
In my humble and partially biased opinion, two of the greatest places on earth to snowboard are the French Alps and Utah. I say the French Alps because, after 13 years of annual trips, I have yet to find better food and better après parties. And I say Utah because it's, like, pretty hard to beat the greatest snow on earth.
Well today, both of these places were announced as future hosts of the Winter Olympics. France will host the games in 2030 (once it has successfully met certain conditions) and Utah will host the games in 2034. This is exciting.
But it was also entirely expected.
France was the preferred choice since June. And Utah was the only choice for 2034. To host the Winter Games, you generally need to have at least two things: money and snow. And right now, fewer places want to spend the former on something that may or may not generate an ROI, and fewer places are getting the latter.
Remember this post looking at the impact of climate change on the Winter Olympics?
Because of these challenges, there is talk of the IOC adopting a permanent rotation of Winter Olympic cities. And Utah has been eagerly positioning itself to be one of the places. Biases aside, this feels like an obvious choice. Salt Lake City has some of the best and most accessible snowboarding in the world (SLC is a great airport) and -- most importantly -- it still snows there.
Photo by Alex Moliski on Unsplash
If you do a search for the number of electric vehicle charging stations in the US, you'll likely get a number somewhere around 160,000. But to better understand what this means, you'll probably want to ask a few follow-up questions:
Are these individual charging ports (for a single vehicle) or are these stations (locations with multiple charging ports)?
How many of these chargers are private versus publicly-accessible?
And how many of these are DC fast, versus just level 2? Level 2 is what most people have at home (I think), whereas DC charging is what you need if you're stopping on the side of the road and need to supercharge your car in 20-30 minutes.
Usually the biggest fear with EVs is range anxiety. We have come to expect that we'll be able to find a gas station when we need it, but, for the most part, we don't yet feel that way about EV charging stations.
So for this concern, the more precise question would be: How many publicly-accessible DC-fast charging stations are there in the US? This is the filter that gives you stations that would be most comparable to how gas stations function today.
The answer, according to the US Department of Energy, is about 10,597 stations and 44,160 charging ports. And according to Bloomberg Green, this puts the US on track to have public fast-charging sites outnumber gas stations in about 8 years.
Of course, it's probably safe to assume that the pace of EV adoption will only increase. And that means that this flip could happen well before 8 years. In my mind, that's soon.
https://twitter.com/tjfarncombe/status/1813232340119728180
It rained a lot today. According to Environment Canada, Toronto's Pearson Airport saw 97.8 mm of rain fall before 2 PM. This is the fifth rainiest day on record; the record being July 8, 2013, which saw 126 mm fall. But today feels a lot like it did in July 2013. The same rivers, streets, and underpasses flooded. People needed rescuing. Cars got marooned. And more than 167,000 customers were left without power. I lost power in the Junction around lunchtime and it didn't come back on until just before 7 PM. That really hurt productivity, although I did manage to get in a workout during the outage.
Sadly, all of this is expected. The thing about air is that its ability to hold water depends on its temperature. For example, according to Nasa, a given volume of air at 20°C can hold 2x the amount of water vapor compared to air at 10°C. So as the earth's atmosphere warms, it is automatically going to hold more water vapor, and that means the potential for bigger and more severe storms. Some scientists predict that for every 1°C increase in atmospheric temperature, we should expect precipitation intensity during extreme storms to increase by about 7%.
This means that flood and water management are only going to become increasingly more important to all cities -- not just the most vulnerable cities like Miami. And it's going to require constant adaption as we figure out how to best manage the climate damage we've done. Of course, it's easy to want to do something about this on days like today when everyone is sharing videos of flooded streets and floating cars. But the trick is continuing to do something about it once most people have forgotten what July 16 was like.
Share Dialog
Share Dialog
Share Dialog