.
Other countries have moved faster than the U.S. on innovative grid enhancements. Australia is developing what it says will be the world’s largest VPP system, connecting 50,000 home batteries. In the U.K., Kaluza, a spin-off of British energy supplier Ovo, is paying customers to access their electric-car batteries while they’re charging in order to help manage electrical peaks (company representatives say the firm will expand to the U.S. in coming months). A similar, decentralized initiative from Ford, which uses batteries on its upcoming electric F-150, may be years away.
In the U.S., new transmission lines are waiting on federal money, while utility-scale storage, though growing, would also be spurred by additional public investment. In the world of VPPs, some U.S. utilities blame slow progress on state regulators that control utilities’ spending and fees, and which can create disincentives for utilities to put money toward new, advanced grid programs if there are no mechanisms to recoup their investments. Battery installers like Sunrun say utilities themselves are purposefully slowing down such initiatives. “There are definitely utilities that are not as forward-looking at Green Mountain Power,” says Chris Rauscher, who directs Sunrun’s policy and storage market strategy. “Historically, those utilities’ playbook has been to delay, delay, delay, just throw sand in everyone’s eyes, because they want time to try and figure out where the future is headed and how they can benefit.” Yet some observers say the battery-makers aren’t blameless either. Interoperability—or the ability for batteries from different manufacturers to work as part of a single system—is a significant obstacle to widespread use of VPPs, since utilities have to be able to charge or discharge large networks of batteries in tandem in order to manage demand spikes. But battery-makers aren’t exactly falling over themselves to work together and overcome those problems. “They all think they can monopolize the market,” says Arshad Mansoor, CEO of Electric Power Research Institute, a nonprofit energy-research organization.
Hilary Swift for TIMEWhile the desire for backup power in the snowstorm-prone state motivated some participation in GMP’s VPP program, many residents joined out of concern for a warming climate. “I’ve just been so alarmed by what we’re dumping into the atmosphere, and the global effect it’s having on ecosystems,” says Gerry Hawkes, who has a GMP-connected battery in the basement of his log house.
And regardless of blame, there remains the sheer enormity of the task ahead, and the scant time left to accomplish it. Electrical systems are premised on large, centralized “base-load” power plants that push a constant current of electricity to the far extremes of the grid, with additional power plants that kick in extra electricity when it’s needed. Indeed, removing carbon emissions from base-load plants might be the final frontier in green grid conversion. Nuclear energy can provide base-load power, but new atomic development has been sluggish for years, thanks in part to enduring public-perception issues following high-profile accidents, while carbon-capture fossil-fuel systems—which could theoretically generate zero-emission base-load power—are still years from large-scale implementation. And though renewable-energy resources like wind and solar produce plenty of power, intermittency means it will be extremely difficult for them to take over for base-load plants without enormous amounts of new transmission lines and storage, from networks of small batteries to multimegawatt behemoths.
Facing the task of remaking that system, McClure is cautiously hopeful. “Utilities across the country are getting better at seeing that we’ve run out of time with fossil fuels,” she says. “On the other hand, we have to move faster as an industry.” Karen Hawkes is hopeful too—she says she’s witnessed an environmental turnaround before. Through the 1970s and 1980s, many of Vermont’s trees began to sicken and die en masse, a phenomenon linked to acid rain from cars and smokestacks, before 1990 amendments to the Clean Air Act helped reverse the decline. She recalls that, during the worst period, her husband Gerry shook with emotion after examining scant, sickly foliage on a maple tree near their house. “I can remember Gerry saying, ‘I think in five years we won’t see the maple trees.’ And I was devastated by that remark,” Karen says, standing near the same tree Gerry had studied decades ago, its leaves shifting under evening sunlight. “But that didn’t happen—the Clean Air Act helped a lot. So I am much more optimistic.”
When Annlyse Retiveau leaned in to sniff my armpits, I held my own breath as she inhaled. I’ve spent a vast majority of my life using products to avoid this precise critique—another human intentionally evaluating my armpit aroma. Yet, whether we like it or not, humans do smell each other, and we can glean useful social cues and health information from the body odor of others, albeit sometimes unconsciously.
There’s nothing unconscious about Retiveau’s sniffing. As a professional nose at the New Jersey-based company Sensory Spectrum, she smells things for a living, to help companies assess the aromas in a new coffee brew, or to evaluate whether a deodorant successfully blocks body odor. She’s neither chagrined nor embarrassed, just professional, as she demonstrates exactly how far her nose must be from my armpit—6 inches—to properly assess my aroma, as well as the correct inhaling technique: short bunny sniffs to avoid sensory overload. And yes, “bunny sniffs” is the technical term.
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Most of our potent body odour arises from a kind of sweat that emerges from apocrine glands in our armpits. Apocrine glands become active at puberty and are primarily responsible for turning armpits into stink zones from adolescence onward. Meanwhile the salty stuff that flows when we exercise or are overheated emerges from a different, more abundant, kind of sweat gland—the eccrine gland. Most of us have between 2 and 5 million of eccrine sweat glands sprinkled across our whole body, including the armpit. Evaporation of water in this salty sweat whisks away heat from skin to cool us down; it’s our major defense against potentially deadly heatstroke.
When it emerges from our pores, sweat is relatively odorless. Potent aroma arises when bacteria living in our armpits devour sweat as food, and release heady odors as a by-product.
These odors provide clues about our identity and our health to those in our communities, even though many of us might prefer to rely on language and optics.
The first thing our noses tell us about those around us is their odor print, the unique collection of aromas that distinguish one person from another, and that allows dogs, for example, to track specific individuals. Parents learn the odor of our newborns just hours after birth (and newborns scootch preferentially towards the odor of breast pads worn by their birth mothers rather than those of other women). Siblings can identify each other even if they haven’t seen one another in years. And for many of us there is a quintessential comfort in the familiar odor of a grandmother or of a romantic partner.
In one study about smell and romance, straight women preferred the body odor of straight men whose immune systems were different enough that any offspring would have healthy immune systems. For most of human history, infectious disease has been our greatest threat. In modern times we may seek life-partners that satisfy a multitude of needs, but more fundamentally, if you could produce babies with immune systems able to fight a potpourri of pathogens, then your progeny—and your genes—stand a better chance at survival.
There are also tantalizing hints that body odor doesn’t just influence romantic relationships, but platonic ones, too. Earlier this summer, a study by Noam Sobel at the Weizmann Institute in Israel reported that people who became fast friends with each other have similar body odor prints, as determined by odor panelists as well as electronic noses.
This begs the awkward question: How do two individuals, meeting one another for the first time, get close enough for a whiff? Most human cultures—at least before COVID-19—have social greetings that involve proximity, whether it’s a cheek kiss, a bow or a handshake. In a fascinating study where people meeting for the first time were recorded on video, Sobel discovered that individuals unconsciously sniff their own hands after a handshake—presumably to take in the aroma of the person they’ve just met. (Although this information has the propensity to ruin handshakes, it may make people-watching at parties and conferences all the more fascinating.)
We don’t just sniff out the identity of those around us, we can sometimes assess their anxiety levels. Law enforcement officers have long noticed that individuals arriving for an interrogation smell like their own unique selves—yet they leave smelling potently similar, after the stressful questioning. This observation suggests that there’s a signature anxiety odor humans produce when afraid that overwhelms their normal aroma. Scientists put this observation to the test and found it had merit.
When a panel of people sniffed odor pads from individuals who sweat from fear (by watching a scary film) and those that sweat normally (when watching a nature documentary), the panelists could distinguish which sweat samples were produced in fear. Militaries worldwide have an interest in capturing and sequestering anxiety odors: The concern is that if one soldier in close quarters, say in a tank, becomes afraid, the odor might spread that fear to other soldiers To date, chemists haven’t been able to pluck the fear molecule out of the collection of body odors, but they’re working on it.
Health status is another fascinating piece of information we may glean from the body odor of others, namely whether their bodies are fighting off a microbial pathogen. A team of researchers, led by Mats Olsson at Stockholm’s Karolinska Institute, injected a tiny component of the diarrhea-causing E. coli pathogen into some study subjects (with their consent). This piece of the pathogen was a protein, called endotoxin, that normally sits on the surface of the bacteria. Endotoxin alone can’t cause an infection (or it’s terrible consequences) but it does trigger our immune systems to rally the troops because they detect that something foreign is afoot.
Study subjects injected with the endotoxin were given T-shirts to wear over a few hours to capture their body odor. The subjects didn’t show any signs of being ill, nor did they feel ill, even though the researchers could measure in blood samples that their immune systems had activated Code Red. Because the endotoxin wasn’t actually attached to a pathogen, the study subjects’ immune systems eventually settled down. They were sent home, while their T-shirts were put in a freezer. The researchers repeated the same experiment some time later, except the study subjects were only injected with saline solution, and no endotoxin, so that normal body odor was collected on a different set of T-shirts.
When a panel of people smelled the collection T-shirts, panelists found the body odor of people whose immune systems had been activated by the endotoxin to be more aversive than normal body odor. It wasn’t a conscious thing; the panelists didn’t say, “oh that person smells sick.” It was an unconscious, negative response to the odor of people whose immune systems were on high alert. The take-home message is that if someone smells aversive, others may avoid being in close proximity, which is a pretty reasonable strategy for avoiding potential infections.
Given that microbial pathogens are a major human foe, it would behoove us to evolve some way to sniff out when others are sick. But since there are many pathogens, it would be inefficient—frankly impossible—to learn the smell of each and every one, especially given that new microbial threats can evolve quickly. Instead, smelling when someone’s immune system is activated could be a universal way of alerting each other that a microscopic war is afoot.
Which brings us to deodorant and antiperspirants, a $75 billion dollar industry that helps keep all our aromatic secrets to ourselves. Antisweat products work to subdue the medley of odors wafting off our bodies: deodorants kill bacteria that turn sweat into stinky odors while antiperspirants literally block our sweat pores, cutting off the sweaty buffet to bacteria responsible for turning odorless sweat into a strong pong.
When we put on products that block body odor, are we inadvertently putting on an aromatic filter—like one might do to a selfie on Instagram, to improve our image? That filter could be hiding our aromatic messages, or dialing down the volume of these dispatches, interfering with lines of communication that might tell others we are anxious, sick, destined to be a bestie, or a good choice as a procreation partner. Then again, some might argue that this odorous communication is a vestige of our evolutionary past, that it should die out as language—and/or biomedical testing—nixes the need for such aromatic cues.
I often wonder, as I put on anti-sweat products whether I am whether we are as a society, one armpit at a time, helping to facilitate the end of human odor communication. Then again, I also value discretion. In this era of rampant oversharing, deodorants and antiperspirants may be delivering a needed dose of privacy from the smelly secrets we would otherwise release into the wild.
In my new novel, 
