James' World 2

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One dusky June evening, two days before the 2022 Pennsylvania Firefly Festival, the biologist Sarah Lower sat on a back porch, watching the sky for a specific gradation of twilight. A group of Lower’s students from Bucknell University hung around her, armed with butterfly nets and stopwatches for counting the time between firefly flashes—a way to differentiate between the multiple lightning-bug species that live here at the edge of Pennsylvania’s Allegheny National Forest. This postindustrial expanse of second-growth trees and hills pimpled with oil wells also happens to rank among the world’s best places to see fireflies.

Once the cloudy sky blushed red from its last glimpse of the setting sun, I set out with Lower and her students toward the forest edge. Moving from habitat to habitat as the evening deepened, Lower narrated which species we saw and their different behaviors. Her students, meanwhile, netted their way down a wish list of research samples.

First up was Photinus macdermotti, a firefly species that emits two quick flashes. Just a few feet away, near a pond ringed by cattails where a beaver lazed face up, the students caught Photinus marginally, a quick single flasher. Males buzzed around one patch of goldenrod, blinking quick winks at the sitting females who deigned to flash back. Like other species of fireflies, males of P. marginellus typically flash in flight, while females wait below on blades of grass, shooting answering flashes at only the most compelling suitors.

At first, these early-evening species looked almost like pixels of static. But the darker it got, the more they came to resemble dust motes twinkling in invisible sunbeams.

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Radim Schreiber

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On one hand, temperatures are rising around the globe, shattering extreme heat records on basically every continent. That’s making air-conditioning less of a “nice to have” and more of an absolute necessity in some parts of the world. 

On the other hand, air-conditioning is becoming a monster when it comes to energy demand. We might have to add a whole US electrical grid’s worth of new energy generation just to power all the air conditioners that will come online in the next few decades. 

Cold take

Air-conditioning seems ubiquitous where I live in the US, to the point that I carry around a sweater in the summer in anticipation of over-cooled offices and restaurants. 

But in many parts of the world, including some of the countries at highest risk for extreme heat, most people go without it. Roughly 5% of households in India have air-conditioning. Of the 2.8 billion people living in the hottest parts of the world, roughly one in 10 has access to AC, according to the International Energy Agency. 

That’s expected to change in the coming decades, as the world’s largest AC manufacturers target growing markets in Asia and Africa. By 2050, over two-thirds of the world could have an air conditioner, and half those units will likely be in three countries, according to the IEA: China, Indonesia, and India.

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Electric delivery vehicles are big business. These “last-mile” solutions from companies like UPS and Amazon are a way around restrictions on freight vehicle emissions in cities and provide green credentials at the point where customers interact with a service.

In Europe, electric van sales went up 74 percent over the first five months of 2023, with EV powertrains becoming the second-favorite propulsion behind diesel, leapfrogging gasoline. Delivery EV production is massively accelerating as companies head toward 2025 commitments for fleet transformation and Ford and Stellantis bring more vehicles to market. Nissan has even been using Nikola battery-electric heavy-duty car transports to deliver Ariyas to customers in California.

But these electric delivery vehicles not especially new. In fact, a very significant proportion of electric road vehicles for most of the 20th century were working in suburbs, small towns, and villages in the UK as “milk floats.”

Low-powered, slow, and silent, the British milk float was the most common electric road vehicle for most of the 20th century, until the demise of morning milk deliveries. Some other utility EVs, like electric forklifts (invented in 1923) or golf carts, have outnumbered them worldwide, but they were never intended to be driven alongside cars.

You bring me milk each morning?

Anyone old enough to remember milk floats in Britain will know them as trundling vehicles that were the bane of morning commutes, impossible to pass thanks to the flatbeds that made them just long enough to be a moving obstacle. But they were also an institution. According to a 2017 Independent article, there were 1,200 being made a year. Most milk floats on the roads must have been pushing 10 years old, so that tells you how in-demand they were.

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Milk float in Earlsfield in London, England, United Kingdom. In Britain, a milk float is a vehicle specifically designed for the delivery of fresh milk.

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Meshuggah concert. (Credit: Andreas Lawen, Fotandi / Wikipedia)

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Martha Crawford started having climate change dreams about 11 or 12 years ago. Unlike many of her previously remembered dreams, these were not fragmented or nonsensical—they were “very explicit,” she recalls. “They didn’t require a lot of interpretation.” In one, she’s reading a textbook about climate change and then throws it behind the back of her couch, pretending it doesn’t exist. In another, she’s sitting in a lecture given by a climate scientist. But the professor starts yelling at her for not paying attention, and she fails the course. The meaning was pretty clear, says Crawford, a licensed clinical social worker: “You’re not paying attention, and you need to pay attention.”

The dreams eventually inspired her to start the Climate Dreams Project in 2019, and since, she’s been facilitating a space where people can share climate dream anecdotes, mostly anonymously.

One dream submitted to the collection was of people digging holes in the desert so that the rising seas would have somewhere to go. In another contribution, a Flood Football game was underway, and in the second half, players were floating on inner-tubes. Another person, who shared four climate dreams, recounted one in which billions of people were funneling into a giant room that looked like a video-game sports arena, but large enough to hold the world’s population. “At the end of the dream, the entire face of the earth was different,” they wrote. “It was completely icy and the only habitable part was a giant plateau with a city on it.”

It would seem that climate change has woven itself into the “fabric of dreaming” as Crawford puts it.

Studying dreams can be slippery. We don’t always remember them, and interpreting them is highly subjective. But, according to a survey of 1,009 people conducted by The Harris Poll in June on behalf of TIME, over a third of people in the U.S. have dreamed about climate change at least once in their lives.

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Lt. Gov. Sheila Oliver, who rose to become one of New Jersey’s most prominent Black leaders and passionately advocated for revitalizing cities and against gun violence, died Tuesday after a sudden illness. She was 71.

No cause of death was given, according to a statement from her family issued by Gov. Phil Murphy ’s office. Oliver was serving as acting governor while Murphy and his family are on vacation in Italy. His office said she had been hospitalized on Monday.

Murphy said he and his family are distraught at the news. Naming Oliver as his lieutenant governor was, he said, “the best decision I ever made.”

She was the first Black woman to hold statewide elected office in New Jersey, winning the vote alongside Murphy in 2017 and again in 2021. She was a well-known figure in state government and made history in 2010 by becoming the first Black woman to lead the state Assembly.

In contrast to her predecessor, who rarely appeared alongside Gov. Chris Christie, Oliver regularly stood at Murphy’s side and signed several bills into law while serving as acting governor.

She was a compelling public speaker and frequent attendee at Murphy’s bill signings and other events, where he typically introduced her as his “rocking” lieutenant governor.

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Lt. Gov. Sheila Oliver

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