Officials say an emergency cell phone alert played a crucial role yesterday in helping California avoid rolling blackouts during an extreme heatwave. Residents apparently jumped into action within minutes of receiving a text that urged them to save energy.

A remarkably severe and long-lasting heatwave has put increasing pressure on the state’s power grid since last week. Record-smashing temperatures in the triple digits have sent power demand for air conditioning soaring.

By Tuesday, demand hit an all-time high for the Golden State at 52,061 megawatts, according to grid manager California Independent System Operator (CAISO). CAISO issued a level 3 Energy Emergency Alert, its highest alert, at 5:17PMET that night. It signaled that rotating power outages could be imminent with energy supplies so thinly stretched.

Soon after, at 5:45PM, the Governor’s Office of Emergency Services (Cal OES) says it issued the cell phone alert. “Conserve energy now to protect public health and safety. Extreme heat is straining the state energy grid. Power interruptions may occur unless you take action. Turn off or reduce nonessential power if health allows, now until 9pm,” the text read. The message was also sent in Spanish.

Within minutes of the alert going out, there was a steep drop in power demand. Between 5:50 and 5:55, it fell by about 1,200 megawatts.

To be sure, CAISO data shows that demand had started to dip earlier in the night — around the time it declared that level 3 alert. But it started to fall more dramatically after the cell phone alert reached folks.

By 8PM, CAISO declared the severe level 3 Energy Emergency Alert over. “Consumer conservation played a big part in protecting electric grid reliability. Thank you, California!” it tweeted.

The Governor’s Office was quick to tout the text messages as a success. “As a result of this action, the California Independent System Operation (CaISO) saw an immediate and significant drop in energy use, providing some relief to the state’s grid,” Cal OES said in a press release yesterday.

The state managed to narrowly avoid widespread rolling blackouts. But tens of thousands of customers, mostly in Northern California, still lost power at some point yesterday. Today, Californians are in their eighth consecutive day under a flex alert that asks them to voluntarily curb their energy use from 4-9PM when power demand typically peaks.

Yesterday wasn’t the first time emergency text alerts have helped officials relieve pressure on its power grid. New York City saw something similar in June 2021. Local officials there sent out a similar text to residents asking them to conserve energy during a brutal heatwave, and power demand soon dropped.

California’s text messages were part of a nationwide system of “Wireless Emergency Alerts.” Those alerts might be sent by federal, state, or local officials to warn of national emergencies, natural disasters, or amber alerts for missing children.

A long, brutal heatwave is expected to grip California at least through the holiday weekend, stressing the power grid. Officials are begging residents to conserve electricity in an effort to prevent outages.

The state is now in its second day of a “Flex Alert” issued by the state’s power grid operator, the California Independent System Operator (CAISO). Under the Flex Alert, Californians are urged to voluntarily curb their electricity use between 4PM and 9PM. That’s the time of day when the grid is under the most pressure because it’s when power demand typically rises as people come home from work, and there’s less solar energy available as the sun sets.

Cutting down on energy use during those hours can help stabilize the grid, CAISO says, hopefully preempting rotating blackouts. Charging electric vehicles and using major appliances like washing machines should be done before 4PM, CAISO advises. It also asks residents to precool their homes to as low as 72 degrees Fahrenheit before that time, and then adjust their thermostats to 78 degrees or higher (health permitting) between 4PM to 9PM.

Heatwaves are notorious for stressing out power grids because the high temperatures push people to blast their air conditioning. Temperatures are expected to reach up to 20 degrees higher than normal across much of the Golden State with triple-digit heat through Tuesday, September 6th. Sunday and Monday will likely see the greatest strain on the grid, according to the governor’s office. Daily temperature records have already started to fall in different cities and are expected to keep dropping.

In California, heat spells also prime the landscape for more severe drought and wildfires — which can cut into power supplies if there’s less available hydropower or if utilities have to cut power to keep their equipment from sparking a blaze. This summer, California was forecast to lose half of the hydroelectricity it normally generates due to drought. The state is also in a jam because the current heatwave sprawls across much of the western US, limiting how much help California can get in the form of excess power from its neighbors. And the state has already faced rolling outages triggered by wildfire risk.

The length of this heatwave is also unprecedented, a press release from the governor’s office said. That places prolonged stress on the grid and exacerbates health risks. The lack of respite over a long period of time makes it harder for people to recover from the strain heat places on the heart and lungs. Heat already kills more people in the US than any other weather-related disaster.

“This is just the latest reminder of how real the climate crisis is, and how it is impacting the everyday lives of Californians,” Governor Gavin Newsom said in a press release yesterday. California legislators just passed a slew of climate bills on Wednesday aimed at cutting the state’s planet-heating pollution down to net zero by 2045.

Newsom declared a State of Emergency on August 31st in response to the heat. That declaration triggers temporary measures to ramp up electricity generation and reduce power demand. For instance, ships berthed at California ports won’t necessarily be required to plug into onshore power — which they’d normally do to reduce air pollution from the vessels’ diesel engines.

Electric vehicles are very helpful for fighting climate change. But EVs need batteries, and batteries need minerals like nickel, cobalt, and lithium. The US has some of these minerals underground, and it wants to dig them up, expeditiously, so that it doesn’t have to rely as much on other countries, including China.

But this is where it gets tricky. Mining operators say they can speed up the digging process, but a bunch of regulatory roadblocks stand in their way. And environmentalists and tribal groups remain extremely skeptical that all this mining can be done in a way that doesn’t ruin the land and spoil the water.

This more or less summarizes the nearly 27,000 comments that the Department of the Interior has received over the last six months since it published a request for information on ways to improve federal hardrock mining regulations, laws, and permitting practices. The department will need to comb through these comments as it mulls much-needed reforms to a very outdated law. And it will need to figure a way to navigate all these competing interests and concerns as it seeks to bolster US mining to supply rising EV demand while also protecting the environment.

It’s going to be a nearly impossible task.

The Inflation Reduction Act, the Democrats’ new tax and climate bill, devotes nearly $400 billion to clean energy initiatives over the next decade, including EV tax credits and financing for companies that manufacture clean cars in the US. And California said it would ban the sale of new gas-powered vehicles starting in 2035, a move that over a dozen other states are expected to follow.

But the only EVs that will be eligible for the $7,500 credit are ones that are made in North America using batteries with minerals dug out of the ground in the US or from its trading partners. These requirements are largely viewed as unachievable by many observers because of the auto industry’s heavy reliance on battery materials and components from China.

This fear is reflected in the comments left by major automakers in response to the Department of the Interior’s request for information. The Alliance for Automotive Innovation, which represents nearly every legacy automaker in the US, put it in blunt terms.

“The US does not have significant processing capacity for EV battery materials and is reliant on other nations for refined raw materials, leaving the US market exposed to the risk of being impacted by supply chains outside of US control,” the group said.

This will only get worse as demand for EVs grows, with the Alliance arguing that the lack of critical battery materials could surpass the semiconductor shortage in terms of impact on the economy.

The Zero Emission Transportation Association (ZETA), which represents EV companies like Tesla and Rivian, says the current mining laws do not reflect the urgency to ramp up the domestic supply of minerals.

“If EVs were to represent 100 percent of new car sales — 17 million annually, in line with ZETA’s primary goal — current lithium carbonate equivalent (LCE) production would only meet 0.05 percent of total domestic EV battery pack demand,” the group states in its comment.

Most of the ire is being directed at the permitting process for new mining operations, with Ford calling it “lengthy, costly, and inefficient.” A new mine in the US can take seven to 10 years to complete all the permitting and paperwork before going online. In Canada and Australia, that process only takes two to three years, Ford notes.

The US should streamline the permitting process to get new mining operations into production faster, the companies recommend. They also want more transparency from all the agencies involved, and a stronger commitment to maintaining deadlines and more money to fund geological surveys to find new mineral deposits. Enacting these changes could spur “enormous economic growth,” Ford claims.

Environmental groups see it a little differently. They largely support the government’s clean transportation goals, but they worry about trampling current environmental rules — and especially tribal lands — in the rush to extract as many minerals as possible.

“The green energy revolution cannot be built on a dirty mining industry, outdated regulations, and environmental injustice,” Samuel Penney, chairman of the Nez Perce Tribe in Lapwai, Idaho, writes in his comment submitted to the Department of Interior.

If the US is to meet its climate goals, it needs a lot more lithium, cobalt, and nickel — key ingredients in EV batteries. This is true globally as well; the International Energy Agency estimates that the world will need roughly 20 times as much nickel and cobalt by 2040 as it had in 2020, and 40 times as much lithium.

It may just not be possible. A US Geological Survey estimated that to fully electrify its vehicle fleet, the US will need 1.27 million and 160,000 metric tons of battery-grade nickel and cobalt per year, respectively — both of which exceed total global production in 2021.

EV companies are already looking for ways to reduce their dependency on some minerals, like cobalt, which has been linked to human rights abuses. But using less cobalt would trigger a spike in demand for nickel. Tesla CEO Elon Musk has practically begged the world’s miners to produce more.

The US currently has one operating nickel mine, in Michigan. Its resources are expected to be exhausted by 2026.

The Department of Energy just took a first step toward launching new lithium-ion battery recycling programs in the US. It issued a Request for Information (RFI) yesterday to ask for public input on how to spend $335 million in federal investments for battery recycling that was included in the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law passed last year.

Lithium-ion batteries used to power electric vehicles and store renewable electricity are a major building block for a clean energy economy. Recycling could ease the impending squeeze on materials needed to meet rapidly rising demand for those technologies — especially as the Biden administration tries to keep the US on track to meet pollution-cutting goals it’s agreed to under the Paris climate accord.

“Battery recycling doesn’t just remove harmful waste from our environment; it also strengthens domestic manufacturing by placing used materials back into the supply chain,” US Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm said in an August 29th press release.

All in all, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill invests over $7 billion over five years to build up a domestic battery supply chain. That includes $335 million for lithium-ion battery recycling programs. The Department of Energy (DOE) issued the Request for Information in order to help guide its implementation of those recycling programs and plans to take comments from the public until October 14th.

The programs are supposed to improve the process of collecting batteries at the end of their lives and harvesting valuable materials from them. The programs also aim to minimize environmental risks from tossing out and rehashing used batteries while also making battery cycling more popular and developing a new workforce for the recycling industry.

The funding will also go toward finding useful second lives for old electric vehicle batteries. An EV battery might be replaced once it’s lost about 20 percent of its capacity. But that means it could have up to 80 percent of its capacity left for other uses. The battery might be paired with solar panels, for instance, to hold excess energy soaked up during the day so that the clean electricity is available at night. Some car companies, including Nissan, are researching how to reuse EV batteries to store renewable energy for power grids.

Policymakers, meanwhile, are scrambling to figure out how the nation is going to have enough batteries on hand to reach its climate goals. To slash greenhouse gas emissions, Biden wants the power sector to run entirely on carbon-free electricity by 2035 — which will be virtually impossible without a lot more energy storage from batteries. Biden also issued an executive order last year calling for half of all new vehicle sales in the US to be hybrid or electric vehicles by the end of the decade. And California, one of the world’s biggest markets for cars, laid out new rules last week to phase out gas-guzzling cars in favor of plug-in hybrid and battery-electric vehicles by 2035.

Similar shifts need to happen across the world to avoid the worst effects of climate change, like dramatically more severe storms, droughts, and heatwaves. Greenhouse gas pollution needs to drop to net zero by around 2050 to reach goals set out in the Paris climate agreement aimed at ensuring a more livable future. But reaching those goals would require six times more critical minerals in 2040 than were produced in 2021, according to an analysis by the International Energy Agency.

That’s already triggered another conundrum — how to satiate the growing hunger for battery materials without tearing up the environment and harming communities near mines. Mining for things used in batteries like nickel and cobalt has historically been concentrated in a handful of regions, making markets for those materials vulnerable to labor and environmental abuses and supply chain shocks.

To reduce US dependence on minerals mined in those regions, the DOE released a “national blueprint” for manufacturing lithium-ion batteries last year. And the Biden administration invoked the Defense Production Act in March to ramp up mining and processing materials within the nation’s borders. But that push for domestic mining has environmental groups and Native American tribes worried about what damage it might cause at home.

If the US prioritizes recycling batteries, rather than relying so heavily on extracting brand new materials, it could help shrink many of those problems.

California has set a hella ambitious goal to build up its offshore wind industry. The Golden State is aiming to reach 25,000 megawatts of offshore wind capacity by 2045, about as much as all of Europe has today.

The target set by the California Energy Commission on Wednesday is the biggest commitment any state has made yet to develop wind farms off of their coasts. The goal is even more monumental considering the US’s fledgling offshore wind industry has really only gained a foothold on the East Coast.

So far, there are two small projects off the coasts of Rhode Island and Virginia capable of generating just 42 megawatts of electricity. The first commercial-scale wind farm, to be built off the coast of Massachusetts, just received federal approval from the Interior Department last year. The pipeline of new projects continues to grow mostly on the East Coast; Virginia regulators approved plans to build the US’s biggest wind farm yet last week.

The reason that the East Coast has so much of a head start comes down to geography. On the West Coast, ocean depths drop steeply relatively close to the shore compared to the East Coast. That makes it hard to affix turbines to the seafloor. Historically, turbines couldn’t really be installed in waters greater than 60 meters deep. To solve that problem, California is looking to new floating turbines that are still in development. Such technologies could unlock some 60 percent of the nation’s offshore wind resources that otherwise might have been out of reach.

Those turbines could help California overcome one of the stumbling blocks in its efforts to transition to 100 percent clean electricity by 2045. The state already generates more solar energy than any other. But it needs another power source to fill in after the sun sets. The California Energy Commission hopes offshore wind can step in to provide enough renewable energy through the evening.

Reaching 25,000 megawatts of offshore wind capacity by 2045 could power 25 million homes, the California Energy Commission says. It also set a shorter-term goal of developing up to 5,000 megawatts of capacity by 2030.

The Biden administration is setting up offshore wind to expand across nearly every coast along the continental US — from the Pacific Northwest and California to the Gulf of Mexico and the length of the East Coast. The goal is for turbines rising above the sea to generate 30,000 megawatts of clean electricity for the US by the end of the decade.

The humble heat pump has finally found its moment in the spotlight. The appliance can potentially save you money on your energy bills, fight climate change, and reduce Europe’s dependency on Russian gas, proponents say. One day, heat pumps might even replace air conditioning and heating systems across the world.

Sure, that sounds super ambitious, but lawmakers are scrambling to deploy heat pumps everywhere they can. President Joe Biden invoked the Defense Production Act earlier this year to boost domestic manufacturing of the technology, and Congress crafted major climate legislation that makes it easier for Americans to afford them. Across the pond in Europe, heat pumps are part of efforts to pivot away from Russian fuels.

With all that hype, you might want to get familiar with the technology suddenly making headlines. So, The Verge put together this guide on what heat pumps are, what they do, and why they’re making such a splash now.

First off, what in the world is a heat pump?

There are different kinds of heat pump technologies, but for simplicity’s sake, we’ll focus on the appliances making the most waves right now. The appliances causing all the fuss are electric heat pumps that are used to heat and cool the air inside homes and buildings. And don’t let the name fool you. Heat pumps can do the same job as furnaces and air conditioners.

How does the thing work?

This varies depending on the type of heat pump, but the defining feature is that they move heat around to where you want it. Specifically, the appliances use a refrigerant to draw in heat and redistribute it. A refrigerant is a substance with a low boiling point that can easily absorb heat. They’re also used in air conditioners and refrigerators.

The most common kind of heat pump you’ll hear about are “air-source” heat pumps that move heat between your home and the outside air.

It’s got two parts: an indoor component and an outdoor component. When used to cool a space down, the indoor component pushes warm air from inside a space over coils filled with liquid refrigerant. The refrigerant absorbs the heat from the air, boils, and evaporates into a gas. From there, the heated up refrigerant moves on to the outdoor component, where it releases the heat. The refrigerant cools down, turns back into a liquid, and the process can begin again. When heat pumps are used to warm up a room, the process works in reverse. The refrigerant absorbs heat from outside and moves that indoors. Thanks to some relatively recent breakthroughs in heat pump technologies, this works even in cold climates because the refrigerant will absorb heat as long as it’s colder than its surroundings.

There are also “ground-source” or geothermal heat pumps that move heat between a home or building and either the ground outside or a nearby source of water.

Image: Energy Star

That sounds surprisingly low-tech. Haven’t heat pumps been around for a while?

Yup. Austrian engineer Peter von Rittinger designed and installed the first documented heat pump system in the 1850s. The first electric ground-source heat pump is credited to American inventor Robert C. Webber, who was tinkering with a deep freezer in his cellar in the late 1940s when he realized it produced scalding water. Not wanting to waste the hot water, he diverted that to his boiler and eventually designed a system to heat his whole home.

Even though heat pumps have been around for a long time, they haven’t become mainstream. In 2020, they only fulfilled 7 percent of global heating demand. Over the years, other technologies that many people have become more familiar with — i.e., air conditioning and furnaces — became more affordable to buy and install. In many places, it was also cheaper to heat your home with gas than electricity. Plus, heat pumps haven’t always worked as well in very cold places as they do in milder climates.

Why are we hearing so much about heat pumps now?

First off, the technology has improved. And that’s made heat pumps seemingly ideal for grappling with several crises the world faces today.

Both the COVID-19 pandemic and Russia’s war in Ukraine have contributed to a global gas crunch. It’s gotten much more expensive to heat your home with gas or rely on a gas-fired power plant to keep the lights on.

That energy crisis is really stark in Europe, where the cost of gas has risen from around $5 per million British thermal units (MMBtu) to $55 per MMBtu over the past couple of years alone. A big part of the problem is that Europe has historically been very reliant on Russia for its supply of natural gas. Since Russia invaded Ukraine, the bloc has tried to quit that addiction — and electric heat pumps are a big part of that plan. Gas is currently the fuel Europe uses the most for its heating, and much of that gas has historically come from Russia. The European Commission wants to double the rate at which it’s deploying heat pumps, with a goal of deploying 10 million units over the next five years.

This is an acceleration of another transition that was already underway. One of the main strategies to slow climate change is to electrify everything — from cars to buildings. That way, they can run on clean, renewable energy like wind and solar once those power sources displace fossil fuels on the grid. Some cities — like Berkeley, California — have even banned new gas hookups in homes and buildings.

Heat pumps became an obvious alternative to old-school gas and oil heating. So, efforts to promote heat pump adoption are peppered throughout a lot of proposed climate policies. The giant climate bill Democrats are working to pass, called the Inflation Reduction Act, for instance, includes up to an $8,000 rebate for income-eligible Americans who install a new heat pump in their home. Anyone who doesn’t qualify for the rebate can still get a tax credit of up to $2,000 for installing a heat pump.

So you’re saying heat pumps are good for the environment?

For the most part, yes. They’re electric appliances, so they can run on clean energy like we mentioned above. But the environmental benefits still depend on how clean the grid they’re connected to is. If you have a grid that is still dominated by coal and gas — which many still are — then that electricity isn’t very clean. At least not yet. The climate case for heat pumps is forward-looking. The thought is that if people switch from gas over to heat pumps while the grid is getting cleaned up, then countries can get to their climate goals much faster. More than 30 countries and the European Union have entrenched a goal in law or policy of reaching net zero carbon dioxide emissions. And more than 100 countries have made similar proposals but are still working to adopt policies to reach those goals.

The other climate benefit that comes with heat pumps is that they are generally pretty energy-efficient. After all, they’re not generating heat — they’re simply moving it around. Air-source heat pumps are 2.2 to 4.5 times more efficient than Energy Star gas furnaces, according to a US-focused analysis published in 2020 by the nonprofit clean energy research organization RMI. Ground-source heat pumps can cut energy use by 30 to 60 percent, according to the Department of Energy. Efficiency gains vary, though, because heat pumps essentially have to work harder to gather enough heat from the ambient environment in colder climates.

All said, 70 percent of houses in the US would reduce emissions today by installing a heat pump, according to one study published last year in the journal Environmental Research Letters. That study took both greenhouse gas emissions and air pollutants like particulate matter into consideration. Looking at just planet-heating carbon dioxide, the US would shrink residential CO2 emissions by a hefty 32 percent if every single-family home started using a heat pump.

Is a heat pump going to save me money?

Once again, it depends. For now, just 32 percent of households would “benefit economically” by installing a heat pump, according to the same study in Environmental Research Letters.

While the appliance can save you money in the long run through lower utility bills, heat pumps typically still come with higher upfront costs than traditional heating or cooling systems. People paid a median of $7,791 to buy and install a ducted air-source heat pump compared to $6,870 for a gas furnace, according to a Consumer Reports survey of its members. A heat pump system, however, can become more cost-competitive if it’s replacing both a gas furnace and an air conditioning unit or if it’s being built into a new structure. That’s why, in the short term, subsidies are going to be key to making heat pumps more appealing to consumers.

Thanks to their energy efficiency, heat pumps might offer the cheapest clean energy alternative to heating and cooling a home for most US households in the coming decades, according to an analysis by the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy.

Will a heat pump work for anybody, anywhere?

Technically, heat pumps can work just about everywhere. Thanks to technological breakthroughs over the past decade, heat pumps can now heat homes even when outdoor temperatures reach subzero. The appliances, for now, just don’t work as efficiently in such cold temperatures as they do in milder climates.

Anyone who doesn’t own their own home is also going to have a harder time turning to a heat pump since it usually needs to be professionally installed. The next big advancement in newfangled heat pump technologies is easy-to-install window units, comparable to window AC units. Unlike more traditional heat pumps, these new window units can essentially just sit in your window sill. New York state recently said it would shell out $70 million to two companies — Gradient and Midea America — to produce 30,000 window heat pump units for New York City public housing.

Gradient says its product will become commercially available sometime this year. But it doesn’t come cheap. While a window AC unit might cost a couple hundred bucks or less, Gradient’s new window heat pump (which can both heat and cool a home) costs way more: $1,999.

This is a big problem with energy-efficient appliances and clean energy technologies in general. So far, many of these technologies have been out of reach for many people — often, renters and folks without thousands of extra dollars to spend on a new appliance, especially when their old one still works just fine. To really trigger a heat pump revolution, that’s going to have to change.

This column is part of a series where Verge staffers post highly subjective reviews of animals. Up until now, we’ve written about animals without telling you whether they suck or rule. We are now rectifying this oversight.

There’s nothing like a baby hippo to remind me there are still good things in this world, and we have Bibi the hippo to thank for a brand-new 60-pound social media star.

Bibi, a hippo at the Cincinnati Zoo, gave birth to her latest little one this week. To commemorate her achievement, the zoo has gifted us with a Twitter feed filled with little ear wiggles.

I don’t know about you, but I need these little snippets of joy.

Does it suck to wear a mask while writing in my office because I don’t want the latest COVID-19 surge to derail my summer plans? Yes. Does that mask make me even more prone to breakouts? Yes. Am I analyzing every pimple for signs of monkeypox? Yes. Is it 101 degrees Fahrenheit outside and I’m worried that blasting the AC is only contributing to the climate crisis? Yes. Do I have high blood pressure? I’ll tell you after the weekend since checking it at the drugstore constitutes a nice date out with my husband nowadays.

Thankfully, I can take solace in wholesome animal videos. It just feels good to know that, somewhere in the world, a baby hippo is lounging in a pool with its mama.

So, here’s to you, Bibi. You, like every mama, are the real hero. Everyone loves to ooh and ahh over a baby. But I see you, girl. You kept up your normal schedule of chilling at the zoo right up until you went into labor. And you didn’t even get some of the modern perks of being pregnant.

Senior hippo caretaker Jenna Wingate told Cincinnati Magazine that Bibi didn’t get to indulge in any pregnancy cravings, even if she had any. They just kept feeding her a typical hippo diet of 20 pounds of timothy hay, five pounds of grain, and 20 pounds of produce, the magazine reported.

Bibi apparently gave birth on watermelon day, and the zoo says the baby probably weighs at least 60 pounds. Rest up, lady; they don’t call it labor for nothing.

This was apparently also a surprise, unplanned pregnancy. Around April Fools’ Day, “Cincinnati Zoo & Botanical Garden staff members were informed that 23-year-old hippo Bibi was pregnant. Since she was on birth control, most assumed that the news was a joke!” the press release announcing the birth says.

On behalf of every woman the world has ever doubted: we know the feeling Bibi.

This is 23-year-old Bibi’s second little hippo, and despite the surprise pregnancy, things seem to be going more smoothly now than they did with Bibi’s first calf, Fiona. Fiona was born six weeks premature at just 29 pounds. The tiny hippo quickly won over the internet, and it seems like her little sibling will follow in her big footsteps.

Now, the whole family seems to be doing well. Fiona’s a healthy 2,000 pounds. Bibi and the new baby will stay backstage at the zoo for now. In the wild, hippos will leave the herd for a week or two to bond with the baby, according to the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance.

So, for now, the only way for the public to see them at the moment is online. (Although you need a zoo membership to watch the webcams.) Oh, and if you have any good baby names in mind, you can submit those online, too.

And, because this is a review, we’ll end on a makeshift scorecard for Bibi, the Hippo mom extraordinaire.

Pros:

• Hippos are only pregnant for eight months before giving birth, even though their babies weigh 10 times as much as a human newborn.
• Bibi appears to be a great hippo mom.
• Bibi has gifted us with not one but two baby hippos to coo over.

Cons:

• Bibi’s baby hippo is too big for me to pick up and cuddle.

Overall score: 11/10

Scientists and journalists are on the hunt for methane spewing out of oil and gas infrastructure in the US. The leaking methane is invisible to the naked eye, but a recent investigation by The Associated Press — with help from NASA and other researchers — helps expose the huge scale of the problem.

In the Permian Basin, a major oil- and gas-producing area spread across Texas and New Mexico, they revealed hundreds of “super-emitting” sites gushing methane. Methane is the primary component of “natural gas” and is even more potent than carbon dioxide when it comes to trapping heat in the atmosphere. Using some neat tech, Carbon Mapper — the group of academic and nonprofit researchers working alongside NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory — spotted 533 of those super-polluting sites. That data was the starting point for some good old-fashioned shoe leather reporting by The Associated Press, which traced down the companies responsible using public records.

That sleuthing exposed a relatively small group of companies releasing a hell of a lot of pollution with impunity. Ten companies alone owned at least 164 of the super-emitting sites. A subsidiary of West Texas Gas, for example, owns a compressor station for natural gas called Mako that was caught leaking 870 kilograms of methane an hour, creating as much climate pollution as lighting up seven tanker trucks full of gasoline a day.

If it weren’t for that research and reporting, those methane emissions probably would have continued to sneak past regulators. They spotted 12 times more leaking methane at Mako than what the company that operates the site reported for its operations across the region in 2020.

The oil and gas industry in the Permian Basin consistently underreports or fails to report methane emissions altogether, according to the AP analysis. AP found that more than 140 super-emitting sites were releasing so much methane that their operators should likely have been mandated to report that pollution to the Environmental Protection Agency — but the vast majority of companies did not.

That ultimately means that the EPA’s Greenhouse Gas Reporting program is undercounting how much pollution is unleashed into the atmosphere, which can obstruct efforts to understand how much global warming we’re facing, as well as what we’ll need to do to adapt to and prevent more catastrophic climate change. Plugging those leaks is an obvious first step to take once they’ve been spotted.

So the race is on to deploy new technology that can capture what’s really going on at all these leaky oil and gas sites. Carbon Mappers used an infrared imaging spectrometer while flying high over the Permian Basin to spot plumes of methane that they wouldn’t be able to see otherwise. The spectrometer picks up the unique wavelengths in light that signal the presence of methane.

In the future, researchers hope to get an even better view from space. Next year, Carbon Mappers hopes to launch two methane-tracking demonstration satellites. By 2025, the plan is to launch a bigger constellation of satellites capable of detecting 80 percent of global methane and CO2 emitters.

It’s part of a broader movement to get a handle on the methane emissions from human activity, which are responsible for about one-third of the global warming we have today. A similar remote sensing effort, called MethaneSAT, is on course to launch later this year. There are more grassroots efforts by volunteers on the ground, too, using spectrometers mounted on vehicles.

This week, the EPA also announced that it plans to fly helicopters over the Permian Basin with infrared cameras to find major emitters of methane. “The flyovers are vital to identifying which facilities are responsible for the bulk of these emissions and therefore where reductions are most urgently needed,” Earthea Nance, the EPA administrator for the region said in a press release.

The agency is still crafting new rules to limit methane emissions — a process that was previously put on hold by the Trump Administration. But last year, the US became one of over 100 countries to sign onto a Global Methane Pledge to cut down methane emissions by 30 percent this decade.

Those goals make it all the more important to take stock of how big a problem leaking methane is now. To see what The Associated Press found in the Permian Basin, you can read the whole story here. It comes with some really cool, but alarming, photos and videos that show methane plumes our eyes can’t see without special tools.

Lab-grown meat seems to be everywhere these days. Last year, cultured meat and seafood companies raised $1.38 billion in investment, and more and more startups are popping up to develop their own products. A lot of people are betting that cultured meat is part of the future of food — and we wanted to find out why.

The creation of cell-based meat starts with a biopsy from an animal. From there, the cells are cultured in a lab and given the right nutrients to grow and multiply. Once there are enough cells, the batch is transferred into a bioreactor, where the cells continue to multiply until the end result is enough cells to sink your teeth into.

This process takes a lot of time and resources, and according to the Good Food Institute, no company today has reached commercial production that is cost-effective. Expanding this enterprise will require a lot more infrastructure. That means bigger vats, more space, and more utilities, which raises lots of questions about the cost.

It’s too soon to tell just what shape the industry will take. In the meantime, consumers have the opportunity to consider what relationship they want to have with their food. Almost a decade ago, Dutch researcher Cor van der Weele explored this question with a focus group in the Netherlands. They came up with a thought experiment called the pig in the backyard, in which one pig could feed a whole neighborhood for years. Check out our video to learn more about the many potential futures of cell-based meat and meet a local backyard pig.

A giant pipeline spewed millions of gallons of fuel into a nature preserve for more than two weeks until two teens on four-wheelers noticed the spill and alerted authorities.

The teenagers discovered the leak in the Colonial Pipeline in August 2020 in the Oehler Nature Preserve outside Charlotte, North Carolina, E&E News reports. Just how massive the leak actually was — about 2 million gallons — came to light recently on Friday, July 22nd.

Colonial Pipeline Company was required to give an updated estimate of the damage because of a recent consent order with the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality. The company had previously reported that the spill released 63,000 gallons of gasoline shortly after the spill was discovered.

Now we know the spill is actually about 30 times larger than originally estimated. That makes it “the largest onshore fuel spill in the nation,” according to the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality. But E&E notes that it’s likely the largest pipeline gas spill since a ruptured storage tank let out 2.3 million gallons of gasoline in East Chicago, Indiana, back in 1986.

Colonial says that it collected about 75 percent of the 2 million gallons it spilled, as well as nearly 10 million gallons of water that came in contact with the petroleum. Fortunately, the company says its testing “has confirmed no impacts to water supply wells.”

The pipeline is already notorious for other reasons. With 5,500 miles of pipeline transporting 100 million gallons of fuel a day between Texas and New York, Colonial Pipeline is the largest pipeline system for refined oil products in the US. In May 2021, the pipeline had to be taken offline for five days following a ransomware attack, triggering higher gas prices, panic, and gridlocked traffic outside gas stations. The fiasco showed how vulnerable the nation’s energy infrastructure is to hackers, who used a compromised password to get into Colonial’s network.

Apparently, most pipelines aren’t very technologically sophisticated when it comes to detecting spills either. Most leaks are found by people, as was the case with Colonial, E&E News reports.