Julia Picard

Starship now operates in more than 60 colleges where students are learning to fix robots and maybe launch their careers.

In Corvallis, Oregon, I'm Julia Picard for Marketplace.

I'm Amy Scott, and this week on our podcast, How We Survive, I travel to an undisclosed location in the San Francisco Bay Area to learn about a controversial solution to the climate crisis.

It's called solar geoengineering, and it's basically a way to dim the sun in order to cool the planet.

Proponents view this as a necessary intervention.

Others are not convinced.

And while so far solar geoengineering is happening at a small scale, what happens if a rogue nation or a rogue billionaire makes the decision for us?

Listen to this week's episode of How We Survive on your favorite podcast app.

Last December, during a power outage in San Francisco, an observer filmed lines of Waymo robotaxis stopped in their tracks and posted it to social media.

Traffic lights, which guide the self-driving cars, had gone dark.

Not knowing what else to do, the cars just bricked.

Autonomous vehicles, or AVs, have been picking up passengers on the streets of San Francisco since 2022.

Jeffrey Tumlin led San Francisco's transportation agency.

He says the rollout was chaos.

Tomlin says before AVs scale further, they need to prove they can safely handle real-world complexity.

And lawmakers in Washington agree.

Multiple bills are being debated in Congress.

Here's Senator Ted Cruz in early February.

Federal regulation for vehicle design, construction, and performance already exist.

They just haven't been updated for AVs.