News Updates

In what NASA called “an extraordinarily close approach,” an asteroid the size of a large moving truck recently zipped past Earth at an altitude of about 2,200 miles, well within the orbit of global satellites. No harm—this time. But how would you defend the planet from approaching asteroids in the future? In Issues, Mahmud Farooque and Jason L. Kessler recount NASA’s experience in engaging the public in two-way conversations about the agency’s Asteroid Grand Challenge, which focused on “finding all asteroid threats to human populations and knowing what to do about them.” The outcomes, the authors report, surprised everyone.

A Massachusetts-based company pioneering a new steelmaking technology that doesn’t emit carbon dioxide has gained major new funding from two industrial and high-tech giants. This should be good news for Colin Cunliff. In Issues, he writes that reducing emissions from this and other hard-to-decarbonize industrial sectors is critical for curbing climate change. And given the scope of the challenges, Cunliff argues, the federal government should make innovation in clean energy a national priority by beefing up research, development, and demonstration of new technologies and applying its full suite of policy tools.

Reinforced by the coronavirus pandemic, the downtowns of nearly every US city have died, the Washington Post declares, while seeing as something of a silver lining “a once-in-a-generation chance to revive them.” In Issues, Carl Schramm offers some basic principles for improving the prospects of dying cities. Among them, mayors and other urban leaders must focus on developing productive entrepreneurship that will make cities more competitive. But many knowledge gaps remain, the author writes, so policymakers and scholars must mount a focused research program to establish an empirical foundation that can guide effective interventions.

Federal regulators have approved what will be the United States’ first small modular nuclear reactor, a step the government says will provide “a new clean power source” to help the nation reduce its greenhouse gas emissions. In Issues, Ahmed Abdulla and M. Granger Morgan see even wider application. Many developing countries, they write, may find the reactors economically and technologically attractive for meeting their growing energy demands in a way that is more compatible with their smaller electricity grids. Toward this goal, the authors offer a blueprint for how to build small modular reactors efficiently and ensure maximum safety.

Efforts to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, including use of so-called direct air capture, aren’t being ramped up fast enough to meet climate goals for limiting global temperature rises, according to a new international report. To drive greater efforts in the United States, Evvan Morton and her colleagues write in Issues, government should do more to demonstrate the feasibility of carbon dioxide removal technologies and to set policies to guide how and where they should be used, who should be responsible for or benefit economically from the removal, and how to manage any unexpected harm resulting from these efforts.

An international group of scientists is stressing the need to study a particular approach to solar geoengineering—injecting aerosol particles into the stratosphere to block some of the sun’s rays—to cool the planet and mitigate climate change. David Keith has long favored such research. In Issues, Keith writes that “the potential benefits of solar geoengineering warrant a large-scale international research effort,” and he proposes some “crosscutting principles” to guide programs in the United States or elsewhere. Beyond examining technical matters, he adds, “any exploration of geoengineering would also have to consider how its deployment would be governed.”

Earth’s protective ozone layer, once threatened by pollution from certain common chemicals, is now expected to recover completely, thanks to the Montreal Protocol, a United Nations agreement activated in 1989 to phase out use of the harmful substances. In Issues, Stephen J. Garber and Lisa Ruth Rand call for applying lessons from the protocol to another pressing problem: orbital debris that increasingly threatens satellites and other spacecraft. This “space junk,” left behind by various government and commercial space activities, is essentially a type of pollution, the authors argue—the very kind of thing the protocol has so successfully reduced.