The cylinder hangs level, a few feet above an open concrete shaft. It is 43 feet long, about 15 feet across, and it weighs 367 tons. The…
A flame has been standing above a clearing in the Gabonese interior for years. It heats nothing. It lights nothing. Nobody is billed. Underneath it a…
A wire fence runs across a high plateau in Chubut, Argentina, and it was put there for industrial safety. Behind it stand wind turbines, a gravel service…
A volunteer settles into a chair in a psychology lab at Princeton and stares at a blank screen. Two faces flash up side by side, then…
Stand at the foot of the shell at Lianjiang and the thing above you does not read as a building. It reads as a horizon that…
In Oyigbo the air stops people at their own front doors. A sulfurous wall rolls off the nearby oil facility before the town is fully awake.…
The strip of ground between two railway rails is dead space. Every line on earth has it, and on every line it holds gravel and nothing…
The plant closed on a spring afternoon and every fuel assembly came out of the core. The staff scattered. The paperwork moved from operating to taking apart.…
Kitimat sits at the head of a long fjord in northwest British Columbia, ringed by mountains that hold weather in like a bowl. On the worst…
Forty three miles east of Suffolk, a vessel is holding something upright against the sky. It is a single blade, and it is 377 feet long. Laid…
On the Atlantic coast of Río Negro a wide bay opens onto open ocean, and almost nothing has been built on it. No pier. No jetty. No…
Twenty four miles northeast of Rügen the Baltic runs flat and grey to the horizon. No land shows. No sound carries in from shore. What sits…
Somewhere over a stretch of dry scrubland, a migrating bird picks up a signal it has trusted for millions of years. Below it lies the flat, polarized…
On the Jiangshan Peninsula in southern China, a line of pump trucks lines up beside a freshly dug pit. They begin to pour, and they do…
Outside Hoima in western Uganda, a length of steel pipe reaches the trench wrapped in something most pipelines never carry. Coiled along its full length is…
On a foggy February morning off the central California coast, a PG&E manager piloted a small boat past a concrete structure crouching just below the surface…
Something enormous is anchored in the Timor Sea, and most people on shore have no idea it is there. It sits 285 kilometers north of Darwin,…
Fourteen miles off the coast of Zeeland, in the southern North Sea, the bottom is sand and almost nothing else. A Dutch wind farm stands on…
Something unusual sits underfoot at every panel in this Kentucky field. It is not soil. It is not gravel. It is decades of compacted coal combustion…
From a low ridge in southern Arizona, the field below looks like a mistake. Long rows of solar panels march across the desert, and underneath them,…
Every evening across the English countryside, something small and fast rises into the air and goes to work. It has been doing this for around 50…
In the high plains of southwest Wyoming sits the town of Kemmerer. It is a small and remote place, built long ago on coal. For years,…
Off the coast of California, a steel giant rises from the waves. It is an oil platform, a tower of girders bolted to the seabed. For…
Somewhere under the flat coast of Texas and Louisiana, a vast emergency is hidden in the dark. It is not a bunker or a vault, and…
Drive past a certain field in Texas and you might rub your eyes. Row after row of dark solar panels stretches all the way to the…
Picture a warm summer evening somewhere in the American heartland, the air thick and humming with life. Millions of insects are on the move, riding the…
On a flat stretch of farmland in England’s East Anglian Fens, the view looks ordinary at first: row after row of dark solar panels tilted toward…
