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Justine Calma

Justine Calma

Senior Science Reporter

Justine Calma is a senior science reporter at The Verge, where she covers clean energy and the environment. She’s also the host of Hell or High Water: When Disaster Hits Home, a podcast from Vox Media and Audible Originals. Since reporting on the adoption of the Paris agreement in 2015, Justine has covered climate change on the ground in four continents. "Power Shift," her story about one neighborhood’s fight for clean energy in New Orleans was published in the 2022 HarperCollins anthology, The Best American Science and Nature Writing. She previously covered environmental justice at Grist and taught a nonfiction climate writing class for the MFA program at The City College of New York. She is an alumna of Columbia Journalism School's Toni Stabile investigative program and the Ida B. Wells fellowship at The Nation Institute's Investigative Fund.

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What do soaring Bitcoin prices mean for the power grid and the environment?

Soundside, a daily broadcast program from Seattle’s NPR news station KUOW, breaks it down in this episode. Catch my interview about the energy and environmental costs of Bitcoin mining in the US, and the legal battle that killed the Department of Energy’s survey of miners’ electricity consumption.


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The first major offshore wind farm in the US just started powering homes in New York.

This is BIG in more ways than one. With blades longer than the Statue of Liberty is tall, these are 12 massive next-generation turbines towering over the Atlantic. Together they should be able to generate 130 megawatts of clean energy for some 70,000 homes. For comparison, the US only had the capacity to generate 42 megawatts from offshore wind until now. More big offshore projects are on the way (and just a reminder, there’s no evidence to show they’re harming whales).


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Is anyone surprised Shell is walking back its commitments to pollute less?

We are talking about the the same industry profiting by creating the climate crisis. Shell previously promised to reach net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, which is impossible unless the company pivots away from dirty energy. Shell’s blaming consumers for its own lack of follow through, saying “investment in oil and gas will be needed” to meet demand.


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Fossil fuel companies are using AI to drill faster.

They’ve used AI for years to find new oil and gas reserves. Now, more advanced AI is helping them drill oil wells more efficiently. Within a few years, a significant chunk of wells could be drilled autonomously, Bloomberg reports. That brings costs down and helps dirty energy compete with renewables like solar and wind, which have become cheaper alternatives to fossil fuel power plants that wreck air quality and cause climate change.


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AI, Bitcoin mining, and clean tech manufacturing could push US power grids to the brink.

Electricity shortages could become a big problem over the next several years unless the US races to get more sources of clean energy online, The Washington Post reports. Data centers for AI and crypto mining are huge energy vampires. And the resurgence of domestic manufacturing for everything from semiconductors to EV batteries and solar panels are also expected to put extra strain on aging power grids.