Jaguar is joining Mercedes, Polestar and other automakers in adopting Tesla's NACS chargers for vehicles sold in North America starting in 2025. The company signed an agreement with Tesla to gain access to its 12,000+ Superchargers for its "current and future customers" using the standard.

"The next generation luxury electric Jaguars, launching in 2025, will incorporate the NACS connector without the need for an adapter in the USA, Canada and Mexico," it said in a press release, adding that it will adopt the standard for "vehicles and home chargers, and source and supply adapters from Tesla for I-PACE drivers once available." Jaguar noted that its in-house battery and power electronics technology will optimize charging rates on both Tesla's current V3 (250 kW) and upcoming V4 (350 kW) Superchargers. 

Jaguar has been quiet of late around its EV plans, but announced back in 2021 that it would become an all-electric brand by 2025, with its Land Rover division rolling out six new EVs in 2024 — all as part of a sweeping "Reimagine" strategy. The company will use a pure electric architecture for its Jaguar lineup, replacing gas and hybrid vehicles like the XE, XF, E-Pace and F-Pace with all-electric versions. Land Rover, meanwhile, will introduce two separate platforms for all-electric and hybrid vehicles. 

Many, if not most, major automakers have now signed up to use Tesla's Supercharger network, including Fisker, Ford, GM, Honda, Jaguar, Mercedes-Benz, Nissan, Polestar, Rivian and Volvo. A number are reported to be in talks, including VW, Stellantis and Hyundai. In addition, other networks are adopting NACs, including ChargePoint and Electrify America. And recently, Tesla received $160 million in funding to expand its Supercharger network in year. 

All of that shows the wisdom in Tesla's gambit over ten years ago to make Superchargers a strong selling point for its EVs. Now, the network is becoming a key feature for other manufacturers as well — to the likely benefit of Tesla. 

During its iPhone 15 event, Apple released a sketch where CEO Tim Cook and VP Lisa Jackson bragged about the company’s environmental goals with Octavia Spencer’s Mother Nature. It was a flex to help bolster the marketing around the Apple Watch 9, some versions of which are sold as carbon neutral. It’s the first product to carry the branding, but others will follow as Apple pushes toward its goal of becoming entirely carbon neutral by 2030. It was after the event, however, that I wondered how much of this was Apple smugly congratulating itself for work that it’s meant to be doing.

There are plenty of companies in the mobile space, and not all of them are as adept at making a song and dance about bread-and-butter stuff as Apple. So, I figured I’d read all the companies’ sustainability reports from the last year to see if that bluster was worth puncturing. But, much as we may want to sneer at Apple for indulging in its smugness, it turns out no major manufacturer is close to snatching that halo. In fact, I’ve had a fairly miserable few days learning how little, even now, some of the biggest names in the space are doing.

Apple’s goals are aggressive, and they are matched by some of its domestic rivals, although they have far smaller hardware businesses. Facebook owner Meta, at one extreme, which is primarily a services company, achieved net zero in its global operations in 2020, and wants to reach net zero across its entire value chain by 2030. Microsoft’s goals are even bigger, as it pledges to become a carbon negative company by 2030. Google, meanwhile, is hoping to reach carbon-free energy in every place it operates by 2030 but it believes it’ll only halve its emissions by that same deadline. And Amazon, which has been the highest-profile laggard in addressing sustainability, has pledged to reach net zero by 2040.

Before we dig in, it’s worth noting there’s no guarantee of consistency between different companies’ reports and the figures aren’t always comprehensive. And we can’t ignore the big financial disparity between Apple and its largest competitor in mobile, Samsung. Similarly, the financial gap between Samsung and the lower-end players in the market is stark, and caring about the environment costs money. But, even so, the limp pledges made by these companies aren’t even as good as they appear to be. (Earlier this year, the New Climate Institute gave Samsung’s climate pledges a failing grade for transparency and integrity, and called out the paucity of its ambition.)

I won’t bore you with every statistic — although I really could — but Apple is standing head and shoulders above pretty much everyone. Take e-waste, where Apple claimed to direct more than 40,000 tons of disused gadgets to recycling rather than landfill. It doesn’t get into specifics of how much was recovered from that, but it’s a fairly standout figure nevertheless. Samsung seems to have collected about a quarter of that figure, and by my wonky math, recovers around 80 percent from that to be reused.

Meanwhile, Xiaomi, the third biggest mobile player in 2022, proudly reported that it had directed 4,500 tons of e-waste to recycling. That figure looks good compared to Oppo, the world number four, which managed to do the same for just 195 tons. Transsion, the parent company of TECNO and Infinix, has merely pledged to run recycling programs. It’s worth remembering that the WEEE Forum predicted, across 2022, that up to 5.3 billion mobile devices would fall out of use, essentially becoming trash.

I was surprised at Apple’s willingness to even mention emissions from supplier factories since it contracts out its manufacturing. It would have been easy enough to launder its dirty emissions onto other companies’ balance sheets and point to its corporate usage alone. Instead, it has received commitments from many suppliers pledging to use 100 percent renewable energy. Apple says its supply chain now has 13.7GW of renewable energy, with a further 6.3GW due in the near future. Samsung, meanwhile, says that it’s looking to move to 100 percent renewable energy at all of its business sites by 2027, and that it already uses green power for 31 percent of its needs. Xiaomi doesn’t appear to have made a commitment to making a firm transition to renewable energy, while Oppo believes that it’s not yet hit its carbon emissions peak until next year.

If there’s one place that Apple still lags alongside the rest of the industry, at least for right now, it’s in repair. Until we know how easy it is for an end-user to replace common components on the iPhone 15, at least, then Apple remains as bad as everyone else. Its self-service repair platform remains frustratingly complex, and it’s still overcharging for basic repairs. (Or just refusing to repair devices as a precursor to getting buyers to replace their devices.) Samsung made a fairly big deal about repairability in its own report, pointing to the Galaxy S23 as an example. It’s worth noting that the gurus at iFixit rated the S23 a 4/10 for repairability, given that while the battery is replaceable, it’s also glued into place.

NIC COURY via Getty Images

For its part, Apple is making some fairly bold claims about how the Watch Series 9 deserves its classification. It says the device comprises 30 percent recycled or renewable materials, including a case made out of 100 percent recycled aluminum. The watch was created in factories using 100 percent renewable energy and at least half of them are shipped by sea, rather than air. The company added it’s not just paying for clean energy for its devices to be made, but has also invested in power generation equal to what users may consume while charging it, too.

The company said that its baseline for the timepiece’s manufacturing emissions was 36.7kg based on its own metrics. From there, it’s managed to reduce the emissions cost from energy altogether, as well as reducing the materials and process emissions. The Series 9, as far as Apple is concerned, only emits 8.1kg into the atmosphere, which is then offset with carbon credits.

In its materials, the company cites the Restore Fund, a project Apple founded, which invests in “high-quality, nature-based carbon removal projects.” Restore Fund is operated in partnership with Conservation International, Goldman Sachs and HSBC, but it isn’t entirely philanthropic. Goldman’s own website describes the fund as designed to be profit-bearing, offering a “future potential financial return from harvesting activities and the sale of properties.”

It’s worth being cynical about offset purchasing, especially since the industry isn’t as clean as you may hope. Earlier this year, The Guardian published an investigation into Verra, the body which verifies carbon offset programs run by a wide variety of big corporations. It found many of the credits bought by companies to reduce their emissions did not translate to real-world action at all. The report suggested that of the 94.9 million carbon credits purchased, there were only real emissions reductions of 5.5 million MTCO2e (metric tonnes of CO2 equivalent). Verra disputed these findings.

It’s worth reiterating that Apple is in something of a privileged position here, given it has a staggering amount of cash on hand. It can use that power to make the sorts of headline grabbing investments in renewable energy its competitors may not have. But its wealth is also a target for progressive critics, including bodies like Population Matters, who point out the company’s annual marketing budget alone could bring clean water to the UN’s 46 least developed countries.

But, from a general view, there’s only one company in the mobile devices space that can stand head and shoulders above Apple in the green stakes: Fairphone. It's still a relatively niche player, but has made building an ethically and environmentally responsible device its guiding mission. The big question is how long it’ll take for all of the biggest players to catch up to where this one small company is right now.

Clogs in water recovery systems on the international space station have been so backed up that hoses have had to be sent back to Earth for cleaning and refurbishing. This is thanks to the build up of biofilms: a consortium of microorganisms that stick to each other, and often also to surfaces — the insides of water recover tubing, for instance. These microbial or fungal growths can clog filters in water processing systems and make astronauts sick.

So space, like Earth, has a germ problem – so what? Because biofilms can compromise the integrity of and damage equipment, including space suits, recycling units, radiators and water treatment facilities, it can cost space agencies loads of money to replace affected materials. For the full year of 2023, NASA has dedicated a whopping $1.3 billion as part of its budget to resupply its cargo missions to the ISS. Preventing microbial growth in encapsulated space missions will be especially critical for long-haul journeys to places like the moon or Mars, where a quick return to Earth for repairs or treatment of sick astronauts is less feasible.

In a cross collaboration between researchers at the University of Colorado, MIT and the NASA Ames Research Center, researchers studied samples from the space station using a specific and well-understood gram-negative kind of bacteria. The scientists also joined forces with experts at LiquiGlide, a company run by MIT researcher Kripa Varanasi that specializes in “eliminating the friction between solids and liquids.” The multidisciplinary study found covering surfaces with a thin layer of nucleic acids prevented bacterial growth on the ISS-exposed samples. 

Space Biofilm Program

The scientists concluded that these acids carried a slight negative electric charge that stopped microbes from sticking to surfaces. It's worth noting though, that the bacteria were up against a unique physical barrier as well as a chemical one: testing surfaces were etched into "nanograss." These silicon spikes, which resembled a tiny forest, were then slicked with a silicon oil, creating a slippery surface which biofilms struggled to adhere to.

Applying this specific method of covering surfaces with nucleic acids to prevent biofilm buildup showed that in the terrestrial samples, microbial formation was reduced by about 74 percent. Surprisingly the space station samples showed an even more drastic reduction of about 86 percent. However, one recommendation the team has made, based on these initial results, is that longer-duration tests should be carried out on a future mission. Pamela Flores, a microbiology expert at the University of Colorado who participated in the study said that, “We don’t know for how long it will be able to keep up this performance,” in a statement. “So we definitely recommend a longer time of incubation, and also, if possible, a continuous analysis, and not just end points.”

We know the sun belches out solar winds, but the origin of these streams of charged particles remain a mystery and has been the subject of numerous studies over the past decades. The images captured last year by the Extreme Ultraviolet Imager (EUI) instrument aboard ESA's and NASA's Solar Orbiter, however, may have finally given us the knowledge needed to explain what powers these winds. In a paper published in Science, a team of researchers described observing large numbers of jets coming out of a dark region of the sun called a "coronal hole" in the images taken by the spacecraft. 

The team called them "picoflare jets," because they contain around one-trillionth the energy of what the largest solar flares can generate. These picoflare jets measure a few hundred kilometers in length, reach speeds of around 100 kilometers per second and only last between 20 and 100 seconds. Still, the researchers believe they have the power to emit enough high-temperature plasma to be considered a substantial source of our system's solar winds. While Coronal holes have long been known as source regions for the phenomenon, scientists are still trying to figure out the mechanism of how plasma streams emerge from them exactly. This discovery could finally be the answer they'd been seeking for years. 

Lakshmi Pradeep Chitta, the study's primary author from the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, told Space: "The picoflare jets that we observed are the smallest, and energetically the weakest, type of jets in the solar corona that were not observed before...Still, the energy content of a single picoflare jet that lives for about 1 minute is equal to the average power consumed by about 10,000 households in the UK over an entire year."

Chitta's team will continue monitoring coronal holes and other potential sources of solar winds using the Solar Orbiter going forward. In addition to gathering data that may finally give us answers about the plasma flows responsible for producing auroras here on our planet, their observations could also shed light on why the sun's corona or atmosphere is much, much hotter than its surface. 

NASA has published the first maps from its new space-based pollution instrument, TEMPO (Tropospheric Emissions: Monitoring of Pollution). Although you won’t be shocked to learn it reveals higher pollution rates in metropolitan areas, the tool can help scientists better study North American air quality on an hourly basis. “Neighborhoods and communities across the country will benefit from TEMPO’s game-changing data for decades to come,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson wrote in a press release today.

The instrument, which launched in April and orbits at 22,000 miles above the equator, can help scientists better study the health impacts of pollutants “at the neighborhood scale.” It can take hourly measurements, providing insights into the effects of rush-hour traffic, smoke and ash from forest fires and how fertilizer affects farm country. The tool measures sunlight bounced off the Earth’s surface, atmosphere and clouds. “Gases in the atmosphere absorb the sunlight, and the resulting spectra are then used to determine the concentrations of several gases in the air, including nitrogen dioxide,” NASA explained.

NASA says it will share its data with partner agencies, including the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Since taking the first measurements earlier this month, teams have been busy checking and calibrating the satellite’s systems ahead of regular hourly operations kicking off in October. NASA views the data as a boon in its quest to reach the Biden administration’s climate goals.

NASA

The instrument beamed back its first images on August 2nd, showing the I-95 corridor in the Northeast (New York, Philadelphia and Washington, DC areas), a slice of the South (central and eastern Texas stretching to New Orleans) and a section of the Southwest (Los Angeles to Las Vegas). As expected, the maps reveal heavy nitrogen dioxide density over cities and their suburban sprawl.

“Detailed views of three regions show high levels of nitrogen dioxide over cities in the morning, and enhanced levels of nitrogen dioxide over major highways,” NASA wrote today. “As the day progresses, the morning pollution often dissipates. Later in the afternoon, it will rise again as the cities enter their second rush hour of the day.”

“This summer, millions of Americans felt firsthand the effect of smoke from forest fires on our health,” said Nelson. “NASA and the Biden-Harris Administration are committed to making it easier for everyday Americans and decisionmakers to access and use TEMPO data to monitor and improve the quality of the air we breathe, benefitting life here on Earth.”

Humans produce around 4.4 billion tons of concrete every year. That process consumes around 8 billion tons of sand (out of the 40-50 billion tons in total used annually) which has, in part, led to acute shortages of the building commodity in recent years. At the same time, we generate about 10 billion kilograms of used coffee grounds over the same span — coffee grounds which a team of researchers from RMIT University in Australia have discovered can be used as a silica substitute in the concrete production process that, in the proper proportions, yields a significantly stronger chemical bond than sand alone. 

“The disposal of organic waste poses an environmental challenge as it emits large amounts of greenhouse gases including methane and carbon dioxide, which contribute to climate change,” lead author of the study, Dr Rajeev Roychand of RMIT's School of Engineering, said in a recent release. He notes that Australia alone produces 75 million kilograms of used coffee grounds each year, most of which ends up in landfills. 

Coffee grounds can't simply be mixed in raw with standard concrete as they won't bind with the other materials due to their organic content, Dr. Roychand explained. In order to make the grounds more compatible, the team experimented with pyrolyzing the materials at 350 and 500 degrees C, then substituting them in for sand in 5, 10, 15 and 20 percentages (by volume) for standard concrete mixtures. 

The team found that at 350 degrees is perfect temperature, producing a "29.3 percent enhancement in the compressive strength of the composite concrete blended with coffee biochar," per the team's study, published in the September issue of Journal of Cleaner Production. "In addition to reducing emissions and making a stronger concrete, we're reducing the impact of continuous mining of natural resources like sand," Dr. Roychand said. 

"The concrete industry has the potential to contribute significantly to increasing the recycling of organic waste such as used coffee," added study co-author Dr Shannon Kilmartin-Lynch, a Vice-Chancellor’s Indigenous Postdoctoral Research Fellow at RMIT. "Our research is in the early stages, but these exciting findings offer an innovative way to greatly reduce the amount of organic waste that goes to landfill,” where it's decomposition would generate large amounts of methane, a greenhouse gas 21 times more potent than carbon dioxide. 

A cargo ship equipped with rigid sails, each the height of a 10-story building, has departed on its inaugural journey. The Pyxis Ocean vessel will test WindWings sails, designed to harness old-school air power to help reduce fuel usage — and the shipping industry’s CO2 emissions. The sail’s creators estimate the technology could decarbonize cargo ships by about 30 percent as the maritime sector tries to reach net-zero emissions by 2050. The estimated reduction could be higher if paired with alternative fuels.

The ship has been retrofitted with two WindWings, each measuring 37.5 m (123 ft) tall. The rigid sails are made from the same materials as wind turbines and can be added to cargo ships’ decks, providing an option for older vessels to reduce environmental impact. The ship’s maiden voyage will chart a route from China to Brazil.

The project is a collaboration between BAR Technologies (which developed the sails), Cargill Ocean Transportation, Mitsubishi Corporation and Yara Marine. “The Maritime Industry is an extremely hard industry to decarbonize,” said Cargill president Jan Dieleman. “So there’s not many tools that you have. So it’s really important that we as users of the maritime industry are also going to get involved in some of the innovation and really move the industry forward.”

BAR Technologies

The shipping industry agreed in July to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions to net zero “by or around, i.e., close to, 2050.” The nonbinding agreement is essentially toothless but meant as a signal to governments of where to benchmark their (binding) targets, according toThe New York Times. The agreement would have been even more lax if not for a “strong last-minute push” from small island nations and other less economically developed coastal countries, which led to a plan that provides a chance at limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. That’s the threshold climate experts agree the world needs to avoid to spare Earth from the worst climate-change scenarios.

“We fought tooth and nail for these numbers,” Carlos Fuller, Belize’s representative at the United Nations, told the NYT last month. “They aren’t perfect, but they give us a shot at staying within 1.5 degrees Celsius. And that’s what we came here to do.”

Wind power has the potential to help reach those goals, but adoption is a challenge. “We have the number of ships using this technology doubling over the past 12 months,” Stephen Gordon, managing director at maritime data firm Clarksons Research, told the BBC. “This is from a low base, however. In the international shipping fleet and new-build order book of over 110,000 vessels, we have records for under 100 having wind-assisted technology today.”

A storm often evokes a desire to feel safe inside your home and able to communicate with loved ones or emergency personnel — yet, electric and landline connections are often the first systems to go down. Comcast is attempting to solve this problem with the release of Storm-Ready WiFi, a connection backup device — one they claim is the first of its kind built by an Internet Provider. It's powered by Xfinity's 10G Network, has WiFi 6 compatibility and works as a WiFi extender during better weather.

As another reminder of the terrifying impact of climate change, Comcast cites the increase in storms nationwide as to why this extra device is necessary. Yes, you can file Storm-Ready WiFi under how to be more comfortable as the world burns — extremely dark, to say the least.

The service is designed to seamlessly transfer your connection over to Storm-Ready WiFi in the case of a power outage. Storm-Ready WiFi's battery lasts about four hours at a time (an average power outage in the US lasts about two hours). Of course, it's not much good if your phone or computer run out of battery, but otherwise, you can work (or better yet, watch all the movies you want) while the sky opens around you. Storm-Ready WiFi is available to buy now for $7 per month for 36 months, both in-store and online.

The Department of Energy is giving grants of up to $1.2 billion to two direct air capture (DAC) projects that aim to remove more than 2 million metric tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere every year. The agency says that's equivalent to the annual emissions of around 445,000 gas-powered cars. The DOE notes that the projects in Texas and Louisiana will "create 4,800 good-paying jobs" as well.

DAC employs a chemical process to separate CO2 from the air. Facilities can then store CO2 underground or put it into carbon-containing products like concrete that prevent the gas from getting back into the atmosphere.

These are the first commercial-scale DAC projects in the US. They'll each be capable of removing more than 250 times as much CO2 from the atmosphere than the current largest DAC location, according to the DOE. Occidental Petroleum subsidiary 1PointFive and its partners are building the Texas facility. The company's CEO says that, when the project is fully operational, it has the potential to remove up to 30 million tons of CO2 from the atmosphere each year.

The two projects are the first selections from the Regional Direct Air Capture Hubs program, which the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law funded. The aim of the program is to mitigate the impact of climate change by developing a nationwide group of large-scale carbon removal sites that will work in harmony with other efforts to reduce emissions.

The DOE says that, when it is sufficiently scaled up, DAC technology can help the US meet its target of neutralizing emissions by 2050. However, as Reuters notes, to reach the level of scale needed for DAC to have a big enough impact globally, it's imperative to reduce the costs involved quickly.

To that end, the agency has announced several efforts to lower the costs of DAC to below $100 for each net metric ton of CO2-equivalent by the end of the 2020s. It's funding 14 feasibility studies along with five engineering and design studies for projects that are in earlier stages. There's also a $35 million government procurement program in place for carbon removal credits.

To reach the Biden administration's goal of having a net zero emissions economy by 2050, the DOE estimates that between 400 million and 1.8 billion metric tons will have to be removed from the atmosphere and captured from emissions sources every year.

Scientists at a federally funded research center in the US have successfully conducted a second nuclear fusion reaction experiment that resulted in a net energy gain. The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) said scientists at the National Ignition Facility (NIF) generated a higher energy yield than in their December breakthrough, as Reuters reports.

The nuclear fusion approach is very similar to the process that results in stars being able to emit light and heat. The scientists used a laser aimed at fuel to combine two light atoms into a denser one. This releases a great deal of energy. The process is said to have a lot of potential as a source of sustainable, low-carbon energy that could help combat climate change.

In the initial experiment in December, the laser delivered 2.05 megajoules to the target. The scientists achieved fusion ignition by generating 3.15 megajoules of energy output. That's a net yield of around 1.1 megajoules, which is equivalent to 0.31kWh — enough energy to power a 50-watt LED TV for six hours.

It's not yet clear exactly how much of a net energy yield was obtained from the latest successful experiment, which was carried out on July 30th. An LLNL spokesperson told Reuters that researchers are still analyzing the final results.

There's quite some way to go until fusion ignition becomes a viable option for mainstream energy production with the capability of powering homes. For one thing, scientists will have to scale up the system substantially. In any case, showing that it was possible to repeat the experiment and surpass the previous results is a positive step forward for clean energy.