Gerrymandering, named after Founding Father and 5th U.S. Vice President Eldridge Gerry, is the process of creating legislative districts that benefit one party more than the other. Districts must be redrawn as a state’s population changes and because of shifts in population concentrations within a state. This process is often a political one because the very elected officials who have an electoral stake in the outcome of redistricting are often able to draw lines that benefit themselves and their co-partisans. Is there a way to keep politics out of drawing legislative districts?

As discussed in our brief on decarbonization, most strategies for reducing CO2 levels in the atmosphere involve switching to power generation and transportation technologies that produce less CO2. An alternate strategy is to extract and store carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, referred to as sequestration. At first glance, sequestration could be an attractive option for achieving the “net zero” goal, where the total amount of CO2 in the atmosphere would remain constant instead of increasing. Instead of building costly new renewable energy sources, retrofitting buildings, and switching to electric vehicles, sequestration offers a way for society to continue producing and using energy largely as we do now. The primary difference is that we would have to implement enough sequestration measures to offset global CO2 emissions. The question is, is sequestration on the levels required to achieve this outcome even possible? What would it cost?

In the past two decades, U.S. natural gas and oil production has increased to the point that America is now a net exporter of these commodities. This change is due to a new technology, hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. How does fracking fit into the debate over climate change?