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NASA’s Zero-Boil-Off Tank Experiments To Enable Long-Duration Space Exploration

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Thursday, March 14, 2024

Figure 1. The Gateway space station—humanity’s first space station around the Moon—will be capable of being refueled in space. Credit: NASA, Alberto Bertolin, Bradley ReynoldsNASA’s Zero-Boil-Off Tank experiments address the challenge of managing cryogenic propellants in space, crucial for future Moon and Mars missions, with potential Earth-bound benefits in hydrogen energy applications.Do we have enough fuel to get to our destination? This is probably one of the first questions that comes to mind whenever your family gets ready to embark on a road trip. If the trip is long, you will need to visit gas stations along your route to refuel during your travel.NASA is grappling with similar issues as it gets ready to embark on a sustainable mission back to the Moon and plans future missions to Mars. But while your car’s fuel is gasoline, which can be safely and indefinitely stored as a liquid in the car’s gas tank, spacecraft fuels are volatile cryogenic liquid propellants that must be maintained at extremely low temperatures and guarded from environmental heat leaks into the spacecraft’s propellant tank. And while there is already an established network of commercial gas stations in place to make refueling your car a cinch, there are no cryogenic refueling stations or depots at the Moon or on the way to Mars. Furthermore, storing volatile propellant for a long time and transferring it from an in-space depot tank to a spacecraft’s fuel tank under microgravity conditions will not be easy since the underlying microgravity fluid physics affecting such operations is not well understood. Even with today’s technology, preserving cryogenic fuels in space beyond several days is not possible and tank-to-tank fuel transfer has never been previously performed or tested in space.Propellant Management in Space: Overcoming Boil-OffHeat conducted through support structures or from the radiative space environment can penetrate even the formidable Multi-Layer Insulation (MLI) systems of in-space propellant tanks, leading to boil-off or vaporization of the propellant and causing tank self-pressurization. The current practice is to guard against over-pressurizing the tank and endangering its structural integrity by venting the boil-off vapor into space.Onboard propellants are also used to cool down the hot transfer lines and the walls of an empty spacecraft tank before a fuel transfer and filling operation can take place. Thus, precious fuel is continuously wasted during both storage and transfer operations, rendering long-duration expeditions—especially a human Mars mission—infeasible using current passive propellant tank pressure control methods.Introducing ZBO: A New Horizon in Fuel EfficiencyZero-Boil-Off (ZBO) or Reduced Boil-Off (RBO) technologies provide an innovative and effective means to replace the current passive tank pressure control design. This method relies on a complex combination of active, gravity-dependent mixing and energy removal processes that allow maintenance of safe tank pressure with zero or significantly reduced fuel loss.Zero Boil-off Storage and Transfer: A Transformative Space TechnologyAt the heart of the ZBO pressure control system are two proposed active mixing and cooling mechanisms to counter tank self-pressurization. The first is based on intermittent, forced, subcooled jet mixing of the propellant and involves complex, dynamic, gravity-dependent interaction between the jet and the ullage (vapor volume) to control the condensation and evaporation phase change at the liquid-vapor interface.The second mechanism uses subcooled droplet injection via a spraybar in the ullage to control tank pressure and temperature. While the latter option is promising and gaining prominence, it is more complex and has never been tested in microgravity where the phase change and transport behavior of droplet populations can be very different and nonintuitive compared to those on Earth.Although the dynamic ZBO approach is technologically complex, it promises an impressive advantage over the currently used passive methods. An assessment of one nuclear propulsion concept for Mars transport estimated that the passive boil-off losses for a large liquid hydrogen tank carrying 38 tons of fuel for a three-year mission to Mars would be approximately 16 tons/year. The proposed ZBO system would provide a 42% saving of propellant mass per year.These numbers also imply that with a passive system, all the fuel carried for a three-year Mars mission would be lost to boil-off, rendering such a mission infeasible without resorting to the transformative ZBO technology.The ZBO approach provides a promising method, but before such a complex technological and operational transformation can be fully developed, implemented, and demonstrated in space, important and decisive scientific questions that impact its engineering implementation and microgravity performance must be clarified and resolved.The Zero-Boil-Off Tank (ZBOT) Microgravity Science ExperimentsThe Zero Boil-off Tank (ZBOT) Experiments are being undertaken to form a scientific foundation for the development of the transformative ZBO propellant preservation method. Following the recommendation of a ZBOT science review panel comprised of members from aerospace industries, academia, and NASA, it was decided to perform the proposed investigation as a series of three small-scale science experiments to be conducted onboard the International Space Station. The three experiments outlined below build upon each other to address key science questions related to ZBO cryogenic fluid management of propellants in space.Figure 2. Astronaut Joseph M. Acaba installing ZBOT Hardware in the Microgravity Science Glovebox aboard the International Space Station. Credit: NASAThe ZBOT-1 Experiment: Self-Pressurization & Jet MixingThe first experiment in the series was carried out on the station in the 2017-2018 timeframe. Figure 2 shows the ZBOT-1 hardware in the Microgravity Science Glovebox (MSG) unit of the station. The main focus of this experiment was to investigate the self-pressurization and boiling that occurs in a sealed tank due to local and global heating, and the feasibility of tank pressure control via subcooled axial jet mixing. In this experiment, the complicated interaction of the jet flow with the ullage (vapor volume) in microgravity was carefully studied.Microgravity jet mixing data was also collected across a wide range of scaled flow and heat transfer parameters to characterize the time constants for tank pressure reduction, and the thresholds for geyser (liquid fountain) formation, including its stability, and penetration depth through the ullage volume. Along with very accurate pressure and local temperature sensor measurements, Particle Image Velocimetry (PIV) was performed to obtain whole-field flow velocity measurements to validate a Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) model.Figure 3. Validation of ZBOT CFD Model Predictions for fluid flow and deformation of a spherical ullage in microgravity by a subcooled liquid jet mixing against ZBOT experimental results: (a) Model prediction of ullage position and deformation and flow vortex structures during subcooled jet mixing; (b) PIV image capture of flow vortex structures during jet mixing; (c) Ullage deformation captured by white light imaging; and (d) CFD model depiction of temperature contours during subcooled jet mixing. (ZBOT-1 Experiment, 2018) Credit: Dr. Mohammad Kassemi, Case Western Reserve UniversitySome of the interesting findings of the ZBOT-1experiment are as follows:Provided the first tank self-pressurization rate data in microgravity under controlled conditions that can be used for estimating the tank insulation requirements. Results also showed that classical self-pressurization is quite fragile in microgravity and nucleate boiling can occur at hotspots on the tank wall even at moderate heat fluxes that do not induce boiling on Earth.Proved that ZBO pressure control is feasible and effective in microgravity using subcooled jet mixing, but also demonstrated that microgravity ullage-jet interaction does not follow the expected classical regime patterns (see Figure 3).Enabled observation of unexpected cavitation during subcooled jet mixing, leading to massive phase change at both sides of the screened Liquid Acquisition Device (LAD) (see Figure 4). If this type of phase change occurs in a propellant tank, it can lead to vapor ingestion through the LAD and disruption of liquid flow in the transfer line, potentially leading to engine failure.Developed a state-of-the-art two-phase CFD model validated by over 30 microgravity case studies (an example of which is shown in Figure 3). ZBOT CFD models are currently used as an effective tool for propellant tank scaleup design by several aerospace companies participating in the NASA tipping point opportunity and the NASA Human Landing System (HLS) program.Figure 4. White light image captures of the intact single hemispherical ullage in ZBOT tank before depressurization by the subcooled jet (left) and after subcooled jet mixing pressure collapse that led to massive phase change bubble generation due to cavitation at the LAD (right). (ZBOT-1 Experiment, 2018). Credit: Dr. Mohammad Kassemi, Case Western Reserve UniversityThe ZBOT-NC Experiment: Non-Condensable Gas EffectsNon-condensable gases (NCGs) are used as pressurants to extract liquid for engine operations and tank-to-tank transfer. The second experiment, ZBOT-NC will investigate the effect of NCGs on the sealed tank self-pressurization and on pressure control by axial jet mixing. Two inert gases with quite different molecular sizes, Xenon, and Neon, will be used as the non-condensable pressurants. To achieve pressure control or reduction, vapor molecules must reach the liquid-vapor interface that is being cooled by the mixing jet and then cross the interface to the liquid side to condense.This study will focus on how in microgravity the non-condensable gases can slow down or resist the transport of vapor molecules to the liquid-vapor interface (transport resistance) and will clarify to what extent they may form a barrier at the interface and impede the passage of the vapor molecules across the interface to the liquid side (kinetic resistance). By affecting the interface conditions, the NCGs can also change the flow and thermal structures in the liquid.ZBOT-NC will use both local temperature sensor data and uniquely developed Quantum Dot Thermometry (QDT) diagnostics to collect nonintrusive whole-field temperature measurements to assess the effect of the non-condensable gases during both self-pressurization heating and jet mixing/cooling of the tank under weightlessness conditions. This experiment is scheduled to fly to the International Space Station in early 2025, and more than 300 different microgravity tests are planned. Results from these tests will also enable the ZBOT CFD model to be further developed and validated to include the non-condensable gas effects with physical and numerical fidelity.The ZBOT-DP Experiment: Droplet Phase Change EffectsZBO active pressure control can also be accomplished via injection of subcooled liquid droplets through an axial spray-bar directly into the ullage or vapor volume. This mechanism is very promising, but its performance has not yet been tested in microgravity. Evaporation of droplets consumes heat that is supplied by the hot vapor surrounding the droplets and produces vapor that is at a much lower saturation temperature. As a result, both the temperature and the pressure of the ullage vapor volume are reduced. Droplet injection can also be used to cool down the hot walls of an empty propellant tank before a tank-to-tank transfer or filling operation. Furthermore, droplets can be created during the propellant sloshing caused by acceleration of the spacecraft, and these droplets then undergo phase change and heat transfer. This heat transfer can cause a pressure collapse that may lead to cavitation or a massive liquid-to-vapor phase change. The behavior of droplet populations in microgravity will be drastically different compared to that on Earth.The ZBOT-DP experiment will investigate the disintegration, coalescence (droplets merging together), phase change, and transport and trajectory characteristics of droplet populations and their effects on the tank pressure in microgravity. Particular attention will also be devoted to the interaction of the droplets with a heated tank wall, which can lead to flash evaporation subject to complications caused by the Liedenfrost effect (when liquid droplets propel away from a heated surface and thus cannot cool the tank wall). These complicated phenomena have not been scientifically examined in microgravity and must be resolved to assess the feasibility and performance of droplet injection as a pressure and temperature control mechanism in microgravity.Back to Planet EarthThis NASA-sponsored fundamental research is now helping commercial providers of future landing systems for human explorers. Blue Origin and Lockheed Martin, participants in NASA’s Human Landing Systems program, are using data from the ZBOT experiments to inform future spacecraft designs.Cryogenic fluid management and use of hydrogen as a fuel are not limited to space applications. Clean green energy provided by hydrogen may one day fuel airplanes, ships, and trucks on Earth, yielding enormous climate and economic benefits. By forming the scientific foundation of ZBO cryogenic fluid management for space exploration, the ZBOT science experiments and CFD model development will also help to reap the benefits of hydrogen as a fuel here on Earth.Project LeadDr. Mohammad Kassemi (Dept Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering, Case Western Reserve University)Sponsoring OrganizationBiological and Physical Sciences (BPS) Division, NASA Science Mission Directorate (SMD)

NASA’s Zero-Boil-Off Tank experiments address the challenge of managing cryogenic propellants in space, crucial for future Moon and Mars missions, with potential Earth-bound benefits in...

Gateway Space Station Full Configuration

Figure 1. The Gateway space station—humanity’s first space station around the Moon—will be capable of being refueled in space. Credit: NASA, Alberto Bertolin, Bradley Reynolds

NASA’s Zero-Boil-Off Tank experiments address the challenge of managing cryogenic propellants in space, crucial for future Moon and Mars missions, with potential Earth-bound benefits in hydrogen energy applications.

Do we have enough fuel to get to our destination? This is probably one of the first questions that comes to mind whenever your family gets ready to embark on a road trip. If the trip is long, you will need to visit gas stations along your route to refuel during your travel.

NASA is grappling with similar issues as it gets ready to embark on a sustainable mission back to the Moon and plans future missions to Mars. But while your car’s fuel is gasoline, which can be safely and indefinitely stored as a liquid in the car’s gas tank, spacecraft fuels are volatile cryogenic liquid propellants that must be maintained at extremely low temperatures and guarded from environmental heat leaks into the spacecraft’s propellant tank. And while there is already an established network of commercial gas stations in place to make refueling your car a cinch, there are no cryogenic refueling stations or depots at the Moon or on the way to Mars.

Furthermore, storing volatile propellant for a long time and transferring it from an in-space depot tank to a spacecraft’s fuel tank under microgravity conditions will not be easy since the underlying microgravity fluid physics affecting such operations is not well understood. Even with today’s technology, preserving cryogenic fuels in space beyond several days is not possible and tank-to-tank fuel transfer has never been previously performed or tested in space.

Propellant Management in Space: Overcoming Boil-Off

Heat conducted through support structures or from the radiative space environment can penetrate even the formidable Multi-Layer Insulation (MLI) systems of in-space propellant tanks, leading to boil-off or vaporization of the propellant and causing tank self-pressurization. The current practice is to guard against over-pressurizing the tank and endangering its structural integrity by venting the boil-off vapor into space.

Onboard propellants are also used to cool down the hot transfer lines and the walls of an empty spacecraft tank before a fuel transfer and filling operation can take place. Thus, precious fuel is continuously wasted during both storage and transfer operations, rendering long-duration expeditions—especially a human Mars mission—infeasible using current passive propellant tank pressure control methods.

Introducing ZBO: A New Horizon in Fuel Efficiency

Zero-Boil-Off (ZBO) or Reduced Boil-Off (RBO) technologies provide an innovative and effective means to replace the current passive tank pressure control design. This method relies on a complex combination of active, gravity-dependent mixing and energy removal processes that allow maintenance of safe tank pressure with zero or significantly reduced fuel loss.

Zero Boil-off Storage and Transfer: A Transformative Space Technology

At the heart of the ZBO pressure control system are two proposed active mixing and cooling mechanisms to counter tank self-pressurization. The first is based on intermittent, forced, subcooled jet mixing of the propellant and involves complex, dynamic, gravity-dependent interaction between the jet and the ullage (vapor volume) to control the condensation and evaporation phase change at the liquid-vapor interface.

The second mechanism uses subcooled droplet injection via a spraybar in the ullage to control tank pressure and temperature. While the latter option is promising and gaining prominence, it is more complex and has never been tested in microgravity where the phase change and transport behavior of droplet populations can be very different and nonintuitive compared to those on Earth.

Although the dynamic ZBO approach is technologically complex, it promises an impressive advantage over the currently used passive methods. An assessment of one nuclear propulsion concept for Mars transport estimated that the passive boil-off losses for a large liquid hydrogen tank carrying 38 tons of fuel for a three-year mission to Mars would be approximately 16 tons/year. The proposed ZBO system would provide a 42% saving of propellant mass per year.

These numbers also imply that with a passive system, all the fuel carried for a three-year Mars mission would be lost to boil-off, rendering such a mission infeasible without resorting to the transformative ZBO technology.

The ZBO approach provides a promising method, but before such a complex technological and operational transformation can be fully developed, implemented, and demonstrated in space, important and decisive scientific questions that impact its engineering implementation and microgravity performance must be clarified and resolved.

The Zero-Boil-Off Tank (ZBOT) Microgravity Science Experiments

The Zero Boil-off Tank (ZBOT) Experiments are being undertaken to form a scientific foundation for the development of the transformative ZBO propellant preservation method. Following the recommendation of a ZBOT science review panel comprised of members from aerospace industries, academia, and NASA, it was decided to perform the proposed investigation as a series of three small-scale science experiments to be conducted onboard the International Space Station. The three experiments outlined below build upon each other to address key science questions related to ZBO cryogenic fluid management of propellants in space.

Astronaut Joseph Acaba Installing ZBOT Hardware

Figure 2. Astronaut Joseph M. Acaba installing ZBOT Hardware in the Microgravity Science Glovebox aboard the International Space Station. Credit: NASA

The ZBOT-1 Experiment: Self-Pressurization & Jet Mixing

The first experiment in the series was carried out on the station in the 2017-2018 timeframe. Figure 2 shows the ZBOT-1 hardware in the Microgravity Science Glovebox (MSG) unit of the station. The main focus of this experiment was to investigate the self-pressurization and boiling that occurs in a sealed tank due to local and global heating, and the feasibility of tank pressure control via subcooled axial jet mixing. In this experiment, the complicated interaction of the jet flow with the ullage (vapor volume) in microgravity was carefully studied.

Microgravity jet mixing data was also collected across a wide range of scaled flow and heat transfer parameters to characterize the time constants for tank pressure reduction, and the thresholds for geyser (liquid fountain) formation, including its stability, and penetration depth through the ullage volume. Along with very accurate pressure and local temperature sensor measurements, Particle Image Velocimetry (PIV) was performed to obtain whole-field flow velocity measurements to validate a Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) model.

Validation of ZBOT CFD Model Predictions

Figure 3. Validation of ZBOT CFD Model Predictions for fluid flow and deformation of a spherical ullage in microgravity by a subcooled liquid jet mixing against ZBOT experimental results: (a) Model prediction of ullage position and deformation and flow vortex structures during subcooled jet mixing; (b) PIV image capture of flow vortex structures during jet mixing; (c) Ullage deformation captured by white light imaging; and (d) CFD model depiction of temperature contours during subcooled jet mixing. (ZBOT-1 Experiment, 2018) Credit: Dr. Mohammad Kassemi, Case Western Reserve University

Some of the interesting findings of the ZBOT-1experiment are as follows:

  1. Provided the first tank self-pressurization rate data in microgravity under controlled conditions that can be used for estimating the tank insulation requirements. Results also showed that classical self-pressurization is quite fragile in microgravity and nucleate boiling can occur at hotspots on the tank wall even at moderate heat fluxes that do not induce boiling on Earth.
  2. Proved that ZBO pressure control is feasible and effective in microgravity using subcooled jet mixing, but also demonstrated that microgravity ullage-jet interaction does not follow the expected classical regime patterns (see Figure 3).
  3. Enabled observation of unexpected cavitation during subcooled jet mixing, leading to massive phase change at both sides of the screened Liquid Acquisition Device (LAD) (see Figure 4). If this type of phase change occurs in a propellant tank, it can lead to vapor ingestion through the LAD and disruption of liquid flow in the transfer line, potentially leading to engine failure.
  4. Developed a state-of-the-art two-phase CFD model validated by over 30 microgravity case studies (an example of which is shown in Figure 3). ZBOT CFD models are currently used as an effective tool for propellant tank scaleup design by several aerospace companies participating in the NASA tipping point opportunity and the NASA Human Landing System (HLS) program.
Intact Single Hemispherical Ullage in ZBOT Tank

Figure 4. White light image captures of the intact single hemispherical ullage in ZBOT tank before depressurization by the subcooled jet (left) and after subcooled jet mixing pressure collapse that led to massive phase change bubble generation due to cavitation at the LAD (right). (ZBOT-1 Experiment, 2018). Credit: Dr. Mohammad Kassemi, Case Western Reserve University

The ZBOT-NC Experiment: Non-Condensable Gas Effects

Non-condensable gases (NCGs) are used as pressurants to extract liquid for engine operations and tank-to-tank transfer. The second experiment, ZBOT-NC will investigate the effect of NCGs on the sealed tank self-pressurization and on pressure control by axial jet mixing. Two inert gases with quite different molecular sizes, Xenon, and Neon, will be used as the non-condensable pressurants. To achieve pressure control or reduction, vapor molecules must reach the liquid-vapor interface that is being cooled by the mixing jet and then cross the interface to the liquid side to condense.

This study will focus on how in microgravity the non-condensable gases can slow down or resist the transport of vapor molecules to the liquid-vapor interface (transport resistance) and will clarify to what extent they may form a barrier at the interface and impede the passage of the vapor molecules across the interface to the liquid side (kinetic resistance). By affecting the interface conditions, the NCGs can also change the flow and thermal structures in the liquid.

ZBOT-NC will use both local temperature sensor data and uniquely developed Quantum Dot Thermometry (QDT) diagnostics to collect nonintrusive whole-field temperature measurements to assess the effect of the non-condensable gases during both self-pressurization heating and jet mixing/cooling of the tank under weightlessness conditions. This experiment is scheduled to fly to the International Space Station in early 2025, and more than 300 different microgravity tests are planned. Results from these tests will also enable the ZBOT CFD model to be further developed and validated to include the non-condensable gas effects with physical and numerical fidelity.

The ZBOT-DP Experiment: Droplet Phase Change Effects

ZBO active pressure control can also be accomplished via injection of subcooled liquid droplets through an axial spray-bar directly into the ullage or vapor volume. This mechanism is very promising, but its performance has not yet been tested in microgravity. Evaporation of droplets consumes heat that is supplied by the hot vapor surrounding the droplets and produces vapor that is at a much lower saturation temperature. As a result, both the temperature and the pressure of the ullage vapor volume are reduced. Droplet injection can also be used to cool down the hot walls of an empty propellant tank before a tank-to-tank transfer or filling operation. Furthermore, droplets can be created during the propellant sloshing caused by acceleration of the spacecraft, and these droplets then undergo phase change and heat transfer. This heat transfer can cause a pressure collapse that may lead to cavitation or a massive liquid-to-vapor phase change. The behavior of droplet populations in microgravity will be drastically different compared to that on Earth.

The ZBOT-DP experiment will investigate the disintegration, coalescence (droplets merging together), phase change, and transport and trajectory characteristics of droplet populations and their effects on the tank pressure in microgravity. Particular attention will also be devoted to the interaction of the droplets with a heated tank wall, which can lead to flash evaporation subject to complications caused by the Liedenfrost effect (when liquid droplets propel away from a heated surface and thus cannot cool the tank wall). These complicated phenomena have not been scientifically examined in microgravity and must be resolved to assess the feasibility and performance of droplet injection as a pressure and temperature control mechanism in microgravity.

Back to Planet Earth

This NASA-sponsored fundamental research is now helping commercial providers of future landing systems for human explorers. Blue Origin and Lockheed Martin, participants in NASA’s Human Landing Systems program, are using data from the ZBOT experiments to inform future spacecraft designs.

Cryogenic fluid management and use of hydrogen as a fuel are not limited to space applications. Clean green energy provided by hydrogen may one day fuel airplanes, ships, and trucks on Earth, yielding enormous climate and economic benefits. By forming the scientific foundation of ZBO cryogenic fluid management for space exploration, the ZBOT science experiments and CFD model development will also help to reap the benefits of hydrogen as a fuel here on Earth.

Project Lead

Dr. Mohammad Kassemi (Dept Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering, Case Western Reserve University)

Sponsoring Organization

Biological and Physical Sciences (BPS) Division, NASA Science Mission Directorate (SMD)

Read the full story here.
Photos courtesy of

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Billionaire hedge fund founder Tom Steyer is running for governor

Billionaire hedge fund founder, climate change warrior and major Democratic donor Tom Steyer is running for governor. Fossil fuel and migrant detention facility investments will likely draw attacks from his fellow Democrats.

Billionaire hedge fund founder Tom Steyer announced Wednesday that he is running for governor of California, arguing that he is not beholden to special interests and can take on corporations that are making life unaffordable in the state.“The richest people in America think that they earned everything themselves. Bulls—, man. That’s so ridiculous,” Steyer said in an online video announcing his campaign. “We have a broken government. It’s been bought by corporations and my question is: Who do you think is going to change that? Sacramento politicians are afraid to change up this system. I’m not. They’re going to hate this. Bring it on.” Protesters hold placards and banners during a rally against Whitehaven Coal in Sydney in 2014. Dozens of protesters and activists gathered downtown to protest against the controversial massive Maules Creek coal mine project in northern New South Wales. (Saeed Khan / AFP/Getty Images) Steyer, 68, founded Farallon Capital Management, one of the nation’s largest hedge funds, and left it in 2012 after 26 years. Since his departure, he has become a global environmental activist and a major donor to Democratic candidates and causes. But the hedge firm’s investments — notably a giant coal mine in Australia that cleared 3,700 acres of koala habitat and a company that runs migrant detention centers on the U.S.-Mexico border for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement — will make him susceptible to political attack by his gubernatorial rivals. Steyer has expressed regret for his involvement in such projects, saying it was why he left Farallon and started focusing his energy on fighting climate change. Democratic presidential candidate Tom Steyer addresses a crowd during a presidential primary election-night party in Columbia, S.C. (Sean Rayford / Getty Images) Steyer previously flirted with running for governor and the U.S. Senate but decided against it, instead opting to run for president in 2020. He dropped out after spending nearly $342 million on his campaign, which gained little traction before he ended his run after the South Carolina primary.Next year’s gubernatorial race is in flux, after former Vice President Kamala Harris and Sen. Alex Padilla decided not to run and Proposition 50, the successful Democratic effort to redraw congressional districts, consumed all of the political oxygen during an off-year election.Most voters are undecided about who they would like to replace Gov. Gavin Newsom, who cannot run for reelection because of term limits, according to a poll released this month by the UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies and co-sponsored by The Times. Steyer had the support of 1% of voters in the survey. In recent years, Steyer has been a longtime benefactor of progressive causes, most recently spending $12 million to support the redistricting ballot measure. But when he was the focus of one of the ads, rumors spiraled that he was considering a run for governor.In prior California ballot initiatives, Steyer successfully supported efforts to close a corporate tax loophole and to raise tobacco taxes, and fought oil-industry-backed efforts to roll back environmental law.His campaign platform is to build 1 million homes in four years, lower energy costs by ending monopolies, make preschool and community college free and ban corporate contributions to political action committees in California elections.Steyer’s brother Jim, the leader of Common Sense Media, and former Biden administration U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy are aiming to put an initiative on next year’s ballot to protect children from social media, specifically the chatbots that have been accused of prompting young people to kill themselves. Newsom recently vetoed a bill aimed at addressing this artificial intelligence issue.

Climate
Activism
Government

This Ohio County Banned Commercial Wind and Solar. Not So Fast, Residents Said.

This story was originally published by Canary Media and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Restrictions on solar and wind farms are proliferating around the country, with scores of local governments going as far as to forbid large-scale clean-energy developments. Now, residents of an Ohio county are pushing back on one such ban on renewables—a move that […]

This story was originally published by Canary Media and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Restrictions on solar and wind farms are proliferating around the country, with scores of local governments going as far as to forbid large-scale clean-energy developments. Now, residents of an Ohio county are pushing back on one such ban on renewables—a move that could be a model for other places where clean energy faces severe restrictions. Ohio has become a hotspot for anti-clean-energy rules. As of this fall, more than three dozen counties in the state have outlawed utility-scale solar in at least one of their townships. In Richland County, the ban came this summer, when county commissioners voted to bar economically significant solar and wind projects in 11 of the county’s 18 townships. Almost immediately, residents formed a group called the Richland County Citizens for Property Rights and Job Development to try and reverse the stricture.  ​“To me, it just is bad for the county — the whole county, not just one or two townships.” By September, they’d notched a crucial first victory, collecting enough signatures to put the issue on the ballot. Next May, when Ohioans head to the polls to vote in primary races, residents of Richland County will weigh in on a referendum that could ultimately reverse the ban. It’s the first time a county’s renewable-energy ban will be on the ballot in Ohio. From the very beginning, ​“it was just a whirlwind,” said Christina O’Millian, a leader of the Richland County group. Like most others, she didn’t know a ban was under consideration until shortly before July 17, when the commission voted on it. “We felt as constituents that we just hadn’t been heard,” O’Millian said. She views renewable energy as a way to attract more economic development to the county while reining in planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions. Brian McPeek, another of the group’s leaders and a manager for the local chapter of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, sees solar projects as huge job opportunities for the union’s members. ​“They provide a ton of work, a ton of man-hours.” Many petition signers ​“didn’t want the commissioners to make that decision for them,” said Morgan Carroll, a county resident who helped gather signatures. ​“And there was a lot of respect for farmers having their own property rights” to decide whether to lease their land. While the Ohio Power Siting Board retains general authority over where electricity generation is built, a 2021 state law known as Senate Bill 52 lets counties ban solar and wind farms in all or part of their territories. Meanwhile, Ohio law prevents local governments from blocking fossil-fuel or nuclear projects. The Richland County community group is using a process under SB 52 to challenge the renewable-energy ban via referendum. Under that law, the organization had just 30 days from the commissioners’ vote to collect signatures in support of the ballot measure. All told, more than 4,300 people signed the petition, though after the county Board of Elections rejected hundreds of signatures as invalid, the final count ended up at 3,380—just 60 more than the required threshold of 8 percent of the number of votes in the last governor’s election. Although the Richland County ban came as a surprise to many, it was months in the making. In late January, Sharon Township’s zoning committee asked the county to forbid large wind and solar projects there. After discussion at their February 6 meeting, the county commissioners wrote to all 18 townships in Richland to see if their trustees also wanted a ban. A draft fill-in-the-blanks resolution accompanied the letter. Signed resolutions came back from 11 townships. The commissioners then took up the issue again on July 17. Roughly two dozen residents came to the meeting, and a majority of those who spoke on the proposal were against it. Commissioners deferred to the township trustees. “The township trustees who were in favor of the prohibition strongly believe that they were representing the wishes of their residents, who are farming communities, who are not fans of seeing potential farmland being taken up for large wind and solar,” Commissioner Tony Vero told Canary Media. He pointed out that the ban doesn’t cover the seven remaining townships and all municipal areas. ​“I just thought it was a pretty good compromise,” he said. The concerns over putting solar panels or wind turbines on potential farmland echo land-use arguments that have long dogged rural clean-energy developments—and which have been elevated into federal policy by the Trump administration this year. Groups linked to the fossil-fuel industry have pushed these arguments in Ohio and beyond. “It’s a false narrative that they care about prime farmland,” said Bella Bogin, director of programs for Ohio Citizen Action, which helped the Richland County group collect signatures to petition for the referendum. Income from leasing some land for renewable energy can help farmers keep property in their families, and plenty of acreage currently goes to growing crops for fuel—not food. ​“We can’t eat ethanol corn,” she added. Under Ohio’s SB 52, counties—not townships—have the authority to issue blanket prohibitions over large solar and wind farms, with limited exceptions for projects already in the grid manager’s queue. In Richland County’s case, the commissioners decided to defer to townships even though they didn’t have to. The choice shows how SB 52 has led to ​“an inconsistently applied, informal framework that has created confusion about the roles of counties, townships, and the Ohio Power Siting Board,” said Chris Tavenor, general counsel for the Ohio Environmental Council. Under the law, ​“county commissioners should be carefully considering all the factors at play,” rather than deferring to townships. “I think it’s important for my children to have…the opportunities that go along with having wind and solar.” Even without a restriction in place, SB 52 lets counties nix new solar or wind farms on a case-by-case basis before they’re considered by the Ohio Power Siting Board. And when projects do go to the state regulator, counties and townships appoint two ad hoc decision-makers who vote on cases with the rest of the board. As electricity prices continue to rise across Ohio, Tavenor hopes the state’s General Assembly will reconsider SB 52, which he and other advocates say is unfairly restrictive toward solar and wind—two of the cheapest and quickest energy sources to deploy. “Lawmakers should be looking to repeal it and make a system that actually responds to the problems facing our electric grid right now,” he said. Commissioner Vero, for his part, said he has mixed feelings about the referendum. “It’s America, and if there’s enough signatures to get on the ballot, more power to people,” he said. However, he objects to the fact that SB 52 allows voters countywide to sign the petition, even if they don’t live in one of the townships with a ban, and said he hopes the legislature will amend the law to prevent that from happening elsewhere. Yet referendum supporters say the ban matters for the entire county. “It affects everybody, whether you live in a city, a township, or a village,” McPeek said. As he sees it, restrictions will deter investment from not only companies that build wind and solar but also those that want to be able to access renewable energy. ​“To me, it just is bad for the county—the whole county, not just one or two townships.” Renewable-energy projects also provide substantial amounts of tax revenue or similar PILOT payments for counties, helping fund schools and other local needs. ​“I think it’s important for my children to have more clean electric [energy] and all the opportunities that go along with having wind and solar,” Carroll said. Now that the referendum is on the ballot, the Richland County group will work to build more support and get out the vote next spring. ​“Education and outreach in the community is basically what we’re going to focus on for the campaign coming up in the next few months,” O’Millian said. “So now it goes to a countywide vote, and the population of the county gets to make that decision, instead of three guys,” McPeek said.

Climate
Energy
Government

Ian McEwan’s Haunting Vision of the Future

It’s perhaps fair to observe that Ian McEwan has entered the elegiac phase of his career. It happens to us all eventually, I suppose, whether one makes donuts or novels; eventually pondering what came before takes up most of your dwindling time. He looked back at the past in his last two novels: Machines Like Me (2019) is set in a 1980s England depicted through an alt-historical lens (the Brits lost the Falklands war to Argentina, but, in a version of the country where Alan Turing still lives, flying cars already exist), and Lessons (2022), a portrait of a feckless boomer born the same year McEwan was, 1948, spans 70 years of its protagonist’s unremarkable, faintly gilded life, one that never quite escapes the shadow of a sexual assault at the hands of his piano teacher, Ms. Cornell, when he was 14. McEwan’s fiction has always been about the need to make meaning from catastrophe, to awaken or shield the moral imagination through the intellect, and in his new book, What We Can Know, the catastrophe is the future and the elegy is for our species, as the oceans rise and prospects grow dour.The book concerns a literary scholar, Thomas Metcalfe, in a diminished England, one McEwan imagines as half-submerged and wholly disillusioned by 2119. The country’s green fields have turned into inland deltas, the southern coast has been eaten by what survivors call The Inundation—erosion of the coasts and rewriting of the world’s topography by the onrush of salt water, spurred not just by climate change but also by a catastrophic tsunami in the Atlantic caused by an errant Russian nuclear missile that landed short of America—and what remains of civilization has reorganized itself around an archipelago in which travel is hard and the only growth industries are data recovery and atmospheric management.McEwan sketches a scarily plausible dystopia, in which Civilization hasn’t ended; after decades of hanging by a thread it has stabilized, salvaged by our weary successors who are forever bound to pay for our excesses. People move through the future quietly, their lives bracketed by scarcity and the faint hum of desalination plants. Interracial love has rendered most people honey-colored, just as the 1998 movie Bulworth predicted would become a necessity, and those with pale skin now face discrimination and othering; there was no stopping those from the global south from moving north to seek higher ground and cooler climates, especially after Pakistan and India’s nuclear exchange.In this world the humanities have become an archival curiosity and Metcalfe, a professor at the underfunded University of the South Downs, teaches to near-empty rooms. He is a relic of the humanities in a world that no longer values them, “a poor cousin to the water scientists,” as he puts it. His colleagues envy the grant money that still flows to the climatologists and biotechnologists in the new “Renaissance of Necessity.” His own work of retracing the biographies of dead poets and their spouses from an archive of the entire internet, made possible only by Nigerian ingenuity, is a ritual of mourning, an act of faith performed in the ruins of meaning. The old moral questions persist, but without the luxury of conviction. McEwan’s novels have grown more austere, more haunted by the sense that the moral and narrative architectures that once defined Western civilization have finally given out.When Metcalfe refers to the twenty-first century as the “century of hubris,” he’s not sneering, he’s nostalgic. His generation has a life expectancy of 64. Electronics are scarce, plane travel nonexistent. Those born into collapse can no longer imagine progress, only curation, it seems. Amid this landscape of loss, Metcalfe begins his excavation of Francis Blundy, a prominent early-millennial poet who once read a cycle of sonnets called “A Corona for Vivien” to a coterie of literati at a dinner in 2014. The poem is ostensibly about his life with his wife, but comes in later years to achieve widespread and enduring fame largely because of the controversy surrounding its nonexistence—no copy of it exists—and the persistent belief that it was a suppressed masterpiece containing profound truths about a changing world during the years of what twenty-second-century citizens have come to call “The Derangement.” That is the time we the reader are living through now, when the world is on a collision course with ever more calamitous climate change–powered disasters. We are promised a future that is One Battle After Another with the elements, in which no political solutions seem possible. Over time, McEwan’s novels have grown more austere, more haunted by the sense that the moral and narrative architectures that once defined Western civilization—its faith in reason, progress, democratic governance—have finally given out.The world of What We Can Know is one of threadbare survival and epistemological doubt. It’s a book about the failure of understanding, and it reads like the work of a man who has accepted that no form of mastery, literary or otherwise, will save us. Yet the mastery is there for all to see: McEwan’s prose has never been looser or more humane. Gone is the mechanical precision that once made his moral contraptions click. What remains is an older writer’s acceptance of disorder, an embrace of the fog. The sentences are warm even when the world they describe has cooled due to nuclear dust settling into the atmosphere as The Derangement faded. The mystery of the poem’s disappearance and the suggestion that it might have been suppressed, or bought off by oil interests, or simply burned, drives the narrative as Metcalfe digs deeper into the moral archaeology of Blundy’s life. Blundy is vain, brilliant, intermittently tender, and wholly convinced that his intellect confers moral immunity. Vivien, a scholar of the Romantic poet John Clare, has allowed her own academic career to calcify in service of her husband’s as a poet. McEwan renders the contours of her domestic life—the long dinners for “the Barn set,” the ironing, the peeled potatoes for the poet’s birthday—as both parody of how much information those living through The Derangement collected digitally about their lives and as a lament for where it was all headed. Hers is a mind turned servant to another’s ambition, the life of the highly educated housewife whose tragedy is self-knowledge.The revelations in her confession arrive with the deliberate rhythm of memory loosening its hold. Vivien recounts her earlier marriage to Percy Greene, a kind craftsman and luthier whose mind begins to fray with Alzheimer’s. It is while caring for Percy that she meets Francis, who charms her, seduces her, and eventually persuades her that the sick man’s death would be merciful—an event he brings about himself, with a mallet. Francis, having inherited both his widow and his violin, begins the slow work of absorbing the dead man’s life into his own art.That theft—and its moral, emotional, and artistic dimensions—forms the novel’s true moral crisis. When, years later, Francis reads “A Corona for Vivien” aloud at a dinner table thick with smoke and brandy, she recognizes its falseness immediately. The poem, a lush meditation on love, mortality, and the natural world, is the inverse of everything the man believes. “I don’t like country walks,” he once told her. “I don’t know the names of flowers and I don’t give a damn.” In that moment she understands that he has not only stolen her husband’s essence but forged a counterfeit of her own devotion. What Metcalfe finds is not the poem itself but explanation of its absence, made manifest in the form of Vivien’s confession. Her memoir, retrieved from a sealed container beside her first husband’s violin, rewrites the story entirely. It reveals a marriage rooted in exploitation, a literary myth built on cruelty. Francis, a self-anointed genius who dismissed climate change as hysteria, depended on Vivien’s labor and intellect even as he erased them. That night, after the guests have gone, Vivien rolls up the poem’s vellum scroll and feeds it into the dairy stove. The act is both vengeance and mercy: the burning of a false idol. Her decision to destroy his work, committing it to the fire on the night of its triumph, is both punishment and release, the act of a woman reclaiming the one power left to her: the right to silence him.Climate change here is not backdrop but the lens through which all the characters must see the world. It muddies everything: the meanings of guilt, of authorship, of love. The irony that Metcalfe’s entire project—his attempt to reconstruct a bygone world from fragments—is perhaps animated by the same delusion that animated Blundy’s poetry does not escape McEwan. The belief that language can fix what nature destroys, or at least allow us a way past it, lives in both the protagonist and the object of his obsession here. He pores over Vivien’s letters, texts, and shopping lists as if they were fossils, “tokens of vitality” in an era when vitality itself has become an endangered condition. McEwan uses that obsession to mirror our own digital archiving of catastrophe, the endless documentation that substitutes for action.Francis’s climate denial, meanwhile, is more than characterization; it is McEwan’s indictment of the twenty-first-century elite class that refuses to imagine the crisis as worth sacrificing our decadent comforts and entitlements for. The poet’s failure to perceive the natural world except as metaphor becomes, in hindsight, a metaphor for civilization’s failure to perceive its own ending. McEwan, who turned 77 this year, writes with the lucidity of a craftsman who knows he’s constructing his own monument to a future he will never know. If Atonement asked whether fiction could redeem guilt, What We Can Know suggests that the very possibility of redemption might be foolhardy.Like McEwan’s most famous novel, Atonement, What We Can Know has a nested structure—beginning with Metcalfe’s frame, then Vivien’s confession, and the recovered fragments of Francis’s correspondence—and it recalls Atonement, too, in its fascination with the ethics of narrative control. Francis Blundy, in his climate-denying, classicist arrogance, is an emblem of the old order, one that governs our world today: male, murderous, self-mythologizing, possessed by delusions that are driving us all off a cliff. Vivien’s corrective isn’t enough to save her first husband, or the world, from Francis’s harm. There is no justice to be found. If Atonement asked whether fiction could redeem guilt, What We Can Know suggests that the very possibility of redemption might be foolhardy. But continue we must; the future McEwan envisions is grim but not loveless. Metcalfe, trudging between the archives and his coastal home, finds an unexpected companion in his colleague Rose Church, and their late-blooming affection, growing into an on-again, off-again literature department romance—halting, courteous, tinged with exhaustion—gives the novel its fragile heartbeat. When Rose reveals her pregnancy near the end, McEwan resists sentimentality. The child’s birth is not salvation; it is continuation, “the next link in the chain of futility and care.” Still, that flicker of human persistence feels like grace.If 2011’s Solar was McEwan’s comic treatment of environmental hubris, What We Can Know is its deeper, more tragic echo. Here, climate change functions as the novel’s moral solvent, dissolving the old binaries—guilt and innocence, art and theft, preservation and erasure—until all that remains is entropy. “The imagined poem triumphs over the real,” Metcalfe concludes, “because the imagination is all we have left.” In that single sentence lies both McEwan’s despair and his faith: despair that human artifice has supplanted the natural world, faith that it might still bear witness to the loss.

It’s perhaps fair to observe that Ian McEwan has entered the elegiac phase of his career. It happens to us all eventually, I suppose, whether one makes donuts or novels; eventually pondering what came before takes up most of your dwindling time. He looked back at the past in his last two novels: Machines Like Me (2019) is set in a 1980s England depicted through an alt-historical lens (the Brits lost the Falklands war to Argentina, but, in a version of the country where Alan Turing still lives, flying cars already exist), and Lessons (2022), a portrait of a feckless boomer born the same year McEwan was, 1948, spans 70 years of its protagonist’s unremarkable, faintly gilded life, one that never quite escapes the shadow of a sexual assault at the hands of his piano teacher, Ms. Cornell, when he was 14. McEwan’s fiction has always been about the need to make meaning from catastrophe, to awaken or shield the moral imagination through the intellect, and in his new book, What We Can Know, the catastrophe is the future and the elegy is for our species, as the oceans rise and prospects grow dour.The book concerns a literary scholar, Thomas Metcalfe, in a diminished England, one McEwan imagines as half-submerged and wholly disillusioned by 2119. The country’s green fields have turned into inland deltas, the southern coast has been eaten by what survivors call The Inundation—erosion of the coasts and rewriting of the world’s topography by the onrush of salt water, spurred not just by climate change but also by a catastrophic tsunami in the Atlantic caused by an errant Russian nuclear missile that landed short of America—and what remains of civilization has reorganized itself around an archipelago in which travel is hard and the only growth industries are data recovery and atmospheric management.McEwan sketches a scarily plausible dystopia, in which Civilization hasn’t ended; after decades of hanging by a thread it has stabilized, salvaged by our weary successors who are forever bound to pay for our excesses. People move through the future quietly, their lives bracketed by scarcity and the faint hum of desalination plants. Interracial love has rendered most people honey-colored, just as the 1998 movie Bulworth predicted would become a necessity, and those with pale skin now face discrimination and othering; there was no stopping those from the global south from moving north to seek higher ground and cooler climates, especially after Pakistan and India’s nuclear exchange.In this world the humanities have become an archival curiosity and Metcalfe, a professor at the underfunded University of the South Downs, teaches to near-empty rooms. He is a relic of the humanities in a world that no longer values them, “a poor cousin to the water scientists,” as he puts it. His colleagues envy the grant money that still flows to the climatologists and biotechnologists in the new “Renaissance of Necessity.” His own work of retracing the biographies of dead poets and their spouses from an archive of the entire internet, made possible only by Nigerian ingenuity, is a ritual of mourning, an act of faith performed in the ruins of meaning. The old moral questions persist, but without the luxury of conviction. McEwan’s novels have grown more austere, more haunted by the sense that the moral and narrative architectures that once defined Western civilization have finally given out.When Metcalfe refers to the twenty-first century as the “century of hubris,” he’s not sneering, he’s nostalgic. His generation has a life expectancy of 64. Electronics are scarce, plane travel nonexistent. Those born into collapse can no longer imagine progress, only curation, it seems. Amid this landscape of loss, Metcalfe begins his excavation of Francis Blundy, a prominent early-millennial poet who once read a cycle of sonnets called “A Corona for Vivien” to a coterie of literati at a dinner in 2014. The poem is ostensibly about his life with his wife, but comes in later years to achieve widespread and enduring fame largely because of the controversy surrounding its nonexistence—no copy of it exists—and the persistent belief that it was a suppressed masterpiece containing profound truths about a changing world during the years of what twenty-second-century citizens have come to call “The Derangement.” That is the time we the reader are living through now, when the world is on a collision course with ever more calamitous climate change–powered disasters. We are promised a future that is One Battle After Another with the elements, in which no political solutions seem possible. Over time, McEwan’s novels have grown more austere, more haunted by the sense that the moral and narrative architectures that once defined Western civilization—its faith in reason, progress, democratic governance—have finally given out.The world of What We Can Know is one of threadbare survival and epistemological doubt. It’s a book about the failure of understanding, and it reads like the work of a man who has accepted that no form of mastery, literary or otherwise, will save us. Yet the mastery is there for all to see: McEwan’s prose has never been looser or more humane. Gone is the mechanical precision that once made his moral contraptions click. What remains is an older writer’s acceptance of disorder, an embrace of the fog. The sentences are warm even when the world they describe has cooled due to nuclear dust settling into the atmosphere as The Derangement faded. The mystery of the poem’s disappearance and the suggestion that it might have been suppressed, or bought off by oil interests, or simply burned, drives the narrative as Metcalfe digs deeper into the moral archaeology of Blundy’s life. Blundy is vain, brilliant, intermittently tender, and wholly convinced that his intellect confers moral immunity. Vivien, a scholar of the Romantic poet John Clare, has allowed her own academic career to calcify in service of her husband’s as a poet. McEwan renders the contours of her domestic life—the long dinners for “the Barn set,” the ironing, the peeled potatoes for the poet’s birthday—as both parody of how much information those living through The Derangement collected digitally about their lives and as a lament for where it was all headed. Hers is a mind turned servant to another’s ambition, the life of the highly educated housewife whose tragedy is self-knowledge.The revelations in her confession arrive with the deliberate rhythm of memory loosening its hold. Vivien recounts her earlier marriage to Percy Greene, a kind craftsman and luthier whose mind begins to fray with Alzheimer’s. It is while caring for Percy that she meets Francis, who charms her, seduces her, and eventually persuades her that the sick man’s death would be merciful—an event he brings about himself, with a mallet. Francis, having inherited both his widow and his violin, begins the slow work of absorbing the dead man’s life into his own art.That theft—and its moral, emotional, and artistic dimensions—forms the novel’s true moral crisis. When, years later, Francis reads “A Corona for Vivien” aloud at a dinner table thick with smoke and brandy, she recognizes its falseness immediately. The poem, a lush meditation on love, mortality, and the natural world, is the inverse of everything the man believes. “I don’t like country walks,” he once told her. “I don’t know the names of flowers and I don’t give a damn.” In that moment she understands that he has not only stolen her husband’s essence but forged a counterfeit of her own devotion. What Metcalfe finds is not the poem itself but explanation of its absence, made manifest in the form of Vivien’s confession. Her memoir, retrieved from a sealed container beside her first husband’s violin, rewrites the story entirely. It reveals a marriage rooted in exploitation, a literary myth built on cruelty. Francis, a self-anointed genius who dismissed climate change as hysteria, depended on Vivien’s labor and intellect even as he erased them. That night, after the guests have gone, Vivien rolls up the poem’s vellum scroll and feeds it into the dairy stove. The act is both vengeance and mercy: the burning of a false idol. Her decision to destroy his work, committing it to the fire on the night of its triumph, is both punishment and release, the act of a woman reclaiming the one power left to her: the right to silence him.Climate change here is not backdrop but the lens through which all the characters must see the world. It muddies everything: the meanings of guilt, of authorship, of love. The irony that Metcalfe’s entire project—his attempt to reconstruct a bygone world from fragments—is perhaps animated by the same delusion that animated Blundy’s poetry does not escape McEwan. The belief that language can fix what nature destroys, or at least allow us a way past it, lives in both the protagonist and the object of his obsession here. He pores over Vivien’s letters, texts, and shopping lists as if they were fossils, “tokens of vitality” in an era when vitality itself has become an endangered condition. McEwan uses that obsession to mirror our own digital archiving of catastrophe, the endless documentation that substitutes for action.Francis’s climate denial, meanwhile, is more than characterization; it is McEwan’s indictment of the twenty-first-century elite class that refuses to imagine the crisis as worth sacrificing our decadent comforts and entitlements for. The poet’s failure to perceive the natural world except as metaphor becomes, in hindsight, a metaphor for civilization’s failure to perceive its own ending. McEwan, who turned 77 this year, writes with the lucidity of a craftsman who knows he’s constructing his own monument to a future he will never know. If Atonement asked whether fiction could redeem guilt, What We Can Know suggests that the very possibility of redemption might be foolhardy.Like McEwan’s most famous novel, Atonement, What We Can Know has a nested structure—beginning with Metcalfe’s frame, then Vivien’s confession, and the recovered fragments of Francis’s correspondence—and it recalls Atonement, too, in its fascination with the ethics of narrative control. Francis Blundy, in his climate-denying, classicist arrogance, is an emblem of the old order, one that governs our world today: male, murderous, self-mythologizing, possessed by delusions that are driving us all off a cliff. Vivien’s corrective isn’t enough to save her first husband, or the world, from Francis’s harm. There is no justice to be found. If Atonement asked whether fiction could redeem guilt, What We Can Know suggests that the very possibility of redemption might be foolhardy. But continue we must; the future McEwan envisions is grim but not loveless. Metcalfe, trudging between the archives and his coastal home, finds an unexpected companion in his colleague Rose Church, and their late-blooming affection, growing into an on-again, off-again literature department romance—halting, courteous, tinged with exhaustion—gives the novel its fragile heartbeat. When Rose reveals her pregnancy near the end, McEwan resists sentimentality. The child’s birth is not salvation; it is continuation, “the next link in the chain of futility and care.” Still, that flicker of human persistence feels like grace.If 2011’s Solar was McEwan’s comic treatment of environmental hubris, What We Can Know is its deeper, more tragic echo. Here, climate change functions as the novel’s moral solvent, dissolving the old binaries—guilt and innocence, art and theft, preservation and erasure—until all that remains is entropy. “The imagined poem triumphs over the real,” Metcalfe concludes, “because the imagination is all we have left.” In that single sentence lies both McEwan’s despair and his faith: despair that human artifice has supplanted the natural world, faith that it might still bear witness to the loss.

Climate
Crisis
Nature

Suggested Viewing

Talking Trees

Yes, trees can talk. They communicate through their roots. Please listen to what they have to say in this short film.

Forests
Extinction
Climate

Sounding the Alarm ~ America's Climate Crisis

"It's really hard being a fire family. Every day it's getting worse." -Brett, wife of Marin County Battalion Chief in California.Every day, Americans who live close to the land and sea face the dangers of climate change—from a firefighter in California, to a beekeeper in Arizona, to a climate refugee losing her home in Florida. The changing climate affects our food systems, water and way of life. These American families are in the trenches sacrificing everything while facing depression, PTSD, and suicide—collateral damage of a crisis unchecked. Award-winning filmmaker, Peter Goetz, captures America's faces and voices, shot in 2020 leading up to the presidential election. Goetz and the Biden campaign made history, producing the first national climate spot to run during a presidential election. But this film dives deeper into the American climate crisis to explore the lives of the people who are sounding the alarm, worried about their grandchildren’s future, asking, "If not us, then who?" This is a story of the resilience, perseverance, and ingenuity of the American people. Ever hopeful, they collectively take on a common enemy. As the young, Navajo solar visionary Brett Issac insists, "We've got to turn this train around before it's too late."

Climate
Crisis
Government

TripleF***

The spirit of a movement that sometimes reminds us of our young revolutionary self, who still believed that he:she could change the world. This green filmed documentary mirrors the global situation and the diversity of climate change related activism.6 continents, 3 dozen filmmakers, countless activists and seasoned scientists. It is not about just one person but about many who stand up. TripleF*** is a documentary on the global climate movement, containing material from six continents (North - and South America, Europe, Africa, Asia and Antarctica), filmed green by cooperating film teams on site. The topic of climate activism itself as a protagonist takes us on a global journey to activists' lives and forms a dialogue within. Why did so many young people became activists? What is life as an activist like, how do they deal with political stagnation, harsh criticism and even threats and why do they still continue? Very personal but not private - to protect the activists' privacy, sensitive topics are woven in as a fictional part. This is the first of 5 Episodes. In this episode, which also stands for itself as a midlength film, the history of climate change related activism is highlighted. In its core spirit of a holistic approach, the project is been realized similarly to its topic of the climate activists' movement: independent, global, green.

Climate
Activism
Documentary

Crossing the Divide

An Iowa farmer reacts swiftly when he hears that radical climate marchers plan to disrupt peace in his tiny town. What he does after that offers a lesson for would-be peacemakers everywhere.

Inspirational
Activism
Climate

THE WATER WILL TAKE US

This film tells the story of the victims of the flood of 2019 in Iran, which happened in the three provinces of North, Central and South of the country and left a lot of damages. The main narrators are three women who reveal the causes of this incident and mismanagements and tell the story of the people who were left to fend for themselves during the flood and after.

Water
Social Justice
Climate

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