The man who invented a time machine

And helped keep the Texas grid alive during this monster heatwave

John Goodenough accepting the Nobel Prize in 2019, at 97 the oldest recipient ever

John Goodenough, who died Monday at the age of 100, invented an extraordinary time machine—one that is saving the residents of his adopted state of Texas this week, and that will play a crucial role in the planet’s future.

Goodenough’s obituary marks him as one of the last of a certain kind of American. He left Yale to join the wartime Army, then earned his doctorate at the University of Chicago on a government scholarship, studying under Enrico Fermi; first at Westinghouse and then at MIT, he helped lay the groundwork for what became Random Access Memory in computers; and then—moving for a while to Oxford before finally landing at UT Austin—he took on what became his life’s work. Batteries.

Exxon had recently patented a lithium battery design, but it was impractical; Goodenough figured out how to layer the cathode with cobalt and lithium oxide. It stored two to three times the energy of other batteries at room temperature; suddenly you could power all kinds of things. It took a few years, but  eventually he was honored (at age 97) with the Nobel Prize. He was still at work when that tribute came, in an office with a painting of the Last Supper on the wall behind him. As I say, a twentieth century man, setting the scene for the 21^st.

Austin Texas is insanely hot right now—a heat dome has parked above the state, producing record temperatures day after day after day. San Angelo, for instance, out on the plains west of San Antonio, busted its all-time heat record (set last year) by three degrees; the state as a whole, the Weather Service warned, “has already experienced a yearly record number of hours of dangerously high heat index readings.” But so far the power grid has more or less held up, and a huge reason lies with the descendants of the batteries that Goodenough invented. Lithium-ion atteries the size of tractor-trailer trucks were deployed in several places around the state, in an effort to avoid the kind of catastrophe that came when ice knocked out much of the state’s power generation in 2021. So far, according to the Washington Post, they’re doing the job: “When a large coal facility got knocked offline during peak hours this week amid the stress of the extreme heat, energy that was being stored in batteries elsewhere in Texas was quickly dispatched to carry the grid through the evening. The batteries were also crucial to keeping the power on when a nuclear plant hiccuped and went offline earlier in the week.”

What the batteries do best, however, is store the abundant solar power that a Texas heat wave naturally produces, and allow you to use it a little later when the sun goes down. As an article in this week’s Scientific American points out, the riskiest hour for Texas electricity planners has become 8 to 9 in the evening, because air-conditioners are still going full blast, but solar panels—which during the afternoon are providing a fifth of the state’s power—are shutting down as the sun drops below the horizon. Happily, the wind tends to rise at dusk, so that helps spin the turbines. But the state has also relied on those huge battery packs—Goodenough’s time machine. And what’s being used now to deal with emergencies will more and more be the standard: stuff batteries full of juice when the sun is shining, and then let them provide cheap power later. You don’t need the more expensive (and dirty) gas and coal plants.

The need for batteries is universal. California’s battery packs helped avert blackouts during their heatwave last summer; in the UK, authorities pay a billion dollars a year to turn off wind farms when the grid doesn’t need the power, and then it spends a small fortune buying electricity from Europe when it runs short. The IEA estimates grid storage for batteries could grow to 680 gigawatt hours by 2030, up from 16 gigawatt hours at the end of 2021. Australia is installing some of the largest batteries in the world, including on top of old coal mines—and partly as a consequence the country is starting to show that renewables can actually drive down demand for coal and gas.

None of this is to say that batteries are perfect. They catch fire (though perhaps not as disastrously as fossil fuels) and lithium and cobalt mining can be deadly (though not on the same scale as coal mining). Happily, the spirit of innovation didn’t perish with Goodenough: there are all kinds of innovative battery projects underway: solid state lithium or vanadium or old-fashioned iron or even more old-fashioned brick.  Plants are springing up across what we’re starting to call the Battery Belt in the south; South Korea’s LG announced big new plans in several states this week.

None of it comes easily, of course—Texas politicians spent the last legislative session trying to discourage renewable energy and prop up fossil fuels. But physics (and economics) are implacable: some combination of conservation, solar panels, wind turbines, and batteries give us our best chance of surviving heatwaves like the one in Texas, and preventing even worse ones in the future.

Oh, and John Goodenough didn’t take any royalties for his inventions, just his university salary; “caring little for money, he signed away most of his rights. He shared patents with colleagues and donated stipends that came with his awards to research and scholarships.” More tech bros like that, please.

In other energy and climate news:

+Multnomah County Oregon—home to the city of Portland—is suing the fossil fuel industry for the damages suffered during the epic 2021 heat dome, when record after record fell. “Multnomah County is utilizing irrefutable climate science to hold corporate polluters accountable for their role in causing a discreet and disastrous event, as well as recent wildfires,” attorney Roger Worthington — a partner at Worthington & Caron, one of the firms representing the county — stated in a press release.

Two things are particularly interesting here: One, many jurisidictions have sued the Exxons of the world, but this time the plaintiffs are including consultants like McKinsey and trade groups like the Western States Petroleum Association on their list of targets, arguing that their actions made things much worse. As DeSmog Blog reports:

McKinsey & Company has a sordid history of working with industries that have deliberately deceived the public about the harms of their products, from Big Tobacco to opioid manufacturers. The consulting firm has also served the fossil fuel industry. As explained in the 2022 book When McKinsey Comes to Town, since 2010, McKinsey has worked for at least 43 of the 100 largest corporate carbon polluters. These companies, “when accounting for the customers who use their products, were responsible for more than 36 percent of the planet’s greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels in 2018,” authors Walt Bogdanich and Michael Forsythe write. Chevron, one of the defendants in the new case, has been one of McKinsey’s biggest clients, generating at least $50 million in consulting fees in 2019.

The targeting of a consulting firm working for fossil fuel clients may be just the beginning of efforts to hold those enabling the industry accountable through litigation, according to Ben Franta, senior research fellow and head of the Climate Litigation Lab at Oxford University.

“Fossil fuel majors have collaborated with ad agencies, public relations firms, and others over the decades to create misleading public communications campaigns,” he told DeSmog. “Much as the consulting firm McKinsey has faced liability in the context of opioid litigation, third parties beyond fossil fuel producers might conceivably face liability in the context of climate litigation.”

+The Charleston SC Post and Courier has some excellent reporting on Saharan dust clouds and their relation to the…kind of hurricanes that threaten Charleston SC. As Tony Bartleme writes:

Depending on the winds, African dust may drift north to Europe. During winter, dust sometimes coats ski slopes in France and Spain with a terra cotta-colored film that makes them look like sand dunes. Dust from Chad has been found as far north as Greenland. When dust and rain mix, you end up with a rainstorm of muck. A year ago, a dust cloud from the Sahara passed over Paris, turning the sky the color of pumpkin. Then it fell in the United Kingdom; forecasters called it a “blood rain.”

But much of Africa’s dust flows west, toward the trade winds — dust that if packed into semitruck trailers would fill 700,000 of them. This sky-borne convoy then crosses the Atlantic.

+Taylor Swift has, rightly, taken some guff for her private plane habits. But it must be said, her current Eras Tour is about the best thing that’s happened to public transit since the beginning of the pandemic:

The Chicago Transit Authority said it provided 5.63 million rides for the week of June 4-10, the highest number since the start of the pandemic in 2020, and CTA said that Taylor Swift’s sold-out show at Soldier Field contributed to the spike. The three-night concert generated more than 43,000 additional bus and rail rides, CTA said.

Last month, nearly 140,000 people packed Atlanta’s Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority system to see Swift perform at Mercedes-Benz Stadium over three nights. That’s more than three times the number of MARTA riders on a typical weekend at stations around the stadium. Philadelphia’s SEPTA system and New Jersey Transit also got a boost from concertgoers taking mass transit to Swift shows.

“What Taylor Swift is doing, and I thank her for this — although I don’t know she intended to — is proving that if you give people better, reliable transit alternatives, they’ll take it,” said Jim Aloisi, a lecturer of transportation policy and planning at MIT and former Massachusetts Secretary of Transportation. “They would prefer to do that than be stuck in soul-crushing traffic.”

+A new report makes clear that almost all of Wall Street’s net-zero posturing is wash, not green.

In a 59-page analysis of US banks and money managers published on Friday, the researchers said the range of metrics, calculations and targets they employ can be confusing and misleading, and “may not be fit for purpose.” And the focus on reducing carbon footprints by selling high-polluting assets or using carbon offsets doesn’t mean greenhouse gas emissions are actually being cut in the real world, said Lisa Sachs, director of Columbia’s sustainable investment group, which led the research. “It’s woefully short of what is needed,” she said in an interview.  

+The environmentalists most under threat of violence are working in rainforests and mine sites targeted by huge multinational corporations. I won’t soon forget helping preside over a memorial service for 227 activists killed in the course of a single year. But the craziness has reached the point where weathermen in Iowa have to deal with the same kind of thing—and truthfully, I completely understand Chris Gloninger’s trauma.

When messages from the same sender continued, he worried the sender was obsessing over him. He said he saw a therapist for PTSD and lost focus at work.

“I was not sleeping,” Gloninger said. “I had bags under my eyes.”

Police identified a 63-year-old man in Lenox, Iowa, who admitted in August to sending the emails, the Iowa Capital Dispatch reported. The man was sentenced to pay a fine, but Gloninger said he still struggled to reengage fully in his job.

+Understand “Scope 3 emissions” and you will understand a good deal about the shape of the climate fight. The WSJ has a pretty good little explainer. Key to note: Europe’s regulators may be considerably more interested in an honest accounting here than American authorities.

+The Church of England divested from fossil fuel last week. This hit me hard—in the early weeks of the divestment campaign in 2012 I traveled to London, in part for a meeting with the CofE executives. They were…totally disdainful of the divestment campaign, insisting that their approach of ‘engaging’ with these companies would work. They finally decided otherwise

Alan Smith, First Church Estates Commissioner, who chairs the Church’s assets committee, said the decision to divest “was not taken lightly.”

“Soberingly, the energy majors have not listened to significant voices in the societies and markets they serve and are not moving quickly enough on the transition,” he said. “If any of these energy companies come into alignment with our criteria in the future, we would reconsider our position. Indeed, that is something we would hope for.”

+One problem with reporting like mine is that it tends to overemphasize action in the English-speaking world. Happily, the remarkable British writer George Monbiot has an update on developments across the channel in France.

Like every government, the French administration should be going further and faster to address the greatest predicament humankind has faced: the gathering collapse of Earth systems. But you can measure the seriousness of the government’s plan by its institutional commitment. France now has a ministry for ecological transition. By the end of next year, the nation’s 25,000 most senior civil servants will have been trained in the principles behind this transition. By the next presidential election, in 2027, every public sector worker will have had this training, tailored to their sector. Think about that: 5.6 million people will be taught about the biodiversity crisis, the climate crisis and the natural resources crisis – how these phenomena relate to the public services they supply and how public sector workers can use this knowledge to change the way they work.

Already, in energy, water and resource conservation, France has done what the UK government vaguely promises for 2040 or 2050 (I’ve come to see 2040 and 2050 as codewords for “never”). Let’s take a look at one of these programmes: waste reduction. The French government has passed a circular economy law, which seeks to stop the unnecessary use of resources. Single-use plastics are forbidden in public procurement. Shops must allow people to bring refillable containers, and charge lower prices when they do. Anywhere that people gather in large numbers must be equipped with drinking fountains, as part of a wider plan to phase out plastic bottles. Manufacturers, wholesalers and retailers are forbidden to throw away unsold items: they must instead be given away or recycled, creating an incentive to avoid overproduction.

+Very good news: a final federal panel has approved New York City’s first-in-the-nation congestion pricing plan, that will charge cars that want to crowd into lower Manhattan and use the money to help fund mass transit. London has demonstrated the tility of this approach

The M.T.A., which runs the city’s subways and buses and the metropolitan area’s commuter railroads and is overseeing the congestion pricing program, hasn’t set a fee scale yet. But a report that it released in August showed that one proposal under review would charge $23 for a rush-hour trip into Midtown and $17 during off-peak hours.

+We talk about record heat as an abstraction, but please take it seriously and remind your loved ones likewise. A father and son hiking in Texas died over the weekend. Imagine the scene further south in Mexico, where temperatures have been at record levels for weeks now