++The new show’s hair and wardrobe team explain the significance of these seemingly small choices. +
++Hulu’s The Other Black Girl, premiering September 13, is a show whose themes are inextricably tied to its styling. +
++Its main characters drift chameleon-like across the screen, switching off hair and outfits and signature lipstick as the plot, which plays with the ideas of Black womanhood, respectability, and performance, evolves. +
++Rare is the TV show where hair product is a major plot point. The hair in such a show had better live up to its star billing — along with the makeup and the clothes. +
++Based on the 2021 novel by Zakiya Dalila Harris, The Other Black Girl works like a Stepford Wives for Black women. On one side of the aisle are the non-robots: people like main character Nella, who, as the show begins, wears Peter Pan collars and sensible cardigans, a baby Afro and face bare of makeup. On the other side are the people who aren’t quite robots but who do seem too cool to be normal people: like Hazel, the new girl at Nella’s office, who wears her hair in long dramatic locs and sports floral blazers in editorial shapes. +
++At first, Nella is relieved to see another Black girl at the tony all-white publishing office where she works. She thinks Hazel’s clothes are unspeakably cool, and she’s more than happy to join Hazel in promising that they’ll look out for each other in the microaggression-strewn landscape of publishing. +
++Gradually, though, Nella starts to suspect that there might be something a little off about Hazel. Every time the opportunity comes to stand up against the white gatekeepers of cultural power, Hazel backs off. She tells Nella she thinks they can be more effective working within the system than outside it — and she seems weirdly insistent that Nella should think so too. +
++Hazel and Nella are performing different versions of Black womanhood. As the show goes on, their performances evolve, too. On The Other Black Girl, a big style change signifies a big change in both personality and politics. On this show, the people who dress the coolest are also the most conformist. +
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Wilford Harwood/Hulu
++For the show’s costume designer Kairo Courts, Nella’s style journey echoes the evolution of an archetypal professional Black woman. “For a lot of us, that’s the evolution of how you start,” says Courts. “In corporate America, you try to emulate, you try to fit in. You know you don’t want to ruffle the waters. That’s what Nella is doing.” +
++Nella starts to change her mind about her style, however, after she lets Hazel dress her up for a big networking event, in a sharp plaid blazer and bold red lip. +
++“You made me look like you,” Nella says, staring at her reflection with mingled delight and trepidation. +
++“You’re welcome,” Hazel sing-songs. +
++After her first makeover, Nella is “looking up to other women who are more bold than she is,” explains Courts. Hazel is one of a group of chic and accomplished professional Black women, and Nella finds their confidence and style deeply alluring. +
++Courts imagines Hazel’s style as looking like Nella’s might if she weren’t trying to blend in at all times. “What would it look like if we didn’t have that blockage where we have to play the part in business settings?” she asks. “What would it look like if you brought your culture and your style to the full front, and it showed up in all the spaces that you are? Because a lot of times, that’s not allowed for Black women. What would that look like, if we were able to get people out of their inhibitions?” +
++Hazel flourishes without inhibitions. She also sabotages and casually backstabs. She’s willing to rep for her culture, but also to betray it if it serves her purposes. Nella, meanwhile, seems to have drawn the conclusion that she’ll only be able to advocate for Black people at work if she disguises herself, cosplaying in the blandest and most conformist clothes she can think of. +
++Hazel’s style is also supposed to look like Nella’s aspirational style goals for slightly darker reasons. “A lot of Hazel’s looks were based on people she wanted to, let’s say, recruit,” explains hair department head Pamela Hall. +
++To target cosmopolitan Nella, Hazel wears her hair in locs. In flashbacks, though, we see her with natural curls, in a silk press, and even with flat-ironed hair. Hazel’s style isn’t about expressing herself and her ambition and culture unapologetically. It’s about how she thinks her targets want to look, themselves. She doesn’t seem to have a real sense of her own to express. +
++The audience, though, has to find Hazel’s style just as alluring as Nella does to understand why Nella is so drawn to her. Essie Cha, head of the makeup department, says she gets the appeal of Hazel and her entourage completely. “They’re gorgeous women and smart and elegant and successful,” Cha jokes. “I would take [their secret] by the bucketful.” +
++Wouldn’t we all? Everyone seems to find Hazel more appealing than Nella, including Nella’s coworkers. Hazel is easy to like. She’s uninhibited enough to showcase the casually chic style white women are always appropriating from Black women. She gives her white coworkers ample opportunity to perform their own cultural tolerance, bringing in cake from Harlem to share around and lying that her grandparents ate the same cake on their wedding night. But Hazel’s Blackness comes without any meaningful challenge to the status quo. The fantasy of the fully uninhibited professional Black woman remains, in the end, a fantasy. +
++The Other Black Girl premieres September 13 on Hulu. +
++Geothermal’s “breakthrough,” and the challenges ahead, explained. +
++If you read about the energy industry in the ’00s and ’10s, you probably caught some excited, hopeful stories about geothermal, the renewable energy source that harnesses heat hundreds of meters below the earth’s surface. “Enhanced geothermal” — a novel approach in which fluids are poured deep underground, heat up, and then are recovered for their steam heat and used to generate electricity — got particular attention, because it promised a geothermal technique that could work most places on earth, not just in volcanic areas like Iceland or Indonesia. +
++Enhanced geothermal is “increasingly being eyed as an enormous potential source of pollution-free energy,” science journalist David Biello wrote all the way back in 2008. Enhanced geothermal has “often been touted as the answer to the tepid growth of the geothermal industry,” reporter Megan Geuss wrote in Ars Technica in 2014, already with a bit of jaded weariness that the promises were yet unfulfilled. Startups like AltaRock Energy got press for their promises of a clean energy source, deployable in any geography, that still worked when the sun wasn’t shining and the wind wasn’t blowing. +
++But as of 2022, a mere 0.4 percent of US electricity generation came from geothermal. That’s some eight times less than solar, 25 times less than wind, and 45 times less than nuclear. If that weren’t depressing enough, consider those numbers still meant the US produced more geothermal electricity than any other country that year, even surpassing heavily volcanic Indonesia. +
++But some significant breakthroughs have recently earned geothermal renewed attention. Fervo Energy, an enhanced geothermal company, announced that it was able to build and run a well in Nevada for 30 days, generating 3.5 megawatts of power. That’s not a lot (a typical natural gas power block produces over 800 megawatts), and it’s still much more expensive to produce than solar or gas power, but it’s the furthest an enhanced geothermal project has gotten to date. Last year, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm announced a major initiative promising to slash the cost of geothermal generation by 90 percent by 2035. That announcement put the current cost at about $450 per megawatt-hour, compared to around $30 to $50 for onshore wind and solar. +
++On one reading, geothermal is finally getting the private finance, the technical progress, and the government support it needs to thrive. But having read the old press, I had a more pessimistic reaction. Is this turning point for geothermal for real, or just more hype? And if it is for real, what took so long? We have known for decades that geothermal has the potential to provide carbon-free energy that, unlike rapidly growing wind and solar, is constantly available, which we desperately need. Why, then, is its market share still stuck at 0.4 percent? What went wrong, and how can we fix it? +
++Why enhanced geothermal is promising, and why it hasn’t happened yet +
++The crust of the earth (the outer layer on top of which we all live) contains a lot of heat, ultimately generated by the radioactive decay of elements in the mantle, which sits below the crust. So beneath us, at all times, are deep rock formations with regular temperatures far hotter than those above ground. In certain locations, these rock formations also contain considerable amounts of fluid (mostly water with some salts in it). When these boiling fluid reservoirs burst through the surface, they appear as hot springs. +
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Franco Origlia/Getty Images
++Those sources have provided heat for centuries, and in 1904 the first successful effort to use this liquid to spin a turbine for electrical generation occurred in Italy. A key limitation, though, is that most areas of the earth do not have easily accessible and/or sufficiently large reservoirs for this kind of “hydrothermal” system to work. Iceland runs largely on geothermal, but it’s very much the exception, and a beneficiary of an unusual geology that leads to a volcanic eruption every five years on average. +
++This has provoked a search for geothermal methods that are not limited to places with existing, accessible reservoirs of water underground. Perhaps the most famous is “enhanced geothermal” (EGS), which Fervo and other companies are pursuing. The idea here is to drill deep into the earth, pour in a liquid to be heated by the hot rocks down there, and then provide a way for steam or very hot water to exit, either to use directly for heat or to spin a turbine. +
++If successful, this approach would mean that geothermal plants could be built in a wide range of areas, with many different geologies. That would provide a useful source of low-carbon “base load” power: a source, like hydroelectric dams or nuclear plants or most coal plants, that produces a consistent electric output all the time. That would be invaluable in moments when intermittent sources like solar and wind are insufficient to meet energy demand. +
++In the mid-’00s, experts believed that we had the technical tools to vastly scale up enhanced geothermal. A panel report released in 2006 by an MIT-led team concluded, “Most of the key technical requirements to make EGS work economically over a wide area of the country are in effect, with remaining goals easily within reach.” But in the 17 subsequent years, surprisingly little progress has been made. +
++Jefferson Tester, then a professor at MIT and now at Cornell, chaired the panel behind that report. When I asked him what happened, he pointed me to the report’s recommendations: accelerated permitting and licensing for geothermal projects, loan guarantees for businesses, tax credits and portfolio standards like those that benefit wind and solar, large investment from the Department of Energy (DOE) in setting up demonstrations in a large number of locations. Very little of that actually happened — and the problem is that very little isn’t enough to get geothermal going. +
++“The scale of geothermal is such you can’t do it just by putting up a solar collector or one wind turbine somewhere,” he explains. “You have to do it at a reasonably higher scale, which means there has to be more net money put in at the front end to drill holes and to evaluate that resource.” +
++Compare geothermal to solar power. A solar plant is just an array of individual solar panels, each of which might cost a few thousand dollars. It’s totally doable for a small company without much capital to build out a single panel and show that it works — which is precisely what’s happened, as solar generation grew globally from around 1 TWh in 2000 to nearly 1,300 TWh in 2022. +
++Geothermal drilling operations, by contrast, are massive, much more expensive endeavors. The largest federally supported demonstration, the FORGE project in Utah, has an initial budget of $220 million, with another $115 million in funding expected. That is well outside the budget of most energy startups, and the kind of thing where government support is usually necessary. Part of why Fervo’s breakthrough raised so many eyebrows is that, according to company claims, most of its funding is private. CEO Tim Latimer says the company has raised over $200 million to date, only a small share of it from DOE. Getting that level of funding for a geothermal endeavor is highly unusual. +
++There have been occasional bursts of federal interest in supporting the technology, but they’ve been partial and abortive. The 2009 Obama stimulus included $368.2 million earmarked for the Geothermal Technologies Office at DOE, but negative headlines followed when some supported projects struggled. Although the loan guarantees actually wound up being profitable, they earned huge Republican opposition in Congress that prevented the program from continuing. Throughout the 2010s, the investment tax credit (ITC) included in the corporate income tax as a subsidy to clean energy offset 30 percent of the cost of solar and wind projects, but only 10 percent for geothermal. +
++“By the early 2010s, natural gas prices got really cheap, solar prices got really cheap, and the market support for geothermal basically evaporated,” Latimer told me. “The irony is that tech for drilling got really good by the early 2010s,” as fracking transformed the oil and gas sector, helping drive those cheap natural gas prices. “But there was no investment or market demand for geothermal. It was this cool technology that just had nowhere to go.” +
++The typical tools used for supporting renewable energy also might not work as well with geothermal. The loan guarantee program, for example, is primarily for projects ready for commercialization, with minimal technical progress needed — just add money. “What they fund meets a certain threshold of proven commercial viability,” Arnab Datta, a senior counsel at Employ America who has studied policy barriers to geothermal, tells me. That doesn’t describe most enhanced geothermal, where commercial viability hasn’t yet been shown. +
++Equity investments — which provide more upside for investors if a project succeeds while minimizing risk for companies should they fail — might work well, but government accounting rules treat such investments as grants and assume they will never make back any money. Normally, government budgeting operates on a cash flow basis, and in an equity investment, the only cash flow at the time of investment is from the government to the firm in which the government bought equity. But the effect is that even government offices authorized to make such investments are hesitant to do so, knowing they will never be credited, either politically or in their future budgets, for any money earned. +
++Is geothermal finally turning around? +
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Dominika Zarzycka/NurPhoto via Getty Images
++Fervo’s bet is that progress in drilling technology due to the fracking revolution in oil and gas has changed the dynamics that have historically held geothermal back. Historically, geothermal projects have involved drilling vertically downward. But fracking has made horizontal drilling cheaper, which enabled a different approach Fervo is using: drilling vertical wells several hundred meters apart, and connecting them underground through horizontal drilling. They argue this lets them move fluid along a larger segment of rock underground, producing more steam and making the well more efficient. +
++Fervo claims its system is ready for commercialization: It just needs to scale up the test well that it’s already shown works, and it’ll be in business. +
++Still, there are hang-ups. Geothermal drilling, unlike some oil and gas projects, is subject to challenge under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), which can lead to years-long regulatory delays in getting projects off the ground. (Yes, you’ve read that right — it’s legally easier to permit an oil or gas well that will add further greenhouse gases to the atmosphere than it is to drill geothermal wells that can provide near-zero-carbon electricity.) Adding in a “categorical exclusion” for geothermal, similar to that for oil and gas, could help a bit. So too would directing some of the resources in the Inflation Reduction Act and the 2022 infrastructure law toward geothermal projects in the stage between speculative R&D and full-scale commercialization. +
++“Theoretically, the place that should be doing this is the Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations, which has about $25 billion,” Datta says. “But that doesn’t have the authority yet to fund exactly this type of thing.” It would need more direct authority from Congress to deploy that money for large-scale geothermal demonstrations. Even before that, though, it could offer the kinds of creative funding mechanisms it has used to promote the hydrogen industry, which are already authorized, to geothermal companies. +
++Some critics are also worried that enhanced geothermal is not as ready for primetime as boosters like Latimer claim. “I think Fervo has done an incredible job of raising money, getting customers, raising awareness, etc.,” Austin Vernon, an engineer who writes extensively on geothermal, told me in an email. “But if you read their paper they were losing 10-20 percent of the fluid they circulated. The cost of that water would be more than the electricity is worth in most wholesale markets.” +
++Worse, he claims, “if you are losing that much fluid in the granite you are almost certainly going to induce seismicity on longer time horizons.” +
++This is not a theoretical concern. In 2017, a geothermal project in South Korea caused a 5.5 magnitude earthquake, which luckily did not kill anyone but did cause dozens of injuries. A sizable enough earthquake problem could not only doom specific geothermal pilots but also lead to a perception of the whole technology as dangerous. +
++Fervo, naturally, disputes these critiques. The 10 to 20 percent figure, Fervo’s Latimer tells me, “is actually a positive result and good news for project viability as the number will only decline from there.” He disputes the notion that this “leakoff” will result in increased seismic risk, because Fervo’s projects “bring injected fluid back to the surface, limiting stress state changes.” +
++Vernon is more optimistic about “closed loop” systems, like the one the company Eavor is building in Germany, in which horizontal drilling is used to place an enclosed pipe that runs from one well to another. That way, the fluid is never released directly into the rock, meaning you don’t need to worry about losing it or it causing earthquake problems; he notes that Fervo itself could easily pivot to this kind of system. Even without liquid concerns, Vernon argues that geothermal’s niche will be in providing hot water directly to heat buildings (like a massive underground radiator) or provide steam to factories, rather than producing electricity, given the efficiency losses involved in converting steam to electricity. Useful, but not exactly world-changing. +
++The ultimate dream is “superhot rock energy.” wherein geothermal firms would drill 4 kilometers or even deeper into the earth’s crust, to the point where the surrounding rocks exceed 400 degrees Celsius (752º F). At this temperature, and sufficient pressures, water goes “supercritical”: Liquid water and steam become indistinguishable and hold more energy, which enables turbines to operate much more efficiently. That could make electricity generation much more viable. +
++“Imagine if you could drill down next to a coal plant and get steam that’s hot enough to power that plant’s turbines,” the CEO of Quaise, a startup attempting to develop this technology, told the New York Times’s Brad Plumer. (The reason coal plants burn coal, after all, is to generate steam to power electric turbines, which is why coal and natural gas and, for that matter, nuclear plants are all known as thermal power plants.) “Replacing coal at thousands of coal plants around the world. That’s the level of geothermal we’re trying to unlock.” +
++This vision is incredibly exciting, because it offers the promise of ultra-low-cost, ultra-abundant zero-carbon energy basically anywhere on earth, a form that could seamlessly fit into existing energy infrastructure. It would mean not just cleaner energy, but more energy. Vernon and analyst Eli Dourado wrote a report laying out what the economy could look like with ultra-abundant geothermal, nuclear, or solar power: It includes things like vertical farming (enabling massive food production on a tiny land footprint), intercontinental travel via rocket, and mass desalination to end water scarcity around the world. It’s all very sci-fi. +
++For the time being, the “fi” part still applies: We simply do not have the technology to drill deep enough to access this geothermal resource right now at a reasonable cost. (The deepest hole ever drilled in the earth, the 7.6 mile/12.2km Kola Superdeep Borehole in the Russian Arctic, took decades before ultimately being abandoned.) +
++What super-deep drilling, Fervo’s enhanced geothermal project, Eavor’s “closed loop” project, and every other next-gen geothermal project have in common is a need for patient capital investment, perhaps through government subsidy. There are major steps needed to make that happen, but they tend to be fairly technocratic: empowering more equity investments from the Energy Department, offering a categorical exclusion to geothermal projects, empowering the Office of Clean Energy Demonstration to spend big on geothermal. They seem, in other words, like the kinds of things that even a divided Congress might be able to make happen, not ridiculous pie-in-the-sky aspirations. +
++If the economics can be made to work, geothermal would provide a renewable energy source that’s always on, and that employs plenty of ex-oil and gas workers, to boot. That has been its promise for decades. Maybe the 2020s will end up being the time that promise is finally fulfilled. +
++An extraordinary autumn is expected after a record-smashing summer. +
++The wave of unusual disasters this summer now includes Hurricane Lee, a storm that swelled from Category 1 to Category 5 in just 24 hours as it barreled toward Canada. It’s a prime example of rapid intensification made worse by warming ocean temperatures. +
++It will add to what’s already been an exceptional year of extreme weather. The US has set a new record for the number of billion-dollar disasters in a year — 23 so far — in its history, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). And this doesn’t even include the costs from Tropical Storm Hilary in California or from the ongoing drought in the South and Midwest, because those costs have yet to be fully calculated. +
++“Seemingly no part of the country has been left unscathed,” Ko Barrett, NOAA’s climate adviser, told Vox. +
++Globally, it’s a similar picture. The European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service recently determined that it’s been the hottest summer since records began, beating the last record set in 2019 by a significant margin. The group reported that both July and August reached global average temperatures around 1.5 degrees Celsius warmer than preindustrial times. These are the same average temperature increases that scientists have warned will mean irreversible, widespread crises around the planet. +
++This summer has seen a rising number of “compound events,” disasters occurring simultaneously or hitting one after another, according to climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe. In some cases, one event might accelerate another. A heat wave, drought, and wildfire can conceivably all hit the same area, for example, and even raise the risks of flooding if a storm finally comes, because the ground is too parched to absorb the influx of water. +
++And there may be worse to come. Disaster season — or at least, what we’ve historically thought of as disaster season — is hardly over yet. Summer and fall are typically prime times for extremes, but this year we also have El Niño, the natural cycle when Pacific waters reach higher-than-average temperatures, which is just starting to ramp up. This is why meteorologists expect an extraordinary fall to follow the unprecedented summer, likely filled with active hurricanes and warmer weather through the winter. +
++With El Niño amplifying the effects of climate change, what we can expect from seasons is rapidly changing. Instead of a singular type of disaster any given region must prepare for, but places all over the world can expect multiple events at once. That means our traditional idea of disaster season no longer holds. What we now have is an extended practically year-round calendar of disasters, which often all hit at once. +
++This summer, extreme weather became more personal +
++That disasters are becoming more extreme is obviously a problem, but the fact that they’re also compounding so they seem to be everywhere at once is arguably worse. It’s a particular challenge, because compound events can strain first responders and supplies. It’s also brought the destructive effects of climate change to billions of people globally. +
++In August alone, Hurricane Idalia overwhelmed southeastern Florida’s shores with a record-breaking storm surge of up to 16 feet, wildfires scorched an unusually dry Hawaii and Louisiana, and southern California saw mudslides and flooded roads from heavy rainfall (as well as an unusual tropical storm warning for Hurricane Hilary). A record number of Americans have also been exposed to more smoke in just the first eight months this year than they typically inhale in an entire year. +
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NOAA via Getty Images
++Meanwhile, this summer has been one of the hottest ever recorded. In the US in July, a third of the entire population faced heat alerts at once. The science nonprofit Climate Central found almost half the world’s population experienced unusual heat attributable to climate change this summer — precisely, at least 30 days of hotter temperatures. And the poorest countries were three times more likely to be exposed to warmer-than-average temperatures than richer countries, meaning the people who contribute the least to the causes of warming are bearing worse impacts. +
++“In every country we could analyze, including the southern hemisphere where this is the coolest time of year, we saw temperatures that would be difficult — and in some cases nearly impossible — without human-caused climate change,” said Andrew Pershing, Climate Central’s vice president for science. +
++While temperature fluctuations are a normal feature of the Earth’s climate, there’s ample evidence greenhouse gas emissions from burning fossil fuels are fueling these new extremes. And this summer is just a taste of what’s to come as crises multiply and seasons shift. +
++Extreme weather is shifting geographically and in timing +
++September is supposed to be the start of the climatological fall, but the first couple weeks so far have ushered some of the hottest weather yet for parts of the US. Other kinds of extreme events, like wildfires and hurricanes, operate on a slightly different schedule. Hurricane season, as defined by NOAA, lasts from the beginning of June through November 30, and wildfire season can reach its peak in the fall, making September more of a mid-way point. +
++All this is shifting, though. It helps to think of extreme weather as requiring a set of conditions that come together for a powerful result. In certain seasons, you’re likely to have all the ingredients — high heat, dry soils, high ocean temperatures, and so on — ready to fuel frequent, major disasters. +
++Even without climate change, you can get the occasional May hurricane or disastrous winter wildfire. But climate change is cranking up the heat, making it more likely that all these ingredients can come together and do so outside of expected seasons. Warmer temperatures can create the perfect conditions for extreme weather at unusual times of the year. Indeed, the start of the hurricane season is actually trending earlier: Eight of the last nine years saw a tropical storm before the traditional June 1 start to the season. +
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Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
++Wildfires have an even less predictable season than heat waves and hurricanes, but they have been more frequent throughout the year, burning more area in the past 20 years than in the decades that came before. And the smoke from these fires is having an even wider impact. Canada’s worst wildfire season on record, particularly in the eastern part of the country, has blanketed the Northeast and Midwest with smoke for parts of the summer. +
++“Extreme drought across Canada led to one of the worst wildfire seasons on record, with lots of fuel and prolonged dryness contributing to this set of events,” Barret said. “All of which is associated with our warming planet. When combined with the right atmospheric set-up, a rarely seen extreme can occur.” +
++The atmospheric conditions this fall are still ripe for disaster — and the possibility that disaster season will linger long past its usual deadline. El Niño is also a multiyear event, scientists worry that next year may be even hotter. And with El Niño exacerbating the warming the world has already experienced, everyone should expect even more extreme weather. +
++“El Niño is just ramping up,” Hayhoe said. “It’s like we’re a frog in a pot of slowly boiling water and somebody just poured a kettle full of more boiling water into the pot.” +
++When the El Niño cycle eventually ends, the world can’t expect a return to normalcy. We’re on a path for more extremes that will accelerate for decades to come. +