News Updates

The retail giant Walmart is expanding its fledgling drone delivery service, expecting to reach 4 million households in parts of six states by year’s end. Eleanor Nelsen, Adeline Guthrie, and Lee Vinsel might have seen this coming. In Issues, they recount efforts to assess people’s views of drone delivery in Christiansburg, Virginia, in what the authors say is the first evaluation of public sentiment in a community with direct experience with the technology. The authors write that the results—some expected, some surprising—“reinforce the complexity of public attitudes toward technology, and the shifts that occur as familiarity increases.”

With nuclear power plants in a handful of states facing possible closure, a cadre of technical and social observers want to keep them open, the Washington Post reports. Some advocates call for building even more nuclear plants, seeing them as carbon-free suppliers of needed energy that will help minimize risk of climate change. But for nuclear energy to play any significant role, the nuclear industry must fundamentally reform itself, Jessica Lovering and Suzanne Hobbs Baker argue in Issues. This will require, they write, “embracing not just new technological pathways, but also a more democratic, inclusive approach to how it does business.”

In the first congressional hearing on unidentified flying objects in half a century, Pentagon officials did not disclose any new information on what they now label “unidentified aerial phenomena.” This even though, the AP reports, the government “is believed to hold additional technical information on the sightings that it has not disclosed publicly.” Such reluctance wouldn’t surprise Keith Kloor. In Issues, Kloor dissects years of supposed sightings and claims by former military officials. He comes away skeptical, sure only that “the Pentagon may well have its own good reason for keeping the UFO story alive. Not that they’d ever admit it.”

Viral videos of beachfront homes washing away illustrate the power of rising sea levels, caused in part by climate change. In Issues, Cornelia Dean maintains that the US Congress shares some of the blame for these losses, especially its adoption in 1998 of the National Flood Insurance Program, which, she argues, set off a disastrous and expensive building boom on the coasts. Among her ideas for undoing that mistake is prohibiting homeowners from receiving flood insurance payouts after their first claim. “Over time,” Dean writes, “that would at least reduce the program’s expenses and might discourage rebuilding in places obviously unsuited for it.”

A heat wave in Texas recently knocked six electric-power generators offline, raising prices along with worries about whether the grid might suffer even larger outages during upcoming summer heat, as it did during a winter freeze in 2021. In Issues, Adam Briggle recounts how living through that freeze prompted a philosophical reckoning. After listing practical ways to make grids more resilient, he wondered, for example, if people and society would gain even more by focusing not on technological change but on reducing energy consumption overall to achieve greater freedom from the grid, especially as climate change brings more extreme weather.

As expanding solar, wind, and battery technologies will require greater production of various critical minerals, several members of Congress have introduced legislation to tighten environmental and economic rules for US mining companies. In this vein, Mark P. Mills argues in Issues that the unavoidable scale of materials demand will have significant impact on both commerce and the environment. “Most policy formulations fail to account for these implications,” he writes. “The country is long overdue for thoughtful and realistic planning that honestly acknowledges the tradeoffs and consequences arising from the materials needed to accelerate what is being called the energy transition.”

With Earth steadily warming, the United States should launch a robust research program on reflecting sunlight back into space, say two leaders of a Council on Foreign Relations report. This call reflects, if you will, a detailed blueprint in Issues for assessing solar radiation mitigation. The Biden administration and Congress, John Deutch and Maria Zuber write, should mount an R&D program funded initially with $50 million per year to support 10 to 15 university research centers. An independent committee should also be appointed to lead pro and con discussions of this technology while researchers seek knowledge to inform hard decisions ahead about if, how, and when it should be used.

Young people in the United States are experiencing “soaring rates of mental health disorders,” the New York Times reports, resulting in what the US Surgeon General calls a “devastating” mental health crisis among adolescents. As researchers work to reverse this trend, they will need to incorporate the lived experience of children, youth, and their families in every step of the scientific process, Erin G. Fox, Nicole F. Kahn, and Gabrielle Battle maintain in Issues. “Engaging youth in the research process is particularly necessary,” the authors write, “because the experiences of young people today are very unlike those of generations before them.”

More than 2,200 dams in the United States are in poor condition, up from just a few years ago, according to an Associated Press analysis. In Issues, James G. Workman proposes using a system of cap and trade to fix troubled dams. Rather than having government impose rigid regulations to make dams more efficient and remove obsolete ones, public and private stakeholders should be allowed to innovate their own ways to make dams safer and perform better, then sell those “credits” for economic gain. “This approach,” Workman writes, “leverages incentives to reform, innovate, and improve into a competitive advantage in which everyone benefits, and so does nature.”