Richard Wang is trying to bring lighter, more powerful batteries to the world. The best way to do that, he says, is by electrifying airplanes.

Wang is the founder and CEO of battery startup Cuberg, which is trying to use new, advanced chemical combinations to develop better batteries than the lithium-ion cells that serve as workhorses for laptops, cell phones, and electric vehicles. There are a lot of companies trying to do something similar—QuantumScape and Sila Nanotechnologies, to name a couple—each with a different pitch as to what chemical makeup or materials science breakthrough is going to deliver the goods. And like other next-generation battery concepts, Cuberg’s cells will be more expensive than commonplace lithium-ion cells, at least at first. But where Wang differs is in his idea for the best way to overcome that barrier and bring his technology to the mainstream. He wants to focus on an area that the push for electrification has barely touched so far: flight.
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Cuberg is betting on what are known as lithium metal batteries to do the job. Instead of using graphite for the battery’s anode, as most conventional lithium-ion batteries do, Cuberg’s batteries use solid lithium, which Wang says results in much higher performance: 70% more energy per unit of weight and volume compared to the best lithium-ion batteries available today, which means electric planes could go a lot farther, and be a lot more useful. Cuberg’s batteries will need a lot of lithium, though, and to overcome soaring competition for the metal Wang says recycling will have to fill in the gap as mining operations ramp up.

Wang began thinking about electric planes as he was starting his battery company in 2015. He was a Stanford PhD student studying materials science at the time, and there was no shortage of battery companies being launched based on academic research. “Many battery startups came out of academia with great ideas and tons of funding, and were all trying to pursue the automotive industry,” he says. That would make sense, he says, because with Tesla gaining steam and other car companies eyeing transitions away from internal combustion engines, the carmakers seemed to be the biggest potential customers for batteries. But Wang felt this thinking was flawed. “What you see is that invariably most of these startups have really struggled to thrive,” he says. “Even when they’re not bankrupt, they’ve been around 10, 15 years and still don’t have a commercial product in automotive.”

The problem, Wang says, is that the top priority for automotive companies actually isn’t to put the most advanced, next generation batteries into their vehicles—at least not in the short term. That’s because car companies work on thin margins; they have to make sure that everything that goes into assembling a car stays below a price point at which people can actually afford to buy it, and at which they can still make a profit.

Aviation, though, has always been different. Fuel is one of airlines’ biggest expenses. When cutting edge advancements come down the pipeline, like carbon fiber components that save on weight, they’ve historically been willing to pay a higher upfront cost for aircraft if it helps them save money down the road. That means that they tend to jump on the new technology faster than car companies. Wang is betting that the same paradigm will hold true for his batteries.

The airline industry is desperately in need of decarbonization solutions—aviation accounts for about 2% of all humanity’s greenhouse gas emissions. At the moment, there are few easy options, and most potential carbon fixes, like so-called “sustainable aviation fuels” made from biomass or captured CO2, will be hard to roll out at scale. Proposals to power planes with electricity are in their infancy as well, and such aircraft would have limited range compared to fossil fuel-powered planes. Still, they have the potential to make a difference.

Cuberg has yet to bear out Wang’s thesis. The company—which was bought by battery-maker Northvolt last March—has tested its batteries in small drones, with full-scale aircraft tests scheduled for 2024. Wang says they’ll likely start making an appearance in the commercial market around 2026. That, he says, could start to have a big decarbonization impact. With current battery technology, the hovering air taxis that technologists hope will soon become commonplace would likely only have a range of about 70 miles, whereas Cuberg representatives say their batteries would take the same aircraft roughly twice as far. A zero-emission electric airplane could likely travel more than 300 miles, while the range of hybrid-electric aircraft would be even longer. All that would help cut emissions from U.S. short-haul flights, according to Wang. And he says those electric flights—which would have an emissions footprint similar to driving an electric car—could help fill other niches too. “It is in some ways actually more analogous to the way you would think about high speed rail,” Wang says. “But without the infrastructure needs.”

Searching for an explanation for compulsive shopping, I recently ran across the story of a woman who couldn’t stop buying rabbits. Her husband told doctors that each day, she would visit the market and return home with yet another furry creature in a compulsive habit that appeared almost like an addiction. Then she would feel guilty about all the rabbits she had purchased.

The reason this 70-year-old woman was suddenly buying so many rabbits? She had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, which scientists believe is caused by a lack of dopamine in some parts of the brain, and she had then been put on drugs to trick her brain into believing it was getting the dopamine it needed. But some patients who received these “dopaminergic” drugs started compulsively shopping, gambling, and binge eating—their brains were getting inundated with dopamine, which made rewarding behavior feel even better than usual.
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I think about the woman who bought so many rabbits every time I look at the many recent Amazon orders on my account, or receive a new package on my doorstep and scurry to move it inside so my neighbors don’t judge my consumption habits. I know that buying more new stuff is bad for the planet—the production and use of household goods and services was found to drive 60% of greenhouse gas emissions—but every time I buy something, I get a little jolt of happiness that’s hard to give up. Like the woman buying rabbits, I can’t stop.

But a new book has helped me understand that my desire to keep buying things isn’t necessarily a personal flaw—it’s the way our brains have evolved. And there may be a way to break the cycle.

“All things being equal, we are predisposed to try to acquire more and more stuff, and to try and work less to get it,” says Ann-Christine Duhaime, a Harvard neurosurgeon who explored how to rewire the human brain to stop needing more stuff in her new book, Minding the Climate: How Neuroscience Can Help Solve Our Environmental Crisis.

We are, after all, evolved from blobs that survived because their networks of cells learned to repeat decisions like moving towards a tasty treat or backing away from a predator. Today, we have some 86 billion neurons, the “action cells” in the brain, that are constantly creating circuits to reinforce rewarding behavior, releasing dopamine as they do so, in order to help us learn how to get a reward. We seek out those releases in dopamine, and at the same time, learn to repeat the actions that lead to them.

Our brains especially like it—and release more dopamine—when we get an unexpected good reward, Duhaime says. Our ancestors likely learned the benefits of “intermittent small variable rewards,” as Duhaime calls them, to teach them to explore. Maybe they were walking through a new patch of woods and stumbled across an unexpected patch of blueberries, she writes. Different networks in their brains told them that the blueberries were a good thing, which also caused their brains to release dopamine, and they learned to repeat the behavior that led to the blueberries.

The good feeling associated with unexpected rewards is partly why we like shopping. Maybe you weren’t even thinking about buying watercolor paints and then you read something that reminded you that you like painting, and you went online to buy yourself some watercolor paints. Even better: the watercolor paints were less expensive than you expected and, when they arrived on your doorstep the next day, they were higher-quality than you thought they’d be. Your brain will be drawn to repeat the behavior that got you something unexpected and good.

You don’t buy those watercolor paints every day because the dopamine hit decreases every time you repeat the same new learned behavior. People get addicted to things when the appeal of getting that new, unexpected reward doesn’t fade with time, which helps explain why that woman who was on a drug that kept the dopamine flowing continued buying so many rabbits.

(Some scientists argue that modern society is so addicted to shopping because so many people are stuck in repetitive mind-numbing jobs—buying things is one of the few ways they are able to do something out of the ordinary.)

Read more: Here’s the Carbon Footprint of Four Families in a Week

Of course, all humans are different, and our brains work differently depending on our genetics and our life experiences. Maybe you inherited a particular kind of receptor for a specific neurotransmitter that makes you react faster in a certain circumstance, so you take more risks than most people do. Or you might have learned in childhood that overspending can lead to poverty, which made you thrifty even if your parents weren’t.

A larger study of Parkinson’s patients published in 2010, for instance, found that not all people receiving dopamine treatments had a tendency to overshop. Those who had impulse control problems tended to be younger male smokers who lived in the U.S. and who had a family history of gambling, which suggested that both genetics and environment played a role.

That’s why Duhaime stresses that our brains are not “hard-wired” to keep consuming more and more. Yes, we have learned over time that the key to survival is acquiring more resources, but the brain also has a tremendous amount of plasticity. The challenge is that our systems are designed for short-term decision-making, and curtailing our own individual consumption for the long-term health of the planet may not benefit an individual person today. When a predator approached, we’d throw a rock at it and be rewarded, but the long-term deterioration of the planet is a little harder for the reward centers of our brains to understand, even if we are intellectually aware of it.

“The problem is, we topped out, and now more and more is bad for us,” Duhaime says. “It’s bad for us climate-wise, and it’s bad for us health-wise.”

The best way to alter the overconsumption habits that have gotten us here is not to stop buying things completely; a better solution may be to substitute new rewards for the old rewards that we know, in the long-term, aren’t good. I told Duhaime that as the days get shorter, I can’t stop eating chocolate just before bed for comfort, even though I know I don’t need the calories. She told me about her new before-bed treat: a glass of almond milk with a scoop of fancy cocoa powder, which gets her that same feeling of comfort without the calories of chocolate bars. Once she started losing weight, Duhaime says, the reward of being able to fit into her old clothes felt as good as the chocolate once did. We need that same substitution for shopping.

Buying used items, as I’ve written before, is an elegant substitution that could help fulfill our desire to acquire. You can buy something that’s new to you, and get that same good feeling of an unexpected reward without requiring a company to extract more resources from the earth.

Read more: I Tried Buying Only Used Holiday Gifts. It Changed How I Think About Shopping

Our current economy is still evolving toward a place where buying used items is rational; sometimes, buying new clothes online is cheaper and easier than buying old ones in a thrift store. But the secondhand market is growing—and is projected to more than triple within the next decade. And even companies like Apple, which long resisted calls from consumer groups to allow customers to repair their devices, rather than just buying a new one, now has a Self Service Repair Store that provides repair manuals and genuine Apple parts.

Creating social rewards can also help nudge more people toward behavioral change, Duhaime says. There’s a reason humans still cooperate and share—our brains get something out of having connections with other people. When like-minded people reinforce each other’s decisions—think about the successes of groups like Alcoholics Anonymous or Weight Watchers—they can help each other change. Already, there are so-called Buy Nothing groups cropping up, forming communities to help people exchange used goods—and there’s a hashtag #BuyNothingDay circulating on social media aimed at discouraging people from shopping unnecessarily on Black Friday.

Duhaime points to a successful project in the Netherlands called Eco-Team Programme, in which neighborhood teams got together to try and change their behavior, perhaps tracking the weight of the trash they generated or the amount of water they consumed. Over time, environmentally friendly habits replaced more harmful ones, as neighbors created new connections with each other by sharing the experience of changing their behavior. “If it’s not rewarding,” Duhaime says, “we simply won’t do it.”

Whether that approach would work in the U.S. is up for debate. There have been efforts to encourage similar behaviors. In his 1995 book, Ecoteam: A program empowering Americans to create earth-friendly lifestyles, David Gershon, an author and expert on social change, set out a strategy. It included forming teams of family members or neighbors and agreeing to some shared goals, like keeping their thermostats at 65°F or getting their names taken off junk mail lists.

Of course, the book is available on Amazon if you are hankering for something to buy.

China has made few friends lately with the serial, uncontrolled reentries of the spent first stages of its Long March 5B spacecraft, which have posed potential threats to populations on the ground. Now, as the South China Morning Post reports, a Chinese rocket has created yet another mess—this time in orbit 500 km (310 mi.) above Earth, at an altitude that could imperil SpaceX’s Starlink satellite constellation.

At a media briefing on Monday in Beijing, a foreign ministry spokeswoman acknowledged that the first stage of a Chinese Long March 6A rocket had broken up in orbit after delivering an ocean observation satellite to space. The first stage typically reenters the atmosphere and burns up on its way down. Preparatory to reentry, the stage dumps its unused fuel, and a possible explosion during that exercise is thought to have led to the break-up. It is also possible that the stage disintegrated when it collided with another piece of space debris.
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Whatever the cause, the mishap spells trouble. One scientist from the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy reported observing more than 40 fragments “tumbling fast, giving very distinct flash patterns.”

Read more: China Sends Yet Another Rocket Stage Hurtling Uncontrollably Toward Earth

The incident has caused some speculation that the break-up was deliberate, since China is on-record objecting to the Starlink constellation, claiming that it could threaten the country’s national security—a worry that has only grown as the constellation has aided Ukraine in its war with Russia by providing the Ukrainian military with broadband service.

But there is also good reason China would not have an incentive to engineer such an incident: China’s Tiangong space station is circling the Earth in a somewhat lower orbit, and could be in the path of the debris as it descends.

“There are three Chinese astronauts up there,” one Beijing-based space scientist, who asked that his name be withheld due to the sensitivity of the issue, told the Morning Post. “The chance that [the debris] will hit the space station is low, but I don’t think anyone would be willing to add to the risk.”

The countdown for the launch of NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) moon rocket officially began just over 48 hours before the six massive engines on the 32-story rocket at last lit at 1:47 a.m. ET this morning, muscling the 2.6 million kg (5.75 million lb.) machine off of launch Pad 39B at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, and hurling it moon-ward. With the successful liftoff, NASA’s Artemis program—which aims to have Americans back on the moon by as early as late 2025—at last got underway.

In some respects, however, the true countdown for this morning’s launch began on Jan. 15, 2004, when then President George W. Bush announced that the U.S. would be returning astronauts to the moon and called for the construction of a new heavy-lift rocket to make the journey possible.
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“The desire to explore and understand is part of our character,” Bush said in a White House speech at the time. “We do not know where this journey will end, but we do know this: human beings are headed into the cosmos.” Exactly 18 years, 10 months, and one day later, that journey—for now without humans aboard—at last began.

The SLS will now make a 25-day journey during which an Orion spacecraft will complete two looping orbits around the moon before returning to Earth for a Dec. 11 splashdown. This morning’s liftoff was bedeviled by last-minute glitches involving a hydrogen leak at the base of the core stage of the rocket and a defective ethernet switch in the range safety mechanism, which would have been used to trigger a self-destruct system if the rocket had gone awry during launch. Repairs on both caused a 44-min. delay in the initially planned 1:04 a.m. ET launch. Once liftoff did occur, the flight went precisely according to the launch controllers plans.

The SLS is a six-engine rocket: its core stage is powered by four liquid fueled RS-25 engines—the same engines that powered the space shuttle. Flanking the core stage is a pair of solid rocket engines—also shuttle legacy hardware. Together, the half dozen engines put out 4 million kg (8.8 million lbs) of thrust, or 15% more than the 3.4 million kg (7.5 million lb.) produced by the Apollo era’s Saturn 5, once the most powerful rocket ever flown—until the liftoff of the SLS this morning.

The solid rocket boosters, which produce 75% of the rocket’s power, did not last long, burning for just two minutes and 12 seconds after ignition. Once the SLS reached an altitude of 48 km (29 mi.), the boosters shut down, separated, and fell away. After this point, the core stage engines burn for another six minutes and eight seconds before shutting down at a low-Earth orbital altitude of 161 km (100 mi.) and a speed of just under 28,300 km/h (17,500 mph). The Orion spacecraft and its own smaller second stage then separate from the core stage and, within 90 minutes, make one complete circuit around the Earth, before the second stage engine lights, accelerating the spacecraft to just under 40,200 km/hr (25,000 mph)—sufficient to peel away from Earth orbit and head out toward the moon. About 30 minutes after that—or two hours after liftoff—the second stage falls away too, leaving the Orion spacecraft to make the lunar journey on its own.

Read more: Inside NASA’s Struggle to Launch America Back to the Moon

It will take Orion five days to reach the moon, where its own onboard engine will then fire, settling the spacecraft into a lunar orbit that will see it circle the moon at altitudes ranging from as low as 96 km (60 mi.) from the lunar surface to as high as 61,000 km (38,000 mi.). After two weeks circling the moon, Orion will relight its engine and head for home. If all goes well, the mission, known as Artemis 1, will be followed in 2024 by Artemis 2, which will see astronauts making a similar circumlunar journey—marking the first time humans have been in the vicinity of the moon since Apollo 17 in 1972. Artemis 3, a crewed lunar landing, will then follow.

“After 50 years, we’re going back to the moon, but this time to stay,” says NASA Administrator Bill Nelson. “We’re going to learn to work, to improve, to innovate, to create, in order that we can go to Mars later.”

Adds Chris Cianciola, deputy manager of the SLS program: “It’s a huge step for us both at the agency and for humanity. It’s the signal that we are going back to space, deep space, not low Earth orbit. This mission will kick off many of our objectives for a test flight before we put humans aboard.”

A Test Flight with Experiments on Board

While the Artemis 1 mission is largely an engineering exercise—designed to prove the flight worthiness of the SLS and Orion—there is also some solid science being done. Hitchhiking aboard the rocket were 10 CubeSats—or mini-satellites, each about the size of a shoebox—that were released into space when the second stage separated. They will conduct a range of experiments.

One of the CubeSats will make seven orbits of the moon, scanning its surface for the presence of water ice in the lunar regolith, or soil, which future lunar astronauts could harvest and use. Another will hunt for hydrogen—which astronauts could also make use of for rocket fuel—in the moon’s permanently shadowed poles. Yet another, provided by JAXA, the Japanese space agency, will use a rocket engine and a cushioning airbag to make a landing on the moon, where it will measure lunar surface radiation.

On-board Orion will also be samples of plants, algae, fungus, and yeast, which will be recovered and studied when Orion makes its return to Earth, to measure the effect the ionizing radiation of deep space had on their genetic make-up—research that has implications for astronauts venturing into the same radiation field.

“We absolutely want to get as much out of this opportunity as we can,” says Cianciola. “There are some really unique payloads here and I’m excited about them.”

NASA’s Long Struggle to Launch

Those scientific findings are for later though. Today, NASA is celebrating the liftoff as a triumph not just of design and execution, but also institutional tenacity—the culmination of what was close to a generation of setbacks, course changes, and near-death experiences for the SLS.

Under the Bush Administration, the return-to-the-moon initiative was dubbed the Constellation program, and the new, heavy-lift rocket was known as the Ares V. NASA engineers and mission planners spent four years working on Constellation, designing and beginning construction on both the Ares V and Orion. By the time the Bush Administration left town and Barack Obama’s presidency began, however, Constellation was badly over budget and behind schedule. President Obama, who had never much mentioned space as a priority on the campaign trail, pulled the plug on the program in 2010, redirecting Orion money to other NASA projects, including the continued construction and maintenance of the International Space Station.

Congress, however, had a thing or two to say about that—especially the delegations from space-centric Texas, Alabama, and Florida—and pushed to restore funding for both Orion and the Ares V, not to mention the jobs they represented. Obama relented—but only partly. Constellation was still a no-go and the moon was no longer on the itinerary. Instead, the White House proposed the head-scratching idea of sending an unmanned spacecraft to find a small asteroid, tow it to the vicinity of the moon, and have astronauts land there and explore it instead. The new rocket that would send the crews on the so-called asteroid-redirect mission (ARM) would also no longer be known as the Ares V. As a signal of the new seriousness—and frugality—of the space program, NASA and the White House settled on the more prosaic-sounding Space Launch System.

More changes were still to come under President Donald Trump’s Administration, which in 2017 canceled ARM and restored the moon as the first destination of the SLS and Orion, with eventual crewed missions to Mars also on the agenda for some time in the 2030s. The new moon-Mars program would be known as Artemis—named after the sister of Apollo.

Read more: NASA’s Mega-Moon Rocket Survives a Hurricane

It took until June 2021 before the final SLS rocket was at last fully built, with its components stacked together in the Kennedy Space Center’s Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB). It then went through a series of preparations and tests. The SLS made multiple trips to and from the VAB to pad 39B for simulated countdowns—known as wet-dress rehearsals—during which the rocket was loaded with more than 2.6 million liters (700,000 gal.) of fuel and the countdown proceeded to just seconds before what would be ignition, before the clock stopped and the fuel was drained. A rehearsal attempt in April failed, due to a fuel leak and a flaw in a venting valve, and it wasn’t until June of this year that NASA successfully completed the wet-dress and declared the rocket ready for launch.

Multiple attempts to get Artemis 1 off the pad were made in August and September, with an initial liftoff, planned for Aug. 29 scrubbed due to a fuel leak and a faulty temperature sensor on one of the core stage engines. Another attempt on Sept. 3 was canceled as well due to a hydrogen fuel leak. A Sept. 27 launch attempt was then called off and the SLS had to hightail it back to the VAB as Hurricane Ian approached Florida.

This morning’s launch too was postponed by two days from its original Nov. 14 target date, due to weather, this time in the face of Hurricane Nicole, though the projected winds and rain were within parameters to allow the rocket to remain on the launch pad without seeking cover.

As of this morning, Nicole has passed and the SLS—18 years in the making—has flown. That journey into the cosmos Bush called for so long ago has at last begun.

It was more than 36 years ago that NASA suffered one of its greatest tragedies, when the space shuttle Challenger exploded 73 seconds after liftoff on a cold January morning in 1986. Yesterday, NASA reported that a piece of debris from Challenger was found off the coast of Florida by a team of divers who were filming a documentary on the loss of World War II era aircraft in the same area.

“My heart skipped a beat,” Michael Cianilli, a NASA manager who viewed the video footage and confirmed the authenticity of the find, told the AP. “Of course the emotions come right back.”

The remnant measures about 4.5 m by 4.5 m (15 ft. by 15 ft.) and is covered in square thermal tiling, indicating that it came from the belly of the spacecraft. To date, about 118 tons of debris, or 47% of the entire vehicle, have been recovered, and are buried in abandoned missile silos at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.

The new piece of debris is the first one discovered since 1996, ten years after the accident occurred. As yet, the find has not been recovered, but NASA treats such artifacts with seriousness and solemnity. The expectation is that dive crews will lift it off the ocean floor and inter it with the rest of the lost spacecraft—part of a tribute to the seven lost astronauts who perished on that long-ago morning.

If you owned a 32-story, 2.6 million kg (5.7 million lb), $4.1 billion moon rocket, the last thing you’d think you’d want to do is leave it out in a hurricane. Well, NASA does own a 32-story, 2.6 million kg, $4.1 billion moon rocket and leaving it out in a hurricane is just what the agency did yesterday—mostly because that turned out to be the best and safest of a bad lot of options. As this morning dawned, it looked like the gamble paid off.

The moon rocket, officially known as the Space Launch System (SLS), is currently set to launch in the early morning hours of Nov. 16, marking the beginning of the Artemis 1 lunar orbital mission. In preparation, the SLS began rolling out to its Florida launch pad last week, making the creeping, 4 mi. (6.4 km) trip from its Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) hangar in just over 12 hours, and taking its position on pad 39B in the early morning of Nov. 4.
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At the time, the rocket’s planned launch date was Nov. 14, but on Nov. 7, the National Weather Service detected Tropical Storm Nicole forming in the Atlantic. It was yet another unlucky break for the SLS, which already missed two launch attempts before—in August and early September—due to technical glitches. Then, on Sept. 27, NASA had to hightail the rocket off of the launchpad and head for safety in the VAB when Hurricane Ian approached Florida.

But Nicole was no Ian; not only was the storm weaker than the September hurricane, its early track had it missing the Kennedy Space Center (KSC) by a wide berth. Nicole grew quickly, however, and shifted course. By Nov. 8, it was strengthening to what would eventually be a Category 1 storm—one that was aiming for landfall just 112 km (70 mi.) south of the Cape Canaveral region, plenty close enough to cause high winds and heavy rains at the space center.

As NASA reports, the KSC team immediately went to what it calls HURCON (Hurricane Condition) 3 status. This meant locking down space center facilities, evacuating non-essential personnel, and leaving in place only a “ride-out team”—a skeleton staff on-site to monitor conditions and tend to emergencies. As for the rocket, the KSC team had a choice. As CBS, CNN, and others report, the SLS is certified to withstand winds as high as 136 km/hr (85 mph), but only if it is secured to its gantry on the launch pad. If it made the 12-hour trip back to the VAB, it would only be able to tolerate winds of just over half that without facing the risk of damage or even toppling in the 74 to 95 mph Category 1 gusts. The decision was thus made to leave it exactly where it was.

“The team decided the launch pad was the safest place for the rocket,” said NASA associate administrator Jim Free, in a statement posted on Twitter.

The team turned out to be right. After the storm passed—it made landfall with maximum sustained winds of 75 mph—technicians scrambled to the pad. They discovered only minimal damage Friday morning: some loose insulation caulk, and some tears in the weather coverings placed over the upper portion of the rocket body. Inspections will continue throughout the day, but for now it appears the snake-bit SLS at last caught a break. As of this morning, the launch remains on schedule for next Wednesday and NASA’s Artemis program—the country’s first attempt to return astronauts to the moon in half a century—remains on track.

(SHARM EL-SHEIKH, Egypt) — The world’s burning of coal, oil and natural gas this year is putting 1% more heat-trapping carbon dioxide in the air than last year, bad news for the fight against climate change but with an odd twist, according to scientists who track emissions.

China’s carbon pollution was down 0.9% this year compared to 2021, while emissions in the United States were 1.5% higher, said a study by scientists at Global Carbon Project released early Friday at international climate talks in Egypt. Both are opposite long-term trends. American emissions had been steadily dropping while Chinese emissions had been rising — until this year.
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In both cases, it is a reaction to the pandemic and perhaps a bit of the energy crisis created by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, study lead author Pierre Friedlingstein of the University of Exeter told The Associated Press. He said those two factors make this year’s data chaotic and hard to draw trends from. China’s lockdown in 2022 to try to control renewed COVID-19 is a major factor in that country’s drop, he said.

Much of the jump was in transportation — cars and air travel — with people’s limits on travel during the pandemic wearing off, Friedlingstein said.

While global carbon pollution is still increasing, it isn’t increasing at as fast a rate as 10 or 15 years ago. But overall scientists said this is bad news because it is pushing Earth closer to hitting and then passing the globally adopted threshold of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) since pre-industrial times.

“It means we better get ready to blow past the target and enter a world that humans have never experienced,” said Princeton University climate scientist Michael Oppenheimer, who wasn’t part of the research team.

Friedlingstein’s team — along with other scientific reports — figure Earth can only put 380 billion metric tons (419 U.S. tons) of carbon dioxide into the air before Earth reaches the 1.5-degree mark. That’s about 9 to 10 years worth of emissions, meaning the globe will likely hit that point around 2031 or 2032.

“The time for 1.5 is running out,” Friedlingstein said.

“This is bad news,” said Brown University climate scientist Kim Cobb, who wasn’t part of the research team. “It’s hard to see any silver lining in rising emissions, when we must cut emissions in half by 2030 to keep global warming to an absolute minimum.”

In 2022, the world is on track to put 36.6 billion metric tons (40.3 billion U.S. tons) of carbon dioxide in the air from energy and cement use, the study calculated. That’s the weight of the Great Pyramid of Giza in carbon dioxide spewed every 75 minutes.

In addition to the United States seeing emissions go up, India had a 6% increase in 2022, while Europe had a 0.8% drop. The rest of the world averaged a 1.7% carbon pollution jump.

Pollution from coal jumped 1% from last year, for oil it went up 2% and for natural gas it went down 0.2%, the report said. About 40% of the carbon dioxide comes from burning coal, 33% from oil and 22% from natural gas, Friedlingstein said.

The team calculates emissions levels through the early fall using data provided by top carbon-emitting countries, including the U.S., China, India and Europe, and then makes projections for the rest of year.

While there are limitations to projections, Oppenheimer said: “This is the A-team on CO2 emissions and the carbon cycle. They know what they’re doing.”

Carbon emissions from fossil fuels plunged 5.3% in 2020 but rebounded 5.6% last year, spurred by China, and now have completely erased the pandemic drop and are back on a slowly rising trend, Friedlingstein said.

The team also looks at overall emissions, including the effects of land use. When land use is factored in, emissions are flat, not rising slightly, he said.

Odds are you don’t have any plans for 4:09 a.m. E.T. on Tuesday, Nov. 8. Assuming your calendar is indeed clear, it might be worth setting your alarm for that time, because it’s then that the last total lunar eclipse until 2025 will begin—and the show should be a dazzler.

A lunar eclipse occurs when the Earth passes directly between the sun and the moon, casting a deep shadow across the lunar surface. In theory, a lunar eclipse should happen monthly, since the moon and the sun are on opposite sides of the Earth once every 27 days during the lunar passage around the planet. But the moon’s orbit is inclined 5 degrees relative to the Earth’s equator, meaning that most of the time, the Earth’s shadow passes above or below the moon.
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It is only about once every year and a half that the three bodies line up perfectly to make an eclipse happen. That year and a half frequency is just an average, however. Tomorrow’s total eclipse will actually be the second one of 2022—the last one having occurred on May 15. After this coming eclipse, a three-year wait for the next one will begin.

Where and When To Watch the Eclipse

As NASA reports, the eclipse will be visible throughout North America, Central America, Asia, Australia, and the Pacific islands. People in portions of South America—Colombia, western Venezuela, and Peru—will also be able to observe the spectacle. Shut out of the show will be Africa, most of Europe, and the Middle East.

The eclipse will unfold slowly, with the 4:09 a.m. time marking the moment the Earth’s shadow will take its first bite out of the moon. That darkness will advance slowly until, at 5:16 a.m. E.T., it will reach totality, which will last until 6:42 a.m. The moon will then sail on, with more and more of its face slowly emerging from the Earth’s shadow.

Read more: Here’s Why the Full Moon Is Sometimes Red

The moon will not completely vanish from the sky the way the disk of the sun does during a solar eclipse. Rather, it will glow a ghostly red, known colloquially as a “blood moon.” The phenomenon is a result of the sun’s light streaming through the Earth’s atmosphere, which scatters down—and filters out—blue wavelengths. Red light, however, passes straight through our planet’s air and bathes the moon throughout the duration of the eclipse. The more haze that there is in the atmosphere—caused by anything from dust storms to wildfires to volcanic eruptions—the redder the light that streams through.

An Enduring Fascination

Humanity’s fascination with lunar eclipses is a long and deep one. Astronomers can both forecast future eclipses and back-date the positions of the Earth, sun, and moon to determine precisely when they have occurred in the past. The earliest lunar eclipse to which NASA has assigned a date occurred on Feb. 6, 746 BCE, and was recorded in Babylonian records.

No matter when an eclipse happened, they were treated with both superstitions and fear.

“The Sun will turn to darkness, and the Moon to blood before the great and dreadful day of the Lord comes,” reads the Bible in Joel 2:31. The Toba people, who inhabited South America in the 16th century, believed that the eclipse was caused by the spirits of dead people taking the form of jaguars and attacking the moon, leaving it bloody. The Native American Hupa people believed that the moon possessed 20 wives and many mountain lions and snakes, and when the moon failed to feed the animals sufficiently, they would attack it and make it bleed. The eclipse ended when the wives intervened to offer protection.

Fewer superstitions may surround lunar eclipses in the 21st century, but these celestial moments still inspire both fascination at the sheer loveliness of the spectacle, and at least a little residual unease at the break in the normal, formal pattern of things.

“The rhythm of life is driven by astronomical changes,” says Alphonse Sterling, astrophysicist at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala. “We don’t feel the oscillations in cesium atoms, but we notice the sky. It takes the Earth 365 and a quarter days to go around the sun and 23 hours, 15 minutes and four seconds to spin on its axis. Part of that predictability too is the appearance of the moon. You have harvest moons and all of that stuff. When regularity isn’t there, it just throws us off.”

That regularity will return tomorrow at 7:49 a.m. E.T., when the last of the eclipse passes and the full moon reappears. In the eastern U.S., the moon will have already set by then, but in other, more westerly parts of the world, skygazers will see order restored, the moon unshadowed, and the lions, snakes, and jaguars appeased once more.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — Better catch the moon’s disappearing act Tuesday — there won’t be another like it for three years.

The total lunar eclipse will be visible throughout North America in the predawn hours — the farther west, the better — and across Asia, Australia and the rest of the Pacific after sunset. As an extra treat, Uranus will be visible just a finger’s width above the moon, resembling a bright star.

Totality will last nearly 1 1/2 hours — from 5:16 a.m. to 6:41 a.m. EST — as Earth passes directly between the moon and sun.

Known as a blood moon, it will appear a reddish-orange from the light of Earth’s sunsets and sunrises. At the peak of the eclipse, the moon will be 242740 miles (390,653 kilometers) away, according to NASA scientists. Binoculars and telescopes will enhance viewing, provided the skies are clear.

South America will get a glimpse of Tuesday’s lunar eclipse, weather permitting. Striking out altogether, Africa, the Middle East and most of Europe will have to wait until 2025.

Among those providing a livestream of Tuesday’s lunar extravaganza: Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles and the Italian-based Virtual Telescope Project.

It’s the second total lunar eclipse this year; the first was in May. The next one won’t be until 2025. Plenty of partial lunar eclipses will be available in the meantime.

NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) moon rocket has been in development for more than 18 years and has never flown so much as an inch. But that might change on Nov. 14 at 12:07 a.m. ET, when the massive 32-story machine blasts off for a 25-day mission around the moon. That mission, known as Artemis 1, will be preparatory to a similar crewed mission that could be flown as early as 2024.

Twice before in the past several months, the rocket has been poised for launch, and twice before mechanical problems scrubbed the plans. But as NASA reports, last night in Florida at just after midnight, the rocket began its slow, nine-hour, 6.75 km (4.2 mi) creep from its hangar in the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) to launch pad 39B, arriving there at 8:30 a.m. today.

Mission managers are confident that this time, the third time, will be the charm. “I think everyone feels really good about the launch,” Jim Free, NASA’s director of exploration systems, told CBS News. “If we weren’t confident, we wouldn’t roll out.”

Read more: Inside NASA’s Struggle to Launch America Back to the Moon

But NASA may have to contend with variables that are entirely out of its control. On Sept. 26, the SLS, which was out on pad 39B in preparation for an impending launch attempt, had to hightail it back to the VAB in advance of the arrival of Hurricane Ian.

Next week, a “non-tropical pressure system” forming in the Caribbean could bring heavy rain and wind gusts of up to 40 knots (75 km/hr, 46 mph) to the Kennedy Space Center. Mission managers said that those conditions are within mission parameters and there will be no need to roll the rocket off the pad yet again.

There’s a lot that China would like you to pay attention to when it comes to its just completed Tiangong (“Palace in the Sky”) space station—and there’s one thing the country would very much like you to ignore.

On the upside, there’s the thousand or more scientific studies that crew members hope to carry out over the decade or so the station will be in operation; there are the 17 nations that will be flying experiments, and perhaps some astronauts, along with the Chinese taikonauts; and there’s the very speed with which the three module station was built.
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The core module—the Tianhe (“Harmony of the Heavens”)—was launched on April 29, 2021; the second module—the Wentian (“Quest for the Heavens”)—went aloft on July 24, 2022; and it was just this week, on Oct. 31 at 3:37 a.m. ET, that a Long March 5B rocket blasted off with the third and final component—the 22-ton Mengtian module (“Dreaming of the Heavens”) measuring 18 m (59 ft.) long, 4.2 m (13.8 ft) wide—completing the T-shaped station.

As for that bit the Chinese would just as soon you not discuss: There was another piece of hardware—a 10-story tall, 23-ton first stage of the Long March 5B—that reached space along with the Mengtian before beginning an uncontrolled, somersaulting plunge back to Earth causing it to land, well, no one could say where.

This is not the first time the Chinese have threatened the planet with a falling piece of Long March flotsam. The first stage of the rocket that launched both the Wentian and Tianhei followed a similar uncontrolled reentry path—both crashing into the Indian Ocean. The very first launch of the Long March 5B, in 2020, resulted in an impact that scattered debris across portions of Ivory Coast, though no one was hurt.

“Once again,” said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson in a statement early this morning as the whereabouts of the rocket stage remained unknown, “the People’s Republic of China is taking unnecessary risks with the uncontrolled rocket stage reentry of their Long March 5B rocket stage.”

He continued: “They did not share specific trajectory information which is needed to predict landing zones and reduce risk. It is critical that all spacefaring nations are responsible and transparent in their space activities and follow established best practices, especially, for the uncontrolled reentry of … debris that could very well result in major damage or loss of life.”

Reassuringly, that risk to life is relatively small, since more than 70% of the world’s surface is water and much of the planet’s land mass is uninhabited. Henry Hertzfeld, a research professor at George Washington University’s Space Policy Institute, told TIME: “I wouldn’t lose sleep over this. Any one person’s chance of getting hit by lightning is probably greater.”

Not long after Nelson made his statement, the good news went around that Earthlings appear once again to have dodged a Long March bullet. As the U.S. Space Command tweeted today, the spent first stage reentered the atmosphere and splashed down harmlessly in the south central Pacific Ocean at 6:01 a.m ET.

Still, it remains not only provocative but perplexing that China doesn’t take greater precautions with its Long March 5 Bs. Disposing of a rocket stage safely, after all, is a relatively easy thing to do. As a rule, government and private sector launchers keep a reserve of fuel in the spent stage’s tanks so that its engine can re-fire, aiming it for a guaranteed oceanic splashdown. SpaceX goes further, landing the first stages on an ocean barge and reusing them.

“We have the technology to control the reentries,” says Hertzfeld. “Why China isn’t using it, I don’t know.”

The question is especially mystifying since China is also a member of the 1972 Liability Convention, a pact brokered by the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs (UNOOSA), which obligates signatory nations to compensate other parties for injury or damage caused by outer space activities.

China remains mum, however, on the reason it allows its Long March 5B stages simply to free-fall back to Earth, and on whether it ever plans to modify the technology to make a controlled reentry possible. Even with the Liability Convention holding the country responsible, Beijing could be making the calculation that it’s cheaper to pay for any damages than fix the rocket.

“They know their obligations under this regime, but it’s all a little hollow,” says Hertzfeld. “I mean, all they have to do is write a check.”

It’s hard to miss what appears to be dry cleaning hanging on the wall of Siddhartha Mukherjee’s apartment in New York City’s Chelsea neighborhood. The apartment is a sunny, stylish, open space, filled with modern furniture, decorated with sculpture and paintings—and then, in perhaps the most conspicuous spot on the living room, is a brown felt suit with very long pants, draped over a plain wooden hanger. It looks entirely out of place—but it’s not.

The suit is the handiwork of German artist Joseph Bueys, who created the improbable bit of fabric art as a tribute to the nomadic Tatars who, as he would tell the tale, saved his life when he was a Luftwaffe pilot during World War II and his Stuka dive bomber crashed in Crimea, in 1943. The Tatars, ignoring Bueys’ status as one more in a horde of soldiers invading their homeland, wrapped him in felt and animal fat to keep him warm and alive until he recovered from his injuries.
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“He was stranded and he was rescued by the locals,” says Mukherjee, “and a lot of his work subsequently had to do with coverings and with felt.”

The tale behind the suit is a singularly human—and humane—one, a bit of individual caregiving in the global slaughter that was World War II. As a work of art, it is very much an apt piece to be displayed in the home of a man like Mukherjee, 52—the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of 2010’s The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, and the newly released The Song of the Cell. Physician, immunologist, biologist, and an assistant professor of medicine at Columbia University Medical Center, Mukherjee has devoted his life not only to his writing, but to research. He sees the practice of medicine as its own act of mercy, something that is unique to—and a credit to—our often-fractious species.

“It’s a function of humans that we can use reason to alleviate another’s pain,” he says. “Most animals don’t do it. For me to want to relieve your pain or your distress—whether by making a medicine or developing a science—is something both human and quite beautiful.”

Mukherjee’s path to that beautiful place was both a long and rather glittery one—one that saw him excelling academically and, later, scientifically, pretty much anywhere he turned his focus. As a boy in Delhi, India, he attended St. Columbia’s School, where, in 1989, he was awarded the Sword of Honor, the highest academic tribute the school could confer. He went from there to Stanford University as an undergraduate, studying philosophy, computer science, and math, and considered all of those fields as his possible life’s work. Before he could make his choice, he was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship—“That is an offer you can’t refuse,” he says—so he went on to study immunology and biology at Oxford University. Only after graduating, did he decide to study medicine too, earning his M.D. at Harvard Medical School in 2000.

“I did my medical training in reverse,” he says. “I was first trained as an immunologist and then a biologist. That was very critical, because it allowed me not just to think about patients, but to think in terms of what the range of possibilities [to treat them] was scientifically.”

Mukherjee’s specialty was oncology, and he ultimately went to work as a professor of both hematology and oncology at Columbia, which not only steeped him in the science of cancer, but summoned up in him a certain grudging wonder at the malign genius of the cancer cell—a wonder that filled and informed The Emperor of All Maladies.

“Cancer cells have this mechanism by which they can turn off immune system recognition,” he says. “I’ve always been interested in the physiology of cancer. How does it exploit its nutrients, its home, its environment? In the 2000s everyone was talking about how if we sequenced the genome of cancer you would suddenly find all of the keys and all that we would need to do would be to find the locks. But we still don’t have a very good pharmacopeia of drugs to direct against [cancer] mutations. So I can tell a patient, ‘You have a mutation in x, y, z gene.’ And then the patient says, ‘O.K., what are you gonna’ do about it?’ And I say, ‘I don’t know. I don’t have anything to do about it.’”

That hard truth did not mean The Emperor of All Maladies was a hopeless or fatalistic book. Mukherjee dove deeply into the science of the cancer cell and surfaced with new insights into the cellular and molecular mechanisms of malignancies and possible ways to shut those mechanisms down—especially by recruiting the immune system itself as a bigger combatant in the battle against the disease. But there was deeper still to go.

A cancer cell is just a cell after all—one of the 30-plus trillion that make up the human body. In studying the science of individual cells—taking what Mukherjee calls an “atomistic” approach—perhaps there would be answers not just to cancer, but to other diseases too, as well as to the larger secret of biology itself. Life on our 4.5 billion year old planet emerged about 3.7 billion years ago, and for the next two billion years at least it got along perfectly fine as nothing more than single-celled organisms. It was only sometime between 600 million and 1.5 billion years ago that those microscopic, free-floating packets of life came together into algae and plants and trees and fish and dinosaurs and whales and birds and dogs and apes and humans and more. Walt Whitman may have coined the words “I contain multitudes,” but evolution actually performed that act of containment long before the 30 trillion cells that made up the poet himself could come together.

“I think the idea of us being accumulations—cooperative units [of cells]—is a tremendously powerful idea,” says Mukherjee. “The reason the book is called The Song of the Cell is because a song is not just a set of notes; it produces something that’s beyond that set. A sentence or a novel is not a set of words. It’s something that is beyond the words. So I think that as we move ahead in time, we will understand these songs, and they will help us understand physiology.”

Mukherjee structures much of his book in a way that does focus on the individual notes of the cellular song, devoting chapters to The Healing Cell (such as platelets); The Discerning Cell (the immune system’s T cells with their “subtle intelligence”); The Contemplating Cell (the neuron); The Renewing Cell (stem cells); and inevitably The Selfish Cell (cancer). There is a danger of anthropomorphizing, or at least aggrandizing, cells in all of this—and Mukherjee is O.K. with that. At one point in the book he recalls his early work at Oxford, studying T cells under a microscope and whispering to himself, “Like eyes looking back at me.”

His experience mirrors that of the cloth merchant Antonie Van Leeuwenhoek, developer of one of the earliest microscopes—about whom he also writes—peering through his eyepiece in 1674 at a drop of rainwater that he had let stand for a day and finding swimming in it a swarm of tiny “animalcules.”

“This was to me among all the marvels that I have discovered in nature the most marvelous among them all,” Van Leeuwenhoek wrote. “No greater pleasure has yet come to my eye than the spectacle of the thousands of living creatures in a drop of water.”

From all of this, Mukherjee concedes, “It does sound as if cells have agency. It’s not the agency that you and I have [in the form of] sentience. But I think they do have agency in the sense that they’re autonomous. They receive signals, they integrate signals. They then process those signals and send out more signals. They have a desire to survive.”

But it’s in the collective desire—the cooperation among the trillions of freestanding cells to make a single freestanding human—that Mukherjee’s book finds its meaning and its magic. Humans may not be the only multicellular species on the planet, but we’re the apotheosis of multicellularity—the best and the brightest that nature has turned out in the long epochs the chemistry set of our planet has been mixing and mingling its ingredients.

“Bacteria still exist,” Mukherjee says. “And they’re highly effective. They are very good at surviving. So I would ask the question, well, if bacteria are so successful, then why aren’t we all bacteria?”

And he answers that question too. “We aren’t bacteria because at some point in time evolution came to the nonconscious conclusion that in fact, agglomerations of organisms were very effective. In some selected environments—like a New York City apartment—it helps not to be a bacterium. Multicellular organisms can gather food, they can gather information, they can contemplate. Multi-cellular organisms are extraordinarily successful, too.”

Multicellular organisms—wholly unlike unicellular organisms—can do one other thing too: They can care. That business of one human working to alleviate pain or suffering of another is something Mukherjee says we should cherish, and the work he does beyond his writing is very much animated by that imperative.

In India, he has launched a Phase 2B study into the use of CAR-T cells—a specialized type of lab-altered T-cells—to battle cancer in a small sample group of patients. CAR-T cells are extremely complex and costly to produce in the U.S., Mukherjee says, with a course of therapy costing up to $1 million. “We’re trying to produce it at vastly less cost,” he says. “So that has been incredibly gratifying.”

In addition, he is conducting studies at Columbia on ways to treat acute myelogenous leukemia—an extremely deadly form of cancer—using CRISPR gene editing technology. And he is studying how a ketogenic—high-fat, moderate-protein, low-carbohydrate—diet can increase the body’s responsiveness to anti-cancer drugs.

Bacteria can’t do work like that. Individual cells can’t do work like that. But songs of cells—in the case of humans, whole symphonies of cells—can. We are a deeply flawed species, but a deeply good species too. We may fly war planes into other nations’ lands but we swaddle and save the downed pilots who attacked us. It’s in individual cells that the capacity to develop that altruistic behavior begins. It’s in the multitudes of cells that make a person—and the multitudes of people who make a world—that that goodness finds its truest expression.

At 3:37 a.m. ET on Monday, China launched the last key component of its space station, the latest step in the country’s efforts to become a leading space power.

The Mengtian (“dreaming of the heavens”) lab module, onboard a carrier rocket, blasted off the Wenchang Spacecraft Launch Site on the island of Hainan. It is expected to dock at the Tiangong (“heavenly palace”) Space Station within several hours.

Read More: From Satellites to the Moon and Mars, China Is Quickly Becoming a Space Superpower

Designed to carry out microgravity and low-earth orbit experiments, Mengtian will be China’s second addition to Tiangong this year, following the July deployment of Wentian (“quest for the heavens”), a laboratory module equipped for biological research.
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Completing the key structures of Tiangong is, in itself, a feat, considering its first core module was sent to low-earth orbit only in April last year. Tiangong makes China only the third country in the world apart from the U.S. and Russia to send up astronauts and build a space station.

China still has many other extraterrestrial ambitions in the pipeline. Within the next decade, it plans to build a base at the moon’s southern tip and from there deploy a telescope with 300 times the field of view of the Hubble. It also intends to collect samples from Mars, among other aims. Some of these developments are scheduled to take place earlier than similar deadlines set by NASA or the European Space Agency (ESA).

It’s this steady progress of the Chinese space program that worries U.S. politicians and senior military officials. Some believe the U.S. is falling behind in the new “space race”—echoing rhetoric reminiscent of the Cold War—with the moon as the finish line once again. The U.S., in a rush to build its own lunar base, is already attempting to test rockets for roundtrip moonflights.

Read More: China Will Ultimately Overtake the U.S. in Outer Space, a New Study Warns

Tiangong will not compete with the 16-module International Space Station (ISS), China says, having at most six modules based on earlier plans. But with the ISS retiring after 2030, unless private U.S. companies like SpaceX and Tesla replace it with their own stations, the Tiangong will be the only space station orbiting Earth. The Tiangong may have even forced the U.S.’s decision last year to delay the decommissioning of the ISS, which was originally scheduled for 2024, says Quentin Parker of the University of Hong Kong’s Laboratory for Space Research.

“Competition is good,” Parker tells TIME. “It helps you train, helps you improve performance, brings down costs and gets new developments more rapidly.”

China-U.S. competition in space

As competition grows, China and the U.S. are accusing each other of militarizing outer space. The Chinese space program’s opaque ties to the People’s Liberation Army fuels Washington’s concerns over using civilian facilities for surveillance and intelligence, even though NASA has a history of working with U.S. defense agencies. Citing security issues, the U.S. in 2011 passed a law barring China from joining the ISS and requiring FBI approval for any space information exchange with the country. Most recently, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson accused China of planning to colonize the moon, stealing tech and using the Tiangong to study how to destroy other satellites, a claim China has vehemently denied.

Leroy Chiao, a former NASA astronaut who was in the ISS from 2004 to 2005, laments how the U.S. refuses to collaborate with China in space, when Russia, its space rival since the Cold War and a perennial security threat to Washington, can still shuttle astronauts to the ISS.

“You can’t tell me the Russians aren’t trying to spy on the U.S. and vice versa,” he tells TIME. “But we’ve had a very successful collaboration on the International Space Station because nothing we do with the ISS has any military value.” Russia, however, plans to defect from the ISS consortium by 2024.

In its January white paper, China emphasized “peaceful collaboration” with international partners in space science and governance. Still, some worry that working with China would abet its military. A recent Center for Strategic and International Studies report argues that Beijing can use data collected from ground stations in South America—a key part of China’s space infrastructure—for surveillance. On the other hand, the ESA and China have been exchanging data collected from European and Chinese satellites to advance earth science research since 2004. Karl Bergquist, ESA Administrator for the International Relations Department, says the agency does not see why “it should not work” with China as the data exchanged is not for military use but for science.

“The more data our scientists have that they can work on, the better it will be for us all,” Bergquist tells TIME.

Read More: China’s New Space Station Has a Big Role to Play—Scientifically and Diplomatically

For its part, China doesn’t want to close its space station doors—Tiangong is open to all U.N. member states. The ESA has even planned for its astronauts to board the Tiangong, though this has been stalled pending further discussion with Beijing. One of the station’s designers told state media that Tiangong is “inclusive” and designed to be adaptable for non-Chinese astronauts. And at least 1,000 scientific experiments will be conducted in the station, Nature reports, mostly involving Chinese researchers but also including projects led by researchers from 17 other countries and regions like Kenya, Russia, Mexico, Japan and Peru, some of which are struggling to support their own space initiatives.

While the U.S. is decades of operational experience ahead of the Chinese space program, China’s willingness to partner with other countries may be cementing its place as a space power today. Since 2016, China has made 46 space cooperation agreements with 19 different countries and regions.

“I don’t believe [China] wants to be confrontational,” Parker tells TIME. “I think they want people to like them; I think they want to be trusted.”

NASA has been asked to do a lot of things in the 64 years it’s been a federal agency, and on the whole, it’s delivered the goods. Beat the Soviet Union to the moon? Check. Build a fleet of reusable space shuttles? Check. Oversee a 15-nation collaboration that built a football-field sized International Space Station? Check.

But there’s one thing NASA has never been asked to do, and that’s a very good thing because it can’t: turn a profit.

As with every other branch of the government, the space agency’s money flows only one way: out. And there was a time that Congress was only too happy to cut seemingly endless checks that allowed NASA to keep spending. In 1966, at the peak of the race to the moon, the space agency’s budget was $5.9 billion—$44.89 billion in 2022 money—representing 4.4% of the total federal budget. But the space fever cooled after Apollo 11 stuck the first lunar landing in 1969, and ever since then, NASA funding, relative to overall government outlays, has grown smaller and smaller, today representing just over 0.4% total federal spending.
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Even with those reduced resources, the NASA of today has been directed to do something the NASA of the 1960s never was: In 2020 and again this year, the space agency was required to file a detailed economic impact report, tallying the jobs created, the tax revenue generated, and the overall economic stimulus that NASA spending had on the U.S. economy at the local, state, and federal level. This week, NASA released its report for fiscal year 2021 and the numbers—at least to hear the space agency’s own bean counters tell it—are impressive.

NASA’s fiscal year 2021 budget was $23.3 billion and that spending, according to the report, generated a total of $71.2 billion in economic activity nationwide via contracts with private sector contractors, research and development deals with domestic and international companies, hiring of government and private workers, and more. NASA activities supported or created 339,600 jobs nationwide and generated nearly $7.7 billion in federal, state, and local taxes. Forty-six states saw an economic impact of at least $10 million, and of those 46, nine saw a revenue boost of $1 billion or more

Drilling down further, it was the Artemis program—which aims to have astronauts back on the moon in this decade—that performed most impressively, generating nearly $2.2 billion in tax revenue, contributing nearly $20 billion of the overall $71.2 billion in economic impact, and producing 37,000 jobs nationwide. Less flashily, NASA’s climate change research produced nearly $810 million in tax revenue, and contributed just under $8 billion in economic impact. Much of the revenue reported is generated by public-private partnerships—and there are a lot of them: NASA has 700 active partnerships with non-governmental companies in 44 of 50 states.

No surprise, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson crowed about the numbers. “Investment in NASA’s missions is investment in American workers, American innovation, and American companies,” he said in a statement that accompanied the release of the report. “NASA may be a small federal agency, but we punch above our weight.”

What can’t be entered on a spreadsheet, of course, are the larger, non-fiscal dividends space exploration pays. It’s impossible to put a dollar figure on the wonder that the latest images from the James Webb Space Telescope inspire; on the discoveries the Perseverance rover is making on Mars; on the 1960s-era thrill that will take hold across the nation when the first Artemis astronaut presses the first boot print back on the moon as early as 2026. Nelson is right that NASA is a small agency, but it has a big impact—one that has always gone well beyond mere economics.

This story originally appeared in TIME Space, our weekly newsletter covering all things space. You can sign up here.

Few people were thinking about a war in Ukraine when SpaceX began launching its constellation of Starlink satellites into space in 2019. The Starlink fleet, which now numbers more than 2,300, is designed to provide broadband connection to underserved parts of the world. Ever since Russia invaded Ukraine last February, the Ukrainian army has been making use of the satellites for battlefield communications.

As Ars Technica, Reuters, and others report, this has left the Russians none-too-pleased. In a statement on Oct. 26, Konstantin Vorontsov, deputy director of Russia’s foreign ministry issued a statement, making a barely-veiled threat to shoot the satellites down if their military use continues.
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“Quasi-civilian infrastructure may become a legitimate target for retaliation,” Vorontsov said, condemning what he called “an extremely dangerous trend that goes beyond the harmless use of outer space technologies.”

There is a certain disingenuousness in Vorontsov’s remarks, since the U.S. Department of Defense has long made use of commercial satellites to carry military communications, which Russia certainly knows. But direct involvement in a Russian ground war is a different matter—at least in the eyes of the Kremlin.

The bad news: Russia certainly has the ability to shoot down a satellite, as it demonstrated as recently as last November, when it launched a missile from the ground at one of its own satellites, blasting it into what NASA estimated to be 1,500 pieces.

The better news: such a single-strike attack would have little impact on as distributed a network as Starlink, and even Russia doesn’t pretend it is going to launch thousands of missiles to bring the whole constellation down.

This story originally appeared in TIME Space, our weekly newsletter covering all things space. You can sign up here.

If you have been alive for the last seven years, you have lived through the hottest recorded period on planet earth. In Europe, temperature records have been broken year after year as heat waves have become an annual occurrence. Much of the continent this summer was gripped by the most severe drought on record as major streams and rivers in France and Italy completely dried up.

We are living in a time of frightening extremes. But it’s also a time of increasing scientific awareness. Climate researchers have long understood that a warmer planet is a less habitable planet. But, until recently, they could say with little precision how rising temperatures contribute to individual storms or the disappearance of species. Today, sophisticated statistical models allow them to assert with confidence how climate change is fueling a host of ecological disasters. For example, the most recent report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change found that a rise in average global temperatures from 1.5 to 3 degrees Celsius would nearly double extinction rates among terrestrial organisms and quadruple the risk of severe flooding.
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As the next United Nations Climate Change Conference, COP27, approaches in November, we stand at the brink. The data is clear—no region or nation is immune from the ravages of climate change. The question is whether we can act quickly enough to head off planetary disaster.

The Many Global Impacts

It begins at the top, in the planet’s high elevations and latitudes where snow and ice are disappearing at an alarming rate. Glaciers in the Alps have lost almost half of their ice volume since 1900, according to the European Environment Agency, and are predicted to shrink by another two-thirds by the end of the century. A larger concern is the rapid melting of ice in earth’s polar regions, which are warming twice as quickly as the rest of the planet. According to data from NASA, Arctic sea ice has declined by 13% per decade since the late 1970s, and the Antarctic ice sheets are losing an average of 150 billion tons of ice mass annually. (For comparison, a single gigaton of ice would cover an area the size of Central Park in a layer more than 1,100 feet thick.)

As the ice sheets melt, sea levels rise. And this, in turn, is leading to inundation and erosion of the planet’s coastal regions. Nowhere is the phenomenon more apparent than in Tuvalu, an archipelago in the South Pacific where the ocean is rising at around 5 millimeters per year (nearly twice the global average). At current rates, say experts, the islands, home to almost 12,000 residents, could become uninhabitable by 2100. Last November, the situation prompted Tuvalu’s Minister for Justice, Communication & Foreign Affairs, Simon Kofe, to give a televised speech at the COP26 United Nations climate change conference in Glasgow, Scotland, from a podium half-submerged in water. “Climate change and sea level rise are deadly and an existential threat to Tuvalu and low-lying atoll countries,” Kofe said. “We are sinking, but so is everyone else.”

The rising temperatures are also fueling more frequent extreme weather events. Nine of the 10 costliest hurricanes that have struck the United States all have occurred since the turn of the 21st century. The megadrought that has gripped the U.S. southwest for more than two decades has seen the west’s two largest reservoirs—Lake Mead and Lake Powell—reduced to vast, cracked mudflats. The Colorado River, which feeds these reservoirs is rapidly fading—and that diminution holds dire consequences for 40 million people across the American West who depend on the river for their water supply.

While the consequences of a warming planet are being felt by people across the globe, the worst impacts are falling most heavily upon the poor. According to a report from the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, more than half a billion of the world’s most undernourished people also live in underdeveloped countries that are extremely vulnerable to climate shocks. By 2030, climate change could drive more than 100 million additional people into extreme poverty, based on a study from the World Bank.

Humans are hardly the only living things harmed on a planet whose climate systems have gone haywire. One study published last April in the journal Science by researchers from Princeton University found that a “business as usual” approach could result in a global collapse of marine ecosystems by the end of the century—a scenario “not seen since the extinction of the dinosaurs,” according to a press release. The Center for Biological Diversity projects that more than one-third of the planet’s species could be wiped out by 2050 if we do nothing to slow global warming.

A Fossil-Fuelled Problem

How, exactly, did we get here? In a word: carbon.

Long before humans began altering the composition of the atmosphere, the planet began warming as it emerged from the last Ice Age, roughly 11,000 years ago. But we have ratcheted up the natural rate of warming through the unchecked burning of coal, oil, and gas.

At the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, people began burning these fossil fuels in mass quantities to power factories, heat homes, and fuel transportation. That burning, in turn, has added enormous volumes of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. As populations and industrialized economies have grown in the last two-and-a-half centuries, carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions have risen exponentially.

World leaders are awakening slowly to the mounting threat of runaway carbon emissions. But the response so far has been incommensurate to the scale of the problem. Since the first major gathering on climate was convened in Geneva, Switzerland, in 1979, the concentration of atmospheric carbon has risen by almost 25%. The Kyoto Protocol, adopted in 1997 and signed by more than 150 countries, was a landmark treaty, one that required developed nations to reduce emissions by about 5% below 1990 levels. It also provided a framework to monitor those reductions. One major shortcoming of the Kyoto Protocol, however, is that it did not require developing countries—including China and India, two of the largest carbon emitters—to participate.

The Paris Climate Agreement of 2015 is the most ambitious global climate agreement to date. It requires all signatories (including China and India) to set national targets aimed at keeping the global average temperature from rising 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. The Paris Agreement also sets forth a pathway for global carbon neutrality by the second half of the century.

The prescriptions of Kyoto and Paris have spurred political action. Last year, the European Union passed a law requiring member nations to collectively cut emissions by 55% from 1990 levels by the year 2030. Last spring, the Biden Administration announced its goal of cutting U.S. emissions in half by the end of the decade.

A Push For Action

But those efforts have often been stymied by political leaders and parties with deep ties to the fossil fuel industry. In 2017, for example, the Trump Administration announced it was pulling out of the Paris accord, citing an unfair burden on U.S. manufacturing firms; that withdrawal officially went into effect in 2020. On his first day in office, President Joe Biden announced that the U.S. would reenter the agreement. And in August, the Democrats finally pushed through landmark climate legislation under the Inflation Reduction Act which experts say will go a long way to helping the U.S. achieve Biden’s 2030 emissions goal.

Meanwhile, leaders of African countries seem to be on the verge of pushing for more investment in fossil fuels across their continent, which has large reserves of oil waiting to be tapped, and they might find eager customers among developed countries, according to The Guardian. Tapping into these vast reserves would be disastrous in terms of meeting global climate targets.

As political tides shift in various directions, renewable, carbon-free energy sources such as wind and solar have steadily increased, accounting for more than a quarter of the total global energy mix, according to the International Energy Agency. In the U.S., renewables make up 20% of “utility scale generation.” But of that total, about one-third comes from hydropower, which, though carbon neutral, is ecologically problematic since it entails damming and diverting rivers.

In addition to renewables, some have promoted economic measures such as cap-and-trade or the carbon offset systems in lieu of reducing their own emissions. Critics say these approaches are vulnerable to shoddy accounting, or even outright fraud. Some promote a more straightforward (and transparent) carbon tax, in which polluters are required to pay a set fee based on the amount of carbon they emit.

Meanwhile, others are pushing technical fixes such as direct air capture and storage, a process in which carbon is siphoned from the atmosphere and pumped into rock formations deep underground. Last fall, the world’s largest carbon dioxide removal plant came online in Iceland. Known as Orca, the facility, which cost an estimated $10 million to $15 million, is powered by a nearby geothermal plant and is capable of capturing 4,000 metric tons of carbon annually—the same amount belched out in a year by roughly 800 cars—a tiny a fraction of the more than 30 billion metric tons of carbon emitted globally in 2020.

A more drastic “geoengineering” scheme proposes to seed the ocean with fertilizers in order to stimulate growth of photosynthetic plankton. These tiny organisms, in theory, could absorb large quantities of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Proponents also say the technique could help reduce the deleterious effects of ocean acidification—also driven by increased concentrations of atmospheric carbon—which has damaged coral reefs and marine ecosystems across the globe.

While the tools available are many, the effort must be rapid, coordinated, and global if we hope to slow the catastrophic warming of the planet. The climate crisis is this generation’s defining battle—and it is a battle that must be won.

This article is part of a series on key topics in the climate crisis for time.com and CO2.com, a division of TIME that helps companies reduce their impact on the planet. For more information, go to co2.com

As climate change threatens to reshape the planet forever, more and more companies are promising to improve their carbon footprint. But reducing greenhouse gas emissions doesn’t just happen overnight. That’s why many big corporations have turned to carbon offsets to bridge the gap.

“It’s a transitional tool,” says Sarah Leugers, chief strategy officer for Gold Standard, a voluntary carbon offset program based in Switzerland. “A company should be on a science-based decarbonization journey and use carbon offsets to take responsibility for emissions along the way.”

A carbon offset is a mechanism through which an individual or organization with an emissions reduction goal pays someone else to reduce emissions. Scientists think about climate mitigation and the greenhouse effect in terms of the whole earth; this means that atmospheric damage from carbon dioxide emitted by a factory in Chicago can be made up by the reduction in CO2 from a project introducing electric stoves to villages in rural India. Carbon offset projects often take place in developing countries in the Global South because the costs to take actions such as planting trees (or paying people to avoid cutting them down) or installing wind farms are significantly cheaper than in industrialized countries.
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Even the biggest proponents of carbon offsets agree they’re not a silver bullet—and there are some with an even harsher critique. “In many cases, [carbon offsets] take the place of someone reducing their own emissions, and they can justify or alleviate the guilt of continued emissions,” says Barbara Haya, director of the Berkeley Carbon Trading Project at the University of California, Berkeley.

The system has come under scrutiny for not delivering on the emissions reductions promised. Both Haya and Danny Cullenward, policy director at the California-based climate research firm CarbonPlan, call the system “broken,” relying on flawed methodologies and incentives with little oversight. Both recommend that businesses focus on reducing emissions in their own operations—such as reducing business travel, using electric vehicle fleets, and switching to renewable energy—over a heavy investment in offsets.

The carbon offset market has grown dramatically in recent years, with major companies like Google and Amazon promising to go net-zero on emissions, in part through buying offsets, and airlines like United and American letting consumers purchase offsets equivalent to the tons of carbon emitted from their flights. In 2021, the total market value of voluntary carbon markets (VCM) reached nearly $2 billion, according to Ecosystem Marketplace, an initiative of Forest Trends, a nonprofit environmental finance organization in Washington, D.C. That figure is nearly four times higher than the value of VCMs the previous year at $520 million.

As the industry goes mainstream, there are hundreds of new carbon offset projects making big environmental promises and few resources to decipher what’s real and what’s bunk. Here’s how the process works and what a business should evaluate if it decides to use carbon offsets.

Certification is a Critical Part of the System

Carbon offset programs encompass many types of projects, although the most common ones include renewable energy projects (such as wind, solar, and hydroelectric), methane capture and combustion (burning methane turns it into a less harmful compound that can be used as fuel), energy efficiency (such as electrification), and forestry-related (like reforestation), according to the Las Vegas-based carbon offset company 8 Billion Trees, which runs big planting operations in the Amazon Rainforest.

One carbon offset credit represents one metric ton of carbon dioxide reduced in the atmosphere, whether through avoidance or capture of CO2. The prices vary depending on the project type, timeline, region, labor and material costs, and other factors. Projects must estimate the metric tons of CO2 avoided and then submit this information to a carbon offset registry, which then translates that climate impact into individual credits that can be bought and sold in a decentralized marketplace.

To receive internationally recognized credits for funding, projects are certified by one of the four major carbon offset registries that set the industry standards. The big four, according to experts, are the American Carbon Registry (ACR), Climate Action Reserve (CAR), and Verra (Verified Carbon Standard)—all three of which are based in the U.S.— and the Switzerland-based Gold Standard.

This certification involves an audit by a third-party verifier, commissioned by the project developer. Project protocols or methodologies approved by Verra, for example, must be scientifically sound, with permanent, measurable emissions that are conservatively estimated—meaning the methodology doesn’t overestimate the climate benefits of the project.

“Make sure [a carbon credit] is issued from an internationally recognized standard, because there are a lot of new organizations emerging that are claiming to issue carbon credits but don’t have the fundamental attributes,” says Leugers, of Gold Standard. Many projects, for example, do not have conservative baseline settings for calculating emissions reductions, or they would have happened even without the intervention of the program. Going with internationally verified projects can help alleviate this issue.

Nonetheless, Haya is skeptical of the methodologies used by carbon offset projects. “We’re in a poor-quality loop,” she says. “Because there are so many credits generated that exaggerate project impact, the prices are too low. At current prices, they’re not high enough to really drive emissions reductions.”

She says that registries should enforce stricter rules on what counts as a carbon offset credit within a project. A project that is liberal with its methodology will ultimately over-exaggerate credits generated and the benefit to the planet. But when registries do crack down on guidelines, project developers will often find another registry willing to accept their lenient protocols.

Monitoring, Reporting, and Verification

In any protocol, a project must include a plan for how progress is reported, emissions are calculated, and credits are issued. Once the plan is implemented, the project enters the monitoring, reporting, and verification, or MRV, phase.

Jodi Manning, vice president and director of marketing and partnerships for California-based Cool Effect, a nonprofit carbon offset provider, says the reporting timelines for their projects vary. Cookstove projects may be evaluated yearly, while forestry projects may be every three years. Nonetheless, Cool Effect says it requires updates every six to 12 months and performs regular site visits with photos and interviews.

At Gold Standard, most projects are required to report back about once a year, Leugers says. She points to Gold Standard’s membership with the International Social and Environmental Accreditation and Labeling Alliance (ISEAL) and its grievance process—to lodge complaints against projects or Gold Standard—as mechanisms for transparency and accountability.

Cullenward of CarbonPlan believes strict compliance with protocols can still be flawed. “We have a system for saying we followed the rules,” Cullenward says. “We don’t really have a system for checking whether or not the rules make any sense.”

Much of the uncertainty is inherent to carbon offsets as a whole, says Haya. “We know how to measure emissions. For offsets, you’re measuring emissions reductions and you have to measure against a counterfactual scenario of what would likely have happened without your program. It’s immeasurable, [and] the uncertainty is being deliberated by a set of actors that all benefit from more credits at poor quality.”

Assessing the Quality of the Carbon Credit

To assess a carbon offset credit’s quality, there are four major terms to know: additionality, permanence/durability, buffer pool, and leakage.

Many experts say the long-term climate benefits of carbon offsets rely on the concept of additionality, which means credits should only be generated for projects that would not happen without funding from carbon offset programs. “If the funds go to pay for trees that would’ve been planted anyway, then no offset should be generated for those trees,” Haya says. “You’re not reducing emissions, you’re just paying someone to do what they would’ve done anyway.”

Cullenward says many carbon offset companies exaggerate the additionality of projects. A recent study looking at wind farms in India found that at least 52% of carbon offsets were for projects that would likely have been built regardless of help from the United Nations-run Clean Development Mechanism, an international offset program established under the Kyoto Protocol in 1997.

“Time and time again,” he says, “when academics and financially disinterested parties do research projects to try and carefully assess the plausibility of those baseline claims, they find smoldering dumpster fires.”

Permanence is the idea that the project’s benefit to the atmosphere is irreversible, while durability is the expected measurement of how long that benefit will last. Some reduction endeavors are permanent; for example, driving less and switching to an electric stove prevents greenhouse emissions from happening in the first place.

“When we put CO2 in the atmosphere from burning fossil fuels, it has permanent consequences,” Cullenward says. “The effect on the atmosphere and the oceans extends quite literally into geologic time. So if you want to use an offset credit to say, ‘It’s OK I put CO2 in the atmosphere [from driving or flying],’ the duration of the claim that’s being made needs to match the duration of the impact of CO2 emissions.”

Other projects cannot be guaranteed to be permanent. To reap the long-term environmental benefits of forestry projects, a tree would need to live for 100 years to store a metric ton of carbon. But droughts, fires, and diseases happen, and when a tree dies, the carbon dioxide is released. Therefore, project developers must take these risks into account when creating their protocols.

To mitigate natural disasters that could reverse the environmental benefits of a project and any other setbacks, carbon offset providers create a buffer pool as insurance. In any given project, between 10% and 25% of credits are held in a companywide pool, which ensures the project over-delivers on its goals.

And “if there is a fire,” Cullenward says, “the people who bought and sold credits on the market are kept whole, so long as their credits in the buffer pool are retired to account for those losses. If a million tons of CO2 goes up in flames in a forest, a million credits can be retired from the buffer pool. So as long as that system is solvent, the program is on track to meet its durability claim.”

But buffer pools are not foolproof. In a recent study of California’s forestry offset program, Cullenward and fellow researchers found that wildfires have diminished 95% of the carbon credits in the buffer pool during the program’s first 10 years. In other words, the carbon loss from wildfires is drastically outpacing the climate benefits of preserving trees through this state-mandated offset program.

Protocols need to account for leakage, which is the idea that projects can cause emissions to increase outside the areas generating offset credits. Haya says this occurs in some forest conservation projects. “If a landowner commits to reducing emissions by reducing the amount of timber they’re harvesting [without changing] the demand for timber products, someone’s conservation on one side of land just displaces timber harvesting somewhere else,” she says.

When evaluating a carbon offset scheme, many companies focus on the co-benefits of projects, such as sustainable development, jobs for locals in the region, community empowerment, health improvements, and biodiversity.

Dee Lawrence, founder of Cool Effect, says she always looks for projects with an environmental justice point-of-view that goes beyond the carbon benefits. She points to recent projects from the company, which include restoring mangrove trees in Myanmar that helps improve livelihoods in poverty-stricken communities by providing jobs, and a biogas digester project in China that transforms methane gas from waste into renewable energy and improves human health by providing cleaner air. “If a carbon offset is done correctly, it can be transformational,” Lawrence says.

As for Haya, she recommends thinking about carbon offsets as one tool of many in the toolbox—but ultimately, she says, cleaning up one’s own operations will truly have the biggest impact.

This article is part of a series on key topics in the climate crisis for time.com and CO2.com, a division of TIME that helps companies reduce their impact on the planet. For more information, go to co2.com

The cost to halt global warming has been pegged at between $300 billion and $50 trillion over the next 20 years—a big range because experts disagree on the best strategies. Additionally, many methods are still being developed and not yet scaled up to tackle the magnitude of the problem.

The main way to slow climate change is an obvious one: Stop releasing greenhouse gas emissions. Emissions reduction strategies decrease the release of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere from a specific activity or across a certain area. According to a 2013 study supported by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, reducing emissions could help prevent millions of premature deaths brought on by air pollution during the following century. Reducing carbon emissions not only improves overall air quality and safeguards human health—it is absolutely essential in the fight against climate change.
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Beyond the reduction of emissions (ultimately achieved by ending the use of fossil fuels), there are a few other ways to reduce the amount of carbon in our atmosphere. But there are a lot of similar sounding terms thrown about in this space. Here’s what you need to know.

Carbon Dioxide Removal

Carbon dioxide removal (CDR) involves taking this greenhouse gas out of the atmosphere and storing it underground or under the ocean floor, ideally for a very long time. There are both nature-based and technology-based approaches to CDR.

The two main strategies for removing carbon from the atmosphere are tree planting and forest restoration or conservation efforts, and direct air capture (DAC), according to a World Resources Institute report released in 2020. Trees have been one of the best CDR tactics for thousands of years because of their ability to sequester and store carbon as long as they stay standing. Earth’s forests have a net absorption of 7.6 billion metric tons annually, which represents about one-third of annual global emissions. DAC, on the other hand, vacuums carbon dioxide out of the air.

Direct Air Capture

DAC facilities use giant fans to suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and either store it underground in geological formations, or reuse it (like for synthetic fuel and concrete). Carbon Engineering in Canada and Climeworks in Switzerland are two examples of companies developing this type of technology. Climeworks has built the world’s largest DAC plant in Iceland, which began operating in 2021. The facility, known as Orca, is capable of capturing 4,000 metric tons of carbon annually (equivalent to the emissions produced from 504 homes’ energy use in one year) and pumping it underground where, when mixed with water, the gas will cool and turn into stone.

There are currently 19 DAC facilities operating around the world. The International Energy Agency states that an average of 32 large-scale plants need to be built annually between now and 2050 to reach global climate goals.

Carbon Sequestration

Carbon sequestration refers to how—through biological, chemical, and physical processes—carbon dioxide is naturally removed from the atmosphere and locked away in the planet’s soils, oceans, trees, and rocks. For instance, as a tree grows, photosynthesis captures carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and stores it in the trunk, branches, leaves, and roots.

Carbon sequestration, however, also has its limitations. For instance, deforestation, wildfires, and other disturbances to the world’s woodlands cause around 8 billion metric tons of CO2 trapped in trees to be lost, according to the Environmental Defense Fund. This is why strategies to slow climate change often involve an emphasis on stopping deforestation, restoring cleared areas, and enabling damaged woods to regrow.

Other limitations exist, as well. Global warming is already reducing the ocean’s ability to absorb carbon. Additionally, carbon sequestration requires farmers to not till or plow their fields, disturbing the soil, because carbon dioxide that has been stored in the soil may be released back into the atmosphere, defeating the original purpose of keeping carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. A shift to regenerative agriculture is occurring in some places of the world, which emphasizes the importance of soil health and adopting different practices so as to not disturb it.

Negative Emissions Technology

Carbon removal technologies are also referred to as negative emissions technologies (NETs). The potential of NETs to rapidly remove carbon dioxide on a massive scale is one key advantage in comparison to natural systems, which are slower to absorb carbon and sometimes face external threats (like wildfires).

However, while large-scale NETs are considered critical to meeting ambitious international climate change targets, these technologies still largely remain in the research and development phase, or are not yet scaled up. Facilities built so far remove just a tiny fraction of the carbon dioxide that scientists say is necessary to make a difference. But governments are getting behind these efforts. The U.S. Department of Energy announced in May 2022 that it would provide $3.5 billion to groups developing direct air capture and related technologies. In addition, the U.K.’s Department for Business, Energy, and Industrial Strategy announced in July 2022 the equivalent of a $64 million investment in carbon removal technologies.

Carbon Capture and Storage

A close cousin to both carbon dioxide removal and carbon sequestration is carbon capture and storage (CCS), which involves, for example, capturing CO2 from point sources, like a coal plant’s smokestack, and then permanently storing it underground or under the ocean floor; in fact, the International Energy Agency predicts that CCS could be responsible for removing as much as 20% of total CO2 emissions from industrial and energy production facilities. Removing carbon as soon as it is burned and either storing it underground or using it to improve oil and gas recovery is a more common and fully established approach than direct air capture.

But the implementation of commercial-scale CCS is costly, which creates a big barrier to widespread use. Additionally, “the deployment of CCS has been hindered by uncertainty in geologic storage capacities and sustainable injection rates,” according to the scientific journal PNAS. Other reports note the problem of leakage of CO2 from stored carbon.

Carbon Stock Protection

Then there’s the approach of carbon stock protection, which separates forest areas that should be preserved as High Carbon Stock (HCS) and High Conservation Value (HCV) from degraded lands with low carbon and biodiversity benefits that could be developed. In the context of wildlife survival and reducing carbon emissions, restoration efforts should strive to reduce net emissions of greenhouse gasses, maximize the capacity of habitats to store and reduce pollution, and preserve and enhance biodiversity.

This article is part of a series on key topics in the climate crisis for time.com and CO2.com, a division of TIME that helps companies reduce their impact on the planet. For more information, go to co2.com

If temperatures are soaring at the World Cup in Qatar next month, spectators and athletes will be able to look online and see if climate change is to blame.

That’s thanks to the Climate Shift Index, an online tool that allows weather forecasters and residents to see how greenhouse gas emissions are affecting daily temperatures. A version of the index that tracks temperatures in the continental U.S. launched this summer. Today, Climate Central, the nonprofit climate science organization that developed the index, released a broader version that allows users to see how global warming is influencing local temperatures anywhere around the world.
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The index works through a bit of clever statistics—every day, a computer system compares current temperatures around the world to historical data and the output of dozens of climate models in order to determine how likely those conditions would be in a world without humanity’s greenhouse gas emissions—and how much more likely a century of burning fossil fuels may have made them.

The index presents those findings on a color-coded map: Yellow means global warming made current temperatures 1.5 times more likely; dark red indicates that the current temperatures were five times likelier to occur due to climate change, an “exceptional” climate fingerprint.

The rollout of the worldwide Climate Shift Index is the latest project in the growing field of attribution science, where climate scientists attempt to show connections between weather events and rising greenhouse gas emissions. Some such analyses, such as figuring out the role climate change might have played in a major heat wave, used to be difficult, months-long affairs, but scientists have worked to speed up and standardize the methods in recent years.

Now, attributing regional or local temperature to climate change is relatively straightforward scientifically, which is why the Climate Shift Index is able to run through the calculations for all the world’s temperatures every day. Doing the same for other weather, like rainfall, is more difficult, and requires more time. Proving out the full extent of climate change’s impact on the most extreme weather events also requires more specialized analysis, such as in the case of the Pacific Northwest heat dome last summer, which scientists at World Weather Attribution concluded would have been “virtually impossible,” without the effects of human-caused climate change.

The work on the global Climate Shift Index has led to some interesting—and troubling—findings. The researchers who developed the tool examined weather data from the past year and found that climate change affected temperatures for 96% of the world’s population. But the effects were especially strong near the equator, and on small islands where warmer ocean waters are boosting temperatures on land. “It’s just really clear that in a lot of those places they’re dealing with climates that are just permanently altered from what they were before,” says Andrew Pershing, the director of climate science at Climate Central.

The hope now is that people will be able to use the Climate Shift Index to see climate change impacts that may have otherwise gone unnoticed—a balmy winter day in Stockholm, for instance, might have a dark red signature on the Climate Shift Index map. It can also help illustrate just how widespread those effects are, showing where climate change is bringing extreme heat, even beyond those few heat waves that make international news. “There were events in other places [last year] that didn’t get the same level of attention, even though they had arguably as much or more of an impact on people,” says Pershing. “We’re hoping the tool will help people see those events more clearly.”