The climate fight moves in stages. A decade ago, we got to the pledge stage. First, governments signed the Paris accords, and then, under pressure from Greta Thunberg’s movement, banks and corporations did the same. Leaders don’t mind making pledges; the hard part is always a few years away, and the pledge itself takes off some of the pressure.

Then other stuff intervened: covid, the invasion of Ukraine, AI, the high prices that those things caused, the fascists that were elected on the back of those high prices. So politicians and corporations began to abandon their climate pledges, in favor of other priorities.

But what do you know, now something else is happening: a global outbreak of extremely high temperatures, and with them all the disasters we’ve come to expect. The question is, will that provide pressure enough to get climate action back on course? We’re going to find out over the next year, and I think we’re going to find out first on the other side of the Atlantic

This spring and summer have been horrific in Europe and the UK. A wavering jet stream—the product of a melting Arctic—has brought heat dome after heat dome to the continent, producing bouts of extraordinarily high temperature. Records have been smashed left and right, and now that heat is producing vast fires, centered in Spain and France, but spreading far afield to the UK, Belgium, and elsewhere.

I want to start the account by saying: these are not the worst heatwaves underway in the world. It’s hit 127 in Iran, even as the bombs are falling; India has seen another brutal spring and summer, and as Hannah Ellis-Petersen and Aakash Hassan write from Andhra Pradesh, the toll on very poor people is unbearable. They describe Mahalaxmi, paid by a government scheme to join with other women in digging a new reservoir by hand

By 11am, the first shift of their day was over. The women headed home, exchanging few words due to their exhaustion. Mahalaxmi did not speak when she got home, but went straight to the bedroom where she collapsed in apparent sleep.

Unable to rouse her hours later, her husband, Palli Shyam Sundha Rao, rushed to find a doctor. Examining her lifeless body, the doctor concluded Mahalaxmi had died from heatstroke.

“It was such a shock to all of us,” said Purilla. “She always seemed so strong. If the heat can take her like this, then it could take any of us.”

So let that serve as a baseline. Scary as what’s happening in Europe and the U.S. is, we retain some wealth to buffer our lives and our communities. That’s not true elsewhere. Still, it’s been wildly hard in Europe. As Mark Landler and Chico Harlan reported on Thursday,

Ravenous fires. Searing heat waves. Freakish storms. The summer of 2026 has already shattered meteorological records in several European countries. On a continent that has weathered centuries of upheaval — ruinous wars, deadly pandemics — it is the weather itself that now has Europe feeling close to a breaking point.

It has displaced more than 300,000 people in France and Spain, where the largest fires in those countries’ modern history have led to their largest peacetime evacuations, with villages destroyed and hundreds of thousands of acres incinerated. It has left millions more desperate for relief from temperatures that routinely soar above 40 degrees Celsius, or 104 degrees Fahrenheit.

And there is absolutely no doubt how connected all this is to global warming—that is, to our longstanding habit of burning coal and gas and oil. Raymond Zhong, writing in the Times, new research makes that clear

For central Spain, the scientists found that the intense heat and dryness in July had roughly a 17 percent probability of occurring in a given year in the present-day climate. In the preindustrial world, however, the likelihood of such conditions would have been one-twentieth as high, the researchers estimated.

In fact, we can say with increasing specificity what happened, and it’s very similar to things we’ve seen elsewhere, and that I described a few weeks ago in an interview with UC climate scientist Daniel Swain. What we’re seeing is what he calls “weather whiplash,” when the extreme rains that climate change produces cause a massive growth of vegetation in the spring, only to see these new high temperatures produce “flash droughts” that turn those green grasses and shrubs into tinder, waiting for lightning to strike. The folks at Yale Environment 360 quoted

Francesca Di Giuseppe, fire forecast coordinator at the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, who said the “rebound” from a wet winter to a dry summer was a key factor. After an exceptionally rainy winter spurred the growth of vegetation, an unusual summer drought turned that new growth to tinder.

The results have been brutal. I won’t bother cataloguing deaths and dollars—if we’re “lucky,” the former will be measured in the many tens of thousands, and the latter in the hundreds of billions—but I do want to give some small sense of what life is like. Madeline Schwartz, editor of the international journal the Dial, writes from Paris that

This summer has unleashed a special kind of hell on France: not just several heat waves with temperatures reaching as high as 112 degrees Fahrenheit, but drought and forest fires, some right next to Paris. On my street, the leaves have already turned brown; a once lush lawn now looks like burned straw. Across the country, farmers are reporting that crops have withered in the blistering conditions.

The British paper The Express reports that signs in grocery stores warn produce buyers about high prices and unavailable items

“Produce such as carrots, onions, and potatoes will likely be hit the hardest due to dry soil shrinking crop sizes, while leeks, cabbage and cauliflower could also become harder to find.”

Salad crops such as lettuce may also face a price hike, as they could be replaced by pricier imports due to the heavy irrigation required.

Cupboard essentials such as bread, pasta, and cereal could be affected too, as wheat and barley crops come under heat stress.

Pippa Neill describes the stress on farmers

“The vines are dying. The grass is yellow and now we can smell the smoke,” Uyen Do, an organic farmer in the Dordogne region of France says, almost in tears. “It’s already very difficult to survive economically and now with climate change it’s becoming a struggle that I’m not sure we’re capable of going through.”

But British farmer Brian King says drought is just one part of the problem. During the recent heatwaves, which saw several days where temperatures exceeded 30C, “the environment was so hostile that the plants are so stressed they want to die because they just can’t take it”.

Drought has pushed the Rhine River to its lowest recorded levels, stranding the barges that normally carry coal and gas. As Eamon Farhat reports,

The cost to ship diesel from Rotterdam to Karlsruhe — further inland from the closely watched Kaub chokepoint — has climbed to the highest since Bloomberg began compiling the data in 2009.

“With every centimeter it’s getting more difficult,” said Florian Krekel at Germany’s WSV, which manages the country’s waterways. “There’s no rain in sight.”

As river levels fall, Hungary and France are having to shut some nuclear power plants because they can no longer safely cool them; oh, and a sunken Nazi warship has reappeared along the dwindling Danube in Serbia, so that’s nice. The Royal Horticultural Society, meanwhile, may have to move its hydrangea garden to the north of England

But it’s the fires that have really left their mark on this European summer. As Margherita Stancati, Noemie Bisserbe, and Ed Ballard wrote in the Wall Street Journal last week, the continent has never seen anything on this scale before:

In Spain, the fires have destroyed more than 370,000 acres so far this year. Isabel Díaz Ayuso, the leader of Madrid’s local government, earlier this week described the Madrid wildfires as perhaps “the worst natural catastrophe in Spain’s history.”

The intensity of the fires has created large, fire-fueled thunderstorms, known as pyrocumulonimbus clouds, for the first time in France’s recent history. The clouds, which have been observed during wildfires in Canada and Australia, are created by intense heat that lifts hot smoky air and causes the water vapor to condense into ash. The clouds can generate lightning, further spreading the fires.

The U.S. is so vast that sometimes we barely notice things happening in the other corner: there are big wildfires burning in Oregon right now, for instance, (and the chance for many more over the course of a windy weekend). But we forget how compact European countries are. France is among the largest of its nations, but the Tour de France had to be shortened on its final day in order to free up policemen to go help with firefighting in other regions of the country. So there’s no escaping the smoke, or its political meaning. And that’s what we need to talk about.

All this comes after a period of what American politicians have called “climate-hushing,” when even non-MAGA leaders have been backing away from the steps needed to speed up the energy transition. That’s been true in other places too. Bill McGuire, a climate researcher at University College London, wrote that

Such is the astonishing scale of the wildfires burning at the gates of Bordeaux and Madrid, that if they had happened 20 – even 10 – years back, they may well have shocked the world into taking action on the climate crisis. But like the proverbial frog in a pot of slowly heating water, we have become inured; not only to the ever more devastating impacts of climate breakdown, but increasingly to the actions needed to bring global heating to heel.

Even as more than 35,000 wildfires rage across the surface of our world, and as we continue to rewind our planet’s climate so it resembles hotter episodes from its distant past, governments and trading blocs are very deliberately turning away from climate action.

The latest evidence that we are not only doing too little but actually doing less as time goes by is provided by the climate action media platform, We Don’t Have Time. It reported last week that the 12 months to July this year saw the reversal across the world of 45 climate policies. The retreat on climate action is global, but Europe – previously seen as a leader in emissions reductions – is in the vanguard, weakening measures across the board, including in the areas of carbon pricing, methane emissions and the phasing out of petrol and diesel vehicles.

There are even some who are seizing on the new disasters to urge…less action. In a truly remarkable essay for Britain’s conservative Telegraph, pundit Allister Heath used the fires to say that the “war against global warming has been lost” and hence it was time to

“accept this sobering reality, cut our losses, cease tilting at (and building) windmills, ditch the despicable con that is net zero, and learn to cope with, and even enjoy, a warmer, drier, more volatile Mediterranean climate.”

This is monumentally stupid on several different levels, and Alan Rusbridger, former editor of the Guardian now proprietor the the British magazine the Prospect outlines a number of them in a (highly enjoyable) takedown. But mainly: why would you recommend a Mediterranean climate at the precise moment that the countries that ring the Med are on fire? And of course it’s not as if you get to choose even the current, fiery Mediterranean climate. If you abandon “net zero,” or the other attempts to rapidly build out solar panels and windmills, you’ll get an ever hotter version.

That hasn’t stopped Britain’s Conservatives from purging party members who want to continue the energy transition, and there are at least some signs that England’s new prime minister, Labour’s Andy Burnham, is tilting in somewhat the same direction. The Murdoch tabloids have been mounting a crusade to open up new oil wells in the North Sea, and Burnham said this week that the country needed to be “pragmatic” in the face of rising energy costs, never mind that the global price of energy won’t budge one pence with whatever new supply can be found in the dwindling deposits off the UK coast.

But my guess is that Burnham may well decide to stand up to Murdoch et al and turn his back on more drilling, simply because the heat and the smoke have made the case for climate action so wildly clear. As Fiona Harvey and a team at the Guardian reported yesterday, a rebellion is brewing because many Labour parliamentarians

are increasingly worried about how support for expanded drilling will play with an electorate alarmed by the worst drought since 1976, soaring temperatures, wildfires, and climate-related food inflation and potential supply shortages.

They worry about losing more voters to the Greens: Zack Polanski’s party has stressed its opposition to further new licences for the North Sea, including the Jackdaw gasfield in the North Sea and the Rosebank oilfield, west of Shetland. A decision to go ahead with the projects could trigger a new surge in defectors from Labour.

Rachael Maskell, the Labour MP for York Central, urged ministers to “keep carbon in the ground”, and watch the recent national emergency climate briefing. She added: “We’re seeing ice caps melting, seas warming up, hotter and hotter summers. This summer has been a warning that we have to go towards a sustainable future fast.”

Clive Lewis, the Labour MP for Norwich South, said there was “no legitimate reason” to press ahead with Jackdaw because it would make only a negligible difference to energy prices while sending the wrong signal internationally as Europe experienced record heat.

Lewis said approving the field would show Burnham was “not looking at the evidence” and that Labour risked adding “the stain of the climate crisis” to the party’s record, alongside Gaza.

Indeed, Britain’s brand new foreign minister Ed Miliband, who had been its energy and climate minister until last week, has already issued a joint communique with his Spanish counterpart calling for deeper climate action

At a time when Europe is facing record heatwaves and terrible wildfires as a consequence of the climate crisis, the two Ministers agreed that this summer’s wildfires demonstrated that climate change was now a national security emergency facing Europe and threatening our way of life.

Both parties agreed that tackling the climate crisis was an urgent policy priority for all countries- to tackle the cost of living, protect health and wellbeing, and to ensure European economic and energy security. The two Ministers noted that climate action was essential to protect not just current generations, but our children and grandchildren too.

The two Ministers underscored the priority they attach to combating climate change within their foreign policy and agreed on the need to co-lead the green transition, convinced that decarbonisation, energy security, environmental protection and resilience are inseparable from our security and the prosperity and competitiveness of our economies.

I think that this is a good sign—and I think it’s a dry run for what the whole world is going to go through over the next twelve months. The signs keep mounting that the El Nino building in the Pacific is going to be massive in scale. As UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres said yesterday,

“This is only a warm-up act. El Nino is strengthening, adding fuel to a planet already on fire.”

As the consequences build, the pressure on decent politicians to act will grow. Obviously the Trump administration, and its fascist friends elsewhere, will continue to coddle the fossil fuel industry—but it will be harder and harder for others to turn aside renewed climate fears. I’d be willing to bet that climate will be a key issue in the Democratic primaries (and campaigning for those will be well underway by this time next year).

In fact, there’s already an effort underway—the veteran campaigner Margie Alt is helping lead a Climate Action Campaign this summer to get the issue back on the political…front burner.

Actions began on Thursday and will take a variety of forms. In Michigan, participants will demonstrate against the Republican representative Bill Huizenga who voted for Trump’s so-called big beautiful bill, which boosted planet-heating fossil fuels.

In Arizona, young activists will meet with the Democratic representative Adelita Shirley Grijalva, a climate champion, and encourage her to continue talking about global warming. In other districts, organizers have circulated petitions calling on the House Democratic leader, Hakeem Jeffries, and Senate Democratic leader, Chuck Schumer, to prioritize climate issues or plan to call on their representatives to connect the climate crisis to recent heatwaves.

I have no doubt it will annoy some Democrats—and no one is saying the issue should dominate the midterms, which must be fought on the value of democracy and the cost of living. But every politician worth her salt should at every opportunity at least mention the anti-renewables jihad that the Trump administration has launched—the number of Americans who support shutting down 90% finished windfarms is tiny, and the rest of us are truly annoyed.

And in many ways this generation of politicians is the luckiest yet, because they have a tool to call on that make those pledges relatively easy to fulfill. With ever-cheaper power from the sun, wind, and batteries, this ultimate cycle of the climate fight will look different than the ones before. We’re going to get a last chance to get this crisis at least a little right. We dare not lose it.

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In other climate and energy news:

+If you ever thought to yourself, “I’d like to have the author reading this newsletter out loud and randomly jabbing his left fist to accentuate every single word,” you’ll be glad to know that my TED talk from the spring is out in the wild. Many thanks to the fine crew who put it together

+Fun to see the mainstream media catching up on balcony solar, now that we’ve got ten states legalizing it. Ivan Penn and Claire Brown in the Times report

“Politicians all over the country are wringing their hands, wanting to do something about energy affordability,” said Bernadette Del Chiaro, a senior vice president at the Environmental Working Group, a nonprofit organization focused on health and safety. “Here is an immediate answer.”

+Blueberries grown under solar panels in Massachusetts are sweeter, new research finds. As Kelly Lippke writes:

Harvest testing showed that berries grown under the panels developed larger, juicier fruit with a noticeably sweeter taste, reported Open Energy Information. Filtered shade reduced heat stress on the plants, slowing the ripening process just enough for natural sugars to fully build.

Protecting the crop from extreme heat also preserved internal moisture, producing firmer berries with higher natural sugar levels and lower acidity than sun-scorched crops.

By softening extreme heat and reducing water loss, the overhead system turned harsh weather into ideal growing conditions, proving that solar arrays and commercial farming can actively complement each other.

+In Minnesota, an old coal-fired power plant is now the core of a big solar farm. As Luis Reyes reports

In Becker, Minnesota, the most valuable thing at the state’s biggest coal plant turned out to be none of that hardware. It was the plug.

On July 21, Xcel Energy announced it had completed the third phase of Sherco Solar, pushing the site to 710 megawatts generated by 1.7 million panels. That makes it the largest solar facility in Minnesota and one of the biggest in the Upper Midwest, by the utility’s own careful scoping.

The capacity number is respectable. The interesting part is where those panels connect. Sherco Solar feeds the grid through the transmission infrastructure and interconnection rights of the Sherburne County Generating Station, the coal giant next door that has been pushing power into the same wires since 1976. Borrowing that connection let 710 megawatts of solar walk past the single worst line in American energy.

+The war in Iran is proving extremely profitable for big oil, as Collin Eaton chronicles:

At ExxonMobil XOM -0.97%decrease; down pointing triangle, profits more than doubled from a year earlier to their highest level since 2022, while Chevron CVX 2.35%increase; up pointing triangle reported its highest quarterly earnings on record.

Exxon said high oil-and-gas production and its nearly two dozen refineries from Texas to Singapore pushed earnings to $14.5 billion. The total was its highest since the peak of an energy crisis kicked off by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

As the story makes clear, the fossil fuel industry needs chaos to prosper now—but chaos also leads everyone to start looking for other answers. Indeed, as Matthew Zeitlin makes clear, the big profits are coming because Exxon, unlike Putin, has working refineries; but as he also points out, overall oil consumption has fallen pretty fast.

This can help explain why, despite the strong profits, investors do not seem particularly jazzed about the oil giants — ExxonMobil and Chevron shares are only up slightly since the beginning of the war in Iran.

+A new book from the Roosevelt Institute, a progressive think tank, starts laying out a post-Trump climate policy path. Building Up in 2029 is extremely useful, with some younger contributors describing what will be necessary to make their lives work. Interestingly, it aims to adapt one aspect of Trump-style governance: a federal equity stake in key companies (though without the corruption):

One of the red lines in US policymaking over the last several decades has been the appearance or reality of policy being firm-specific. The role of government, in this line of thinking, is to set basic rules of the road that all firms have to follow, and let the market determine which firms succeed or fail. This approach has much to recommend it: Government may not have as high-quality information as the private sector has via price signals (so it could bet on the wrong firm), and there is a risk of corruption if policymakers exploit firm-specific policy to boost their own private wealth.

And yet, in a world of monopolies, oligopolies, and imperfect market competition, price signals may not be that reliable for the private sector either, and there are reasons to think that public service norms can make civil servants behave selflessly. More to the point, governments that are concerned about where and how goods and services are produced have an interest in not ceding too many consequential decisions completely over to the private sector, which in contemporary America has its own short-term profit biases.

To be sure, equity stakes are neither necessary nor sufficient for a robust climate agenda. But their new availability shows that the Overton window is rapidly shifting on the US government’s tool kit. To wit, in June 2026, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and the Trump administration embraced the idea of taxing AI companies through a takeover of shares for a new sovereign wealth fund. If AI turns out to be a bubble, the idea won’t cost the government anything. If the industry finds a viable revenue model, the plan could generate trillions of dollars for climate and other priorities 25—multiples larger than the IRA without having to spend a dime of taxpayer money. This is an example of how policies on AI, defense, and China competition can provide numerous vehicles for the “what” for climate action. The “how” can be provided by old tools like grants, loans, taxation, and regulation, alongside more novel tools like sovereign wealth funds, public factories, international carbon clubs, and climate macroeconomic planning.

+The estimable folks at Solar United Neighbors are launching a new scheme for “Neighbors Coops” this summer, and there’s a planning session you can attend (virtually) to see if it’s right for you

We are launching a new program, Neighbors Co-ops, to train and support community members to implement a local solar co-op in their neighborhood, town, or city!

As a Co-op Lead, you’ll host local events, recruit co-op members, track participation, coordinate with solar installers, and guide the co-op process — with support from SUN every step of the way. The commitment is not small, but you’ll reap the benefits through lower electricity bills for you and your fellow co-op members by installing solar on your homes!

Meanwhile, make your plans now for mid-September’s People of the Sun gathering at Standing Rock in North Dakota. It’s going to be a truly remarkable coming together, at the site of the fight over the Dakota Access Pipeline—which is, among other things, one of the loveliest places in the American west, at the confluence of the Missouri and Cannonball Rivers. As Cody Two Bears, a huge leader of the environmental justice fight, writes:

Native communities face some of the highest energy burdens in the country. Many families pay far more of their income toward electricity and heat than the national average. In some places, homes still lack reliable access to basic electricity. For remote Tribal homes, connecting to the grid can cost tens of thousands of dollars. At the same time, our communities are on the front lines of climate change and have contributed the least to the crisis.

Solar energy is not an abstract solution for us. It can mean keeping the lights on. It can mean lower bills for an elder. It can mean backup power when the grid goes down. It can mean workforce training for Native youth. It can mean a Tribe has more control over its own infrastructure, its own economy, and its own future.

That is energy sovereignty.

The Trump administration, of course, quashed much of that Solar for All work, and the fallout has been particularly painful for Native communities. But if there’s any group in this country that knows history takes a long time…As Cody Two Bears continues:

People of the Sun is an Indigenous-led summit, honors ceremony, and concert celebration taking place September 16-18. It is happening ten years after the NoDAPL protests, but it is not only about looking back. It is about honoring the work Native Nations have carried forward over the last decade and building what comes next.

We are bringing together Tribal leaders, community members, climate advocates, artists, funders, organizers, and allies for conversations about energy sovereignty, food sovereignty, water, financing, infrastructure, workforce development, and the future of climate work in Indian Country. We will honor Native communities doing this work. We will make space for music, culture, connection, and celebration.

Because this work is heavy, and our people need places to refill our cups.

People of the Sun is for people working in the climate space. It is for people who care about the environment and want to better understand Indigenous-led solutions. It is for funders and allies asking how they can help in a meaningful way. It is for anyone who understands that the next chapter of climate work must be rooted in justice, community, and sovereignty.

+Finally, the Financial Times reports that China is pouring money into support for green energy projects across its region, driven by the Iran war’s oil shortages. It’s a good reminder that our dismal politics are not the only, or even the main, story in the world.

The value of China’s BRI green energy deals in the first six months of this year topped its total for the whole of 2025, according to research by Australia’s University of Queensland and the Green Finance & Development Center in Shanghai. It included $11.8bn in construction projects and $8.3bn in investments.

“The lower cost of green energy has consistently driven Chinese investment despite the trade war and now countries that have been working with China on green energy might see benefits from less energy price volatility caused by the Iran war,” said Christoph Nedopil Wang, a China energy and finance expert at the university and author of the study.

We talk regularly about Big Oil, but it would probably make more sense to at least occasionally refer to it as Big Gas—many of the same players are involved, of course, and the two are often found in the same places, but it’s been clear for some time that oil is not a growth industry. The rapid rise of EVs in most of the world undercuts projections of future use—we’re at or near the top of the plateau now, and by 2030 or so the amount of oil we use should be going down.

That’s why the hydrocarbon industry’s growth story has been largely about natural gas. It’s used for many things—heating, cooking—but above all for generating electricity, and it’s on that ground that the fossil fuel industry has set out to build its market, stressing constantly that it is clean and cheap. Two important new reports in recent days make it clear how false those claims really are.

The first comes from a Center for Climate Integrity team led by Rebecca Leber and Rebecca John. Leber has a long record covering the industry—her 2020 report in Mother Jones about the industry paying Instagram influencers to plug natural gas was an early landmark in our understanding of pay for play social media, as well as the lengths the industry would go to in order to tell its fibs. (“#cookingwithgas makes food taste better,” says Camille, an LA-based foodie who poses artfully with her spatula, to her 16,700 followers.”)

But as they document in the new report, which should be read in full, this is a very old story. It turns out that the natural gas industry has been playing the pr game for a very long time. As far back as the 1950s, gas had a bad image: it was known to contribute to respiratory problems when burned indoors (more on that later!), and to local air pollution. And as scientists first started analyzing the greenhouse effect in the 1970s, most of the concern was about carbon dioxide, but there was a growing realization that methane—which is essentially what natural gas is—was the smaller but still important sibling greenhouse gas. And so the industry began doing what it did best, which is lying, or to use the technical term, “public relations.” They constructed a whole mythology around natural gas, turning it into the fossil fuel equivalent of the “other white meat.”

In the late 1980s, the gas industry and major oil companies started to brand gas as a “bridge fuel” — a clean-burning transition fuel to a renewable energy future. In reality, they planned a long-term future for natural gas, while simultaneously undermining renewables, obstructing the destination to which gas’ “bridge” was supposed to lead. Over the next 20 years, the industry effectively solidified the bridge fuel myth by co-opting the science and oversight originally intended to keep carbon and methane emissions in check.

Working together in a growing coalition that included the oil majors and ultimately several major environmental groups, the industry managed to temper concerns about methane using strategies crafted by the same firms that for decades undermined the scientific consensus about the harms of tobacco. AGA and allied groups aggressively challenged the science around methane through industry-funded studies and the creation of the objective-sounding Gas Research Institute.

But their approach was multi-dimensional. While muddying the waters on the industry’s methane problem, the gas industry was careful not to deny the issue of climate change outright, instead focusing attention on carbon dioxide. It paired this with relentlessly promoting the concept of gas as clean — certainly cleaner than coal or oil — and positioning gas as a bridge fuel and climate solution. In the process, the gas industry solidified partnerships with EPA with the explicit goal of fending off regulations in favor of voluntary emissions management, while also recruiting environmental organizations that would lend legitimacy to their arguments.

I want to highlight the effectiveness of this strategy with a story about…me. In 1988, before this campaign took off, I was writing The End of Nature, sometimes called the first book for a general audience on climate change. And in it I wrote:

A common suggestion is to replace much of the coal and oil we burn with natural gas, since it produces only about half as much carbon dioxide. But it natural gas—methane—escapes into the atmosphere before it burns, it traps solar radiation more efficiently than co2…As a result, switching to natural gas may have no effect on the greenhouse effect. It might even make it worse.

So give me credit for knowing this crucial science when I was 27.

But not really, because I think I more or less forgot it over the next two decades, as the gas industry rearranged the terms of the debate, and turned it into the lesser of two climate evils, the “bridge” to a future of cleaner energy. This argument was bought wholesale by politicians, especially Democratic ones—if you go read Barack Obama’s State of the Union addresses, most of them include a paragraph praising the fracking revolution as both an economic boon and a way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions; we were replacing coal with something cleaner. The Sierra Club’s leader, Carl Pope, barnstormed around the country with one of the fracking industry’s chief spokespeople, promoting this “solution” to the climate crisis.

And so it seemed novel to me when two Cornell scientists, Bob Howarth and Tony Ingraffea, about fifteen years ago, began publishing data showing that leak rates from fracking meant that natural gas was no cleaner than coal—the argument that had been there all along. I wrote some early pieces on their work for the New York Review of Books, and then published a long piece in the Nation that made the same point I’d made more than a quarter-century earlier.

Our combined emissions of methane and carbon dioxide have gone steadily and sharply up during the Obama years. We closed coal plants and opened methane leaks, and the result is that things have gotten worse.

I’ve made up for my forgetfulness, I think, by helping lead battles against fracking, and against the buildout of LNG export terminals; those of you who have been long subscribers to this newsletter got to participate in that latter fight, which we won in the Biden years and then lost in the Trump risorgimento. But if the PR campaign flummoxed me, imagine how well it worked on people who weren’t paying much attention at all (which included virtually everyone in political life, especially Democrats who saw natural gas as a way to have their green cake and reccycle it too). Many thanks to Leber, John, and their whole team for laying the story out in all its gory detail.

The other claim about natural gas is that it’s cheap—this is the formulation that “leaders” like New York governor Kathy Hochul are currently relying on as they link fracked gas and affordability as an excuse to cut back on moving towards renewables, and that data center developers are using to justify a buildout of natural gas generation.

But a report out this morning from the good folks at Oil Change International puts paid to all that. It makes clear that the industry is running out of the really cheap stuff—the fracked gas from the Permian and Appalachian shales that it’s been pumping for the last two decades. Many of those wells are playing out fast, and now it’s going to need to turn to the more “geologically complex” Haynesville shale of east Texas and Louisiana, and that will drive up costs—especially since more and more of the gas is, at least theoretically, going to be exported to Asia as the industry builds out massive shipping terminals along the Gulf of Mexico.

If industry succeeds in locking in unprecedented demand for U.S. gas by expanding exports and domestic consumption, U.S. supply may be pushed to its limits. Gas supply can only meet such high levels of demand if prices rise to cover the higher production costs of marginal gas supplies. This connects rising dependence on gas to rising energy costs. U.S. consumers and those in LNG-importing countries must push policymakers to reduce dependence on fossil fuels and accelerate the transition to reliable, affordable renewable energy

The numbers are fairly startling:

Between 2026 and 2040, the average wholesale price of gas could be 80 percent higher than during the past decade of U.S. LNG exports, a decade when energy price volatility was already causing hardship in the U.S. and LNGimporting countries. Prices could double relative to the 2020 to 2025 average by the late 2030s.

In other words, those politicians locking us in to natural gas are guaranteeing that our kids will spend much of their lives paying far more for energy than they should—and far more than people in the rest of the world will be spending. Because politicians in those countries are starting to wake up. A big piece in the Times yesterday described the ways that many governments are now trying to “unshackle” themselves from natural gas, after watching the supply dry up with the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. In the Philippines, for example,

the country’s largest solar project began delivering its first megawatts of power in March. That came two weeks after the outbreak of the Iran War, which pushed up energy prices and knocked out 20 percent of the global L.N.G. supply.

“That was fortunate timing. It was like fate,” said Emmanuel Rubio, the chief executive of Meralco PowerGen, the utility-backed power generation company that operates and invests in Terra Solar and gas- and coal-fired power plants in the Philippines.

For a country that imports nearly all of its fossil fuels, the solar project has proved that “we can actually be, to a certain extent, self-reliant,” he added.

The collection of lies around natural gas are collapsing in other ways, too. Another new study, this one from an Ohio team, went back to those fears around gas and indoor air pollution that dated all the way back to the 1950s, and what it found was truly startling. As Gary Fuller summarizes, replacing a gas stove with an electric burner—say, an induction cooktop, available online for $60—reduces childhood asthma dramatically. And when I say dramatically, I mean: better than the best medicine.

Ohio’s publicly owned MetroHealth began the study in December 2024 but funding was terminated early by the incoming Trump administration. It had been designed to investigate if replacing gas cooking improved asthma for 1,200 people living near Cleveland, Ohio.

Prof Ash Sehgal of Case Western Reserve University, the project’s leader, said: “We had completed the project at fewer than 100 households. As a result, over 1,100 households were unable to benefit. We also had to lay off about 20 project staff.”

The team finished the stove replacements that were under way and closed the project, but to the researchers’ surprise, the benefits could be clearly detected even in the scaled-down study of 72 homes.

Sehgal said: “We were surprised when we analysed the results and found a very large effect size. The improvements in asthma symptoms following stove change were similar to – or even greater than – those reported in clinical trials of commonly used asthma medications.”

Angela Bland, a 38-year-old resident of Akron, Ohio, said: “I didn’t realise my gas stove was the issue until I used the electric stove. I now need my inhaler way less often.”

If you want more on this study, check out Sammy Roth’s Climate Colored Goggles newsletter. He interviewed Segal too: “Our improvement was about twice as much as you typically see with medical treatment of asthma,” the researcher said. It truly is remarkable to think how much good we could do simply by dousing the campfire that most people have in their kitchen.

Anyway, to summarize: the natural gas industry is destroying the climate, and destroying people’s lungs, and it’s trying to lock us into this expensive practice for decades to come.

Any effort to slow it down is met with massive resistance. In Colorado, for instance, some towns have tried to prevent gas hookups in new buildings, requiring them to go all-electric. The industry has responded by organizing on behalf of a constitutional amendment called the “Right to Natural Gas,”which will go on the November ballot. As Maya McDaniel writes

The proposed amendment states that “producers and utilities have the right to sell natural gas to homes and businesses.” That could force changes to building codes that encourage electric heating and cooking, undoing progress towards electrification.

“Really, it’s just a cynical attempt to lock fossil fuel industry profits into the state constitution,” said Kelly Nordini, CEO of Conservation Colorado, an environmental nonprofit. “That’s bad for people’s pocketbooks, for clean air, for clean water; it has no provisions for public health or safety.”

Really, the first lucky break for natural gas came back in the 19th century, when it acquired that moniker, to differentiate it from “manufactured” or “town” gas, made by burning coal in the absence of air, and then piped through municipalities for street lighting and other tasks. These gasworks shut down as big deposits of naturally-occurring gas were discovered, hence the name.

I’ve taken to calling it ‘fracked gas’ in recent years, since that industry term for the new methods of liberating the fuel from tight rocks makes it sound almost as disgusting as it is. “Fossil gas” works too, or perhaps “asthma gas.” But our job is to make it a dirty word of some kind. The future depends on it.

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+Scientists who once relied on federal funding are turning to Only Fans as a backup. Check out OnlyMarms from the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory, where you can gorge on

Unfiltered yellow-bellied marmot content from the Rockies” delivered as near-daily photos and videos of chubby, personable marmots (with charming names like Staple, Pawprint, and Cabinet) that give Jimothy the raccoon a run for his money. Viewers can leave monetary “tips” on each post, which are split between the platform and the poster.

Points for creativity, but it shouldn’t come to this

+A sad and powerful story from Bangladesh about how the cutoff of diesel due to the Iran war is devastating farmers who depend on the fuel to run their irrigation pumps. Peter Goodman writes:

For three days, he waited at the gas station in a crush of hundreds of villagers, as the temperature rose to 104 degrees. People tried to cut the line, and fights broke out, drawing police officers wielding batons. This, Dulal Hossain endured for the chance to buy diesel fuel.

He was tormented by worries about his rice plants, the source of most of his livelihood. The diesel he eventually carried home by bicycle, in a jerrycan strung from the handlebars, would fuel the pump that bathed his fields with groundwater. The pump was empty.

It was late March, the dry season in western Bangladesh, and a month after the United States and Israel unleashed war on Iran. Around the globe, energy prices were soaring as shipping was halted through the Strait of Hormuz. In South Asia, diesel was scarce. So crops were deprived of water.

For six weeks, Mr. Hossain, 68, pedaled between the gas station and his fields, bearing replenishment for his pump. He inspected his rice plants like a parent attending to an afflicted child. Their leaves were turning yellow. Stems drooped toward cracked soil.

He could not stave off calamity. When he harvested his rice last month, he wound up with barely one-fourth the usual volume. That was enough to feed his family, but left him nothing to sell. Short of cash, he cut back on meat and fish. He resorted to borrowing to buy seeds for growing vegetables.

“I’m going backward,” he said.

The only slightly hopeful coda I can offer to this story is that Pakistan—which once ruled Bangladesh—has switched a huge amount of its irrigation pumping to solar panels over the last two years, reducing the use of diesel by at least a third. If the world leaned into it, we could have those panels in Bangladesh too by the next planting season.

+Ed Mazria, who has been a powerful voice for green building and electrification for many years, has an important essay in Architect magazine detailing how much we could be saving, in both energy and cash

The Trump Administration has been loudly warning the American public about a so-called “Green New Scam”—a narrative it is using as cover to “permanently end” energy-efficient appliance and HVAC standards and roll back the 2024 International Energy Conservation Code (IECC).

Their message: Energy-efficient appliance and HVAC equipment standards “raise costs and disrupt consumer choice,” while updating to the 2024 IECC “would increase residential construction costs by more than $9.2 billion annually compared to the 2006 code levels.” This, they say, would saddle homebuyers with as much as $14,000 in extra construction costs with a 10- to 20-year payback period.

Simultaneously, they point to the energy demands of AI and hyperscale data centers to justify keeping aging coal plants open and incentivizing new fossil-fuel power plants, all while actively stifling clean energy development.

This administration’s narrative is the real scam. By relying on outdated and cherry-picked numbers, the administration is attempting to strip away policies that have in fact saved consumers trillions of dollars, all to prop up the flailing fossil fuel industry.

When you look at the facts—a jurisdiction transitioning from the 2021 to the 2024 IECC—the cost of the upgrade in a home purchase is roughly $2,000 to $3,000, according to analyses by the Department of Energy (DOE) and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL).

Furthermore, the annual energy savings pay off that initial cost in about 2.5 years. Better yet, if that $2,000 to $3,000 is rolled into a standard 30-year mortgage, the monthly utility bill savings exceed the slight increase in the monthly mortgage payment. The homeowner will usually see a net-positive monthly cash flow in the very first year.

Good news then, as Jan Rosenow reports, that the EU is embarked on a crash program to increase electrification. Under the new plans

electricity is to meet 46% of the EU’s final energy consumption by 2040. Getting there means to speed up 9x compared to the annual increase of the electrification rate since 1990.

Meanwhile, the redoubtable Auke Hoekstra has the numbers from Africa that demonstrate just how expensive it is to live without electricity. It’s worth reading this carefully:

Households without electricity spend $38 billion a year on fuel-based light, and per unit of useful light a kerosene wick costs up to 150 times more than an efficient bulb (Mills, 2005). A family burning kerosene pays $12 to $18 a year to light one room badly and fill it with smoke (CEIBS, 2024). The poorest customers in the world’s energy market pay its highest prices. Nobody designed that; it is simply what happens when the only light you can afford is the kind you buy by the bottle, week by week. Or maybe when nobody offered you an LED light on solar yet.

Solar, of course, is the answer here:

Currently three solar panels would cost about $200. The cheapest 2 kW off-grid inverters costs around $100. A five kWh battery will cost around $200 in a few years. $500 in total. Include streamlined financing and distribution and you are looking at around $700 for a family of on average seven people. $100 per person.

Such a setup could easily last 20 years and if people have to pay for it themselves they will take care of it and sell it if they don’t need it anymore or upgrade. So that’s $5 per person per year. Times 660 million people we are talking about 3 billion per year. Compare that to the $2.4 trillion in health damage alone and it is a truly paltry sum. If you care about nature and climate change it’s also the most effective intervention possible per dollar. And it aligns with our feeling of fairness. Very few people will say: these families don’t deserve $5 per person per year to solve their energy problems.

+European insurance exec Gunther Thallinger has been telling the truth about climate change for a long time, and his message is getting more and more urgent. Talking to reporters last week he said

Extreme weather events — such as the heat wave that just hit Europe — are making more and more assets too risky to insure, according to a director at Europe’s largest primary insurer.

“Certain locations and perils cannot be covered as we would wish them to be covered,” said Guenther Thallinger, who sits on the management board of Allianz, in an interview. “We cannot help it.”

Heat, floods, storms and wildfires “could become so frequent that they challenge traditional insurance models,” he said. “Risk-adequate pricing would not be affordable any longer.”

Those European fires keep getting worse, as French and Spanish authorities struggle to contain blazes even as the fourth extreme heat wave of the summer begins today. French firefighters reported yesterday that they had encountered their first pyrocumulonimbus or “fire cloud,” a phenomenon that has become fairly regular fare in Canada, Australia, and the American west. As Claire Moses reports

These large, fire-fueled thunderstorms, also known as pyroCbs, are created by intense heat from large blazes or volcanic eruptions. They produce lightning and burning embers that can spark more fires, and they generate high and unpredictable winds that fan the flames and spread the embers. But they rarely bring rain.

One pyrocumulonimbus generated more blazes over the weekend in one of the hardest-hit areas of France, Marc Vermeulen, the director of fire and emergency services in the Gironde region, said at a news briefing on Sunday.

Wildfires are so hot they can sometimes create their own weather systems. The smoke from the fires acts as a plume of heat rising fast into the atmosphere, according to Britain’s Royal Meteorological Society. That chimney effect sucks in air at ground level, feeding the blazes oxygen and pushing them into new terrain.

Meanwhile, it’s so hot in Japan that they’ve coined a new word for it: A kokushobi, or “cruel heat day” is when the mercury tops 40 degrees Celsius. As Kiuko Notoyo and Francesca Regulado report,

“Numbers are difficult to understand because people perceive them differently. By giving it the name ‘cruel heat day,’ people will understand it better just by hearing it, and they’ll feel that today is dangerous,” said Taro Kawasato, the assistant director of the Japan Meteorological Agency’s climate prediction division.

+Superb coverage from Emily Fishbein and Jauman Naw of how the repressive Myanmar government, and warlords along the Chinese frontier, are producing gruesome conditions in the rare earth mines.

The businesses carrying out this extraction face few consequences in Myanmar — in part because the industry operates in a legal grey area. Chinese companies extract rare earths in autonomous, militarized regions controlled by local ethnic armies, which protect mining operations while taking a cut of the profits. The mined material is then trucked across the border into China, where it is mixed and essentially laundered with rare earths from other sources and processed for use in global products.

The conflict monitoring organization Armed Conflict Location & Event Data, or ACLED, has ranked Myanmar’s war as the second-most extreme on the planet, and also the world’s most fragmented, with more than 1,200 distinct armed groups. Corruption and weak rule of law have further contributed to an explosion of criminal activity of all kinds. According to the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime, Myanmar has the highest levels of organized crime of any country in the world.

+If you’re feeling a bit hopeless, you could go to Collapse Camp in Germany—and perhaps feel oddly empowered. An organizer explains:

Collapse Camp has a broader thematic scope. It's not just about actual disaster relief. It's also about emotional recovery, self-defense, protecting demonstrations and left-wing spaces, providing a solidarity-based power supply , and preserving food, to name just a few examples. We were surprised ourselves during the organizing process by how many fantastic offers we received that we hadn't even considered at first.

Always relegating the idea of ​​rational preparation for crises and disasters to the right-wing prepper camp is getting a bit retro. In a polycrisis and collapse, disasters are inevitable, and those who don't prepare will be left high and dry. Preparation, or "prepping," therefore comes in various forms: individualistic, fascist-style prepping, standard prepping (which, for example, the Federal Office of Civil Protection and Disaster Relief recommends), and now finally: solidarity-based prepping . And solidarity-based prepping isn't primarily about stockpiling supplies, but about building relationships.

Speaking of camping, EVs are now so popular in China that they’ve spawned a whole new craze: EV camping. As Julia Shong and K Oanh Ha report

In China’s fiercely competitive EV market, standout features sell cars. Beginning in 2022, manufacturers rolled out camping and napping options aimed at outdoor enthusiasts. These range from the ability to power lights while parked to dedicated “Camp Mode” settings that fold seats completely flat and regulate overnight cabin temperatures. EV maker Xpeng’s “Sleep Mode” even includes looping white noise tracks of a crackling bonfire, crashing waves and a heavy storm.

These high-tech cabins have also turned cars into an extension of the living room and bedroom in a society where privacy is hard to come by, as multigenerational households are common. “A lot of people are going to their cars to have a one-hour nap,” says Daniel Wu, head of global brand and marketing for XPeng. “After work they’ll stay in the car for about an hour before heading home, doing things they enjoy — for example, playing games — simply because it’s such a comfortable space.”

On Douyin, the “car‑camping life” hashtag has attracted 9.2 billion views, ranking among the platform’s most popular camping‑related themes. Tutorials explain how to convert EVs into campsites and suggest what gear to buy. EV rental bookings on the mainland during the Chinese New Year holiday this year surged six-fold compared with the prior year, according to local media, citing data from car rental platform Car Inc.

Everything I’m about to write is fairly obvious. But since wildfires, and hence smoke, will persist all summer, and since the hot world we’re creating produces ever more wildfire and hence an endless supply of future smoke, I think it’s worth taking a moment to get all this on the record.

Also, the flow of smoke down from Canada has produced a perfect MRI of the MAGA nervous system, revealing with unparalleled clarity the belligerence, ignorance, self-love, and utter lack of irony that mark the species.

To hit the basics: roughly a thousand wildfires are currently burning in Canada, many in northern reaches of the province of Ontario. Much of the direct fire damage is being borne by members of Canada’s First Nation communities, whose small communities are the main inhabitants of these wild places. People are crowded into Thunder Bay, Ontario, where every hotel room is filled; the stories of escapes like the one picture above are truly harrowing. Alessandra Freitas, for instance, interviewed members of the Namaygoosisagagun First Nation in the northwest part of the province. Here, for instance, is the account of Miiyah Paavola:

“It was all very fast-paced. There was not really much time to think about what was happening,” Paavola told CNN.

She grabbed a wet towel before squeezing aboard a small aluminum boat with five other people, three dogs and a cat. The isolated community, also known as Collins First Nation, has no road access, only a railway line and Collins Lake.

Paavola couldn’t fully grasp the scope of the danger until her boat pulled away.

“All you could see was orange and gray and it was very dark,” she said. But as they sailed away, she could finally see just how close they’d been to the fires. “When I was going across maybe about the second island, that’s when I watched it. I could just barely see the flames reach the shoreline. And it was a very thick wall of smoke that followed it very quickly.”

“If we had waited any longer, we would have been dead.”

As Johnnie Jae, the founder of Red Pop! News pointed out,

It's NOT just that people and wildlife are losing their homes...it's the history that is being lost for generations to come.

It's tribal records, artifacts, art, regalia, ceremonial grounds, things that have been passed from generation to generation, hidden, protected and preserved, repatriated and restored.

So, just to be clear—the most powerful disruption from these fires is to small bands of people who have done nothing to cause them, and whose culture has been endlessly damaged by the larger western project of settlement and control.

But flame, of course, is not the only product of fire. There’s also smoke, which contains high concentrations of particulates, the solid and liquid droplets in all forms of air pollution that are especially dangerous because they can slip past a body’s natural filters, aggravating asthma and pulmonary disease and contributing to heart attacks and smoke. Those clouds of smoke drift on the prevailing winds, which have been blowing south towards southern Ontario, where Toronto has been engulfed in smoke. Here’s a particularly vivid portrayal of the life in North America’s fourth-largest city

But of course the border with the U.S. does not prevent smoke from spilling across, and some of the most densely populated parts of America have been inundated with smoke as well. Last Thursday, for instance, Detroit had the most polluted air in the world, as Charles Ramirez chronicled:

Detroit had an air quality index, or AQI, of 724 at one point, the No. 1 spot on IQAir’s ranking of the most polluted global major cities on Thursday. IQAir makes air quality monitoring and air cleaning products. The index is a measure of PM2.5 or particulate matter, and the index reading makes the air “hazardous,” according to the company, which means unhealthy for everyone.

By 5 p.m., Detroit’s index number had fallen to 341 and its ranking to second, behind Chicago’s 402. Both measures were considered “hazardous.”

Parts of Ohio were even worse. Toledo, for instance, doubled its old record for air pollution, and nearby Monroe recorded AQI values above 800. I’ve been in Beijing and Delhi on days when you couldn’t see across the street, and this was worse.

Jeff Masters has the most comprehensive set of numbers, as per usual

The award for worst air in the nation on July 16 went to the city that has in the past billed itself as a climate haven: Duluth, Minnesota. The city’s 24-hour air quality index, or AQI, for PM2.5 particle pollution hit 934, over three times the threshold for “Hazardous” pollution. This shattered Duluth’s previous all-time AQI record of 159 set July 20, 2021. EPA pollution records go back to 1999.

Now, in a normal world, this scenario would trigger a compassionate response, as leaders sought to help the people most at risk. But MAGA is an almost perfect mirror world, where every impulse is bad. On Fox, for instance, the channel’s public health expert timidly (“I know you’re going to cringe”) recommended that people at risk wear KN95 masks to prevent particulates from getting sucked down your throat. “Not a chance. Not a chance,” said host Brian Kilmeade.

Meanwhile, a series of Republican “leaders” started producing angry denunciations of Canada, for polluting America’s air with their thoughtless fires.

Michigan congressman John James, whose campaign for state governor has been endorsed by President Donald Trump wrote in an X post on Thursday: “FINAL WARNING TO CANADA: Manage your forests to prevent these fires. American lungs are paying the price for Canadian inaction, year after year.”

Ohio Senator Bernie Moreno, longtime car dealer, said he planned to introduce “a bill next week to sanction Canada and the responsible Canadian government officials for this atrocity.”

And of course the ultimate source of all MAGA craziness weighed in as well. Here’s Donald Trump:

“We are holding Canada responsible for the fact that they are not properly maintaining their Forests, and Brush therein, and the United States is being unnecessarily invaded by filthy, polluted, and unhealthy air, the quality of which is dangerous, and totally unacceptable!”

Trump promised tariffs to make up for the costs, and indeed—and remember this—insisted that “maybe they should pay us some damages.”

The GOP case, such as it is, rests on the idea that Canada has erred in “managing” its woodlands, an outgrowth of the idea that he expressed during one wave of California’s hideous fires that the state should simply “rake its forests.” Or, as he expressed it during its first term, “you gotta clean your floors.”

Whatever the use of this prescription in America’s forests, it doesn’t apply to most of the land now burning in Canada. That’s because Canada has never managed these forests in any way, certainly not to suppress burning the way that America did across the 20th century. These are not forests with roads; these are vast, trackless expanses. Climate analyst Zeke Hausfather has performed his usual public service by actually looking at the data.

Here’s the short version. Canada’s area burned has surged, and it has surged in step with warming: hot, dry fire seasons burn far more forest, with area burned rises roughly 80% for each 1C increase in fire-season temperature (with a correlation coefficient of 0.61). This relationship is robust to a variety of statistical tests and controlling for confounding variables. The boreal burns in rare, high-intensity crown fires on a natural cycle measured in a century or more, across enormous remote areas that have never been logged, thinned, or effectively suppressed. Only about a fifth of Canada’s burned area over the past four decades was even inside forest regions that have ever been actively managed. You cannot have a fuel-buildup from forest mismanagement in a forest you were never managing.

As he points out, even if the Canadians somehow decided to go “thin the forest,” it wouldn’t work.

The boreal is on the order of three million square kilometers. You are not going to thin or prescribe-burn your way across it, and the crown fires that produce the smoke wouldn’t stop at a fuel break anyway.

So what is driving the huge increase in Canadian wildfires? It appears some mysterious force is raising the temperature of the earth. As Quinn Gablicki points out, quoting the University of Michigan climate scientist Jonathan Overpeck,

As long as humans continue to burn fossil fuels, global temperatures will increase, droughts will worsen, and there will be bigger, more frequent wildfires and smoke events.

The haze hanging over much of the United States today, Dr. Overpeck said, is “the harbinger of worse times to come.”

Or, as Eleanor Olszewski, Canada’s minister of emergency management put it on Friday,

“Warmer, drier weather is becoming more common, increasing wildfire risk in Canada and around the world,” she wrote. “Northern Ontario and Quebec, for example, received less than 40 percent of normal precipitation this June, with temperatures above historical averages.”

None of this, of course, is surprising in any way. America’s forests are currently on fire too, and in remarkable fashion. With our no-pack snowpack year, large fires are burning across the interior West—and what do you know, lots of the smoke is drifting north into Canada, causing bad air quality in British Columbia.

“As wildfire activity increases, so has smoke across many areas of the region. Much of this smoke is originating from fires south of the Canada-U.S. border and will have varying impacts over the coming days,” an update Saturday evening from the provincial wildfire service said.

This is far from the smallest irony in this saga. In fact, “irony” hardly seems an apt word, suggesting that there is something even slightly subtle about the idiocy. For instance, as our leaders complain about Canada, it seems as if it might be nice if they also noted that our neighbors to the north have consistently set firefighters south to help America fight its great blazes. When Los Angeles caught on fire in January of 2025, Ontario deployed 150 firefighters to help.

“Our closest friend and our closest ally needs help, and we’re going to make sure we’re going to be there supporting them,” the province’s premier said.

And what do you know, last week a Canadian pilot died fighting one of the vast conflagrations on the Colorado-Utah border. As Michele Brunoro reports, Nicholas Dale left behind a wife and two sons.

“He was out there doing his best and just so very sad that we lost a great person and an experienced person fighting something, a natural disaster,” said Dale’s long-time friend Adam Gilliver.

While we’re on ironies, let’s note in passing that the smoke pouring out of these great blazes temporarily diminishes the power of the solar panels that are our main weapon in slowing the heating of the earth. Miriam Wasser reports on the experience of one Massachusetts homeowner.

In the two days before the first big plume arrived, Stephen Gordon’s solar array produced about 53 kilowatt-hours of power per day — an amount he said is typical for a warm summer day, and more than covers his household needs during daylight hours.

Then came Wednesday, when people throughout New England woke up to gray or even orange-tinted skies. Gordon’s total output that day was just under 23 kilowatt hours, less than half of what his panels generated the previous day.

But of course all of those ironies pale next to the main one: smoke drifts across borders when there’s a big fire, but carbon dioxide constantly drifts across every border every day. And if you could see carbon dioxide, and watch its flow over time, the biggest single cloud has emanated from the United States. China may catch us someday but we’re the ones who have produced the current mess.

I’m sitting listening to David Wallace-Wells lecture this morning at the Chautauqua Institution, and he reminds us that the carbon humans have produced “weighs more than everything we have ever built on the surface of this planet. It weighs more than the total mass of life on the planet. It weighs more than the total mass of life and buildings combined.”

So—if there are “damages” to be paid, who should pay them? Canada, whose forests are burning? Or America, who set those forests on fire.

This is not an academic question. Lots of players are trying to extract damages from the fossil fuel companies. As the Center for Climate Integrity documented,

Eleven U.S. states and dozens of city, county, and tribal governments collectively representing more than 1 in 4 Americans are currently taking major oil and gas companies to court to hold them accountable for deceiving the public about the dangers of fossil fuels and make them pay for the resulting damages.

And MAGA politicians are doing everything they can to try and stop those suits from succeeding. As Abraham Lustgarten reported in April

Republican-led state legislatures are passing a slate of laws that effectively shield oil and gas companies from legal claims that they are responsible for the destruction and mounting toll caused by climate change. Fifteen laws have either been passed or are currently being debated in 11 states. Together, they threaten to remove long-standing tools for the public to hold corporations accountable.

A ProPublica investigation has found that most of these bills are part of a coordinated effort, orchestrated by a constellation of groups that share staff or have funding ties to the prominent conservative activist Leonard Leo, who is credited with placing conservative justices on the U.S. Supreme Court. These groups have drafted state legislation, planned its dissemination and engaged a well-connected lobbying firm to get them signed into law.

At the federal level, the very same politicians complaining about Canadian wildfires are trying to moment, this takes the form of the Stop Climate Shakedowns Act. They’ve drawn support from the industry that owns them

“We thank Senator Cruz and Rep. Hageman for introducing legislation to stop a growing patchwork of state laws and lawsuits that threaten American energy and risk raising costs for consumers,” said American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers (AFPM) President and CEO Chet Thompson and American Petroleum Institute (API) President and CEO Mike Sommers in a joint statement.

America, though the all-time champion, is not alone in spewing fossil fuels, of course. One of the other ironies of the moment is that just as Canada catches on fire, its prime minister Mark Carney is announcing a new system of pipelines from the tar sands of Alberta. As veteran climate journalist Adam Radwanski wrote in the Toronto Star, under Toronto’s “dystopian haze” Canada’s pivot away from climate action is “impossible to ignore.” In her excellent new newsletter Patterns, Naomi Klein writes “as the nation burns, Carney celebrates new fossil fuel projects as “nation building.”

So irony drifts back and forth. But responsibility can never really be shed. MAGA means never having to say you’re sorry, but that’s simply not true.

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In other energy and climate news:

+Check Out SolarPak, mobilizing Pakistani youth to help extend the solar revolution there, which has been concentrated in its middle classes, to the poorest parts of the country. Its founder Ayaan Ahmed wrote me

Our team, all under 18, has electrified 27 communities in Khairpur Mirs, Sindh, and built an internal research arm, Impact Labs, that tracks household outcomes over years. A Carnegie Mellon economist now studies our results with us weekly.

In other words: the solar revolution is being extended to its last mile by teenagers, and we are measuring what happens when it arrives.

+Jeffrey Insko has an elegiac essay about the horrible setbacks in the fight to block Enbridge’s Line 5, setting it in a deep historic context

Yesterday, Governor Whitmer’s Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy granted Enbridge a key permit for the foolhardy Line 5 tunnel; the United States Army Corps of Engineers permit will surely follow very soon. Although not surprising, it’s a stunning decision, and not only— though this is bad enough— because it gives Enbridge permission to desecrate Indigenous burial grounds. It’s also in keeping with the Trump administration’s campaign to Make America 1953 Again.

+From Matthew Schneider-Mayerson and colleagues, a close analysis of New Yorker fiction to see how those short stories have dealt with climate change over time

We find that climate change exists in just 10.1% of these stories and freshwater pollution, marine pollution, air pollution, deforestation, species extinction / biodiversity loss, or toxic waste exists in 15.6%. When present, these environmental problems are mostly marginalized and minimized; structural culprits – governments, corporations, and the wealthy – are rarely assigned responsibility; and pro-environmental actions and behaviors are rarely modeled.

I’m not sure this is precisely what story writers are called to do, but what do I know—I’ve only written one novel, and it was mostly funny.

+European coal mines are insisting they’re cutting methane emissions. Petra Sorge’s reporting shows that instead those mines are figuring out novel and absurd ways to measure methane emissions,

In Germany, open-pit mine operators all took a common tack, according to reports seen by Bloomberg and submitted to the country’s environmental agency. Soil samples were collected “from the freshly exposed coal embankment” and then crushed into small particles, while the methane emitted during this process was captured and quantified.

That makes no sense, said Necki, who compared measuring ground-level coal emissions to shaking and opening a soda bottle, then trying to measure the remaining carbon dioxide inside. “You will not get a valid result,” he said, “because the gas has already disappeared into the atmosphere.”

+Oliver Millman writes that the U.S. may soon be the “Cuba of gas cars,” a showroom of the automotive past.

China’s growing dominance in EVs came into sharper focus earlier this year, when Shenzhen-based BYD—short for Build Your Dreams—overtook Tesla to become the world’s largest EV seller. Its cars are already on the streets in Mexico and, following a recent trade deal, to a limited extent in Canada. The U.S. increasingly finds itself surrounded by a world going electric, and often doing so cheaply. In China, BYD’s Seagull model sells for $7,800, albeit heavily subsidized. In the U.S., the cheapest EV on the market, the Chevy Bolt, starts at around $29,000.

+Davide Castelvecchi, writing in Nature, has a truly comprehensive update on the rapid move towards sodium replacing lithium in batteries.

What has surprised many observers is how rapidly companies claim to have improved on sodium-ion’s flaws. Auke Hoekstra, an energy analyst at Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands, says he has been taken aback by the pace of advancement. “I honestly did not expect it to go that fast — and I am usually the guy who is seen as an optimist,” he says.

Hoekstra is known for his bullish predictions about renewable energy, which have often been correct. Now he is bullish on sodium-ion. Although other analysts and researchers are unsure how strongly the technology can compete with lithium-ion devices, he sees it as an innovation that will enable the price of batteries to keep falling, thus speeding up the electrification of the world’s economy. “For the future of energy, this really would be a game-changer,” he says.

Sodium for batteries can be extracted easily from the industrial chemical soda ash (or sodium carbonate), which is plentiful and more straightforward to mine than are most forms of lithium. “Sodium is an almost inexhaustible resource,” says Zhang Yizhi, a spokesperson for CATL. It is more than 1,000 times as abundant as lithium in Earth’s crust, and up to 60,000 times as plentiful in the ocean. Last month, industrial-grade sodium carbonate cost only US$200–280 per tonne, compared with $20,000–25,000 per tonne for battery-grade lithium carbonate, Zhang adds.

+George Monbiot has some sage advice for new UK prime minister Andy Burnham: shut down the ruinously expensive and laughably ineffective carbon capture and sequestration projects of his predecessors and save British taxpayers a few billion pounds.

The great majority of CCS will be attached to new fossil fuel-burning power stations, wood-burning power stations and hydrogen production from fossil gas. In fact, almost all the projects in the government’s first tranche are for fossil fuel-based schemes. But there are abundant alternatives to these highly destructive plans. Given the speed at which battery technology is evolving, enabling a balanced and reliable electricity supply without any use of fossil fuels, the committee’s claim is bunkum.

+Protestors hounded Microsoft’s sustainability chief at a conference this week, pointing out that the company is breaking all its emission reduction pledges in pursuit of more “compute” for its AI program. As Katie Brigham reports

“How does signing a 20-year deal with Chevron help you reach your clean energy goals?,” one protestor asked, referring to Microsoft’s recently announced power purchase agreement with Chevron for nearly 2.7 gigawatts of natural gas-fired power to supply a West Texas data center. The project represents one of the largest gas-powered artificial intelligence developments in the U.S., and Stiffler acknowledged that she had been planning to ask about it, herself.

Microsoft’s Melanie Nakagawa answered the question. at least in part, saying “that project with Chevron is initially using natural gas and it’s a natural gas contract,” before emphasizing that the company has built “over 4.5 gigawatts of clean energy already today,” and remains committed to balancing speed-to-power with its clean energy goals. She added that, “with this deal in particular, we’re looking at a range of tools in our toolbox to ensure that we can continue to grow our power, but also do so in a way that is responsible and sustainable.” She stopped short, however, of making any commitments to transitioning the project to renewable energy over time.

Meanwhile, kudos to many activists including my Third Act colleagues for persuading the city of Boulder ,Nevada to fight a new data center, which the Trump administration wants to situate on nearby Bureau of Land Management land

“Even if the project is now on adjacent BLM land, the impact does not stop at a property line,” one resident said. “My biggest concern are our water supply and our electrical infrastructure.”

Another resident said, “Although the facility may be located outside of the city limits, the impacts of supplying utilities, expanding infrastructures, and supporting a project of this magnitude would directly impact Boulder City and its residents.”

+Finally, Maine’s first solar-powered ice-cream shop has come on line in South Portland. Willard’s is pioneering what it calls a “Sun to Scoop” model, to complement its “Garbage to Garden” waste reduction partnership. Would you like a picture of some solar panel installers eating ice cream? I am here to provide it

I write this under an ashy, yellow northeast sky; smoke from wildfires in Ontario and Minnesota swept across the region in the middle of the night, and I awoke at 3 (as I too often do in these parlous times) with stinging eyes. But I will try to see clearly enough to discern some of the latest numbers in the climate and energy battle—numbers which prove to me the economic folly of staying on our current course.

To me, I admit, these are secondary—there’s not enough money on earth to make me want to condemn people to a few centuries of waking up in smoke, and I know without calculation that a clear blue sky is worth almost any price. But I also know how the world works, and so I want to provide people with the ammunition they need to carry on this fight—and the last few weeks have seen that ammunition piling up in the arsenals of logic and thrift. There is at this point no doubt that the world would operate more cheaply on clean energy, which is a lucky thing, and one that needs to be hammered home till the conventional wisdom (that sun and wind and batteries are a luxury) is finally routed.

The most basic point, of course, and yet one often lost in the debate is that once you’ve installed renewable energy you no longer have to pay for fuel. IRENA, the International Renewable Energy Agency, put a number on that in its annual report at the end of last month.

In 2025, renewables helped to avoid an estimated USD 480 billion in fossil fuel costs and around 8.4 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide emissions.

If we round the number of our fellow humans off to about 8 billion, that’s $60 for every man, woman and child on the face of the planet, even though we’re still fairly early on the adoption curve for clean power. The numbers are stark:

Since 2010, the cost of solar PV has fallen by 89%, onshore wind by 71%, and offshore wind by 63%. This highlights how renewables are now the cheapest source of new electricity in most markets. In 2025, more than 90% of newly commissioned, utility-scale capacity delivered power at a lower cost than the cheapest, newly-installed fossil-fuel-based alternative.

If you move from energy generation to energy efficiency, the numbers are just as interesting. Mark Gongloff, in a charming essay that begins by noting GOP umbrage at Mayor Mamdani’s suggestion that during a heatwave 78 degrees would be a good setting for the AC, goes on to show how the Trump administration is gutting the ongoing federal effort to make appliances more efficient. Cost?

Higher standards available to the DOE could save the average US household $160 a year and all US businesses $15 billion a year in electricity costs between 2030 and 2050, according to the Appliance Standards Awareness Project (ASAP), a nonprofit research and advocacy group.

And what about making money? Dan McCarthy describes a new study from the “business-focused” think tank E2 that shows that the clean energy projects—at least 216 in number—cancelled since Trump took office would have supplied at least half a million good jobs.

Trump took office amid an unprecedented surge in the clean energy economy. The 2022 Inflation Reduction Act spurred the rapid construction of both renewable power projects and domestic factories intended to build solar panels, electric vehicles, batteries, and other crucial cleantech.

But the boom went bust pretty much as soon as Trump won the election in late 2024.

Just as an example, here’s a story from a few days ago about the administration stymieing four windpower projects in Minnesota that would have produced not just a gigawatt of badly needed clean electricity, enough for several hundred thousand homes, but also 1,100 construction and 4,400 “indirect jobs,” for a total economic hit of $168 million.

If you want to try to add it all up, here’s another analysis, from the people at Energy Innovation. Their model shows that, taken together, the result of the major Trump era moves on energy policy will be that

Households will pay an additional $650 billion for energy – an average of $460 per household in 2035 and $490 in 2040.

And their attacks on EVs, which mean that more Americans get to shell out at the gas pump year after year, will

inflate gasoline prices 14 percent in 2035 and 26 percent in 2040, atop near-term upward pressure from the Iran war and other market forces.

and the One Big Beautiful Bill, by removing incentives for a quick energy transition, will

cost the U.S. economy 820,000 jobs per year on average over the next decade, in addition to the 144,000 clean energy jobs lost[1] within the past 18 months.

And

Slowing down electrification and domestic energy manufacturing will lower GDP in all years, totaling $2.3 trillion cumulative lost GDP, with effects flowing into other economic sectors. The U.S. economy will lose $150 billion in GDP in 2030, peaking at a $250 billion net loss in 2032, then reverting to losses of $200 billion in 2035 and $120 billion in 2040.

This all amounts to setting money on fire—almost unbelievable amounts. And real money—not notional SpaceX shares, now plummeting; not weird Kalshi bets. It’s money that families have to fork over, month after month, if they want to keep the lights on and the minivan trundling down the road.

And of course the numbers grow exponentially larger if you even try to calculate the public health and climate costs of burning ever more fossil fuel. The Energy Innovation study again:

Worsening local air pollution will raise healthcare costs by $43 billion, with annual increases of $4 billion in 2035 and $4.5 billion in 2040, contributing to rising household costs alongside rising energy prices and goods inflation.

And here’s a new report in the premier science journal Nature from Anders Levermann on the economic costs of a heating planet even before we hit the biggest and most expensive tipping points

By definition, tipping points are reached when a series of interlinked changes amplify one another until the whole system becomes unstable and shifts uncontrollably into a different state. Loss of sea ice at the poles, for example, reduces the amount of sunlight reflected into space, further heating Earth’s surface, which then accelerates ice loss. These vicious cycles of change define a tipping point, at which the climate cannot return to its former patterns.

Before that point, the climate system becomes increasingly unstable. It fluctuates considerably — a rise in variability is a well-established property of such ‘non-linear dynamical systems’ approaching a critical threshold. That society will face these fluctuations and that they will intensify through the tipping transition hasn’t been realized by scientists and policymakers, so far.

Earth will experience an increasingly erratic climate: more and stronger fluctuations in flows of melt water, ocean circulations and the extent of sea ice. These changes will lead to more frequent and intense extremes in temperature, precipitation and storms — leading not only to more heatwaves and droughts, but also to more cold spells and floods.

Modern economies are adapted to relatively stable climatic baselines. Agricultural productivity, infrastructure design, insurance pricing and financial risk management all rely not only on expected mean conditions but also on the predictability of variability.

Farmers need to factor in lost harvests; architects and urban planners need to account for extremes of temperature, wind and rainfall; and financiers and insurers need to consider the cost and scale of damages. But once these factors are no longer predictable, all bets are off — life becomes uninsurable and the world becomes unsafe.

In case you think scientists are the only ones worrying, Richard Partington discusses new analyses from leading bankers that attempt to put some numbers on these emerging dangers: the rapidly approaching El Niño, for instance, is threatening massive “food shocks” that will stretch into at least 2028:

“El Niño puts ‘climateflation’ back on the agenda,” analysts at the Italian bank UniCredit wrote in a research note. “Europe’s recent heatwaves are a reminder that the climate baseline is already shifting. El Niño could add a new layer of pressure later this year, as it amplifies the effects of global warming.”

According to analysts at Goldman Sachs, the strength of this El Niño could cause a 15.8% surge in global food commodity prices. That would have a knock-on effect worldwide, including for consumers in Europe, where it predicted food prices could rise by 1.3% across the eurozone.

Unlike politicians, bankers actually try to do something to limit their risk. As Ishika Mookerjee reports, private equity funds are unleashing an increasing army of “heat detectives” to figure out the climate risks of their investments.

A Bloomberg Green analysis of the latest sustainability reports published by 12 of the largest alternative asset managers show overall mentions of physical climate risks and related terms nearly doubled from a year before, with Carlyle Group Inc., General Atlantic LP, KKR & Co. and Partners Group AG seeing large increases. Funds tend to identify floods and cyclones as the most immediate risks. Most are now screening their portfolios for vulnerabilities to heat and treating it as a long-term, chronic risk, especially for their combined private equity assets totaling more than $700 billion.

Given all that, the endlessly maddening question is why are we still headed down this path. Why is Gov. Kathy Hochul not listening to the private equity sleuths headquartered in her state’s financial capital and instead signing up New Yorkers for 40 years of new natural gas pipelines, and why is Hawaii flirting with LNG? Why is the Trump administration doing everything it can to run our bill ever higher?

If you think the answer must be that there’s some competing policy formulation that comes up with different numbers, think again. Here’s the remarkable account from Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman of the first meeting between the oil industry and the Trump White House after the 2024 election.

At one point during the meeting, the executives began complaining about the Climate Superfund bills that had recently passed in Vermont and New York. As they spoke, Trump’s policy adviser, Stephen Miller was texting the attorney general Pam Bondi. “I’m on it,” Miller told the group. Less than two months later, the administration sued both states seeking to block enforcement of the laws.

In another instance, the ExxonMobil chief executive, Darren Woods, voiced concerns about European Union regulations that required big companies to monitor and reduce the environmental effects of their activities and develop “climate transition plans.”

Haberman and Swan report that, upon hearing this, Trump instructed Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick to impose additional tariffs on the E.U. until they abandoned those regulations.

At another point in the meeting, held in the Cabinet Room on March 19, 2025, Miller asked the executives in attendance for a list of 10 projects the White House could help fast-track and requested that they “highlight how much more energy the projects would produce in the United States during the Trump presidency.”

And in one of the most fateful exchanges, the Chevron chief executive, Mike Wirth, pushed for an extension of the firm’s license to operate in Venezuela.

Less than a year later, the Trump administration had seized the country’s leader, Nicolás Maduro. Shortly after that, Chevron expanded its presence in Venezuela.

Yesterday I called Swan to discuss this reporting, and he described to me a room filled with some of the most powerful executives in the world, stunned by what they were witnessing.

“They were almost in awe,” Swan told me. “There was no semblance of a policy process, but rather the C.E.O.s were raising their grievances, and Trump was essentially saying, ‘Make it so, it shall be done.’”

Indeed, as David Fickling reports, Big Oil has no choice but to rely on gaming political systems, because private investors have shifted most of their money to clean energy. That means that subsidies are ever more important

The cost of these measures looks set to rise to about $1.1 trillion this year, according to a study last week by the United Nations Development Programme. If crude averages $110 a barrel over the full year, it could climb as high as $1.43 trillion. That’s almost as much as was spent on such subsidies during the year the Ukraine war started in 2022.

Whatever the final figure, the amount of government cash support pumped into the fossil fuel system this year will be running close to the amount that both public and private investors were prepared to invest in it. It’s an extraordinary situation for an industry that claims to be governed by capitalist laws of supply and demand, rather than statist central planning.

Just to reiterate: instead of speeding the conversion to clean cheap energy, which would save households huge amounts of money, we’re instead shoveling taxpayer cash to the fossil fuel industry, and in the process overheating the earth, which will be the most expensive thing that ever happened, by orders of magnitude. The most important thing the planet’s leaders could possibly do is flip this switch, and reverse these flows—we’ve clearly got the money, since we’re shelling out these huge sums in subsidies. Fickling again:

This support is so pervasive that in most places we don’t even notice or question it. That has to change. Governments must stop throwing sand in the gears of the energy transition. Far from reducing as the climate emergency intensifies and heatwaves claim thousands of lives, they have been doubling down on counterproductive support for polluting fuels, while loading tariffs and regulations onto clean energy.

The horrible irony here is that markets are coming much closer to getting things right than our political institutions, which are currently doing all they can to maintain the status quo. Our next real chance to disrupt that madness? November 3.

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In other energy and climate news:

+Climate displacement is one of the defining crises of our time, and Josh Fox’s new film, The Welcome Table, finds a new way in: The veteran documentarian and activist gathers climate survivors to share their stories and show a path forward. The film is streaming now on HBO Max, but many groups are hosting screening parties, and raising money for local organizations; if you sign up to host a watch party they’ll send you a special screening guide.

+Chilean salmon farming is environmentally problematic, but a little less so when it runs on solar power, not diesel. Kelly Lipke reports on one farm where fish have found protection from sun and predators beneath the shade of floating panels.

+The always-important Tom Athanasiou has a long and eminently readable report from the “fossil fuel transition” conference in Colombia this spring. It’s the most eyes-open account of the session I’ve come across

Fossil fuel extraction must be phased out at a breakneck pace with almost complete cessation by 2050. Similarly, the build-out of fossil fuel infrastructure must stop immediately. There’s no room—even in poor countries—for new oil and gas fields or coal mines. All effort must go to the construction of zero-carbon infrastructure.

Yet none of this is even conceivable unless the overall effort is very widely accepted as fair. This judgement will be made in many ways and many places, and not in abstract terms. For example, the tension between “phasing down” and “phasing out” fossil fuels is anything but abstract, and it won’t be easily reconciled. At Santa Marta, the “oil-rich African nations” insisted they would keep drilling as they transitioned to renewables. Onuoha Magnus Chidi, an adviser to Nigeria’s regional development minister: “Not phasing out—phase down. That is the message… We are phasing down, and we are saying that there should be early planning. It must be fair to all.”

I find his point impossible to dispute. The alternative has to be: if a phase-down strategy is pursued with adequate ambition, and if it takes proper account of both the North/South and rich/poor divides, then it becomes a phase-out strategy that can honestly be defended as being “fair to all.”

+Matthew Shaer has a superbly reported piece in the Times today on the folly of America’s automakers, mostly standing by as they watch the world move towards EVs

According to the International Energy Agency, a Paris-based policy group, one of every four vehicles sold globally in 2025 was battery-powered. Analysts with Bloomberg have predicted that in the next decade, that number will more than double, putting gas-powered cars — for the first time ever — in the minority of overall new vehicle sales. Overseas, Asian and European manufacturers have spent years preparing for this eventuality, dumping billions into the development of battery technology. With predictable results: China now makes 75 percent of all E.V.s sold anywhere on earth. (The United States makes around 5 percent.) Many of those vehicles are produced by BYD, a Chinese company that recently became the largest manufacturer of battery-powered cars in the world.

+If you were worried that plug-in solar represented a safety risk, a new white paper should put your mind at ease; it’s nothing like the risk from gas and diesel generators.

Meanwhile, the fabulous folks at the Bright Saver nonprofit just dropped a new deal. Now that ten state legislatures have approved balcony solar (so many thanks to my Third Act colleagues around the country!), they’re going to be offering the panels at cost to anyone who signs up for a membership

The nonprofit is selling systems for ​“what it costs us to purchase in bulk from the manufacturers,” Bright Saver’s Cora Stryker said. She declined to name those manufacturers, noting that the organization is brand-agnostic and could switch at any time.

Bright Saver sells a 180-watt kit for about $285 and a 360-watt kit for $414. To access these prices, you first have to become a member, which costs $29 annually (with renewal optional). Otherwise, a 180-watt kit is $499, and a 360-watt kit is $699.

The organization aims to be the Costco of clean energy; only members can access the deep discounts. And more product deals are coming. Bright Saver plans to offer plug-in home batteries that work with balcony solar kits as soon as next year.

With the membership, the 180-watt kit works out to $1.74 per watt. The 360-watt system, which is just 5% the size of a typical 7,200-watt rooftop array, is significantly better priced at $1.23 per watt.

That’s a good deal in the U.S. Nationally, the average rooftop system costs $2.60 per watt before local and state incentives, largely because of the high ​“soft costs” of marketing, permitting, and installation. Balcony solar kits sold domestically by companies such as Craftstrom, APsystems, and EcoFlow hover around $1.50 to $2.50 per watt, although it’s possible to find systems on sale for less.

But even Bright Saver’s 360-watt-kit price is more than three times what Germans can pay. There, balcony solar through Ikea is a stupefying $0.35 per watt. Clean energy really is cheap energy, especially outside the U.S.

+Megan Mayhew Bergman, a superb teacher and one of my favorite nature writers, has a new essay on the need for real climate grief:

Just outside Manchester, Vermont, there’s a heron rookery I’ve driven past for nearly two decades. Each year, the elegant great blue herons and their nests dotted the skeletal marsh trees. The birds stood guard over their young through sleet and torrential rain, their stoic devotion a marker of Vermont’s tenuous spring.

Then, gradually, there were fewer herons. This spring, there was only one. I passed her on my way to dentist appointments and while driving my children to soccer games. The trees and marsh remain. But the once-visible community of herons does not.

This heron raises her young alone.

No one held a memorial service. There was no public acknowledgment that something beloved or integral to the landscape had diminished. Yet each time I pass the rookery, I feel an ache that does not seem entirely polite to share. It feels like a contradiction at the center of modern life: we experience profound environmental loss and largely pretend nothing is happening.

As a culture, we know what to do when a person dies. We gather, tell stories and hold sacred space. We make room for sadness. But what do we do when a species disappears from a landscape? What do we do when a coastline changes beyond recognition, when a forest is felled for wood pellets and lumber, or when a rookery we love becomes an empty, ghostly landscape of broken trees and still water, with nothing but the sound of the highway to drown out the chorus of the frogs?

+You know me, I like solar power. So trust me when I say, this is one of the stupidest—and really, most evil—technological ideas I’ve ever come across, which means that of course it’s been embraced by the Trump administration. As Hiroko Tabuchi writes,

The federal government has approved plans by a start-up company to test a satellite that would use a 60-foot mirror to reflect sunlight back to Earth after dark, as part of a project the company says would power solar farms, provide light for rescue workers and illuminate city streets.

In a license issued on Thursday, the Federal Communications Commission gave the green light for Reflect Orbital of Hawthorne, Calif., to launch its Eärendil-1 satellite into low Earth orbit. The company plans to deploy its test satellite this year but has said it eventually wants to send as many as 50,000 big mirrors into space.

The approval came despite a flood of opposition from astronomers, wildlife experts and others who say the light from the mirrors could distract airplane pilots, wreak havoc on astronomical observations and interfere with circadian rhythms, the light-and-dark cycles that help people, animals and plants know when to wake and sleep, to bloom or to migrate.

In other absurd federal government news, the White House is going to shut down its key agricultural research lab near DC

USDA announced plans 1 year ago to close BARC—a sprawling, 2600-hectare campus home to experimental agricultural facilities and labs where hundreds of researchers study invasive pests, cow genetics, bee biology, water conservation, and other topics. The agency cited a handful of dilapidated buildings and a desire to increase “efficiency” as the reason for shuttering one of its largest scientific campuses.

And if you can stomach one more, join Heather Hansman for the tale of Rec.Gov, the new reservation system for campsites on federal land which of course has been quickly gamed by bots

Even beyond bot usage, academics have shown that digital access through Rec.gov is inequitable, and that demand for camping and other public land access is outpacing technology and policy. Rangers can’t do anything about those empty campsites, which they want to see used. People like me are pissed they can’t get outside when they want.

And they’re also pissed that the government contractor Booz Allen Hamilton is profiting off of every single Recreation.gov transaction, to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars.

As we work though our frustration about access, it’s worth considering why a consulting company Bloomberg once called “the world’s most profitable spy organization”—one that you might remember as Edward Snowden’s employer when he leaked global surveillance documents, and which recently lost 31 Department of Treasury contracts because a former employee leaked Trump’s tax documents—is holding the keys to our public lands.

+As the UK fights on and on about net zero, the biggest source of its carbon emissions is a single power plant that burns mostly wood logged in the U.S. The thinktank Ember has the latest sad chapter on the debacle that is Drax.

Despite being the UK’s largest emitter, Drax’s emissions from burning woody biomass are not counted in official UK emissions statistics. This is due to a United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change accounting convention designed to avoid double counting emissions between the energy and land use sectors. This means biomass power emissions are not included in the UK Emissions Trading Scheme and biomass generation is eligible for public subsidies earmarked for renewable energy. In total, Drax has received £8.72 billion in public subsidies for biomass burning since 2012.

Biomass power generation is currently defined as renewable because it is assumed that carbon emitted during combustion is sequestered through replanting and removed from the atmosphere as part of the natural carbon cycle. However, the carbon payback period for woody biomass can be significant, as it can take decades for regrowth to sequester the same volume of carbon emitted. Bodies including the European Academies Science Advisory Council have cautioned against unabated biomass generation for this reason. The immediate, direct emissions from burning wood at Drax are almost twice as high as direct emissions from gas generation (see Methodology for further details). Including emissions from biomass power plants in analysis of UK emitters accounts for the fact that the carbon saving from biomass power is far from guaranteed.

+France is undergoing a truly dire heat wave, which in turn is forcing it to shut down many of its nuclear reactors because rivers have become too warm to cool them. As the Euro edition of Politico reports:

Monday’s broiling temperatures in France forced EDF to stop three of France’s 57 nuclear reactors and reduce production in another seven, the state-owned utility provider said in a statement. When the mercury rose to record-breaking levels last month, a trio of reactors went offline and five were slowed down, causing an 8.7 percent dip in power production just as air conditioners caused a rise in electricity demand.

But solar panels don’t require a river to cool them, and so they’re functioning awfully well right now. In fact, here’s a remarkable idea to end with. As Anna Adamsson, Marriele Mango, and Olivia Tym report, in New Orleans a new model for solar is emerging:

A Beehive Microgrid consists of a “Hive”—a grid-connected microgrid powered by solar and energy storage (solar+storage)—and “Bees”—a group of mobile solar+storage trailers. Bees are charged and stationed at the Hive. In preparation for severe weather or during a power outage, the Bees can be deployed throughout a region to provide services such as Wi-Fi, electrical outlets for charging phones and other devices, refrigeration for food and medication, and to serve as a hub for volunteers or medical providers. When there are no disasters or power outages to respond to, the solar+storage systems can generate economic benefits, such as utility bills savings, and the Bees can be deployed to power outdoor community events like concerts and picnics

The most useful thing I did this week was appear on Ezra Klein’s New York Times podcast to talk about the rise of clean energy. He framed the story well, and asked generous and sharp questions, and my only regret is that I was too jacked up going in (this is one of the very few remaining real forums in American journalism) and so I think I interrupted him at several points when I just should have been listening. But I know it was a real conversation because at several points I found myself thinking new things, and one that I blurted out was: "Even better than the E.V. is the e-bike, which I think may turn out to be the transformative invention of our time on Earth."

Even as I said it I wondered if it was an overstatement, so this edition of the newsletter is an effort to interrogate that claim, not to mention an homage to the great Tadej Pogacar, who grabbed control of the Tour de France on Thursday with a truly remarkable climb up a couple of Pyrenean peaks, blithely adapting to the 100-degree heat. If he can do it, why not the rest of us?

The Economist updated an October article this week that began in much the same tone: “Forget EVs,” the headline read. “Cycling is revolutionizing transport.” And really, they began in the right place: even before we get to e-bikes, bikes themselves are a magical technology, according to one recent reckoning from Anthony Blazevitch four times more efficient than walking. (Here’s the chart from Scientific American that more or less proves it).

As the Economist account pointed out,

Though robotaxis have notched up impressive growth, they look ploddingly pedestrian compared with far zippier pedal-powered rivals. Waymo, Alphabet’s self-driving taxi firm, proudly proclaims that its cars do around 250,000 trips a week. Yet in New York alone that number of trips is made every three days using the city’s bike-share scheme.

In London cyclists now outnumber cars in the City, the financial district, by two to one. Paris, where they now outnumber motorists across the whole city, is catching up with Europe’s traditional bike capitals, Amsterdam and Copenhagen, though cycling is still growing in those cities, too. In Copenhagen, the Danish capital, bikes account for almost half of commuter journeys to work and school.

Even in Beijing, just 30 years after most cyclists were pushed off the city’s roads to make way for cars, the number of cyclists is rising again. Only these days they are more likely to be riding a fancy Brompton bike than a black Flying Pigeon, the ubiquitous pedal-powered ride in the years after the communist revolution.

Covid helped spark the bike boom—American bike trips increased 19% between the summers of 2019 and 2020—but the other factor has been the rapid development of e-bikes.

By giving cyclists a pedal assist, these open up riding to people who cannot comfortably squeeze themselves into slim-fit Lycra. Workers can turn up at a meeting without breaking a sweat or needing to change. They are especially useful for transporting children and groceries, which is hard going if done by pedal power alone. E-bikes have also massively accelerated the use of local bike-share schemes, and made them profitable. With Chicago’s “Divvy” bike scheme for example, e-bikes are now ridden 70% more than “classic” bikes, despite being a lot pricier.

It’s very hard to find up-to-date numbers, but as early as 2023 the estimates were already that e-bikes were cutting oil demand by a million barrels a day, probably more than EVs. There are now 400 million of them on the road in China. I can remember Beijing in the days when the bike was dominant, and “driver” was an occupation—a chauffeur for party higher-ups. Those days may be coming back, as people grow tired of traffic jams, and as Chinese cities make bike infrastructure ever-better. As Daizong Liu, Xianyuan Zhu and Alphonse Tam described a couple of years ago

Beijing put forth a comprehensive plan to make the city more cycling-oriented by 2035. Beijing began this work in 2019 by developing 6-metre-wide, elevated, bike-only lanes to help ease congestion between dense residential areas and busy office districts. The projects are already yielding results: according to ITDP’s analysis, e-bike riders in Beijing now represent approximately 23% of commuters who have shifted from driving and ride-hailing services as their primary transport mode. This shift has contributed to an annual reduction in fuel consumption of nearly 59.86 million litres and an estimated decrease in CO2 emissions of 240,000 tons.

If you broaden your scope a bit to include anything on two wheels, you can see even more progress. Delhi, which has replaced Beijing as the poster child for bad air, has just put up $2.5 billion to electrify more of its transport—two-thirds of the vehicles in the city are on two wheels, and plenty more are the three-wheeled rickshaws that once ran on pedal power but now belch smoke from inefficient engines.

There’s endless room for improvement everywhere. Writing in Streetsblog, Pete Tomao offers new calcuations for the borough of Queens.

Queens Community Board 1 — which encompasses a broad swath of Western Queens — contains roughly 44,749 cars. That’s about 0.49 cars for every household. If Western Queens matched Manhattan’s car ownership rates, there would be 21,000 fewer vehicles on local streets, enough to fill more than 80 football fields of parking space.

Here’s what that might look like. Curbside parking becomes rain gardens, and sidewalks are expanded. Some streets become permanent pedestrian plazas. Instead of hearing cars as you walk on busy streets, you hear your neighbors’ voices.

Medians turn into community gardens, and every intersection has finished crosswalks. All of this is possible. Other cities and countries have already done it.

Most people would look at that and say: Nice. But most people don’t take big contributions for the fossil fuel industry. Probably the easiest way to track the growing importance of bikes is by seeing the backlash they’re creating; around the world, the very worst politicians are making anti-bike crusades key parts of their propaganda. Nigel Farage (now locked in a tight electoral contest with a trash can) has called bike lanes evidence of “anti-car fanaticism,” and Ontario premier Doug Ford’s effort to rip up Toronto’s main bike lanes is currently under court review. But leave it to the Trump administration to escalate things one step further. Last week Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, (whose qualification for office was appearing on the RV-based “reality” show “Road Rules,” and who has just completed a similar gas-guzzling trip with his family sponsored by Toyota and Shell) declared that he was ending federal funding for bike paths because they were “DEI.” As Edith Olmsted reported, federal grants under Biden in 2021 2021 grants funding bike lanes noted that they would serve to “improve infrastructure, strengthen supply chains, make us safer, advance equity, and combat climate change.”

Upon hearing “equity,” President Donald Trump’s goons can’t help but get triggered into attacking any federal spending that won’t benefit them directly. In reality, those Biden-era grants directed funds to build a new transit center in North Carolina, replace bridges in New Mexico, extend streets in New Hampshire, install traffic lights and crosswalks in Missouri, and install bike lanes in Seattle, among other projects. Now the financial status of these projects is unclear.

If “goons” seems strong to you, note that the classy Duffy decided to mock his predecessor’s name in his announcement of the new policy

The thing that makes a bike lane “equitable” is that most people can afford a bike even if they can’t afford a car. If the Secretary of Transportation was actually interested in, say, transportation, then he could usefully occupy himself drawing up some new rules of the road. There are, for instance, “e-bikes” that work just by turning a throttle. These “e-motos” are far more like motorcycles than bicycles, they can go way too fast, and they should be regulated—a license, a helmet, kept to the road and not the bike path. Actual e-bikes—which help you pedal—might well be restricted to pushing you no faster than 20 mph, which would still move you far more quickly around most cities than you can travel in a car.

But that’s not, of course, what motivates the Trump administration. They don’t mind crashes—that’s why they keep making life easier for the bloated SUVs that make American roads ever more dangerous. They hate bikes and e-bikes because they don’t use oil, and all federal policy in this area is devoted to making us burn more, at all times.

It’s not going to work, I don’t think. Bikes are fun, bikes are cheap, e-bikes are super easy to recharge. They’re good for you. As Micah Toll points out, they’re especially good for teenagers, who can cruise the streets in something other than a car.

This type of group riding brings back real-world socialization, which is especially crucial right now. According to the U.S. Surgeon General, American teens are experiencing a “loneliness epidemic,” and much of that isolation has been linked to digital life. E-bikes can help counter that by encouraging face-to-face interaction, literally side-by-side, rolling down the street, talking and laughing the whole way.

People sometimes moan about the fact that we haven’t yet developed flying cars (and God help us if we ever do). But it turns out the transportation we needed was there all along, just waiting to get better. A bike is magic, and an e-bike is a bike without hills and showers. That’s enough miracle for now.

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In other energy and climate news:

+If you want to see what turns on folks like Sean Duffy, here’s perhaps the dumbest truck ad in the history of car ads, starring Trump pal Dana White who brought cage-fighting to the White House. It’s argument, in its entirety, is that the thing that’s good about RAM pickups is that they are very loud, and that if they weren’t loud they wouldn’t be American and hence…not good. It builds to a climax where he literally replaces God with Noise:

Something to ride? Ride it straight into the history books, because quiet won't get you anywhere. In this country, in loud we trust.

Meanwhile, if EVs were feeling a little slighted by my bike advocacy above, good news on that front: Mack Hogan, one of the country’s big-time car reviewers, says they’re progressing much much faster than their noisy counterparts:

When I left Road & Track to join InsideEVs, my car enthusiast friends were surprised. I was trading in the glamorous world of six-figure supercars and earth-shaking monster trucks for the practical business of charging infrastructure and battery chemistry. Why would I bother, they asked, when even the mightiest EV was less exciting and heavier than a run-of-the-mill sports car?

The answer was hard to explain in the present tense. I was tired of living in a world where the past was celebrated as somehow pure, and the future tinged with anxiety about emissions and regulation. I wanted to get excited about the future again, and as I saw gas cars stagnate, I knew that I had to turn the page.

So I did. In the two and a half years since, I can say with certainty that I’ve seen more exciting progress in the EV sector than I have in the last ten years of internal-combustion development. And the party’s just getting started.

It’ll only get better from here. As the North American battery supply chain gears up, prices are falling quickly, and automakers are iterating constantly. Battery breakthroughs like high-silicon anodes, lithium-manganese rich chemistry, and solid-state technology promise to further drive down costs while improving range and longevity. Meanwhile, EVs are getting simpler due to the proliferation of software-defined vehicle architectures, which make them cheaper to build, easier to service, and simple to update.

There are no equivalent gasoline breakthroughs on the horizon. After 150-odd years of iteration, we have already taken the easy money off the table. You’re not going to double MPG without adding a battery, and you’re not going to drive down costs far below today’s figures without major sacrifices. The technology is nearing the end of the line.

Meanwhile, the Chinese (of course) are figuring out cool electric cargo ships

Electric cargo ships are entering real-world operation at a rapidly growing pace (Figure 1). In 2022, there were only four electric cargo ships in China; by 2025, this figure had increased by 950%, to 42.

Ship types have diversified, from bulk carriers and container ships to multi-purpose cargo ships. At the same time, vessel sizes have grown significantly, with the maximum deadweight tonnage (DWT) rising from around 3,000 tonnes in 2022 to approximately 14,000 tonnes in 2025.

This indicates that China is testing the feasibility of electrification for increasingly larger ships. Although battery capacity constraints continue to limit sailing range per charge—which typically hovered between 150 km and 400 km from 2022 to 2025—trends show steady improvement; by 2025, electric cargo ships with a range of up to 500 km were already in operation in China.

+Accounts of the great European heatwave (still ongoing in many places) continue to trickle in, with the Guardian doing the best job of both chronicling the disaster and linking it to its causes. Here’s their account of what schools are like

Teachers say they have been desperately trying to keep children safe, with some covering younger pupils in wet paper towels as they lie on the floor, while older students have been given trays of water under their desks to put their feet in.

Staff say learning on the hottest days is almost impossible, with pupil behaviour and attention deteriorating rapidly.

Some teachers and pupils have fainted, while others say they have had to buy fans and window shades out of their own pockets to try to keep themselves and their pupils safe.

And just in case you’re wondering what a record heatwave feels like on London’s Tube, Rosie Peters-McDonald has the answer:

A quick glance at the thermometer I’m carrying on this unscientific investigation shows that the station is about 30C. On the platform and tube it crawls up to 32C, and then at the Victoria line platform at Finsbury Park it hits 34C. In the UK, it is illegal to transport cattle above 30C; transporting people at 34C, though, might be becoming the norm.

Asher Minns, executive director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, a partnership across several UK universities, says that tube tunnels are “basically radiators”, taking on the heat of the clay and concrete around them. The carriages, platforms and surrounding tunnels are also warmed by the hundreds of kilowatts of heat the trains produce while breaking. And the warmer it is outside, the worse it gets underground.

But Minns adds that the infrastructure is difficult to adapt because of its age and the surrounding clay. It will likely be years before the network is better suited to dealing with the heat, so for now he says the focus needs to be reducing risks to passengers.

+Portland, Oregon’s climate fund is working so well that…politicians want to raid it for other purposes. Jamie Parfitt has the story:

In November 2018, Portland voters overwhelmingly approved a tax on large retailers to fund clean energy and job training projects. It was the work of longtime climate activists and leaders in communities of color.

Measure 26-201 instituted a 1% Clean Energy Surcharge on gross revenue from retail sales in the city for companies with total annual revenue above $1 billion and in-city revenue over $500,000. Proceeds would go toward the new Portland Clean Energy Community Benefits Fund, or PCEF, to support those climate-related projects.

Eight years later, the PCEF has amassed at least $1.7 billion — all of it already allocated, either through community grants or long-term strategic initiatives. But in a cash-strapped city facing pressing needs beyond climate change alone, that growing war chest has increasingly invited proposals for other uses.

To Mayor Keith Wilson, it’s a way to bankroll renovations to the Moda Center and keep the Trail Blazers in Portland. To some city councilors, it’s one way to undo job cuts in the budget they just reluctantly adopted. To the city’s police union, it’s a way to boost the Portland Police Bureau’s budget and hire several hundred more officers.

+Writing at the National Catholic Reporter, Sabrina Danielson and Ellie Simmons have the scoop on why nuns are so much more environmentally engaged than priests, bishops, etc. (something I have seen in many places)

Research shows that the top U.S. Catholic leaders, U.S. bishops, have largely approached climate change with ambivalence and denialism, and have largely avoided engaging in significant climate action, despite their power to do so within their local dioceses. This is likely due to their ties to Republican individuals and organizations.

In contrast, Catholic sisters, who have little formal power within the U.S. Catholic Church, are leading on environmental issues at many levels of society and within the Catholic Church.

Our research finds that 1) key qualities of sisters' avowed religious life facilitate their environmental leadership and 2) bishops and diocesan priests' environmental leadership may be inhibited by their power and money interests, as well as their isolation from community…

Many sisters perceived U.S. bishops and diocesan priests as being resistant to environmental activism because they were more focused on maintaining their institutional power. For example, one sister described bishops as “hesitant to move on any area that is controversial.”

Here, some sisters discussed bishops and diocesan priests as not wanting to anger conservative financial donors or parishioners. This aligns with findings that political conservatives are more skeptical of climate change. The sisters noted that “money does talk” and some “have outsized influence in some of their dioceses because of the amount of money that the family has.” Diocesan priests were described as “trying to please the people and not rile them, and they don’t want their money to go down.”

+Here’s an interesting two-fer: the face of a big Swiss dam now studded with solar panels. Apparently they work best in winter, because these alpine dams are often. up above the cloud layer.

I visited Omsk once, or at least its airport; we were en route from Moscow to Ulan Ade on the Mongolian border, and the Aeroflot flight landed there to refuel. (It was a memorable journey; this was still the Soviet Union, and on boarding for the full-day flight, the stewardess handed each passenger a baggie with a scrawny chicken drumstick). All of which is to say, I’m equipped to pronounce, with the gravitas proper to a pundit, that Omsk is long ways from anywhere else.

Including the Ukrainian border, which makes it remarkable that Zelensky’s drone specialists managed to fly a whole squadron of their craft more than 2,500 kilometers from home and bomb the heck out of Putin’s largest oil refinery. It was the high point of an ongoing campaign designed to highlight what may be Russia’s greatest weakness: that it, like a number of other countries, is heavily dependent on oil.

Just as Donald Trump has proposed building American prosperity on the back of “energy dominance" via “liquid gold,” oil was supposed to be Russia’s strength, the source of its greatest riches. (John McCain memorably called it a “gas station with nukes.”) And indeed in the early days of the war Russia flexed its hydrocarbon muscle, threatening to cut off Europe’s gas supply. Throughout its invasion of its neighbor, Russia has relied on the often-covert export of oil via its fleet of “shadow tankers” to keep revenue flowing. Trump of course made this easier and more profitable for his buddy by temporarily lifting sanctions in the wake of our own ill-advised attack on Iran.

But if our attack on Iran has made other nations demonstrably more nervous about relying on the import of hydrocarbons, Ukraine’s attacks on Russia’s petroleum network should make them nervous about depending on the stuff even if they don’t have to bring it in from afar. It turns out that in the drone age it’s a very risky business, because it relies on colossal pieces of infrastructure that can’t be easily defended.

One of those is the supertanker—there’s one on fire today in the Gulf, apparently hit by an Iranian missile because it strayed from the Tehran-approved shipping lane. Ukrainian drones attacked another yesterday in the Sea of Azov, crippling the vessel. There’s essentially no defense for these slow-moving giant ships if an adversary with a few drones wants to take one out—they are, after all, a floating pool of flammable liquid.

Another vulnerability is the terminal where you load and unload the crude—Ukraine got one of those yesterday too, in occupied Crimea

The facility serves as a major logistics hub for petroleum products on the occupied peninsula, handling the receipt, storage and transfer of oil between rail infrastructure, storage tanks and tankers

And a third—and perhaps most exposed—is the refinery. An oil refinery is one of the most specialized pieces of equipment humans have ever built; anyone who’s ever driven by one on the highway will recognize that the tangle of pipes and tanks that makes each so complicated. It’s an industry truism that no two are alike.

That means that they’re highly vulnerable. If you aim your drone well, maybe it will smash, say, the ELOU-AVT-11 Unit, which at Omsk is what they call the thing that does the initial distillation and desalination of the crude. Without it, the secondary units that produce, say, gasoline and jet fuel have nothing to work with. And this is highly complicated equipment not easy to replace—given western sanctions, the current guess is six months to a year. And it’s not as if Ukraine has hit just that refinery—in fact, it was one of the last squares on a drone pilot’s bingo card. As Illia Kabachynskyi reports

It's also worth remembering that Ukraine has already hit all ten of Russia's largest refineries, some of them more than once. That means it's no longer a single plant waiting for repairs—it's effectively all of them at once, which piles additional pressure on repair crews and on the supply of replacement parts that are hard to source under sanctions.

Russia started this energy war, of course—over the years of the conflict it has targeted heating plants and the like, trying to freeze the fighting spirit out of the Ukrainians during their long winters. It’s been effective at producing cold, but not at winning the war; along with the attacks on schools, hospitals, and other civilian targets it seems to have helped reinforce the Ukrainian will to resist.

Now—with far more attention to avoiding civilian casualties—the Ukrainians are striking back, at defense plants, and especially at refineries. As Zelensky said this morning,

The very idea of Russia having a strategic rear is gone. For a long time, Russia believed it had territorial advantage no one else possessed, a deep rear, where it could safely keep everything its war depends on, believing no one could reach them. We have reached them.

But of course what’s at stake here is not just the oil that the Russian war machine runs on. In Russia, as in America, almost everything runs on oil. I remember that the one and only time that I sat down with Barack Obama, the first thing he told me was that “the price of gasoline is the most salient fact in American politics.” If that’s even close to the case in Russia, Putin better watch out: in occupied Crimea, gas prices are going above ten dollars a gallon. The government is desperately trying to import gasoline from as far away as India. As Pjotr Sauer reported this morning, police are having to draw guns to quell disturbances at gas stations where lines can stretch for kilometers, “fuel tourists” are crossing the borders with China and Kazakhstan to fill their tanks, and as a result

“Mass fatigue with the war is turning into mass irritation,” said Andrei Kolesnikov, a Moscow-based political analyst. Even so, he said the shortages were unlikely to trigger widespread protests in Russia’s tightly controlled political system. “There is certainly shock, but the lack of any real means of influencing the situation – and the risks associated with trying to do so – make protests unlikely.”

This seems likely to get worse. Here’s a social media post from an Omsk resident watching the drone strikes: "Don't waste any time right now. Anyone with a car who's watching me - head to the gas station! The lines are about to get crazy."
And here’s an account of how Russian horse breeders are reporting a surge in sales because a steed is now cheaper to maintain than a car; check out the video of the equestrian cantering past the endless line at the gas station.

Ukraine has stood up to Russia’s attacks on its energy infrastructure mostly by starting to diversify: as Paul Hockenos reported last winter, the country is undergoing a rapid renewables revolution

According to estimates from the Solar Energy Association of Ukraine, the nation installed at least 1.5 gigawatts of new solar generation in 2025 — enough to power roughly 1.1 million homes — and grid operators intend to almost double the country’s renewable energy production over the next four years.

“Ukraine’s energy transition is not a slogan,” says Ievgeniia Kopytsia, a Ukrainian energy analyst at the Institute for Climate Protection, Energy and Mobility. “Since the full-scale invasion, Ukraine has added over 3 gigawatts of new renewable energy capacity. It’s a security-driven transformation, unfolding under extreme constraints, that prioritizes decentralization, flexibility, and speed of recovery.”

In the most basic terms, a single missile can take out a gas-fired power plant. But as Jeff Oatham of DTEK, Ukraine’s largest energy company and its largest private energy investor, explains,

“You would need around 40 missiles to do the equivalent amount of capacity damage at a wind farm.”

Solar, too, makes an unattractive target. “Attacking decentralized solar power installations is not economically rational,” says Ukrainian energy expert Olena Kondratiuk. “Missiles and drones are expensive, and significantly disrupting such systems would require a large number of strikes, while the overall impact on the energy system would remain limited.” Both solar and wind parks can function even when parts of them are out of operation.

That’s because sun and wind and batteries are not like oil—they are small, interchangeable pieces of infrastructure, easily subbed in. There aren’t chokepoints like refineries and tankers and terminals; there’s no cascading failure. My roof is covered with solar panels, and I suppose a saboteur could put a ladder against the wall and climb up there with a hammer and do some damage. But it wouldn’t shut down the electric grid across New England; it would be a problem, not a crisis. Which in turn is why no rational saboteur would ever bother.

And once you can run cars and heat pumps and cooktops off the power those panels and turbines generate, then you’re far more protected against attack. If Vladimir Putin had an electrified Russia he would worry far less about Ukrainian drones. Of course, if the world ran on electricity Russia would never have built up the treasury required to act like a bellicose beast.

Look, world leaders should be moving quickly to clean energy because it’s the one scaleable weapon in the war against climate change. But I’ll take any motivation—and I’ll count it as a real bonus if a cleaner world is also one where it’s harder to attack your neighbors because they don’t have vulnerable infrastructure. The peace dividend from sun and wind could be very real.

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In other energy and climate news:

+Guy Trebay reports that for the rich climate change is less of a problem—they’re installing “snow rooms” in mansions and on yachts.

A snow room is more or less the opposite of a sauna — a cavelike space of ice and snow. In some, white flakes descend gently from the ceiling to create the feeling of being inside a snow globe.

The petrochemical billionaire Mukesh Ambani had one installed in Antilia, the skyscraper in Mumbai, India, that his family calls home. The 440-foot superyacht Serene, owned by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia, also has one.

I’ll just note that these are precisely the people that have driven the temperature through the roof.

Meanwhile the Wall Street Journal is reporting that the new accessory every “hot girl” wants is a vintage gas-guzzling SUV, for which they’re willing to pay top dollar.

In wealthy zip codes and tony beach towns, shiny new luxury cars have taken a back seat as a status symbol. Instead, young women are pining for throwback, off-road SUVs. They’re “hot girl” cars—accessories meant to be flaunted on social media.

“I’ll just sit in a coffee shop and watch a million girls take a photo in front of my car,” said Tezza Barton, a 35-year-old content creator and founder in Los Angeles who got a brown 1995 Mercedes-Benz 230GE soft top SUV last year for about $100,000. “It’s the perfect backdrop.”

Classic cars have always enthralled collectors. Now interest in vintage Jeeps, Land Rover Defenders and Ford Broncos is surging for women who will pay top dollar for old cars, never-ending upkeep be damned. Kendall Jenner has a 1989 Toyota Land Cruiser. Sydney Sweeney has been spotted in Los Angeles driving a 1969 red Bronco she restored herself. Mega influencer Alix Earle often posts photos inside vintage pickup trucks and Broncos.

In this case I’ll just note that if they keep it up, they will be hot girls in more ways than one

+Andy Revkin has the tale of the Clearwater—the late Pete Seeger’s wonderful Hudson River sloop—being booted from a tall ships parade for daring to raise the idea of climate change

Clearwater was removed from the Sail4th 250 Parade of Sail by the USCG and escorted out of the Exclusion Zone by the US Coast Guard, US Navy, and NYPD.

Captain Rory Kane inquired why, and was informed the removal was due to the presence of banners reading: ‘Save the Clean Water Act and Indigenous Rights, Racial Justice, Climate Solutions’”.

A representative from Sail4th 250 informed the Captain the decision was ‘above them.’

+Just to get the numbers on the record, Trump’s efforts to stifle solar and wind projects are putting at least 92 gigawatts of clean cheap power on the shelf, Catherine Boudreau reports

More than $121 billion worth of early-stage renewable energy projects are at risk of getting caught up in the Interior Department’s permitting blockade, according to a Wood Mackenzie analysis.

That total represents a pipeline of 92 gigawatts of solar, wind, and battery storage projects planned on federal and private lands through 2029. They could be subject to heightened scrutiny by DOI under five policies published last year — including one that requires Secretary Doug Burgum’s office to sign off on permits rather than career bureaucrats. Wood Mackenzie’s analysis doesn’t include the some 29 gigawatts of onshore wind projects that the Pentagon is also holding up, citing national security concerns.

How much will that cost us? New modeling shows that meeting rising electric demand with renewable energy would save the country $5 billion a year compared with using fossil fuel.

Meanwhile, a new study shows that the costs of using gas to generate electricity are consistently underestimated. As Cassady Craighill writes

While utilities often seek approval for new gas plants based solely on their upfront construction costs, a new analysis by Current Energy Group and GridLab reveals these “sticker prices” omit a slew of hidden infrastructure costs, including mandatory, long-term contracts for firm pipeline transportation, gas storage and gas processing equipment.

Accounting for these fixed, decades-long fuel liabilities routinely inflates a project’s true cost to consumers by roughly 30%, significantly altering its economic competitiveness against cleaner energy resources. That’s like budgeting for the price of a new house and a new car next year, but failing to account for the closing costs and realtor fees, utility bills, moving expenses, insurance, taxes, gas and maintenance.

+As extreme heat waves plague much of the planet, Cam Fenton has a remarkable anniversary account of what may be the greatest heat dome anomaly yet, the 2021 catastrophe that saw temperatures reach 121 F in British Columbia

For most paramedics in Vancouver, shift change happens around 6:00 am, as the night crew leaves and the day shift takes over. It’s usually cool, especially in Vancouver, where the ocean breeze helps moderate the temperatures. But on June 28, 2021, it was already 22 C and rising when Jayne Hamilton started her shift.

“I knew it was going to be hot, I knew it was going to be miserable,” she explains. “I didn’t, even with that, have an understanding of how hot it was going to be.”

Like Ackerman, Hamilton was immediately dispatched to a cardiac arrest. By the time she cleared from that one, she was sent to another.

“Somewhere between the second and third one, we started commenting out loud that ‘this is not normal,’ ” she says. “When you’ve made it to three cardiac arrests before 10 o’clock in the morning, it’s odd.”

Hamilton is an advanced care paramedic. A specialist dispatched to the most serious emergencies, she has more training than the primary care paramedics who make up the bulk of the ambulance service. But even with that focus, Hamilton says “a heavy week of cardiac arrests” would be three in a four-day work block. But on June 28, she says she responded to 11 of the 27 that came across her dispatch computer.

“It seemed endless, like just an endless avalanche,” she says.

+The ten new winners of the Keeling Curve Prize were announced last week. They included Barefoot College International, which is training rural women to be solar engineers.

+From Brandon Loomis, an excellent piece in the Arizona Republic detailing just how bad things are getting on the Colorado River

The natural flow — a term for what likely would pass Lees Ferry if not for the dam and other impoundments above it — averaged 15.2 million acre-feet in the 20th century, according to Brad Udall, a climate research scientist at Colorado State University’s Colorado Water Center.

In this century so far, it has averaged just 12 million. The difference adds up to 80 million acre-feet over the 27 years since the reservoir last oscillated near capacity in the 1990s — a volume of lost water since 2000 that could have filled Lake Powell’s storage capacity more than three times over.

The average yearly flow during the worst 27-year period of the 20th century was more than a million acre-feet higher than during this megadrought. The last seven years have been bleaker still, averaging just 10.2 million acre-feet. Even stacked against the worst seven-year stretch of the 20th century, the last seven have brought an annual deficit of 1.7 million, a loss that’s more than five times the water that Phoenix, America’s fifth-largest city, supplies to its customers.

and there’s no big secret what’s going on

The Colorado River Basin is warming at a rate of 3 degrees Celsius per century, Udall said, compared with a global average rate of 2 degrees. Each degree Celsius is expected to reduce Colorado River flows by another 9% from increased evapotranspiration, he said, citing 2020 research by U.S. Geological Survey scientists published in Science magazine.

+Emily Pontecorvo reports on the Trump administrations latest efforts to permanently end efficiency standards for appliances

The Process Rule changes threaten the potential to create significant consumer savings, according to the Appliance Standards Awareness Project. The group estimates that based on recent technological advances, the DOE’s next round of standard updates could save the average U.S. household $160 per year on their utility bills, and businesses a collective $15 billion in annual operating costs over 20 years. The group also projects that updated standards have the potential to reduce summer peak electricity demand 34 gigawatts by 2040, which would be like taking New York City off the grid. There are climate benefits, too, of course — an estimated reduction of 800 million metric tons of carbon emissions through 2050.

+Online screening tonight of the important new documentary Vs Goliath, about the epic fight to head off more dangerous development in Cancer Alley

+We’re used to thinking of the dark satanic mills as the places where fossil fuel consumption really took off, but a new book argues it was really in people’s homes, especially in the Low Countries. Wout Saelens draws on

probate inventories, household manuals, personal journals, medical treatises and contemporary artwork to reveal how households in the early modern Low Countries embraced peat and coal to fuel new standards of warmth, light and domesticity.

+The Glacier Challenge is underway, and if you win you could become one of 18 people traveling to Colombia to work on glacier restoration

+Fascinating new study finds a tight link between gas stoves and asthma

At baseline, 10 individuals (11.8%) had an emergency room visit or hospitalization in the past 4 weeks. At follow-up, 3 individuals (3.5%) had an emergency room visit or hospitalization in the past 4 weeks (absolute difference -8.2%, 95% CI -16.2% to -3.4%). There were also significant improvements in missed work or school days. Indoor NO₂ levels decreased from 21.0 to 6.3 ppb (change -14.7, 95% CI -20.8 to -8.7).

+If you still think of it as “alternative energy,” high time to update your priors. The indefatigable Mark Gongloff chronicles the sheer size of the green economy

A recent report from the London Stock Exchange Group Plc (LSEG) found that “green economy” companies, or those that derive a significant portion of their revenue from stuff like clean energy, efficiency and water management, now have a total stock market value of $10 trillion. If this were a standalone sector, it would be bigger than healthcare and third in the world only to technology and industrials.

Since 2008, valuations for these companies have grown by 18% a year, compared with 12% for the broader market, the report found. Their stocks have outperformed global equities by 133%. A representative sample of these companies, the FTSE Environmental Opportunities All Share Index, topped the FTSE Global All-Cap Index by 12% last year.

In fact, this stealth sector just had one of its best years on record despite many of the world’s governments and the corporate sector abandoning their pre-Trump pledges to zero out carbon emissions to stave off the worst of global heating. Green revenues grew 5.3% last year, the fastest since 2022, the year of President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act (IRA).

Evidence keeps mounting that the green economy has entered a new phase, one where its rapidly improving economics give it lasting immunity from fickle political sentiments. Even as the dreams of the 2015 Paris Agreement, net zero, the IRA and more have crumbled, the technology with the power to make some of those dreams come true has only gained momentum.

“What the LSEG data shows us is that the green economy’s resilience is no longer dependent on politics,” Matthew Roling, founding executive director of the Abrams Climate Academy at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, said in a statement. “Energy security, grid reliability and supply chain security are now the primary drivers. Those are arguments that resonate in boardrooms. That’s a materially more durable foundation than the Paris Agreement consensus ever was.”

+Ketan Joshi has the numbers on just how fast the big tech companies are running up their electricity use to keep AI providing us with all the hallucinations we could ever want:

I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect from Google’s latest climate report, but holy hell, I did not expect this.

The company’s total electricity consumption jumped from 31 terawatt hours (TWh) in 2024 to 43 TWh in 2025. This is very easily the biggest increase in their electricity consumption ever, and it puts them way ahead of Microsoft. It is almost certainly a reflection of the obscene energy hunger of their ever-expanding bloated generative AI systems, and a vindication of the warnings we’ve been raising for several years now.

That is to say, Google is using more juice than New Zealand or Nigeria or Morocco.

Google doesn’t even bother to pretend to be on track for its climate goals. Mix the foolish decision-making of FOMO-ridden executives with the most stunningly inefficient software tool big tech has ever created and you end up with a formerly efficient company turned into a blunt Bitcoin-style climate bomb, weirdly still convinced they’re saving the planet.

+Just to wrap up where we started, a kind of beautiful story out of Ukraine. It turns out that when the Netherlands (which has some history with windmills) replaces its wind turbines with more modern models, it is sending the old ones to embattled Ukraine, since they still have many years of life left. As Yuri Zoria reports

A Ukrainian entrepreneur named Serhii has already bought six of them. He runs a factory in the south that presses seed oil for the world market, and he wants nine turbines standing on a nearby hill by year’s end. His power supply is the reason. The grid gives him roughly two hours of electricity, then ten hours without. A single Dutch turbine can change that math.

The war reaches the machines too — Russian attacks target not only substations and conventional power plants but also solar and wind arrays. A Russian drone hit the blades of one, Serhii said, and his crew set about repairing it. He plans to order three more before the year is out.

And that bad mood was deepened by some truly remarkable reporting that began dropping late last week, from a combined team at Pro Publica and Drilled that included the truly vital freelance reporter Amy Westervelt. It concerned a paper by two Princeton professors, Robert Socolow and Stephen Pacala, from the summer of 2004, 22 years ago. A two-decade-old academic paper does not seem all that crucial—but it played a huge role in setting the terms of the climate and energy debate, one that endures to this day. And it illustrates exactly how wasteful much of our current federal effort has become. So—even though it’s infuriating—it’s a story very much worth recounting. Settle in.

This paper quickly became known as “Wedges.” It emerged at one of the low points in the climate cycle that I referred to last week, the post-Kyoto pre-Inconvenient Truth period when Dick Cheney was driving federal energy policy and not much was happening, and so people were grateful for the assertion from these two climate academics that

Humanity already possesses the fundamental scientific, technical, and industrial know-how to solve the carbon and climate problem for the next half-century. A portfolio of technologies now exists to meet the world’s energy needs over the next 50years and limit atmospheric CO2 to a trajectory that avoids a doubling of the preindustrial concentration.

They went on to outline a series of fifteen “wedges”—everything from substituting natural gas for coal to inreasing fuel efficiency for cars—that they said would add up to enough emissions reductions to stabilize global temperatures. And crucially they said that that none of this was pie-in-the-sky.

Every element in this portfolio has passed beyond the laboratory bench and demonstration project; many are already implemented somewhere at full industrial scale. Although no element is a credible candidate for doing the entire job (or even half the job) by itself, the portfolio as a whole is large enough that not every element has to be used.

Because it told people what they very much hoped to hear, it became an instant sensation—when Al Gore’s remarkable movie came out in 2006, for instance, it ended on a positive note.

Americans need not despair, he said, because “we already know everything we need to know to effectively address this problem.” Behind him as he spoke, the opening words of Socolow and Pacala’s paper — the same ones Mottershead had suggested moving to the top — appeared on a screen.

I remember hoping that much of this paper would turn out to be true—at least it gave people something to work on. And hey, it was coming from respected, independent researchers, right? Why not give them the respect they seemed to deserve.

But the paper’s scientific validity began to erode pretty fast. For one thing, they’d picked a comparatively easy baseline, plotting to hold atmospheric concentrations of co2 to 550 parts per million, or double the level before the Industrial Revolution. Already by 2004 that number was seriously in question; by then more and more scientists were murmuring about 450 ppm, and in 2008 Jim Hansen published a landmark paper putting the safe maximum at 350 ppm. (I remember this well, because we built the planet’s first big global grassroots climate campaign on the back of that number).

There were plenty of other things that seemed unlikely, and that turned out to be wrong. For instance, they were big on biomass (and when I mean big, I mean they proposed using one sixth of the planet’s cropland to grow stuff you would then burn). They wanted to produce massive amounts of hydrogen for use in fuel cell cars, a technology that’s gone nowhere. The word “batteries” goes unmentioned. But these are mistakes—they couldn’t have known then how these technologies would develop, though their guesses were staggeringly wrong, despite being delivered with absolute Ivy League assurance.

Their biggest “mistake” was to advocate replacing much of the world’s coal-fired power with natural gas—indeed they wanted to quadruple the amount of natural gas. It was a few years later that scientists led by Bob Howarth at Cornell began to explain exactly what folly this was—that you were simply trading reductions in heat-trapping carbon dioxide for increases in heat-trapping methane—but by then it was too late, and we were deep into the fracking era whose final chapter (overseas export of liquefied natural gas) is now the main goal of the fossil fuel industry.

If you’ve been paying attention, most of these mistakes pointed in the direction of continuing to burn stuff. And it turns out that was no mere mistake—it was pretty much the goal. Because as Westervelt and the Pro Publica team have now uncovered, the tiny-print final footnote to the paper was the most misleading thing in it

The authors thank J. Greenblatt, R. Hotinski, and R. Williams at Princeton; K. Keller at Penn State; and C. Mottershead at BP. This paper is a product of the Carbon Mitigation Initiative (CMI) of the Princeton Environmental Institute at Princeton University. CMI (www.princeton.edu/cmi) is sponsored by BP and Ford.

In fact, BP was no footnote to this study—the paper had been a joint production of its authors and British Petroleum, whose chairman, John Browne, literally came up with the phrase (“wedges”) that would define the paper.

“We’re like, ‘Yeah, whatever you want,’” Pacala remembers thinking. “‘You’re paying the bills, buddy.’”

The enterprising reporters have tracked down the voluminous correspondence between the oil company and the scientists, and god it’s damning. Here’s a note from a BP executive to the researchers, for instance

The pro-fossil fuel slant of the Wedges paper was no accident. Princeton’s Carbon Mitigation Initiative was funded by BP, and the reasons were quite explicit. Here’s the most damning exchange the reporters uncovered, in my opinion

In an email to Socolow after the paper’s submission, Mottershead celebrated, writing that the target meant that “around 50% of primary energy could still come from fossil fuels.”

This, Mottershead wrote, was “THE key piece of the framework for politicians and business, in my view.” Socolow acknowledged, in another subsequent email, that the figure would keep the fossil fuel industry a “part of things for at least another 50 years.”

This commitment was unblushing in ways that blow my mind.

When the university and BP revisited their relationship for a 2016-2020 funding renewal, the parties made it explicit: “A premise from the outset was that CMI’s job was to invent a future where the fossil fuel industries have not disappeared,” the renewal document said. “This is still our job.”

And of course if your plan for dealing with global warming was to keep burning lots of fossil fuel, you were going to have to figure out how to deal with all the carbon that would therefore pour into the atmosphere. By default, one—or really, three—of the wedges would have to be carbon capture and sequestration. And in order to make the case that this was a viable technology, the authors had to—well, they had to massage the truth way past the point where they should have.

“We were CCS enthusiasts,” Socolow said in an interview.

But the researchers appeared to be stretching their own parameters to make carbon capture and storage fit. The “Wedges” framework was supposed to be made up of “ready to deploy” technologies. Yet carbon capture and storage had barely been tested, and no experts interviewed could recall a commercial power plant using it.

Still, the Princeton group kept it at the center of the mix.

The effect of this paper can be felt today. When the Inflation Reduction Act was passed in the Biden years, it contained desperately needed funding for sun, wind, and batteries. But Joe Manchin, who had taken more money from the fossil fuel industry than anyone else in DC (including from BP’s North American Political Action Committee) traded his decisive vote for a grab bag of gifts for the fossil fuel industry—including huge amounts of federal money for carbon capture and sequestration.

I remember a conversation with Mark Jacobson—the unbought Stanford researcher who figured out that sun, wind, and batteries were the wedges that would count—shortly after the IRA passed. Jacobson (who had been attacked by a committee of 21 luminaries for insisting that renewable energy was the best way out of the climate mess) was lamenting the waste of money on carbon capture, and I was dutifully explaining that it was the pound of flesh that had been necessary to get the money for the actual energy transition. Jacobson, as it turns out, had the last bitter laugh—when the Republican congress gutted the IRA last year, the carbon capture part was one of the few things they left intact. It’s an ongoing pointless effort whose only purpose is to continue providing some kind of cover for burning more fossil fuel. A government that doesn’t believe in global warming is nonetheless paying the oil industry incredible sums to pretend to capture carbon.

And when I say pretend, that’s what I mean. The Pro Publica crew simultaneously published another piece demonstrating quite conclusively that two decades later Socolow’s “enthusiasm” for CCS was a dead end. As they write, “right now, globally, we’re permanently burying less CO2 than a single large power plant can emit in a year.” Here’s the key chart from that paper

If you look at it closely, the blue lines show the projections made by the various groups that followed Socolow and Pacala for how much carbon we’d capture, compared with the brown line at the bottom, which shows how much we actually do capture. Which is, to a rounding error, none. The second chart shows all the projections for how much solar power we’d generate, none of which came even close to capturing how fast this technology would explode.

Give Jacobson the last laugh here. As he pointed out last week, “replacing gas with renewables for California’s electricity has reduced twice the carbon as all the world’s carbon capture projects.” That is, a few years work in one of the fifty states in one of the 200 countries on earth has done more than the thing that the fossil fuel industry has based its whole climate rationale on.

A couple of final footnotes here, which really get at the perfidy of all of this.

In the same year that BP was rewriting the Princeton paper, they were also using one of the world’s biggest ad agencies, Ogilvy and Mather, to spread the idea of the “carbon footprint,” which is to say the idea that it’s all your fault, not BP’s. (Read Rebecca Solnit’s account. It’s a hard call but I’d say their pollution of the world’s information system outranks even their pollution of the Gulf of Mexico).

And last month Princeton became the first of the Ivies to renege on their pledge to divest from fossil fuels. Why? Because according to their investment manager, fossil fuel companies “will necessarily play a significant role in the clean-energy transition we want for our nation and for the Earth.” Hey, put a Tiger in your tank. At intellectually corrupt Princeton, and among the nation’s intellectually corrupt elites, too little ever changes.

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In other energy and climate news:

+One of the better accounts of Europe’s extreme heat came from the Wall Street Journal, which interviewed lots of Americans and expats

Americans in Europe have been getting the shock of their lives this summer as temperatures soar to new records across the continent. Highs have approached 100 degrees Fahrenheit in the U.K. this week, and topped that level in cities like Paris.

Expats and tourists from some of the hottest, muggiest U.S. states are bewildered: How has a lifetime of sweltering heat not prepared them for this?

“I did get humbled,” said Marissa Parks, a 30-year-old nurse who moved to London last year from Houston. “Being a Texan, it feels kind of embarrassing to be in London and be like, ‘I can’t handle the heat here.’”

But if you want a real, sweaty feel, you need to read Sarah Wilson’s Parisian chronicle in her This is Precious substack.

My apartment is currently 43C. It drops to 38C overnight. I slept in a tent in a forest for a few nights. I tried three nights in the apartment. Each night I would wander the city with my laptop, hopping from a workspace to a hotel foyer to a gym (where I’d take a cold shower in my bra and undies and dry myself with my dress; my soggy outfit would keep me cool for another hour or so). I sat in parks, my feet in the fountain, talking to family and friends in Australia until 1am when it was safe(ish) to head upstairs.

After opening the window, I turned on the fan, putting a wet towel over the top. I showered with my sheet and another towel and got into bed, wearing frozen socks (a tip from a WhatsApp group), the wet sheet and towel over my body, and holding two ice bricks. Within two hours everything was dry and hot again and I repeated the process.

There has been much pointless social media back-and-forth about air conditioning in Europe, which of course we need now. (We need it even more desperately in Asia, South America, and Africa). And the good news is that it comes most easily and efficiently from the device—the heat pump—that we’ve been advocating for nonstop since this newsletter started. (Thanks again to all of you, who spearheaded our successful effort to get a quarter billion dollars from the Defense Production Act under Biden for boosting their production). My only addition to this debate would be to point out that on an overheating world we might be better off calling them ‘cold pumps.’ In fact, Dan McCarthy reported over the weekend that whatever you call them, these devices are about to surpass air conditioners in total American sales

+Boy oh boy do they work fast in China, where in a matter of months sodium batteries have gone from cool new innovation to being tested—successfully—in long-haul 18-wheelers. As Jo Borrás reports:

Chinese heavy truck brand FAW Jiefang recently completed a full-condition, systematic test that ran for nearly seven months and covered more than 15,000 km (~9,350 miles). The tests closely tracked its electric truck fleet’s real-world operations in both extreme heat and cold, relying on continuous service-style operations (as opposed to laboratory test cycles) that exposed the sodium-ion battery packs to the kinds of stresses electric trucking fleets actually face on a daily basis: long-haul runs, repeated charging sessions, and constant exposure to changing road and weather conditions.

At -40°C, the 339 kWh sodium-ion battery pack co-developed by FAW and battery supplier Zhongke Haina retained more than 90% of its usable capacity – more than enough to ensure it can reliably meet the freight needs in the coldest regions of northern China, where nighttime temperatures can frequently plummet to -20°C in areas like Harbin and Shenyang.

Meanwhile, Chinese carmaker BYD froze one of its luxury EVs at -22F for 24 hours just to show it wouldn’t matter. And as Iulian Dnistran reports, when they plugged it in the “car’s state of charge went from 20% to 97% in 12 minutes, just like BYD claimed when it debuted its latest battery tech, making the range meter read nearly 626 miles (1,009 kilometers).” I know you well enough to know that you would like a picture

.

+What happens when you pretend climate change doesn’t exist? In Corpus Christi, as Dylan Baddour describes, they’re finding out:

Climate scientists have concluded that the Earth’s warming atmosphere has made droughts worse over the past 25 years and will continue to do so over the next 25.

But that isn’t reflected in Texas’ water plans. “Climate-related projections are not something that any of Texas’ state water plans have included,” a spokesman for the Texas Water Development Board said, referring questions about climate to the Office of the State Climatologist.

“The majority of factors point toward increased drought severity,” said an assessment of weather trends by the climatologist’s office in 2024, Corpus Christi’s hottest year on record. “Future rainfall deficits comparable to those earlier in the 20th century will have greater impacts due to higher temperatures.”

As a result, the city very nearly ran out of water this spring.

+A Pakistani dentist, Zain Ashar, was noticing huge levels of tooth decay in many of his patients who were outdoor laborers. And he figured out why, in a story that gives you some deep sense of just how much we’re pushing the limits of the planet and of ourselves.

Like most outdoor laborers during peak season, Rashid drinks 15 to 20 liters of water daily to survive the relentless heat. (While this can seem like an excessive amount of water, a worker can sweat as much as 1 to 1.5 liters an hour from heavy labor in 45°C temperatures. To compensate for the loss of electrolytes through sweat, workers here consume yogurt and lime drinks with added salt, and eat pickles and other salty foods.) By mid-morning, sweat soaks through his clothes as his body’s cooling mechanism works overtime. He chews on sugarcane during breaks, which provides quick calories — an ancient practice that sustained ancestors but now compounds health problems. Nothing about his general health seemed unusual at first. But when I asked about saliva — that often-overlooked component of oral health that most people never think about — there was a long pause.

“My mouth is always dry,” he said quietly in Urdu. “Even when I drink water until I feel sick. My mouth stays dry.”

That’s when something clicked into place that would fundamentally reshape my understanding of what I’d been observing in my practice. I’d documented this pattern of tooth decay in 37 patients by this point, all agricultural workers, all from the same climate-ravaged zones in the central-eastern state of Punjab. I just hadn’t connected the dots to heat-induced dehydration and its catastrophic effects on oral chemistry. Their mouths weren’t just dry — external climate forces were fundamentally turning them into hostile environments for their own teeth. I realized I was witnessing something far more systemic and urgent than a collection of individual dental problems. This was environmental collapse writing itself directly into human biological systems.

SALIVA IS NOT just moisture. It’s a physiological fortress, a sophisticated system that most people take entirely for granted until it fails them. For anyone, but especially for people doing physically demanding work in extreme conditions, saliva performs three critical functions that are absolutely essential to tooth survival: It buffers acids from food and stomach reflux that would otherwise erode enamel; it holds calcium and phosphate minerals, which actively remineralize tooth enamel when microscopic damage occurs; and it contains enzymes and antibodies that fight bacteria, helping prevent infection and decay. Without adequate saliva flow — and I mean genuinely adequate, not just the minimal amount needed to swallow — teeth begin to demineralize within weeks, a process that becomes increasingly difficult to reverse.

+An Italian windfarm took down its older generation of windmills, replacing them with newer models—and as Reuters reports, even though the number of turbines fell by 73 percent, the farm is now producing two and half times as much electricity.

Edison ​said updating ⁠plants could play a major role in Italian wind power growth, noting that those ​suitable for upgrades account for around 6 ​GW of ⁠the country’s 13.5 GW of installed wind capacity.

Modernisation of existing wind sites could potentially add more than 13 GW ⁠of ​renewable capacity, helping meet Italy’s national ​target of 26 GW of installed wind power by 2030.

+Dan Gearino has a cheery account of the dawn of the plug-in solar era in America where (and huge shout out here to Michael Richardson and his Third Act crew) ten states have now approved the new technology this spring. He talks with Craig Morris, head of Germany’s plug-in solar association:

Morris explained that the main benefit he sees with plug-in solar is that consumers are taking greater control of their energy costs and becoming participants in the transition to clean energy. He views this as part of creating and maintaining a political consensus that supports the transition, which is good for everyone.

He also sees land-use benefits, with plug-in solar occupying otherwise unused spaces in yards and on roofs and balconies. His organization has calculated that widespread adoption of plug-in solar would meet about 2 percent of Germany’s electricity demand.

+Interesting new book from Will Hackman, who makes the case that we need to be using different language

Let’s talk about public health. Let’s talk about pollen counts, allergies, lung inflammation, asthma and other conditions made worse by climate change. Let’s talk about hurricanes, floods and fires, but not only from 30,000 feet. Let’s talk about what happened in those communities and what it took for people to rebuild.

There are so many ways to make this more specific to humans. It is not about saving the planet. It is about saving us. It is not just a climate crisis; it is a humanity crisis.

I have found that this approach can be received well by Republicans and conservatives. I live in a rural and conservative part of Virginia. When you start talking to people about what climate change means to them personally and locally — why they have a self-interest in the issue — they respond.

+This is disgusting: Kylie Mohr documents the upsurge in betting on wildfires in prediction markets like Polymarket

In January 2025, Polymarket listed almost 20 questions, created by the platform’s “markets team,” related to the wildfires burning up Southern California. How many acres will the Palisades Fire burn by Friday, three days after it ignited on a Tuesday? Will the Palisades Fire reach Santa Monica by Sunday? When will the Palisades fire be 50% contained? Will the Palisades and Eaton fires be contained before February?

People spent $1.2 million betting on these queries, according to Aeon Magazine.

Aside from the moral problem, as Mohr points out this creates a lucrative incentive for arson.

+Sudarshan Varadhan, Ruth Chai and Adrian Portugal bring the good news that the Philippines may be the new Pakistan when it comes to ultra-rapid solar deployment. In the wake of the Iran war,

People in the Philippines are flocking to install solar power ​on rooftops and escape the burden of soaring electricity prices, making it the world’s biggest spender on solar panels since ‌the war in Iran started.

Top power distributor Meralco has raised prices by 10% since the Middle East conflict began in late February. Now, a median household spends around 12% of monthly income on electricity, assuming it consumes 200 kilowatt-hours — approximately the monthly average for three people.

Adrian Sabatera, a 39-year-old software engineer, thought about getting solar for years but found it too ⁠costly. That changed as costs came down and electricity prices kept rising.

“I wouldn’t be shocked if a third of the middle-class population eventually finds ​their way to this setup,” Sabatera said after recently pulling the trigger on a 570,000 peso ($9,300) installation at the Manila house he shares with ​three others.

One benefit of having watched the climate story from the start is that I tend not to panic when “climate” is temporarily eclipsed as an issue, almost always thanks to the hard work of Big Oil. It happened at the end of the 1980s after the initial furor over the newly public “greenhouse effect,” and again after the Kyoto climate talks; when Al Gore made global warming a central issue in the oughts, the collapse of the Copenhagen talks put it on the back burner. Many of us built the movement that pushed it back to the front again in the oughts, culminating in the Paris accords; when momentum wavered Greta Thunberg and her colleagues emerged, building the consensus that took us through the IRA.

At the moment, of course, a resurgent fossil-funded right wing has killed off that landmark legislation, and done all it can to destroy clean energy in the U.S.; America is out of the global climate talks; around the world various strongmen have made protest far more difficult. The new authoritarians have managed to intimidate many of the centrist pols in much of the world who are no longer willing to talk much about “climate;” indeed, there’s a closet industry of pundits and consultants advising them not to.

But it’s never occurred to me that this state of affairs would last very long—physics is running this show, and it won’t be long denied. And now I think we can see the next of these cycles firing off—and this one, I think, will be climactic. We have a chance to insure that civilization comes out of this one focused on the physical world.

The politics of climate begins with…climate. Perhaps you’ve heard that Europe spent the past week suffering through a truly remarkable heat wave, with France reaching a new all-time record temperature, the UK recording its hottest day ever, Spain smashing all its old marks. It’s truly brutal—and it recalls, for Europeans, the heatwave of 2003, which ended up killing 70,000 people. Even today, the continent is ill-prepared for extreme heat—in France, for instance, Angelique Chrisafis reports that

The impact of the heatwave has been made considerably worse by the high proportion of French buildings and infrastructure not designed to cope with high temperatures. Paris, one of Europe’s most densely populated cities, known for its poorly insulated housing stock, has for years been considered to have the highest heatwave mortality risk of any capital on the continent. The French government has been criticised for a lack of preparation and for cutting funding for projects designed to adapt infrastructure to the climate crisis.

Half of all French homes have insufficient protection from high temperatures, leaving inhabitants dangerously overheated, a report for the NGO Fondation pour le Logement (Foundation for Housing) found this month. About 66% of French people struggle to tolerate the heat in their homes.

Maïder Olivier, the head of climate advocacy at the NGO, said France had a “massive and worsening problem of heat-trap housing”. She said climate inequality in France was growing, with low-income, suburban housing estates suffering the worst from heatwaves.

Apparently English homes, especially modern ones, aren’t much better. And the heat has caused a surge in British hospital admissions, even as it’s damaged hospital equipment. Andrew Gregory writes

Several NHS trusts in England have declared critical incidents as a direct result of the extreme heat. One hospital had done so after its machines failed in multiple areas, a doctor said. Labs used for testing were also affected and two linear accelerator machines, used to treat cancer patients, had stopped working amid the high temperatures.

The doctor said that although they were working in a relatively new care setting, it was “tacked on to an old Victorian hospital”, creating severe infrastructure challenges. “It’s hopeless, really,” they said.

The doctor also said their NHS trust had faced “major issues” with IT servers overheating on Wednesday. “We thought we were going to lose everything, so we were all asked to turn off non-essential computers and electrical equipment, including lights.”

But it’s not just dialysis machines going down—in France, nuclear reactors had to be taken offline because the river water used for cooling was getting too warm. Also, save some tears for the poor American tourists complaining to the Wall Street Journal that European restaurants offer too few ice cubes in their drinks.

Look, there’s no doubt why these records are being smashed—as Bob Henson writes at Eye on the Storm,

Extreme heat is among the most-studied consequences of human-caused climate change, and the connections between a warming planet and amplified, localized extreme heat are not only intuitive but well documented.

In this case the jet stream—powered by the temperature differential between the poles and the equator, and unsettled by the melt up north—has gone kaflooey, producing what’s called an “omega block” for its distinctive shape. The sun beating down on this heat dome is relentless. As Lauren Dalban reports for Inside Climate News

“There’s a sad inevitability to all of this, with scientists like me trotting out the same quotes year after year,” Friederike Otto, a professor of climate science at the Imperial College London who leads the World Weather Attribution, a group that works to link weather events to climate change, said in an email. “Simply put, we remain on a one-way trip towards a more dangerous future, and it’s time we hit the brakes.”

I could of course go on and on about the heat; it’s wretched. (And remember that we’re paying attention in part because there’s lots of media, some of it English-speaking, in Europe; similar hideous heatwaves have been plaguing much of Asia this spring). But what I really want to talk about is its political meaning—I think this heatwave is one of those events that will help bring “climate” back into fashion in our discourse.

Britain will be an interesting test case. Its politics have been roiled for the last two years by the odd static incompetence of Keir Starmer’s Labour government, now about to be replaced by the Andy Burnham government. A key question for that new administration will be the role of Ed Milliband, who has been serving as the energy secretary, and may be in line for a job as chancellor. He’s been (almost uniquely) effective in his role, moving fast to boost clean and cheap renewable energy in the UK.

But that’s roiled the fossil fuel industry, which is putting big money behind the rightwing Reform Party, which according to an April investigation by Sam Bright and Adam Barnett, has collected two-thirds of its funding from oil interests. Together with the always vile Murdoch press, they’ve mounted a full-on attack on “Net Zero” policies, alleging—a la Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal in this country—that they’re responsible for rising energy prices in the UK.

The entire status quo is in on this fight—including British labor unions. They aren’t venal the way oil companies are, but they are fighting against change, in the name of their current members. And they’ve focused their fire on Milliband. Sharon Graham, head of the giant UNITE union, has said

Jobs in Britain are important. We need someone in that role [chancellor] who understands that, and at the moment that isn’t Ed Miliband. … It’s been floated that Ed Miliband would be chancellor, that would be a noose around the neck of what we need to do on jobs.

Happily, we’re starting to see serious pushback to this endless irresponsible climate delayism. It begins with scientists. In France eminent climate researchers have started speaking out to Le Monde, complaining about the inability of scientists to effectively connect the dots between climate change and heat for the public. British scientists have gone one better: nine of them wrote the agency responsible for regulating the press to complain about the lame coverage.

“News stories about heatwaves often do not mention the influence of climate change or the burning of fossil fuels on increased temperatures – for example, three in five stories during the May heatwave did not – while two-fifths of those about net zero make no mention of climate change. In this context, it is unsurprising that the public often do not understand these issues or the connection between them.”

I think my favorite was a letter to the London Times from the veteran climate research Brian Hoskins of Imperial College London, which I reprint here just because I like its cadences:

The sentence “net zero is not an arbitrary slogan, rather it is dictated by the laws of physics” should be a watchword in the years to come.

And here’s my guess: Milliband will be vindicated, landing in an important new job. Despite the complaints of union leaders, Britain’s green economy is one of the few things that’s booming on the island. He’s not backing down: at a press conference last week he heralded the fact that more than a hundred billion pounds in private clean energy investments had been made during his term.

Experts told the Guardian that the new investment data, as well as previous findings by the Confederation of British Industry that the UK’s net zero economy had grown faster than the rest of the economy and generated higher-paying jobs… [contradicted the claims of union leaders]

Miliband said: “I’m proud to have led a pro-business, pro-growth department in these last two years. This achievement didn’t happen by accident, but because of clarity of mission, government investment and building not blocking. As we have shown in energy, progressive government in hard times requires partnership with business to secure economic growth, built on an active industrial strategy.”

Indeed, forty progressive economists in the UK wrote to the labor leaders this week, rejecting their attack on Net Zero.

“There is no alternative to the green transition. The effects of climate change are with us now. Miliband is right to oppose further expansion of North Sea oil and gas.”

If Burnham were to back off the Net Zero pledges, he’d be disappointing the sixty percent of Brits who like the strategy. Starmer staggered in part because he took rightwing positions on immigration, giving the Green Party an opening; that door will grow much larger if he backs off on climate policy, so I suspect he won’t.

And the heatwave will give him political cover to do the right thing. As the head of Greenpeace UK said last week

The only way off this hellish treadmill is to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels. Our next prime minister needs to act on the evidence outside their window, and the advice of their scientific advisers, and stay the course on climate policies. The alternative is parched reservoirs, unaffordable food, shuttered hospitals and schools and wildly fluctuating bills each time a new oil war is kindled.

My further guess is that the coming El Niño will have the same effect on global climate politics—and maybe even in our caboose of a nation. We enter this new warming spell in rough shape: recent data shows the heat content of oceans at all-time highs. Things are grim enough that one (ghoulish?) investor has launched a fund designed to make money off the coming crisis

Hedge fund Moreton Capital Partners is targeting $500 million for a special-purpose vehicle to trade multiple commodities that stand to be impacted by the weather phenomenon, including South African corn, Malaysian palm oil and Australian wheat. The markets are underestimating risks, according to Moreton’s co-founder Les Finemore.

“We think it’s going to be a dramatic reshaping of the global food situation,” Finemore said in a video interview from Mexico City. “We feel like today the market is seriously mis-pricing that risk.”

American politicians may feel that the easiest course for the short term is to back off on climate talk—and the green movement is perhaps inclined to let them get away with it through the midterm elections, which will be fought largely as a referendum on the mendacity of the Trump administration. (Though it’s political malpractice not to be calling out Trump’s incredibly unpopular attacks on solar and wind energy). But next year, as primary season begins in earnest, El Niño will insure climate is firmly back on the agenda. And given the explosion in clean energy, the case will be easy for smart candidates to make.

That this cycle has gone on since the 1980s does not mean it can go on forever. We’re clearly reaching desperate physical tipping points. So this had better be the last turn of the wheel—by the end of the decade we need to have decisively broken the political power of the fossil fuel industry, so we can get on with the energy transition, and with building a world that can survive the damage Big Oil has inflicted.

It starts now.

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In other energy and climate news:

+From Michael Coren, a fascinating column about emerging new models for affordable solar leasing schemes.

A new model from an upstart company called Terra Energy is shaking things up in Florida, Texas and soon California. After subscribing for three years, customers can cancel and have the panels removed from their roof free of charge. If they keep them, they lock in a low, predictable electricity rate relative to their local utility, like any other leasing model…

The elimination of a 30 percent tax credit for homeowners in the One Big Beautiful Bill last year effectively raised the cost of the average home solar system by $8,000.

While homeowners lose out, businesses enjoy the solar investment tax credit through 2027, making leases and PPAs more attractive. That’s scrambling two decades of “own, don’t lease” advice because only businesses like Terra and others can pass on the tax credit to homeowners.

Third-party ownership now makes up the majority of new residential solar sales, according to Wood Mackenzie, an energy research firm, up from a minority share last year.

“Our view has historically been that ownership is the best path,” said Thompson of EnergySage. “But not everyone can pony up $30,000 or get a loan. New leasing models are a vehicle that gives people the opportunity.”

Meanwhile Jeff St. John describes how Sunrun, Tesla and RenewHome are teaming up to make a really big virtual power plant out of all those home batteries. The three companies Wednesday

announced an agreement to ​“deliver more than 16 gigawatts of flexible energy capacity” to tech giants and utilities around the United States. Those gigawatts will be produced by hundreds of thousands of home battery systems managed by Sunrun and Tesla, as well as more than 8 million smart thermostats and devices managed by Renew Home.

These batteries and smart thermostats are already installed in homes and businesses across the country, Paul Dickson, Sunrun’s president and chief revenue officer, told Canary Media. Some are enrolled in utility or grid programs that call on batteries to discharge, or thermostats to turn down energy use, during the handful of hours per year when grid demand is at its peak, he said.

But he noted, ​“Most of the constructs for these distributed power plants are tapping into the resources a fraction of the time they could be realized.” This new partnership is meant to ​“further legitimize these devices as core dispatchable, capable resources.”

+Climate activist and writer Mike Tidwell’s recent book The Lost Trees of Willow Avenue will be part of a novel PBS series called “Sacred Ground with Tim Daly” that focuses on the heroic work of several North American climate activists. Episode two stays true to Tidwell’s chronicle of the impacts of climate change on his one DC-area street, from dying trees to Lyme disease to constant flooding. It also captures the inspiring work of people fighting back like Tidwell’s neighbor and climate activist Congressman Jamie Raskin. (You can also see some very vintage footage of…me.)

+Hannah Story Brown has an epic account of the epically foolish plan to build a new LNG pipeline 800 miles across the middle of Alaska

By pipeline company Glenfarne’s projection, construction of Alaska LNG could cost up to $55 billion. The real cost, if built, is likely to be much higher. A new report from Public Citizen analyzing the final cost of constructing operating LNG terminals in North America found that the average cost overrun was 59.7 percent. LNG Canada, the project most comparable to Alaska LNG for requiring a custom-built pipeline over hundreds of miles of challenging terrain, ran more than 130 percent over budget. As report authors Lois Parshley and Mekedas Belayneh note, “Alaska’s proposed pipeline route traverses a longer distance, and more severe terrain, in a labor market that is structurally thinner [than LNG Canada].”

Then there is rapidly escalating competition from renewables. Global electricity generated from wind and solar has increased by more than 350 percent since just mid-2020, and surpassed generation from natural gas for the first time in history in April this year. Nations around the world are frantically investing in green energy and industry to defend themselves from energy price shocks; any gas from this pipeline might go begging by the time it’s completed.

+Meanwhile, you know what actually makes money? Windpower. Here’s Paul Lovell’s update from Iowa, center of the midwestern breeze belt:

Consider Howard County. With a population of just under 9,400, limited commercial development and an economy heavily dependent on agriculture, Howard County saw its first wind farm in 2008. Today, the county hosts 147 wind turbines with a total capacity of 244 megawatts — enough to power about 50,000 homes — with two more projects in development.

These turbines have a total taxable valuation of over $115 million. This past year alone, they generated $2.7 million in tax revenue, representing 14.5 percent of the county’s total tax budget.

This revenue is critical. New property tax legislation signed into law this year limits growth in county and city general levies to about 2 percent per year. With inflation for materials and labor continuing above that rate, Iowa counties face painstaking budget choices. Expanding the tax base through wind development offers a practical solution to maintain quality public services.

Before the wind projects, Howard County could replace only one or two bridges per year, and rural gravel roads suffered from severe deferred maintenance. To turn things around, Howard County used tax increment financing, using future property tax growth from turbines to fund infrastructure bonds. Since 2010, TIF has helped the county replace more than 30 bridges, pave 20 miles of road, and purchase critical maintenance equipment. Road maintenance agreements with developers meant wind companies, not taxpayers, covered the costs of upgrading local gravel roads during construction.

Nova Scotia seems to have gotten the message, and is betting big on wind—not just to supply its one million residents, but to export power to the States, where Trump is preventing eastern seaboard states from setting up wind farms of their own. Emma Graney reports

The $60-billion project could generate as much as 40 gigawatts of power if all phases are developed. The first stage, at 5,000 megawatts, would produce roughly 24 terawatt hours of power each year – around twice the output of the Sir Adam Beck Hydro complex at Niagara Falls.

Wind West would initially provide electricity to Atlantic Canada, Quebec and perhaps Ontario, but Mr. Houston believes transmission cables carrying wind-produced power will one day run from Nova Scotia into the United States.

“The world has to change a little bit for that to happen, but it will,” he said.

Already, the province has made tentative overtures to its southern neighbours.

In February, Mr. Houston signed an agreement with Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey to work toward supplying the state with clean energy from offshore wind. He said New England and New York are interested in similar agreements.

+Great news from France, where a court has ruled that the fossil giant TotalEnergies is responsible for the emissions from its customers burning its products, a kind of liability the oil majors have done their best to dodge.

“Extracting, refining and marketing of a barrel of oil inevitably leads to its combustion,” the court said in detailing why Total played a role in ​clients’ emissions.

+New from Jason Dove Mark, a fascinating book about shifting baselines, and how they skew our sense of change. I just got to spend a few wonderful days with Jeremey Jackson, the ocean scientist who first popularized the concept; I’m glad it’s getting more and more attention.

+A new kind of travel show, that doesn’t burn any jet fuel. Check out Parke Wilde’s “Adventures of the Not Jet Set.” I hope everyone is enjoying some low-carbon adventure—my mantra is, despite all the damage this remains a beautiful world, and one of our jobs is to simply witness its beauty. It’s a task I take seriously! I’ll leave you with a picture I took last week at Shelburne Farms, one of Vermont’s most beautiful places. I was giving a talk there, but took a stroll beforehand, gazing out across Lake Champlain at my beloved Adirondacks. Sometimes people ask how I keep going year after year in this work, and this is a big part of the answer

Beginning next week, Australians across a huge swath of the continent will begin getting three free hours of electricity every afternoon—to charge their cars, runs their dishwashers, fill up a storage battery to run the house at night. I’ve written about this before, so I won’t belabor it here, except to say that humans have spent the last 1.79 million years (according to new research last week) working hard for energy: spending time gathering firewood, spending time working to pay the power bill. Now, in one large part of the earth, for one large part of the day, electricity will be too cheap to meter. You want some abundance? Here you go.

So it seems like a good time to dig in to the larger questions of energy, climate, pollution, and money—an interrelated set of issues, and one where the numbers are shifting quickly and dramatically almost every month. Here’s the bottom line, which I think is beginning to drive public policy almost every place except the U.S., where we have lots and lots of work to do: As the cost of clean energy keeps plummeting, it gets more and more obvious how much money we waste, and how much financial risk we incur, by staying with fossil fuel.

Let’s start first by talking about the climate crisis, and the ways it’s rapidly becoming an economic crisis. My old colleagues at 350.org have been publishing a series of quite brilliant reports on the subject in recent weeks. One, for instance, is on the insurance crisis, which is growing across the planet. This is from Risalat Khan and Kenny Stancil:

In the United States, homeowner insurance premiums increased by 29% from January 2021 to January 2026, and personal auto insurance rose nearly 25% over the same period. These mounting costs are among the biggest contributors to overall inflation.

France raised its mandatory natural catastrophe surcharge on property insurance from 12% to 20%, effective January 2025. In northern Australia, premiums climbed more than 130% in real terms between 2007 and 2022, a 6% growth year on year.

Across most low- and middle-income countries, insurance coverage is usually less than 10%, and sometimes far less, leaving uninsured communities and businesses to bear most of the risks and losses from climate disasters.

Somewhat karmically, a new report from risk analysts First Street finds that…data centers face much of this risk from extreme weather:

Approximately 54% of global data center capacity operates in markets facing elevated chronic heat or drought stress, while 79% is exposed to significant acute hazards such as flood, wind, or wildfire. For many markets, climate risk should now be considered part of the base case rather than a tail-risk scenario.

But most of us only buy insurance once a year, and it’s such a depressing task that we try to forget about it immediately. Groceries are different, and as Nicole Pita points out the link to climate change is pretty clear.

Droughts in the US Midwest and Canada destroyed harvests in 2022. Floods in India and South Asia pushed up rice prices in 2023 and 2025. The climate crisis is affecting crop production itself, making food harder to grow. The irony is that food systems produce one-third of global greenhouse gas emissions, making them both a victim and a driver of the crisis.

And it will get worse. Here’s a new report from the Autonomy Institue on what the climate crisis is doing to the cost of “Five a day” in the UK

Heat waves are projected to add around 11% to the price of the UK’s top twenty fruit and vegetables by 2035 and around 68% by 2050 under a high emissions scenario, on top of normal inflation. Imported tropical fruit such as melons, oranges, bananas, easy peelers and grapes will rise 12% to 14% by 2035 and 80% to 93% by 2050 on these climate grounds alone.

• Compounded with estimated normal inflation, total average shelf prices of the overall basket of fruit and veg will reach upwards of 170% above today’s level by 2050.

• This means that climate-flation will be contributing 40% of total inflation across the basket of basic goods by 2035 and over 60% of it by 2050. Climate change will have gone from a junior contributor to the dominant driver of shelf-price inflation on fresh produce inside the working lifetime of someone in their thirties today.

(A note to the perplexed: “easy peelers” turns out to be what Brits call mandarin oranges and clementines. I like it.)

Here’s how Emma Court and Kyle Kim summed it up in a comprehensive Bloomberg account

Extreme weather also makes growing crops more expensive. For example, Del Monte Corp., which sold more than $4 billion of bananas, pineapples, avocados and other food products last year, has been investing in measures to shield crops from rising temperatures and sun damage. This includes covering them with shade cloth and spraying them with a reflective layer of so-called plant sunscreen. The company is also paying more for cooling throughout its supply chain, including by requiring upgrades in fruit-processing plants in the Midwest that were originally designed for lower temperatures.

The effects of climate on pricing are difficult to capture, because they build gradually, says Hans Sauter, Del Monte’s chief sustainability officer. But lower yields, increasing disease threats and higher costs can all contribute to more expensive produce. “This is part of our DNA. We have been dealing with climate events forever,” he says. “But these new circumstances are making it more expensive.”

Regions where temperatures are already warm will likely be the most exposed to climate inflation, in part because additional heat can more readily slash agricultural harvests. Among the worst-off are countries in Africa and South America, which also tend to have lower incomes, with less infrastructure and fewer resources to guard against climate change.

But the fossil fuel that drives climate change raises costs in other ways too. The most obvious is their effect on public health. It’s hard, of course, to calculate this with precision, but the attempts leave us with staggering numbers: the NRDC, five years ago, demonstrated that fossil fuel pollution was costing America $820 billion a year. (That’s nearly a Musk). The numbers elsewhere are much higher.

Sometimes, though, it’s easier to see them in reverse. A new study this month, described by Gary Fuller, finds that when London cut down sharply on urban air pollution with its congestion pricing zone, remarkable things followed:

Low emission and clean air zones attract controversy whenever they are proposed, but there is growing evidence that they work in improving air quality. The Bradford zone was followed by a reduction of about 25% in GP visits for heart and breathing problems and survey data shows that the central London zone was followed by a reduction in the likelihood of a person taking sick leave…

The researchers looked at emergency admissions to hospital, excluding cases such as accidents, burns, drug overdose, poisoning or self-harm. For people living in the central London zone, admissions increased at 3% per year before the schemes started. After their launch this trend was altered, with a 3% reduction in annual trends for emergency admissions, including an 8% reduction for heart problems and a 6% reduction for breathing problems.

That adds up to real money. Not only that, but people can breathe, always a plus!

If you try to add all this up, you get some interesting numbers. As Kate Yoder reports

“What’s striking is that already, households are bearing serious costs,” said Kimberly Clausing, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. She co-authored a paper from earlier this year finding that families were paying between $400 and $900 more each year because of the effects of climate change, with the costs above $1,300 in the 10 percent hardest-hit counties, many of them found in Florida, Louisiana, Nebraska, Colorado, and California.

What’s more, people are figuring all this out.

Two-thirds of US voters agree that global warming is affecting the cost of living to some degree, according to new survey data from the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, including most Democrats and moderate Republicans. Of those two-thirds, a majority of them said that climate change was driving up what they pay for groceries, utility bills, and home insurance.

And then there’s the sheer cost of energy itself—of the need to keep paying for coal and gas and oil while the far-cheaper sun and wind goes to waste. We’re stuck in a political moment when feckless Democratic politicians (paging Kathy Hochul) are making “affordability” their excuse for going along with Big Oil. But in fact one example after another is making it clear that, as Ray Wills writes, “what is making us poorer is not the move to clean energy – it is doing the transition slowly and badly. His examples are back in Australia

The Australian Energy Market Commission’s latest Residential Electricity Price Trends work is blunt: accelerating renewable generation, transmission and battery storage is ‘essential’ to keep electricity prices affordable over the next decade.

In scenarios where new wind, solar and transmission arrive on schedule, household bills fall compared to today. When those projects are delayed, prices remain higher for longer because the system leans more heavily on expensive gas and unreliable old coal.

Independent modelling tells a similar story. Analysis for the Clean Energy Council shows that if Australia stalls the rollout of renewables, household bills in 2030 could be around 30% higher than on a timely transition path – roughly $449 a year extra for a typical household, and even more for small businesses.

Nexa Advisory’s work finds that transition delays that lock in more gas-fired generation could add about $115.7 billion to wholesale costs between now and 2050.

Individuals can and do figure out some of the ways to lower their own costs. Not surprisingly, the spike in gas prices for Americans during our farcical Iranian excursion convinced some to change their habits or their technology. Lydia DePillis looked at the numbers:

Americans are powerfully attached to their cars, and their spending at gasoline stations jumped 21 percent from February to May. But that ability to spend has limits. According to Dow Jones Energy, consumption was 6.1 percent lower in May from a year earlier. Some of that is a long-running trend owing to the increasing efficiency of passenger vehicles, said Denton Cinquegrana, the company’s chief oil analyst, and about half is probably a consumer response to higher prices.

But much of the real work needs to be done by governments: nothing people can do by themselves will have much affect on the cost of food, healthcare, or energy. And when governments do their job well, the results can be amazing. I began with Australia and its free afternoon electricity; let’s close with Europe. As Jan Rosenow points out, the continent’s commitment to energy efficiency is paying off: it’s spending 29 percent less on energy than it would have if consumption had kept growing this century.

Importantly that is energy nobody had to generate, import or pay for. It built up slowly, over twenty-five years, across 27 countries, in warmer buildings, more efficient factories, better appliances, the switch to LED lighting and steadily more efficient transport. At any given price Europe now pays around a third less than it would have without those gains.

This shield holds whichever direction the next shock arrives from. If anything, the figure undersells the benefit, because it counts only the energy saved and not the power stations, pipelines and grid connections nobody had to build. It is one of the most effective protection measures against future energy crisis: the energy not consumed cannot be withheld, weaponised, or made more expensive by a supplier you do not control.

As he points out, there’s vast room for expansion:

A heat pump in a well-insulated home on clean electricity cuts the energy the building needs, replaces the gas boiler, and runs on a grid that keeps getting cleaner. That single device also pulls the household out of the gas import chain for good, and as a side effect keeps it cooler through the sort of summer Europe now gets most years.

In the Netherlands, for instance, you can sign up for free clothes-washing, drying, and dishwashing between noon and five p.m., part of a scheme from a company called CoolBlue.

People are quickly figuring all this out across much of the world. It remains for a savvy American politician to really lay out the case. But when she does the rewards will be high. “Free” would be a popular thing.

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In other energy and climate news:

+Some big wins for climate and energy in last night’s New York voting. It looks like a lock that former New York comptroller Brad Lander will be headed to Congress, where he will instantly become one of the House experts on the links between big money and Big Oil. My hope is that he’ll team with Sheldon Whitehouse in the Senate to form a loud and constant chorus on the topic. By the way, a useful video from the ever-candid Whitehouse here

Meanwhile, further up the Hudson River, Lisa Kaul won her Democratic primary for state Senate in the district around the town of Poughskeepsie. Climate was a big element in her campaign, and you can check out a quite powerful digital ad here—per the discussion above, it’s focused on affordability.

+Fascinating deep dive into the economics of Enhanced Geothermal from the straight-shooting Justin Mikulka. As he notes, this technology—drilling a pair of holes deep into the earth, pumping water down one so it will pass through hot rocks, retrieving the warm water from the other, and using the heat to turn a turbine on the surface—has gotten a ton of hype, and lots of expensive support from the federal government, above all I think because it is congenial to Big Oil (they know how to drill stuff, after all). But will it produce affordable electricity? Mikulka has well-reasoned doubts

Fervo describes its own power generation as “24/7 clean, cost effective, scalable.”

Fervo’s current $/KW costs are $7,000.

New build gas is estimated at $2,300+

Solar plus storage is at $2,100-$2,600

Now Fervo claims that if everything goes right in the future they will bring that down to $3,000. So even in their best case scenario they will not be competitive with solar plus storage which is also expected to get much cheaper. And they are a long way from their best case scenario and none of this has been proven at commercial scale.

Competing straight-up against sun, wind, and batteries is tough. If Fervo “works” it will be with massive government subsidy, which would be better spent on cheaper tech. Pipes and pumps and huge amounts of water—these are increasingly the tools of the past, up against the frictionless world of sun and wind.

I tend to think hydrogen falls into this same category—expensive compared with the straight-ahead application of electricity and batteries. But there are places doing it right: Lithuania just launched a ship that runs on green hydrogen generated from solar panels on its dock. As Luis Reyes writes

The ship is called Rasa, and it was christened at the Port of Klaipėda on June 18, 2026. This is not a concept render. It’s a 42-meter tanker that’s about to start collecting sludge, sewage, stormwater and garbage from other ships calling at the port. Glamorous work, no. Technically interesting, very much yes.

+Some of the bigger names in climate science, including American Michael Mann, have joined in a call to avoid solar geoengineering, centering their argument on the risk of “termination shock.”

Recent analyses demonstrate that it would take as long as two decades to create the required infrastructure. By then we would be completely reliant on maintaining it – a tall task in a dangerous world with global conflict. It would only temporarily mask the pent-up warming implicit in the ongoing buildup of carbon dioxide, and this pent-up warming would be released in a catastrophically rapid “termination shock” if circumstances force the cessation of solar geoengineering.

For me, I think we can only talk coherently about geoengineering in a world where the political power of the fossil fuel industry has been broken—one more reason why mass deployment of clean energy around the globe over the rest of this decade is so crucial.

+Check out the trailer for Josh Fox’s important new film, The Welcome Table. It debuted on HBO yesterday, and it’s about the surge of climate immigration already underway on our overheating planet. Fox, of course, is the independent filmmaker who brought us Gasland, the most crucial document in the fight against fracking. He’s got a good eye, a good mind, and a good heart.

+John Todd is one of those fascinating figures who have been at it a lifetime—his New Alchemy Institute became most famous for its Living Machines, which use plants to clean wastewater. Now he’s scaling up the concept—what if we used old tankers to roam the oceans (under solar power) just slowly cleaning up the seas?

For example, a large — but by no means the biggest class of — oil tanker, can hold around 80 million US gallons of liquid fuel, or other liquids. including sea water. There will be enough potential treatment capacity within the ships’ hold spaces to house eco-machines large enough to make a positive impact on surrounding waters

+Many thanks to the good folks at CarbonBrief for Cosmos, a database of the world’s climate research, currently containing 1.8 million studies

+Fascinating commentary from Jérôme Pinti on the role that animals play in regulating carbon and climate, citing a new consensus report from 300 researchers:

A 2023 paper in Nature Climate Change estimated that protecting and restoring wild animal populations and their ecological roles could increase carbon dioxide uptake by an additional 6.41 gigatons per year. Numbers like that show why animals belong in climate conversations, and how they can be part of climate solutions, with different roles in different ecosystems.

For example, in forests, animals such as elephants disperse seeds and influence where trees grow. In grasslands, grazers such as bison can affect plant growth, nutrient cycling, and fire dynamics. In soils and sediments, burrowing animals can change oxygen and nutrient availability and store energy as they hibernate during tough winter months.

The same is true for the ocean, which is Earth’s largest carbon sink. Marine organisms are active agents of resilience: They transport carbon, build habitats with carbon-rich materials, and tie up carbon in extensive food webs. In my Biological Oceanography Lab at the Gulf of Maine Research Institute, we aim to quantify the importance of zooplankton and fish in the ocean’s biological carbon pump, a process where marine species, from plankton to whales and everything in between, move carbon from the ocean’s surface into the deep sea through a variety of processes.

On a more tragic note, one wildlife lover—a woman named Mona Khalil—was killed last week while pursuing her life’s work of safeguarding sea turtles laying their eggs. An Israeli airstrike wrecked her home on Mansouri Beach, and she subsequently died of her wounds. As Rhett Ayers Butler writes,

She had not set out to become a conservationist. Born in Lagos to Lebanese parents, she later left Lebanon during the civil war. In the Netherlands she worked as a porcelain restorer, a trade that required patience, precision, and care for damaged things. She could have remained there. Instead she kept returning to the family land on Lebanon’s southern coast.

One night in 1999, while walking near the shore, she heard a sound in the sand and saw a turtle coming up to lay her eggs. She learned that the beach was one of the last important nesting places in southern Lebanon. In 2000, after Israel withdrew from the area, she returned more permanently. With Habiba Fayed, she restored the family farmhouse and began protecting the nests.

And while we’re on animals, a new study finds that solar panels on barn roofs help lower thermal stress on cows during hot afternoons. As Lior Kahana reports,

To assess the impact of PV modules on roof heat flux, the team conducted field measurements at a naturally ventilated dairy barn in Shandong Province, China. The barn measures 32 m in span, 372 m in length, and has an eave height of 4.5 m. It features a south-facing gable roof with a 17.17° pitch and a single-layer profiled steel sheet construction without insulation.

The facility was divided into two zones. One section was left without PV installation, while the other was fitted with 1,152 PV modules with a total capacity of 299.52 kW. The modules were installed parallel to the roof slope, maintaining a 0.10 m ventilated air gap between the panels and the roof surface, and covered 60% of the south-facing roof area. The two zones housed 164 and 316 dairy cows, respectively.

“Linear mixed model analysis revealed that PV panels significantly reduced roof heat flux during daytime (57.7% influence weight, p < 0.001), with the strongest reduction occurring during peak solar radiation between 11:00 and 13:00,” the researchers said. “This effect was primarily attributed to shading, photovoltaic conversion, and convective cooling within the ventilated air cavity beneath the modules.”

“PV panels significantly lowered indoor temperatures during daytime (8.7% influence weight, p < 0.05), achieving a maximum reduction of approximately 2.3 C during the critical afternoon heat stress period (14:00–16:00),” they added.

+It’s always important to get hyperlocal perspectives on global crises: there have been lots of pictures of houses falling into the ocean on the barrier islands of North Carolina, but local resident and journalist Pat O’Keefe offers an in-depth and passionate discussion of the the many forces at work. One thing he notes is that the devastation of Hurricane Helene in western North Carolina made it easier for legislators to sympathize with the plight of those along the coast.

+Rameen Siddiqui notes that the world continues to fall behind on the Sustainable Development Goals, even as the 2030 deadline approaches.

Less than four years from the deadline, and only 16% of the targets are going to be met. The 11th edition of the Sustainable Development Report, released today by the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network, is the sort of statistic that ought to be raising much more alarm. The 2030 Agenda was supposed to end extreme poverty, preserve the oceans, build peaceful institutions, and put the global economy on a sustainable path. With 2030 in sight, 84% of these commitments are going downhill.

The reason the 2026 SDR is worth reading with care is not the rankings, although those are important. It is the timing. UN talks begin this year on the future beyond 2030. In 2027, a new Secretary-General will be elected. The framework that replaces the current agenda is being shaped in conversations happening right now, and the SDR’s argument, that implementation has been the missing piece throughout and must be the organizing principle of whatever comes next, lands at the precise moment when that argument can still influence the design of the successor framework.

+Jeff St. John contends that we have superb new acreage for solar panels—on top of warehouses around the world

In a sense, warehouse rooftops are like open fields in dense urban landscapes, with acres of flat space available for solar panels.

Ava has awarded Prologis a contract to build nearly 7.3 megawatts of solar on sprawling roofs across five sites, enabling about 3,000 residents to see lower bills. Keefer previously worked for Clean Power Alliance, another California community energy provider, which is building 9 megawatts of warehouse-rooftop community solar with Prologis…

His company’s analysis of federal data indicates U.S. commercial, industrial, and institutional rooftops could host 581 gigawatts of solar, enough to provide the lower bounds of the country’s overall electricity demand. Similar data from a 2023 study by the Environment America Research and Policy Center found that warehouses across the U.S. have nearly 16.4 billion square feet of rooftop space, capable of hosting enough solar to power more than 19 million homes.

+The estimable Yessenia Funes has an excellent account of why voting rights have lots to do with climate justice.

Leslie Fields has a background in civil rights and voting rights work. She worked at the NAACP, where she discovered environmental justice as a focus in Texas. Now, she is the chief federal officer of the Harlem-based environmental justice advocacy group WE ACT.

WE ACT has been responding to the nationwide consequences of the Voting Rights Act’s rollback. Section 2, in particular, is about voters electing the representatives they want. It’s about the people choosing the person they trust to lead.

“If we don’t have the representatives we need, who come from the community and are accountable to the community, then you’re going to have terrible decisions being made on the local level and all the way up regarding the environment, regarding communities’ sustainability, regarding where investments are being made,” Fields said.

“Some of the states that we’ve lost billions of dollars in Justice40 funds from the Biden administration to support climate resilience and adaptation,” she added, “won’t have the leadership to represent them, and we’re still fighting to get that funding back.”

+More money coming from the World Bank for Africa solar, as Antony Sguazzin explains

WeLight, which operates more solar mini-grids in Africa than any other company, said the International Finance Corp. bought a stake in the business, backing its expansion into Nigeria and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

The firm, which currently operates in Madagascar and Mali, said it raised €27 million ($31 million) from the World Bank’s private-sector lending arm and founding shareholders. Axian Group Ltd., Sagemcom SAS and Norfund AS established WeLight in 2018 to provide electricity to rural communities that don’t have access to national networks. It runs almost 190 mini-grids, serving more than 800,000 people.

+Finally, a shout out to the good people of Matinicus, the island furthest out in Maine’s Penobscot Bay. I was visiting my fisherman brother there over the weekend, and found that locals had spent the year installing a truly remarkable solar system that powers most of the island and has cut its use of diesel for electric generation by two-thirds. This is a relatively poor rock out in the Atlantic Ocean, and if it can build—mostly with local expertise—a truly state-of-the-art solar system, it should be a good spur for communities everywhere. Energy independence, not to mention lobster! This system may allow the community to survive into the future—Eva Murray’s excellent chronicle can be found here

On February 28, a few hours after President Trump launched his absurd war against Iran, I used this newsletter to note that it was yet one argument for clean energy, for “building out the un-embargoable supply of electrons that come, most easily and cheaply, from the sun and wind.” A few days later I tried to lock that point into the public discourse by observing that though sunlight must travel 93 million miles to reach the earth, none of those miles go through the Strait of Hormuz.

Those points have by now become the commonplace wisdon—note, for instance, Paul Krugman’s fine column this morning. It would be pleasurable to wallow a bit in the president’s disgrace, but not productive. So, as the war fitfully winds down, with the remaining question being just how expensive our surrender will turn out to be, it’s time to peer a little further out into the future and try to figure out how the quite different postwar world might use this opportunity to make rapid progress.

I think the first thing to remember is that the war was launched against a backdrop of already ongoing energy transition. As a rollicking new report out today from the thinktank Ember makes clear, the move towards power from the sun and wind was well underway, predicated by a fear of climate change that helped produce the investments that drove the cost of clean energy inexorably down. The report’s authors remind us where the bottom line sat as of the beginning of the war:

Around 80% of the global population can get 80% uptime solar-plus-storage power for less than $100/MWh, and half can get it for below about $80/MWh. That is already competitive with average fossil generation costs today, typically around $100/MWh.

And they go on to remind us, even more crucially, that those numbers will keep inexorably moving

Today’s affordability map is therefore not fixed. As time moves on and electrotech costs continue to fall on learning curves, regions that are already cheap become cheaper, and regions just outside competitiveness cross the line. The global area where solar plus batteries can provide high-uptime electricity at low cost expands over time.

By 2030, our analysis suggests that more than three quarters of the world’s population can get 80% uptime solar-plus-storage power for less than $80/MWh, and 90% of the world for less than $100/MWh.

Another way to say it is, the fossil fuel industry was already on the back foot before all this began. Indeed, a way to understand the Trump presidency, including its “excursions” into Venezuela and Iran, is as a reaction against this new reality: the desperate attempt by Big Oil, and by a would-be Big Man, to assert what Trump keeps calling “energy dominance.” We were trying, as it were, to “roll coal” on the rest of the world, with war but also with Trump’s other tricks, especially tariffs. His bet was that America was so militarily powerful, and its market so attractive, that we could coerce other countries into going along with his vision of a 1950s world where America used its oil supremacy to keep atop the heap.

For a moment it seemed almost to be working. Faced with preposterous tariffs, a number of countries promised to buy large amounts of American liquefied natural gas in order to placate the administration and see their bill drop. But China, the big target, was unintimidated, fighting back with its control over critical minerals, and with the fact that it no longer feared disruption in global energy markets. That’s because, as David Fickling pointed out the other day, China had restructured its energy supply over the last three years, effectively going on an “oil detox.” The war, and its effect on prices, simply supercharged this, as one can tell from the easily available statistical evidence on things like how much people were charging their cars with electricity as opposed to pumping them full of gas.

Public charging in China in April increased 17% from the previous month, to hit 10.38 terawatt-hours, or TWh, similar to the electricity consumption of the Netherlands. Add the majority of charging that happens at home, and the increase from last year is probably about 8 TWh — equivalent to about 800,000 barrels per day of oil. Other data back this up: The decline in gasoline and diesel production during April, relative to the average over the previous three years, was almost identical, at 790,000 barrels per day.

But as Fickling also pointed out, the real threat for Big Oil is that China’s Asian neighbors, who are the remaining potential growth market for LNG, are watching closely and figuring this out. These are the countries that were supposed to be cowed by American might and then supplied by the new surge of gas from the fracking belt

The problem is that those rising middle powers do have alternatives to meet their energy needs, thanks to the growth of renewables. Asia’s LNG-to-power market was already being aggressively undercut on price by solar, batteries and wind. The war in Iran has demonstrated that clean energy is more reliable, too.

Indeed, just run the numbers and you get some pretty stark news:

A new gas-fired power plant in Asia needs to sell electricity for more than $100 per megawatt-hour to break even. Even existing plants, whose construction costs have long since been paid off, need $70/MWh or more if they’re fueled with LNG. Photovoltaic solar power, or PV, can be had for half the new-build price, at around $50/MWh or less. You can even add a battery and wind turbines and have round-the-clock clean electricity for less than what established gas plants are paying just for their fuel and maintenance.

This is why Trump’s failed war is so important. Those Asian leaders—who again represent most of the projected increase in demand for energy—would have slowly moved in the direction of cheap clean energy. But now they don’t have to go slowly, with one eye over the shoulder to make sure a wrathful America doesn’t punish them. They will now laugh at Trump all the way to the bank.

And all of this converges at the exact same moment with something even more important: the El Niño about to unleash itself on the planet. Political leaders here and abroad thought they had somehow bottled up the issue of climate change, that they could conveniently ignore it. Physics, as usual, has other ideas, and it looks as though those ideas will be expressed with…vigor. Essentially, an El Niño serves as a way for the ocean to release heat that has been accumulating in its waters, and as Tom Harris notes, there is a lot of that heat.

Global ocean heat uptake jumped by a staggering 23 zettajoules (ZJ) in 2025 alone. For context, 23 ZJ is roughly 200 times the total annual electricity generation of the entire human race. The 2025 ocean heat uptake represents an eight-fold increase over the 1958–1985 annual mean baseline

The degree to which we’ve been storing global warming in the oceans can’t be overstated, and now the door to that sauna is being flung open. You may recall the shock a few years ago when global temperatures started occasionally breaching the 1.5 Celsius mark; Harris cites predictions that we could see months in 2027 when we go past the two-degree mark. Jim Hansen and his team just published a new paper predicting that the El Niño is coming fast enough that 2026 will likely set a new record for global temperature

For the purpose of predicting temperature in the remainder of 2026, we note in Fig. 8 that global SST in 2026 has approximately “caught” the 2024 global SST in May (upper figure) and 2026 continues to be at least 0.1°C warmer than in 2023 (the last El Nino onset year). We expect that gap to be maintained, as the upcoming El Nino is at least as strong as the one in 2023. We note also that Earth’s energy imbalance for the last 15 months of data (January 2025 through March 2026) is 1.58 W/m2 , even higher than the prior decade (Fig. 4). The year 2026 should already exceed the 2024 record, with higher temperatures to come in 2027.

(And as Hansen notes, if his predictions are correct it will go some way towards rejiggering scientific assumptions about just how sensitive the climate is to our emissions—that is, recent celebrations in some quarters that the worst climate outcomes were off the table may well have been premature. Meanwhile, also worth reading Daniel Swain’s very detailed forecast for how it all may affect the West Coast)

We don’t know in advance all the ways that El Niño will manifest, but I confess to being fearful; we’ve been barely dealing with the stresses that temperature rise has already inflicted, and the soaring mercury will come as farmers are already facing the fertilizer shortage that Trump’s war provoked. The best we can hope for at this point, I think, is a year that stops a little short of cataclysmic; in any event, I believe it will be enough to produce a return to the politics of, say, 2020, when the world was more focused on the climate crisis.

We’ve been drifting away from that focus in this country, mostly because Democratic politicians began to lose their nerve in the face of ongoing attacks by the fossil fuel industry. But now is the time to regain that focus. As it turns out, new research makes it clear that Americans are in fact at least as worried about climate change as they ever were. Here’s a summary from David Gelles:

Take, for example, April research from Gallup, which found that 44 percent of U.S. adults “worry a great deal about global warming or climate change.” That’s among the highest percentages since 1989, and just short of the all-time high of 46 percent registered in 2020.

Another 22 percent of Americans worry “a fair amount” about climate change, meaning it’s an issue that is solidly on the radar for two-thirds of U.S. adults .

A survey last year from George Mason University also found that about 65 percent of Americans were “very worried” or “somewhat worried” about global warming.

And unlike in some previous studies, when climate change often ranked near last among voters’ major concerns, that poll found that the threats posed by a warming world were squarely in the middle of the pack, above issues like crime and health.

Democratic candidates in the primaries—which are not so far off—are going to have no choice but to grapple with the fact that

A full 72 percent of Democrats say they worry a great deal about the issue, the second-highest figure on record, according to Gallup

But really, it should be an asset, not a trouble. As a new study of climate communications makes clear across six countries makes clear

“By a margin of more than 4:1 we’ve seen people believe more clean is a better path to affordability than more fossil.”

As of now, with the Iran debacle receding and El Niño looming, we can say a few things with certainty:

1. The cheapest power on earth comes from the sun and wind, and everyone but us seems to have realized it

2. That clean power gives us some hope of dealing with the climate crisis that threatens our future, not to mention our insurance premiums

3. That clean power does not involve us in foreign wars

4. And the only important person on earth who does not agree with1, 2, and 3 is Donald Trump, who is being daily proven wrong on exactly everything. I mean, the man can’t fix the reflecting pool. So opponents should constantly identify Trump with climate denial and with solar denial; make him the face of our retrograde policy.

   How hard can that be?

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In other energy and climate news:

+The indefatigable organizer Pete Sikora offers a truly comprehensive lesson in effective (and ineffective) mobilization, by comparing the progress New York City has made with its law requiring big-building energy retrofits with the lack of progress that New York State has made on its climate laws. His diagnosis:

We are wildly unlikely to win with only small numbers of white progressives, while acting as if we also have deep, but unseen support in communities of color. Instead, we have to organize and mobilize strong support in enough places around the state to build a truly multiracial effort mobilizing working people.

A strong, diverse campaign ought to include low income whites in at least some rural places. It can’t happen without enough good, accountable paid organizers working to build support in diverse places and demographics, especially Black, Latino and Asian low income communities. We’ve got to find the money and build the organization or organizations to make it happen.

Meanwhile, there’s emerging evidence that good organizing is taking at least some toll on Trump’s crusade against the planet and the science that helps us understand it. As Justin Gerdes reports, the courts are starting to take apart Trump’s anti-wind efforts:

On June 6, a federal judge vacated guidance issued by the Treasury Department in August 2025 that had ended renewable energy project developers’ ability to prove their eligibility for federal tax credits by demonstrating they had already spent at least 5% of the total project cost.

Last week, the Justice Department gave up on defending President Trump’s wind permitting moratorium.

“The door to federal permitting is now unlocked again and each developer will be able to make the case for permitting their individual project based on the facts and the law,” Kit Kennedy, the managing director for power, climate, and energy at the Natural Resources Defense Council, told Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo.

This comes after federal judges this winter struck down all five stop-work orders issued by the Interior Department in December 2025 to block construction of East Coast offshore wind farms.

For clean energy companies, and their putative allies in Democratic state attorneys general offices, the message is clear: stay on offense.

And after a fearsome howl from critics, word came yesterday that the White House will back off the attempts I described last week to remove the system of buoys monitoring the flow of ocean currents. Maxine Joselow:

The National Science Foundation had said in May that it would begin removing hundreds of underwater instruments this month that collect data on coastal flooding, marine heat waves and other climate and weather events.

But the agency announced on Thursday that it will pause efforts to take apart the system, known as the Ocean Observatories Initiative, while convening an expert panel to determine its future.

“Effective immediately, N.S.F. will not proceed with further removal or de-scoping of equipment,” the agency said in a statement.

+A series of hot, dry summers have finally claimed one of England’s most iconic trees, a giant oak in Sherwood Forest that, as Patrick Barkham says,

was said to have provided a sanctuary for the outlaw and his gang when fleeing the tyrannical Sheriff

Elsewhere in the UK, more than 80% of peatlands have been degraded—and around the world these damaged ecosystems are producing as much as five percent of the planet’s greenhouse gas systems. So it’s good news that researchers and farmers are figuring out how to “re-wet” or flood the systems, and then use them for solar panels. As Stephanie Baum writes, researchers have foundthat

solar panels on rewetted peatland provide a unique habitat for bird species along with generating green energy and potentially locking up carbon…

Hanna Rae Martens, a peatland ecologist at the University of Greifswald and lead author of the study, said, “The presence of wetland species like reed bunting and the endangered meadow pipit shows that the solar park is truly re-wetted and has peatland species returning.

“But we also recorded species like Eurasian tree sparrow and tree pipit, which are not typically found in peatlands. They all appear to use the structure of the solar panels. When I’m out on site, I see a lot of meadow pipits sitting on the panels, flying off to catch insects and then flying back to their perch.”

+A big new solar panel factory in Cartersville, Georgia will soon be the country’s largest. As Michelle Lewis writes,

This isn’t just another factory; it’s the only place in the country where every major piece of a solar panel – from ingot to finished module – gets made under one roof. The module assembly side is already running at full capacity, turning out 16,700 panels a day.

“Producing the first solar cells at Cartersville is a milestone for Qcells and for American manufacturing,” said Andy Park, global CEO of Qcells. “A dependable domestic supply chain doesn’t just create thousands of good-paying jobs; it gives our customers greater certainty on price, supply, and tariffs, and a product they can trust from start to finish.”

Cartersville, by the way, is represented by a far-right climate-denying congressman, Barry Loudermilk, who has explained that wind and solar are not “mature enough” to be on the grid. Joe Biden did his darnedest!

+As I wrote about more than a year ago, Elon Musk is powering his peculiarly racist AI with a series of highly polluting engines around datacenters in Tennessee and Mississippi. The NAACP, noting that most of the damage is inflicted on Black neighborhoods, filed suit to make the world’s richest man comply with federal environmental law, but now the Trump administration has ruled that their single biggest donor can ignore those laws. The Southern Environmental Law Center is challenging that conclusion:

In the filing, the Department of Justice never disputes that xAI is pumping out unlawful and harmful pollution into Memphis and North Mississippi. Instead, the Department argues that it doesn’t matter whether xAI is breaking the law and threatening community members’ health if the Trump Administration blesses the lawlessness. While the Department points to vague national security concerns as its reason to let xAI continue to illegally pollute unabated, all companies, even ones that contract with the federal government, are required to follow the law

The attempted power grab by the Department of Justice has implications that go far beyond Memphis and North Mississippi. The Department is trying to dramatically undermine the longstanding right enshrined by Congress in federal law that allows impacted communities to file lawsuits—known as citizen suits—against polluters for violating the law. Citizen suits are an important part of the federal Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, and other bedrock environmental laws. They serve as an essential backstop—and often a last resort—for communities when government regulators fail to hold polluters accountable. The provision was passed by Congress with bipartisan support, and courts have repeatedly upheld the constitutionality of citizen suits.

Elsewhere on the oligarch watch, Alex Cuadros reports that the Trump administration is rewarding another big donor by weakening restrictions on methane emissions.

Trump has since named a former Hilcorp lobbyist to a top post at the Environmental Protection Agency, putting him in charge of an effort to unravel the methane rules with help from trade groups backed by [major donor Jeffrey] Hildebrand, a ProPublica investigation has found. That will bring a sweeping reprieve for the nation’s 700,000 stripper wells, boosting Hildebrand’s profits while saddling society as a whole with the climate fallout.

Stripper wells collectively contribute just 6% of the nation’s oil and natural gas. But in recent studies, scientists have identified them as the source of roughly half the sector’s methane emissions — in part because they tend to be thinly monitored, run-down and thus prone to leaking. As a result, these barely productive wells play an outsize role in climate change, disproportionately amplifying heat waves, droughts and wildfires.

+Kudos to my Third Act colleagues, the Sierra Club, and the Hip Hop Caucus for keeping pressure on the World Cup over its sponsorship from Saudia Aramco, world’s biggest oil company. As Dharna Noor reports,

This coming Sunday, protesters will demonstrate at or near five 2026 World Cup stadiums and six other major sporting arenas, chanting and holding signs calling for an end to fossil fuel sponsorships.

“People all over the world are watching the World Cup, which is a good reminder that we’re all in this together, that it’s one planet,” said Brent Suter, pitcher for the Los Angeles Angels of Major League Baseball and supporter of the campaign to end “sportswashing”. “It’s a good moment for a big message about the climate.”

+I’ve spent a fair amount of time in the rickshaws of Dhaka, mostly back in the day when they were powered by human muscle turning pedals. That was largely replaced by two-stroke engines, and more recently by batteries, and now there’s an emerging plan to use those batteries in the evening as a virtual power plant for the Bangladeshi capital. When rickshaws return for the evening with a third of their batteries still charged, SolShare is figuring out how to aggregate that power and sell it to the grid. Drivers should see a thirty percent increase in income.

+Finally, here’s your dose of over-the-top good news today. The French have launched a first-of-its-kind floating platform designed both to capture solar energy and to…farm oysters.

The result of several years of collective work and consultation between researchers, marine professionals and local stakeholders, this prototype represents a concrete response to several contemporary challenges: the energy transition , the preservation of the oyster farming sector in the face of climate hazards, and the sustainable development of lagoon areas.

I leave you with a picture of it being towed out to sea off the city of Sète

The Texas paper was more direct, and more accurate, than anyone else covering the story. The Times obit gave top billing to the fact that he led the acquisition of Mobil and “cut costs relentlessly;” the Wall Street Journal waited till paragraph six to note that he was “openly skeptical” of climate science (much like the Wall Street Journal). But the Chron had it right—when people think back in a hundred years or a thousand or ten thousand, the one thing worth remembering about him will be the crucial role he played in holding back action on climate change.

I’m going to recount the lowlights of the story here, and add one that gets very little notice in the obituaries, but that ties directly to the ongoing crisis.

Raymond was a research engineer who spent his whole career at what was then the world’s largest company. He joined its board in 1984, already a leading candidate for CEO, which means he was near the top during the 1980s, the period when (as we now know thanks to great investigative reporting) the company’s scientists correctly identified the dangers of global warming and linked them directly to Exxon’s products. That research, as Inside Climate News reported in 2015,

laid the groundwork for a 1982 corporate primer on carbon dioxide and climate change prepared by its environmental affairs office. Marked “not to be distributed externally,” it contained information that “has been given wide circulation to Exxon management.” In it, the company recognized, despite the many lingering unknowns, that heading off global warming “would require major reductions in fossil fuel combustion.”

Unless that happened, “there are some potentially catastrophic events that must be considered,” the primer said, citing independent experts. “Once the effects are measurable, they might not be reversible.”

This was, of course, the same decade when Jim Hansen was carrying out his groundbreaking research at NASA (and I was writing The End of Nature). Exxon, as it turns out, was on precisely the same wavelength. Here’s, to me, one of the great historical what-ifs: imagine that, on the night that Hansen made his remarks to Congress, an Exxon exec like Raymond had gone on the evening news and told Tom Brokaw, Dan Rather, or Peter Jennings that “our research shows pretty much the same thing.” No one would have accused Exxon of climate alarmism; instead, we would have gotten to work as a civilization.

Instead, they chose denial. And it was Raymond who played a lead role, as Exxon helped form the Global Climate Coalition, first of the obfuscation fronts. He became the spokesman for anti-science in many ways: in 1997, as the world approached the first global climate talks in Kyoto, he gave what may be a speech second only in importance to Hansen’s original testimony. Speaking in Beijing to the Worl Petroleum Congress, he contended that the world was cooling, that there was no way to know if co2 was to blame, and that in any event “it is highly unlikely that the temperature in the middle of the next century will be significantly whether policies are enacted now or twenty years from now.”

These, of course, were exactly the things Exxon’s scientists had told them were not true. Indeed, they’d been explicitly warned that

man has a time window of five to ten years before the need for hard decisions regarding changes in energy strategies might become critical.

And Exxon had believed its scientists. As a 2015 Los Angeles Times report made clear, they’d begun building drilling rigs higher to counteract rising sea levels, and plotting out what parts of the Arctic might be prime for oil drilling once they’d helped melt the ice.

Exxon, more than any single force on earth, made sure that the planet didn’t address climate change while it had time. Given what it knew in the 1980s Exxon could have had a head start on building and owning the solutions like sun and wind. But, as one of Raymond’s successors said two years ago, that didn’t happen because “we don’t see the ability to generate above-average returns for our shareholders” with clean energy. And he was right. You can make money putting up solar panels, but you can’t make Exxon money, because the sun delivers energy for free. It doesn’t offer the same scope for greed.

And greed was the word here. For his role in helping wreck the earth’s climate system, Exxon paid him $686 million, or $144,573 a day during his tenure as CEO. His retirement package was $400 million.

And even when he finally left Exxon in 2005 he continued on doing damage—this is the often overlooked part of his story. He was the lead independent director at JP Morgan Chase, which had been the Exxon house bank, and which, as I chronicled for Rolling Stone in 2020, became the fossil fuel industry’s biggest lender—the “doomsday bank.”

Many of us ginned up a campaign to get him off that board (along with Rev. Lennox Yearwood and other protesters, and with Jane Fonda looking in through the glass windows, I was arrested at a DC Chase branch to help kick off that fight in 2020). It was eventually successful—that summer he was demoted as lead director, and left the board in December.

But Raymond’s legacy lives on. Just as Exxon has gone on pumping out oil (and climate nonsense), Chase has kept pumping out money. As the brand new edition of the Banking on Climate Chaos report pointed out last week, Chase remains the number one financier of fossil fuels around the world, besting Mitsubishi, Citigroup, and Bank of America; since 2021 they’ve pumped a quarter-trillion dollars into this effort. Asked by the Guardian for a comment, a Chase spokesman said

Asked for comment about its fossil fuel lending, a JPMorgan Chase spokesperson said: “As one of the world’s largest financiers of energy, we support the full range of energy solutions and technologies, with a focus on reliability, affordability, security and long-term resilience.” That kind of bland corporate-speak hides an almost unimaginable multitude of sins.

Like a great many Christians, I don’t believe a loving God consigns people to eternal damnation. But I do believe that Lee Raymond, Exxon, and Chase have helped send the rest of us to a kind of hell. As Jeff Masters just reported

The world recorded its highest burned area for any January-May during the past 15 years, with more than 150 million hectares burned globally – 22% higher than the previous high set in 2020 and about double the recent average for this period. In the U.S., the burned area so far in 2026 has been the highest for at least the past 10 years — about double the 10-year average — according to the National Interagency Fire Center.

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In other climate and energy news:

+Let’s take the bad taste out of our mouths with a new book from Elizabeth Dunn and Jiaying Zhao that argues that the most effective ways to fight climate change are also things that make people happy, from changing diets to changing vacations.

Leave The Lights On boldly reframes climate action not as a burden, but as an opportunity to build a brighter future—without guilt, and without giving up the things that make life worth living. With warmth, clarity, and a refreshingly optimistic voice, Zhao and Dunn explain what it means to “do your part.” Because sustainability doesn’t lie in doing everything, it lies in doing something, joyfully.

+Earlier this year I told you about claims from a Scandinavian battery maker that they had invented a solid-state battery with remarkable storage capacity, and promised to follow up. It now appears to be, as I suggested, too good to be true, and Finnish authorities are on the case. However, as Fred Lambert reports,

I hope it doesn’t cool people on the technology, because solid-state batteries do appear to be genuinely, finally coming. Toyota has invested over $15 billion and targets production vehicles by 2027-2028. Samsung SDI has the world’s largest pilot solid-state production line and plans mass production by 2027. These are real programs from companies with real technical credibility. Solid-state is coming — just not from Donut Lab, and not with the impossible combination of specs they promised.

Meanwhile, here’s something quite real and remarkable, and just a little further south. The almost unbelievably adaptive Ukrainian defense industry has just rolled out an electric motorcycle that carries two soldiers in full gear at 80 kilometers an hour, and with a range of a hundred kilometers. What does the Ukrainian army want with this? Well, it produces no noise, and no heat signature for drones to hone in on.

Motorcycles have become one of the most operationally critical vehicle classes on the Ukrainian frontline, where small mobile groups, reconnaissance teams, and casualty-evacuation crews need to move quickly through terrain impassable to heavier vehicles.

Meanwhile, the Chinese also seem to be hard at work on new battery technology that may hold even more promise than solid-state batteries:

Unlike traditional lithium-ion batteries, which rely on heavy metal compounds like nickel, cobalt, and manganese to “house” lithium ions, lithium-air batteries utilise lithium metal as the anode and oxygen from the air as the cathode reactant. This design significantly reduces weight and complexity, earning them the nickname “breathable batteries.”

The theoretical energy density of lithium-air technology is staggering, reaching up to 12,000 Wh/kg—a figure comparable to gasoline (approx. 13,000 Wh/kg). While current laboratory prototypes have achieved over 1,200 Wh/kg, this is already more than four times the 250–270 Wh/kg capacity of mainstream lithium-ion batteries and significantly higher than the 500 Wh/kg expected from solid-state batteries.

+Michigan politicians—Democrats in the lead—are so scared of EVs that they literally want to ban Canadians and Mexicans who have brought Chinese models from driving them across the border.

“We’re gonna be aggressive here because Michigan jobs are on the line, but also so is national security. So close our border to Chinese vehicles and Chinese technology in the vehicles, even for day trips. That’s how aggressive we believe we need to be right now,” Rep. Hailey Stevens (D-Mich) said while speaking at a policy conference.

Something tells me this is not the smartest way to protect autoworkers. Maybe instead they could take a clue from Mexico, where president Claudia Sheinbaum just unveiled an electric van designed and built in the country and available for under ten grand. Here’s what the future looks like—her name is Olinia and she’s undeniably cute

By the way, Democrats like Slotkin are among those pushing more use of ethanol, which is a terrible idea. As David Widawsky points out

Producing ethanol requires substantial fossil fuel inputs, including fertilizer, processing energy and transportation. But the larger problem is land use: when crop production is diverted from the food supply into fuel production, forests and grasslands somewhere else get converted into new agricultural land to replace the lost food. That conversion releases massive stores of carbon into the atmosphere. Globally, the emissions from these land-use changes often outweigh the tailpipe emissions reductions ethanol is supposed to achieve.

+From Toby Couture and David Jacobs in PV magazine, a fascinating look at what’s happening in Africa, where solar is being led by installations on stores, warehouses, and factories.

The logic of the African solar market differs fundamentally from that of European or North American markets. In countries like Nigeria, solar energy does not primarily compete with cheap grid power. It competes with gasoline or diesel generators.

In many African countries, power outages are a daily occurrence. The result is that for years, businesses, hospitals, hotels, and manufacturing plants have had to purchase (and service) expensive back-up generators—often at enormous cost. Diesel power is expensive, noisy, maintenance-intensive, and dependent on volatile import prices.

Against this backdrop, solar-plus-storage systems are fundamentally changing the economic equation. With pay-back times of one to two years in certain parts of the continent, a market is emerging that is not reliant on subsidies but instead that is driven by commercial self-interest.

This also explains the market’s remarkable structure: According to AfSIA, around 85 percent of newly installed solar capacity is in the commercial and industrial (C&I) sector. Private households have so far played only a minor role. The driving forces are companies whose business models depend on a reliable power supply. For such companies, solar is increasingly becoming a matter of competitiveness and operational reliability.

Mini-grids, battery storage, and private solar systems can scale much faster and more cost-effectively than traditional power plants and grid expansion plans. This does not mean that central grids will become obsolete.

However, their role is likely to change: away from being the sole backbone of the supply system, toward becoming part of an increasingly hybrid energy system.

+The invaluable Emily Pontecorvo has a new report on the growth of clean energy manufacturing across the U.S., which includes some heartening news:

The U.S. saw 30 new utility-scale solar factories and 30 new battery factories come online last year alone, according to ACP. The country now has the capacity to meet average domestic demand for storage systems through 2030, and can produce enough solar panels to satisfy demand two times over.

In both industries, nearly all of that capacity has been added since 2022, when the Inflation Reduction Act created new subsidies for domestic manufacturing. The advanced manufacturing production tax credit incentivized not just solar and battery factories, but also all the production of components that go into these technologies, including solar and battery cells, polysilicon, wafers, and anodes. On top of these direct subsidies, the IRA generated demand for U.S.-made products by granting bonus tax credits for utility-scale solar and battery projects built with domestically produced parts.

+Pontecorvo’s HeatMap colleague Katie Brigham calculates that with all the new tech IPOs this week, there will be lots of AI wealth that some of its holders may want to devote to climate philanthropy

“It is not lost on the people who are working on AI that there are big environmental impacts associated with data centers,” Lara Pierpoint, managing director of Trellis Climate, told me. Her organization helps philanthropists and foundations invest in first-of-a-kind climate infrastructure projects that wouldn’t move forward without their support. She expects that the “strong outdoor and environmentally-focused culture” of the Bay Area will also hold sway over these emerging philanthropists.

Nan Ransohoff, Stripe’s head of climate, laid out the scale of this coming capital influx in a recent Substack post: “The OpenAI Foundation holds 26% of OpenAI, worth about $220 billion at today’s valuation. Anthropic’s seven co-founders have pledged to give away 80% of their wealth and have instituted the most aggressive donor matching program for employees in tech history,” she writes.

Whether it will be enough to make up for the damage the wealthy do is a different question. A new report deepens the longstanding claim that the wealthiest do hugely outsized climate damage, but it turns out it’s less their yachts than their investments. As Fiona Harvey explains

Through their ownership of companies and private financial and physical assets, from oil producers to property developments, the super-rich are responsible for an outsized slice of the greenhouse gases that are overheating the planet. The top 1% of people by wealth, through their shareholdings and investments, control about a quarter of global annual emissions in total.

Greenpeace has calculated the “climate debt” of these high net worth individuals, by attributing to them their share of the damage done to the climate by the assets they own. By this reckoning, the world’s richest cause nearly $1tn a year of damage to the climate.

+As it gets hotter, the air gets dirtier. New data shows LA began the year with its five smoggiest months in a decade

So far this year, the South Coast air basin, which includes Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside and San Bernardino counties, has seen 39 days when the concentration of lung-irritating ozone (commonly known as smog) exceeded the federal standard, according to preliminary state air quality data.

That’s even worse than the infamously hot and hazy 2017, when Greater Los Angeles had 36 unhealthful air days by June 4 and ultimately saw 145.

+I have a feeling that extreme heat may turn out to be one of the stories of the 2026 World Cup (along with the incredible thuggishness of American authorities). Happily, some activists will be there to explain why: protests are scheduled outside five venues sponsored by the fossil fuel industry. As the Sierra Club reports

The growing global movement against sportswashing surged to new heights in May when 2026 World Cup player Morten Thorsby of Norway joined footballers around the world in signing a petition urging FIFA to adopt stronger heat protections and drop fossil fuel sponsors. Now, Brent Suter of the L.A. Angels has become the first active Major League Baseball player in the game’s history to speak out.

“As an athlete, I care a lot about promoting companies that share my values, and I also care a lot about our planet,” Suter, a longtime environmentalist, told the campaign. “Have I used and directly benefited from fossil fuels in my life? Absolutely. Do I believe that continuing to fully depend on fossil fuels as a society is dangerous? Absolutely. We need to find ways to power our society in cleaner ways, and I want to represent companies that want to be part of the solution.”

Sammy Roth has more here

+The great climate scientist and activist Peter Kalmus has left NOAA, as he explains in the latest installment of his newsletter

Yesterday, Monday, June 8, was my last day doing climate science for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, after 15 years of service. I’ve been a remote worker in North Carolina since the summer of 2022, and I was forced to resign due to a mandate to return to in-person work.

I don’t have another job lined up. Instead, I’m hoping to focus on my writing much more, and I’m planning to continue doing heat science work as a freelancer. I’m nervous about losing my salary for my family, but I haven’t felt this free in a long time, and I’m excited about what I can do now. I’m already well on my way with a new writing project (fiction for a change, and I’m having a blast!). Also, both my sons will be at UNC with in-state tuition in the fall, and we’ve already saved for that. I think it will work out.

In fact, perhaps more than work out:

I’d been very constrained at NASA for a long time. I was arrested twice for climate civil disobedience, but I was reprimanded and told that a third arrest would lead to my termination (I got arrested a third time anyway). At one point, after jumping up on the stage at the AGU, the biggest climate science conference in the US, I was under review by the JPL Ethics Office for a year. This was so stressful it gave me health issues. My overarching goal has been, and always will be, standing up for young people, working class people, marginalized people, and all of life on Earth, and standing against the billionaire class and fascism. I think I can probably accomplish this goal more effectively without the Big Brother-like constraints of my former job.

+From China, the world’s first underwater data center, cooled by seawater and powered by a wind turbine that sits on the ocean surface. As Amy Hawkins writes,

Located more than 6 miles (10km) off the coast of Shanghai, the datacentre is submerged 10 metres below the surface of the water and is powered by a nearby offshore windfarm. According to the Chinese government, the datacentre reduces power consumption by more than one-fifth compared with land-based datacentres.

+You’ll recall that the last edition of The Crucial Years had a lot to say about the quickening pace of electrification across Asia in the wake of the Gulf War. (Actually, I guess not the wake, since it’s still ongoing as of this morning). Anyway, the good folks at Ember yesterday published a massive report on the subject, chock-full of interesting numbers.

Economics, security and industrial opportunity now all point in the same direction. Asia holds half the world’s people and 4% of its oil and gas, but three quarters of the electrotech factories that can replace the fuel it lacks. The Great Divergence was powered by the energy the West mastered. The Great Convergence runs on the energy that Asia manufactures. If this is to be the Asian century, its path will be electric.

+Sad news from North Sumatra, where climate-driven extreme rains have killed off seven percent of an endangered orangutan species in a matter of days. It’s a reminder that we’re making a hell for everything, not just us.

Meanwhile, record winter temperatures in the Antarctic are raising yet more fears about destabilizing the great ice sheet. As Jonathan Watts reports

Temperatures in the Antarctic climbed above 15C this month, shattering the previous winter heat record for the usually frozen region and raising concerns about the speed of climate breakdown.

The new winter peak temperature was logged by the Argentinian Esperanza base on the Trinity peninsula on 6 June amid a protracted heatwave, when the maximum daily temperature exceeded zero degrees for three consecutive weeks.

Scientists said the high of 15.4C broke the previous record set at the same station in 1998 by 2C. “This is absolutely crazy,” said Raúl Cordero, an Ecuadorian climate professor at the University of Groningen. “It is also about 20C above normal for this time of the year. That is a huge anomaly.”

+One more interesting solar breakthrough: panels that can directly desalinate water. Aaron Greenbaum describes the research

Recently, researchers from the University of Rochester in New York published a study in Light: Science & Applications that outlined a new desalination technique. The technique revolves around an aluminum panel etched using femtosecond lasers (lasers that pulse so fast they can only be measured in one-quadrillionth of a second). Thanks to the laser etching, the aluminum panel not only absorbs light but also becomes superwicked: It attracts water to an almost supernatural degree.

When the panel comes into contact with salt water, a thin film of water is pulled up, completely defiant of gravity, and evaporates using solar energy, leaving behind crystallized salt and other minerals. While the evaporated gas is recollected as salt-free water, the superwicked surface also moves salt crystals onto the edge of the panel, keeping the main surface clean and efficient. Not only is the process self-sufficient, but it also solves the problem of other desalination projects: It doesn’t discharge brine (a highly saline water that is poisonous to sea life).

That comes as at least a slight bit of happy news, after reports that the US has been blowing up Iran’s coastal water systems, which if true is a clear war crime.

One of the (many) curses of the Trump era is that he keeps us fixated, hour by hour, on his latest stupidity or fraud, a constant swirling game of three-card monte that ends only when he robs some more of our attention and money. So I will try valiantly for a moment to escape his asteroid belt of provocation (it’s not easy—did you know that America decided this week to sink a few billion into promoting…coal) and try to think a little more broadly.

This step back is occasioned by Thomas Piketty and his team at the World Inequality Lab in Paris, who last week released the Global Justice Report, subtitled “A Plan for Equality & Prosperity Within Planetary Boundaries.” Piketty, you will recall, is the London-born economist who in 2013 released his book Capital, in many ways launching the ongoing critique of global inequality and the generalized scorn for the billionaire class. (At one point, remember, America and the world generally admired these people).

Now he and his team has enlarged their analysis to include the 21st century’s novel dilemma—that we are steadily and rapidly overheating the planet—and the result is this report, which I read in certain ways as the data-rich companion to Naomi Klein’s 2014 classic This Changes Everything, an investigation of whether it is possible to imagine prosperity without ruinous growth. Much has changed in the years since those volumes—most importantly, the plummeting price of solar and wind energy and of batteries to store that power has opened up a much larger escape hatch. And it’s from that premise that Piketty’s new work really proceeds.

The Global Justice Project says that rapid decarbonization is a must, and that it needs to be paid for by the rich, and that that payment should come in the form of a global wealth tax and a global income tax, which funnel fairly large sums of money from the north to the south. They aim for a “sufficiency” world, in which all have enough and where the share of wealth owned by the richest one percent drops dramatically—a kind of globalized Sweden, I’d say, in which people work half the hours we do at present, and consume more education and health care and less stuff. They view it as an alternative to “degrowth” scenarios, and also to our current unrestrained growth model, and say that it leaves the world with lower temperatures than either of those schemes.

To avoid climate catastrophes, we show that sufficiency is required: a structural transformation of the economy involving shorter working hours, a lower material footprint, a shift from material-intensive sectors toward relatively immaterial sectors such as education and health, and major changes in food systems and land use. Rapid decarbonization of energy systems is also necessary, as is the sharp compression of income and wealth inequality. This compression is both a social justice objective and a condition for financing necessary climate investment and human capital expenditure and for sustaining political support from bottom- and middle-income classes in both the North and the South.

Here’s a little diagram they provide of the basic outline

I have a certain sympathy for the argument—expressed most pithily by David Roberts on Bluesky—that this kind of sky-castle architecture doesn’t amount to much; I too am more fascinated by the daily drumbeat of technological innovation. And I think that the accumulation of that innovation may undermine part of Piketty’s argument; I have a feeling that the investment required for decarbonization is going to be easier to come by, as the price for good stuff just keeps falling, and the economic logic of paying for fossil fuel becomes ever smaller.

But I also think that the climate crisis is not the only ecological threat we face, nor indeed the only threat period. I think it’s pretty clear that democracy can’t survive inequality; there’s an ever-better case for taxing the hell out of billionaires even if all you do is bury the resulting money in a hole in the ground. One possibility is that the mega-rich will succeed in their current project of deliberalizing the planet, and we’ll all get to live in our own nasty little sovereignties; another is that the Bernie Sanderses resident in most parts of the world will figure out how to combine their efforts and that over time we’ll get something that looks a bit like what Piketty (or for that matter Kim Stanley Robinson in Ministry for the Future) imagines. One tell for me that this team is not entirely politically detached came in this paragraph about what would happen if America (or China) predictably refused to join in such a scheme:

If necessary, the Global Justice Platform can be implemented with an incomplete coalition of countries, including the absence of the US and/or China. According to our projections, the climate damages imposed by the US on other countries would be about 3% of world GDP per year, on average, over the 2026-2100 period if the US does not participate in the GJP. Under simplifying assumptions, other countries should impose a corrective tax of approximately 80% on all US exports to collect tax revenues approximately equivalent to the damage. Given the projected decline of the US share in world GDP – from 30% in 1945 to 15% in 2025 and 5-10% by 2100 – it is likely that such tariffs would induce the US to join the GJP. The same conclusion applies to the case of China, but with a higher tariff (180% or more).

The report concludes that

“A habitable, equal 21st century is materially possible. What stands in the way is not technical impossibility but political choice and the hard but crucial work of building a coalition behind it.”

I think that’s a worthy goal to keep in the back of our minds as we proceed with the daily work of building the infrastructure for this new world; every election is a chance to get us a little closer, by electing the kind of people who understand the need for this kind of compression of wealth.

But the infrastructure is the part we can do something about right now, and on that score there’s some equal mix of encouraging maddening news, all of it again on a large scale.

On the one hand, our farcical war in the Gulf continues to serve as the recruiting sergeant for the renewable revolution. As a Bloomberg team reports in a long and important essay, the Gulf War has been “Asia’s Ukraine.”

About two hours from Manila there’s a solar power plant capable of powering 60,000 homes. Surrounded by fields growing okra and eggplant, it had been sitting idle since August, waiting for a connection to the grid — stuck in a queue just like many other renewable energy facilities around the world as power networks struggle to catch up with rising electricity demand.

Then the Iran war cut off the Philippines’ supply of imported liquefied natural gas. Immediately, the government cut fuel taxes and offered free bus rides to the public. Then a few weeks later, as the Strait of Hormuz remained blocked, officials began deploying policies toward a deeper, more structural plan to reduce the country’s dependence on fossil fuels.

One strategy was to fast track more than 30 renewable plants by the end of April. One of those was that 125-megawatt solar plant, built by Citicore Renewable Energy Corp, which is now supplying clean energy to the grid. It is “good timing,” said Joselito Ernst Cañete, operations manager at Citicore, just as electricity demand increases to power air conditioners during the peak summer months.

What happened in the Philppines isn’t an isolated example. With their energy supplies threatened, countries across Asia and Europe have chosen to speed up deployment of renewables and electrification.

Meanwhile, the cheerful solar guru Danny Kennedy chimed in from a conference in Singapore where he found the western politicians and analysts way behind the Asian curve. I will quote from his account at some length because it’s important

Philippines. After declaring a national energy emergency in March, the government activated a whole-of-government mandate for energy security. Regulatory bottlenecks for renewables are being dismantled. Rooftop solar inquiries are up 500% since the crisis began. This is not a green ambition. This is a survival response.³

Vietnam. The country has revised its power development plan, targeting a minimum of 47% renewable electricity generation by 2030. Vietnam is already the region’s largest EV market, and its government has expanded EV tax incentives in direct response to the Iran War’s impact on fuel prices.³ HSBC recently extended $4 billion in clean-tech financing to Chinese firms, much of it flowing into EV and solar exports to Vietnam and ASEAN.⁴

Indonesia. Beyond the factory I visited in Batam, the government is engineering a broad fiscal shift — expanding EV incentives with a target of 2 million electric cars and 12 million electric two-wheelers on the road by 2030. With the world’s largest nickel reserves, Indonesia is positioning itself to replace diesel imports with a domestic battery ecosystem. The logic is national sovereignty as much as climate policy.³ We’ve also talked about their 100GW solar archipelago plans.

Thailand. Advanced its net zero target by 15 full years, to 2050. Solar generation surged 72% in 2025. The country is adding 50 GW of renewables and 14 GW of energy storage by 2037. A major 1 GW module supply deal between China’s GCL-SI and Thailand’s Getz Energy was just signed to support that buildout.⁵ ⁶

Singapore itself. Already scaled solar to 1.7 GW and is executing multi-gigawatt cross-border subsea clean electricity cables from Indonesia, Cambodia, and Vietnam — with a requirement that developers bundle storage at origin for 24/7 firm power delivery. Singapore, to its credit, is acting. The conference, perhaps, just needed a bigger window.³

We already know China and India — the two largest energy consumers in Asia — reached a historic tipping point together in 2025. For the first time, fossil fuel generation fell in both countries simultaneously: China down 0.9%, India down 3.3%.³ These are not small numbers. These are inflection points.

And yet even as this good news is happening, the Chinese are also beginning to shutter many of the solar panel factories that are at the heart of this revolution, because they’re not making enough money. This is, on the hand, understandable, and on the other entirely maddening—these factories are the single most important industrial asset on earth—they are factories for lowering the temperature of the earth. As readers are doubtless painfully aware, I’ve been beating this drum for a good long while, but I’m glad to see others joining in. Adam Tooze, the interesting bricoleur in charge of the Chartbook newsletter, wrote in the FT this week, it would be understandable if we were talking about some mundane commodity like cement.

But solar panels? Since when were solar panels just another commodity? They are a technological miracle. They make us into farmers of the sun. For the past half century, research labs around the world, starting in the 1970s with Nasa spin-offs and the big US energy research push under Jimmy Carter, have been straining to reach this point. Together with batteries, which are also rapidly approaching the point of excess supply, they are the key to a sustainable future.

As Tooze points out, it cost China very little in subsidies ($18 billion) to build this behemoth (though one should probably add in the subsidies that, say, Germany provided to its citizens to buy the early models, underwriting the startup of China’s engineering miracle).

I’ve long argued that on a rational world, trying everything it could to head off the worst of global warming, we would “globalize” these factories, running them 24/7 and then piling up the panels on every railroad siding and wharf on the planet so that people could come take them away. This would be, I think, a backdoor way of achieving a fair amount of what Piketty has in mind, far messier than his global scheme but somewhat more plausible. By some calculations, ten years production from those plants would produce enough panels to provide all the power the world currently uses.

If my sense that the coming El Niño will revive the world’s focus on the climate crisis—well, this is the easiest possible route forward. And it comes not just with more power, but with different power. Elon Musk may be rushing his IPO for data centers in space or whatever the heck he’s currently selling, but some of us will hole up here on earth, quite sufficient with the solar panels in our yards.

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In other energy and climate news:

+Along somewhat these lines, very worth reading the Volts interview with James McGinniss, an entrepreneur pushing small battery systems to tenants and small holders—in the case of his company, mostly business like laundromats and small groceries. He argues that cumulatively they’re going to be…very important

What we’ve found is — this is another mind-blown moment for me — when you look at the National Electric Code and UL certification and how, outside of whatever jurisdiction that you’re in, just what is safe physically to do, you can do hundreds of kilowatt-hours in buildings because there’ll be multiple 200- to 400-amp panels. Each of those — there’s the 120 rule — and you can push a lot more power into them than you think, not just these little batteries. We’re keeping things small because of the current environment that we live in.

The physical, safe way to do it — I see paths to having, imagine in every panel on a commercial building you have a stack of these batteries like a server rack, and they are all plug-in based. You are not just doing one giant system on the roof, which has totally different safety and weight considerations and needs permits, etc. When you think about these metropolitan areas, you could imagine solar on every balcony, solar on the roof, storage on every panel, and they are all plugged in.

You’re talking about megawatt-scale deployments.

+I’ve spent what seems like months of my life trying to dispel the notion lodged in American minds that China is undercutting the climate by endlessly building coal plants; as it happens, China is decreasing its coal use. But not the U.S. (see above); indeed, new data shows that America is now investing more in fossil fuel than the vastly larger People’s Republic. From Josh Gabbatiss:

High demand for electricity to power these data centres has led to companies rushing to build new gas-fired power plants across the country.

This trend, combined with “soaring” gas-turbine prices, drove a threefold increase in US gas‑power investment in 2025 – and the IEA expects this to continue throughout 2026.

As the chart below shows, Chinese investment in coal- and gas-fired power is expected to drop this year, amid domestic policy changes and the Iran war sending gas prices spiralling.

Together, these trends mean the IEA expects US investment in fossil-fuelled power plants to overtake China’s in 2026.

Happily, as Haley Zaremba points out, the solar boom in the U.S. is also continuing despite Trump’s best efforts

Newly released data from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) shows that at the close of last year, solar energy additions were the single largest form of new energy capacity installations for the 28th straight month, starting in September of 2023. In fact, in spite of a broad rollback of Biden-era clean energy incentives since Trump resumed office in January of last year, renewables represented a whopping 88 percent of energy additions in 2025, with utility-scale solar alone counting for 72.6 percent of U.S. electricity additions.

This massive growth trend has caused solar power’s share of the United States energy mix to surpass that of wind power, nuclear power, and hydropower. And while many if not most of these renewable projects were greenlit and funded before Trump took office and rolled back tax cuts and subsidies for solar and wind projects, experts say not to expect a major cooldown any time soon.

In fact, FERC projections show that solar energy installations will continue to grow by 86 gigawatts over the next three years, at which point the sector will surpass coal as well, Trump’s $700 million plan to revive coal production notwithstanding.

Meanwhile, out in Trump’s favorite parts of the world, solar spending in Africa is also outpacing fossil fuels. As Allan Olingo chronicles

Of the 322 energy projects announced across Africa in 2025, 173 were solar projects, followed by hydropower at 46, wind at 34, gas at 22 and hybrid energy projects at 14, according to the energy research firm Electron Intelligence.

“Africa is not on the periphery of the global energy transition, it is sitting at its center,” said Mugwe Manga, climate finance lead at FSD Kenya. “The continent holds the world’s best renewable resources, and the economics have now decisively turned in favor of clean energy.”

According to Olamide Niyi-Afuye, CEO of the Africa Minigrid Developers Association (AMDA), the continent is undergoing a broader strategic shift in how energy infrastructure is being developed, with an emphasis on systems that can be deployed faster and expanded gradually with flexible financing.

+Thanks in no small part to James Talarico (and that Leo fellow), it’s a good season for rethinking the basics of Christian theology. Talarico has reminded us that kindness is somewhat more Scriptural than cruelty; now a California pastor, Jeff Spencer, has written a nifty sermon arguing that the creation story in Genesis was really the first incarnation. And he quotes that California mystic (who knew, thanks to his fundamentalist father, every word of the Bible by heart), John Muir.

“The earth, he said, is a divine ‘incarnation.’ Here, Muir uses a word that most of Western Christianity has reserved exclusively for Jesus. Muir applies it not just to Jesus, not even just to humanity and the creatures, but to the matter of earth itself. Even earth’s geological formations, he says are ‘heaven incarnate’; the rocks can be called ‘instonations’ of God. Everything is in essence spirit, incarnated in flesh, in leaves, in rocks. All these varied forms of matter ‘are simply portions of God,’ wrote Muir. They are all of ‘the God essence.’”

I can’t help but wonder if this long thread of Christian thought, typically suppressed and condemned by the gatekeepers in the church, influenced Father Richard Rohr when he wrote much more recently, “When Christians hear the word ‘incarnation,’ most of us think about the birth of Jesus, who personally demonstrated God’s radical unity with humanity. But I want to suggest that the first Incarnation was the moment described in Genesis 1, when God joined in unity with the physical universe and became the light inside of everything.”

+Annals of divestment: Quebec’s pension fund reports that getting out of fossil energy and into the clean stuff made it a lot of the green stuff.

La Caisse — the Quebec pension fund managing the retirement savings of six million Quebecers — confirmed this month that its exit from oil has paid off financially.

Since launching its climate strategy, its energy investments returned 10 per cent annually, compared to 8 per cent from a global oil index — a gap that amounts to almost $4 billion above what investing in oil companies would have generated.

+You’ve heard about urban legends, but one rural legend—fanned by the same fossil fuel disinfo experts that have been hard at work for decades—is that farmers should reject solar panels because they might shed glass that would somehow end up in future crops. As Austyn Gaffney reports:

In January, Michigan Republican state Rep. Cam Cavitt posted a 51-second clip to Facebook labeled ​“Solar Farm SECRET.” In the segment, he claimed that farmers in his district couldn’t grow potatoes on land where solar developments were sited.

“Frito [Frito-Lay] did the same with the potato growers up by us,” fellow Michigan Republican Rep. Dave Prestin told Cavitt in the clip. ​“Any field that had solar panels installed on it will never be allowed to grow potatoes for human consumption due to the leaching.”

Shockingly, this isn’t true.

PepsiCo, which owns Frito-Lay, told Canary Media that the company ​“has not issued blanket guidance to growers that fields with solar installations will not be accepted.”

Nor is there any published evidence that solar farms have a negative impact on potato farming, according to experts consulted for this story. On the contrary, there is agrivoltaics research showing that potatoes—and many other crops—can benefit from growing alongside shade-making solar panels.

+Denmark is out with its new climate policy, and where others (New York!) are in cowardly retreat, they have decided that they will go to 110% emissions reductions by 2050 (funding work elsewhere to make up for past emissions). I predict that this will end up making them richer, not poorer. They’re also introducing a tax on private jets and cruise ships. Creeping Pikettyism!

Meanwhile in Scandinavia, the Finns are putting huge storage batteries outside a new Microsoft data center that will allow them to capture the excess heat from the facility and use it to warm almost half the house in a large district. As Patrick Jowett writes,

Peter Strannegård, Fortum’s Executive Vice President, Renewables and Decarbonisation, said that once fully implemented, data centre waste heat is expected to cover approximately 40% of the total 2 TWh annual district heating demand of the 250,000 heat users in the area.

The recovery of waste heat from Microsoft’s data centre sites is scheduled to begin step by step next year, Fortum’s update adds, in line with Microsoft’s construction and commissioning schedule.

“As new phases of the data centres are completed, increasing volumes of waste heat will be available for the district heating customers,” the company said. “Waste heat recovery increases local heat production capacity, reduces exposure to fuel price volatility and helps maintain predictable district heating prices.”

Fortum also explained that the set-up of the plants allows heat production to respond flexibly to varying demand, strengthening reliability and price competitiveness of heat production for district heating customers in the area. “For the wider energy system, flexible heat production helps balance electricity demand, particularly during fluctuating renewable generation,” it said.

Meanwhile, as I noted above, the U.S. energy secretary has decided to invest in…coal

+New Zealand’s conservative government has not been particularly planet-friendly, but they are investing in putting solar panels on hundreds of schools

“Early modelling by Energy Efficiency and Conservation Authority (EECA) shows that solar panels are estimated to pay for themselves within five to seven years and a 30kW system - the standard size for a school - could save a school up to $8000 a year in electricity bills,” Energy Minister Simeon Brown said.

“Schools will also have options to sell energy back to the grid, generating an estimated $6.7m in revenue over 10 years.”

+Chelsea Harvey reports that municipal heat preparedness campaigns across the country are suffering from federal funding cuts

The federal government doesn’t define heat waves as a disaster, even as events with fewer victims, like hurricanes and floods, qualify for Federal Emergency Management Agency assistance. So money is short, no matter who’s president. But they said it’s gotten worse under the Trump administration, which has canceled grants ranging from long-term resilience funding from FEMA to tree-planting support from the Forest Service.

Those challenges roared to life at a disaster planning conference in Boston earlier this month. Heat officers from around the country were asked to respond to a fictional scenario in Phoenix, where an imaginary blackout silenced the thrum of air conditioners citywide as temperatures soared to 111 degrees.

Funding lapses were an urgent undercurrent, even as participants dreamed of expanding heat emergency plans and urban cooling projects.

“You can identify those big budget items, and you can advocate for them, but you’re not necessarily going to get them,” Jane Gilbert, a veteran official who has overseen heat programs in Miami, said at the two-day workshop attended by nearly two dozen officials from across the country.

But, did I note, we’ve got plenty of money to subsidize new coal power?

+Very good to see blue states suing the federal government over its dispersal of billions to buy back offshore wind rights. As Ella Nilsen writes,

New York Attorney General Letitia James called the March announcement an “illegal agreement.”

“After repeatedly losing in court, this administration cooked up a sham deal to pay a foreign energy company hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to abandon offshore wind and invest in oil and gas instead,” James said.

The lawsuit was filed in the US District Court for the District of Columbia. State attorneys general from New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Maine, Vermont, Massachusetts and Rhode Island argued on Tuesday the administration had violated the law when executing the March deal — failing to hold a hearing required by law to determine that keeping the offshore wind leases “would likely cause serious harm to life, property, national security, or the environment.”

+Finally some good news. The Trump administration is desperately trying to sell off the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for oil drilling, but it’s almost impossible to find buyers. Only two companies put in bids on small corners of the acreage. Partly this is because campaigners—mostly native Alaskans—have made it toxic: not even Exxon wants to go dig up a wildlife refuge. And partly its because—can you imagine, in the 21st century, making money by digging up oil in the farthest corners of the earth, refining it, shipping it, and then selling it to…who exactly? As Dan McCarthy reported the other day, EVs are taking over the world

Nearly 60% of cars sold in China this year will be electrified.

EV sales are growing rapidly across the rest of Asia, too. This year, sales are expected to leap by over 50% across Asian countries other than China, IEA found, driven in large part by the availability of super affordable Chinese EV models.

In Europe, which has strong emissions standards that push consumers toward EVs, sales are growing especially fast. This year, EVs will make up one-third of new cars sold in the region, powered not only by EV-adoption poster child Norway but also by rapid uptake in Germany, the U.K., and Turkey.

There are moments when it feels like the president’s attention (as occasionally happens when we age) just keeps getting narrower and narrower—the things he really cares about (arch, reflecting pool, Kennedy Center, gilded horse statues) are all within a few miles of his home. He can barely be bothered to stay interested in the war he started in Iran; he’s more concerned with giving pretend tours of his imaginary ballroom. (“You come in, you have cocktails,” he explained to his daughter in law, interviewing him for Fox in true dear-leader fashion. “They they go through the door, in for dinner.”)

But the momentum behind the truly dangerous Project 2025 reordering of our society continues apace, even if—without Elon Musk to give it a face—we aren’t noticing. Late last week the White House announced plans for a major tightening of political control over research grants. Instead of relying on the advice of expert panels as to which research should be funded, as Kevin Bogardus explains

One or more senior political appointees designated by their agency head must conduct “a pre-issuance review” of all discretionary grants, making sure they follow several principles, including to “demonstrably advance the President’s policy priorities.”

Since I enjoy making up new words (though surely someone has beaten me to this?) I’m going to call it “scilencing.”

The danger inherent in this should be entirely obvious. Jeff Mervis at Science interviewed a number of observers:

“What OMB is proposing is not a reform of grants management,” Elizabeth Ginexi, a former program officer at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), writes in a Substack post. “It is a vehicle for complete political control of science … over every stage of the federal science funding lifecycle.” Representative Zoe Lofgren (D—CA), a leading critic of the Trump administration’s research policies, calls the proposal “a dystopian move that would destroy what remains of merit-based review.”

This would be a bad idea in a reason-based administration. In one that believes medieval nonsense about public health and that is eager to deregulate chemicals and end efforts to clean the air, it’s downright lethal.

And there is no doubt where the impulse really originated. The science the Trump administration really hates is climate science, because it threatens the “energy dominance” that the White House has made its basic foreign and economic policy, not to mention the profits of the fossil fuel industry that has been such an attentive donor. It’s not the first time that GOP administrations have tried to stymie climate science. Everyone remembers James Hansen’s crucial 1988 congressional testimony that global warming was underway; fewer recall that when he returned to Congress the next year the White House tried to rewrite and soften the conclusions in his testimony. That was under George H.W. Bush; under his son, in 2006, the White House tried again to rein him in. As he told Andy Revkin, NASA officials

ordered the public affairs staff to review his coming lectures, papers, postings on the Goddard Web site and requests for interviews from journalists.

Dr. Hansen said he would ignore the restrictions. “They feel their job is to be this censor of information going out to the public,” he said.

Hansen was crucial enough—the Paul Revere of climate change—and senior enough that he was able to keep working and speaking. And the scientific research money kept more or less flowing. But now, in this new bureaucratic play, the Office of Management and Budget is trying to make sure that such independence (the single most obvious requirement for scientific advance) is a thing of the past. As John Timmer wrote at Ars Technica

The result is a horror show for US science research. Not only is peer review made a secondary consideration, but the new rules would allow any federal agency to cancel any grant at any time based on the vague assertion that it isn’t in the “national interest.” The document would also ban any grants on a number of culture war topics, limit international collaborations, and block spending on things like publishing papers and attending conferences.

It is, in short, a recipe for how the government can finish the job of crippling American science.

This is not yet a done deal. There is a 45-day comment period for letting the government know what you think of their plan, and 42 of those days remain. Here’s the place to have your say.

I’m not, I must say, convinced they’ll pay great attention to the comments, so it’s also crucial to be letting your congress people know what you think about this attack on science. The congress has so far been able to save at least some of the things Russell Vought has sought to kill: indeed, word came this week that the NOAA budget will include money to keep the carbon dioxide observatory at Mauna Loa (aka the world’s most important scientific instrument) up and running. That’s a direct result of Congress hearing outcry, so let’s keep it up.

Remind them that real leaders actually want to know what science can tell them—case in point, the remarkable new movie, Pressure, which tells the story of how General Eisenhower listened to the new and unorthodox science of meteorology to guide his D-Day decision making. (95 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, for those of you who like numbers).

The good news, I suppose, is that on climate and energy the cat has largely escaped the bag. We do know what the problem is, even if the ramifications become more dire with each passing week. (Here’s a somewhat terrifying update on the prospects for this year’s wildfire season; meanwhile, Tom Harris has the new numbers on Antarctic melt.). And we know where the solution lies. Indeed, it too comes into clearer focus with each passing week. As I wrote earlier this year, the action in the next few years is going to be about batteries, and boy is that proving true. Bloomberg confirmed this week that 2025 was the first year the world installed more than a hundred gigawatts of battery storage, up 48 percent from the year before, and expected to grow another 46 percent this year.

South Australia held a big auction last week for “firm supply” across the territory’s electric grid. This is supposed to be the last place where fossil fuel is superior: always-on power. But all the low bids came from companies that wanted to (and now will) install big batteries. As Giles Parkinson reported

It is yet another sign of the growing dominance of battery storage technology in Australia’s main grids (and off grid).

Big batteries have dominated other long duration storage tenders, particularly in NSW, were it has sidelined pumped hydro projects, and battery storage has been steadily sending gas peakers to the sidelines, particularly in the demand peaks they used to dominate.

Indeed, Australia is emerging as the test case for just how fast and furiously you can switch a grid to clean renewables. Even as its government continues to mine huge amounts of coal to send abroad, it’s providing a generous domestic subsidy for Aussies who want to put smaller batteries in their homes. And that, in turn, is underwriting a revolution on the grid. As Adam Morton and Petra Stock wrote this past week

Nearly 60% of the household-scale battery capacity installed across almost 200 other countries this financial year will be in the southern continent, according to a recent analysis. Since July, about 415,000 have been connected – roughly one unit for every 25 Australian homes.

Previously, power prices would rocket in the evenings as gas-fired power – the most expensive form of energy generation on the Australian grid – was turned on to meet peak demand. With solar and wind now providing nearly half the electricity, and coal-fired power plants gradually closing, gas has been used to fill gaps after the sun sets.

But batteries are increasingly taking over that role. Total gas-fired generation was 24% lower across three months this summer compared with the year before. Tennant Reed, the climate change and energy director with the Australian Industry Group, representing more than 60,000 businesses, says it has “completely changed how electricity prices are formed”.

I hope you’ll go back and read the sentence I italicized in the last paragraph: the use of gas to create electricity dropped 23 percent in a year. This is much like what’s happened in California, where Mark Jacobson reports that the world’s fourth largest economy is using 60% less gas to produce electricity than it did three years ago. That changes on this scale are possible is precisely what terrifies the fossil fuel industry, and in turn the Trump administration.

And the possibilities are everywhere. Canary Media’s Julian Spector wrote last week, a new global report shows that these so-called “firm renewables” (wind and sun coupled with batteries)

“has crossed the threshold of cost competitiveness with new fossil fuel generation,” in areas with plenty of sun or wind. ​“The central question is no longer whether firm renewables can compete on cost, but how quickly the structural conditions needed to realise their potential can be put in place across the diversity of markets and institutional contexts prevailing globally.”

China sets the bar with its shockingly low cost of firm renewables today.

IRENA looked at 252 solar projects that went online there in 2024 and found that many of them could be augmented with extra solar capacity and batteries to deliver power cheaper than the $100-per-megawatt-hour benchmark for new gas-fired plants. Almost all the modeled solar-battery plants could beat that cost for firm clean power 90% of the time; even at the higher reliability threshold of 99%, nearly half the projects remained competitive, and the lowest cost was $46 per megawatt-hour.

And would any of this be, I don’t know, politically popular?

Beginning one month from tomorrow, Australians, whether they have solar panels or batteries or none of the above will get three free hours of electricity every afternoon from noon to three. If you want to know why our government needs to shut up scientists and ward off engineers, that’s why.

Oh, they’re also trying to shut down the world’s central archive of disasters, which lets us learn from the past. I predict that will not slow the pace of trouble.

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In other energy and climate news:

+Science is constantly self-correcting, and now the big climate assessments will drop the RCP 8.5 “high emissions” scenario, because…we’re moving quickly towards lower emissions (see above). But that’s not “good news”—the current trajectory still has the planet warming 3.5 degrees Celsius before the century is out, which is more than enough to turn our civilizations upside down. In fact—as recent data about the great Atlantic currents has made clear—it’s becoming clear that we can do far more systemic damage to the earth at lower temperatures than we once thought; the earth is finely balance.

From the remarkable Stefan Rahmstorf and colleagues, a new paper on the situation in the north Atlantic:

A region of the northern Atlantic–sometimes called the “cold blob”–has cooled since the 19th Century while the rest of the world has warmed. It is particularly the ocean which has cooled there. Scientists have been discussing whether this is because ocean currents bring less heat into this region, or because more heat is being lost through the sea surface there. An analysis of temperature data sets based on measurements show it is the former–changing ocean heat transport–which dominates heat content changes in the “cold blob.”

This is a sign that those great currents are slowing—not good news.

+Great reporting from Amy Westervelt and Geoff Dembicki about the “shadowy global network of right wing think tanks” that, among other things, works to make climate protest illegal

With more than 500 member think tanks globally, the network remains robust. Atlas members are in regular contact with each other, sharing ideas, tips, and strategies. (The network has even bragged about being an early adopter of the internet.) Representatives from member think tanks meet up at annual right-wing events in the U.S. and elsewhere. Ideas are shared between member think tanks via various publications, including the quarterly Freedom’s Champion magazine, a Latin America podcast, and various books in both English and Spanish (even a cookbook!).

Alejandro Chafuen, an Argentine American businessman who took over the Atlas Network presidency in 1991 and remained in charge until 2018, once described the network’s audience in one word: elites.

“To answer the question ‘Who is the real customer of a think tank?’” he said,” I will refer to the often ignored passage of Ludwig von Mises, in his book Bureaucracy. In it he describes a type of person—elite—who I believe is not only the real customer of Atlas and many think tanks, but also our ideal customer, who benefits us and is served by us.”

+A new study published this week estimates mortality from the growing number of savage heatwaves in India, and the news is… not good

We estimate that a single day of extreme heat causes approximately 3,400 excess deaths nationally; a five-day heatwave causes nearly 30,000.

These findings have implications not only for India but also for other countries in South Asia and Sub Saharan Africa facing similar heat vulnerabilities, highlighting the global urgency of heat adaptation measures. With respect to heatwave frequency and temperature thresholds, these estimates are conservative lower bounds.

+Jan Rosenow offers a cheery update on just how fast we’re learning to use electricity to power industrial processes—that’s about a third of emissions, and even a couple of years ago we were thinking of those as “hard to abate.” No longer

Today, electricity meets only about a fifth of industry’s final energy. Across the full set of scenarios, the median rises to 35% by 2050. But that average hides the more interesting story. In the scenarios built around strong climate ambition, fast power-sector decarbonisation and supportive industrial policy, electrification reaches a median of 51% by 2050, with the upper tail going as high as 85%.

Electrification is a structural fossil fuel phase-out and decarbonisation lever, not a marginal one. Swapping an industrial gas boiler for a heat pump cuts emissions on day one, and then keeps cutting them automatically as the grid gets cleaner. Industrial heat pumps, electric boilers, electro-thermal storage and resistance heating can already replace large shares of low and medium-temperature heat.

A case in point: Carly Leonida, writing from this year’s Electric Mine conference in Lisbon, Portugal, has a compelling account of the way that electricity is coming to the world’s mines.

Miners presenting in Lisbon weren’t discussing pilot vehicles in isolated trial environments. Instead, they were talking about ventilation bottlenecks, charging strategies, battery swap logistics, productivity metrics and operational redesign.

At Eldorado Gold’s Lamaque Complex in Québec, for example, battery-electric equipment is no longer viewed primarily as a decarbonisation initiative. Instead, it has become a practical solution to a mine-planning challenge.

Speaking during the underground mining stream, Eldorado Gold’s Martin Pichette explained that the company’s electrification strategy was driven initially by the realities of deeper mining. As haul distances increase and mines extend further underground, ventilation infrastructure becomes increasingly difficult and expensive to expand.

+A delegation of Texas community leaders has gone to Japan to ask them to stop financing a big new LNG terminal in Freeport. From Oil Change International:

This is the first time a community harmed by a Japanese-funded LNG project has filed a series of coordinated complaints against the whole chain of project financiers —targeting both Japanese public institutions JBIC and NEXI, private megabanks MUFG, Mizuho, and SMBC, and the Japanese power company JERA.

The complaints come as Japan faces mounting scrutiny of its fossil fuel dependency, with the soaring oil and gas prices due to the Hormuz crisis exposing the vulnerability of Japan’s long-term LNG strategy. In October 2025, Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi signed a $550 billion US investment commitment in a desperate attempt to mitigate tariffs and appease President Trump. Prime Minister Takaichi announced the first tranche with a $36 billion commitment to US oil and gas investments.

+Here’s a shocker. That good neighbor Elon Musk is adding a bunch more gas turbines to his AI factory in Mississippi.

Meanwhile, just in case you’re wondering if renewable energy is really cheaper, new data shows that the cost of natural gas power plants has gone up 68% in this country since 2023, largely thanks to the data center rush. As Josh Saul writes, this is

adding to customer and political concerns about rising power bills.

The average project expense for a gas power plant with combined-cycle turbines, the more efficient type, rose to $2,157 per kilowatt last year from less than $1,500 in 2023, according to a report from BloombergNEF.

+Florida is spending a lot of money on “beach renourishment”—but not enough to keep up with rising sea levels and growing storms. As Jack Randall reports:

On the Treasure Coast, renourishments have cost about $75.6 million in St. Lucie County, $40.5 million in Indian River County and $39.3 million in Martin County, according to TCPalm’s analysis of data that ends in 2025.

Dumping new sand on diminishing beaches is the prominent method federal, state and local governing authorities use to shore up erosion. It’s a strategy that has been criticized by researchers and environmentalists, who question its long-term efficacy as sea levels continue to rise.

Harold Wanless, a professor and researcher at the University of Miami, called the continued use of beach renourishment “ridiculous.”

“They never last,” Wanless said. “They don’t protect well, partly because of sea level rise.”

+Much of Europe just suffered through its greatest May heatwave ever. Among the casualties, competitors at the French Open tennis tournament. From Tumaini Carayol:

The 26th seed, Jakub Mensik, described the conditions as “insane to play in” after collapsing with cramps and having to be escorted towards the locker room in a wheelchair after his five-set second-round win over Mariano Navone on Wednesday.

Despite being well known for his durability, the two-time French Open finalist Casper Ruud completely overheated in the first round and looked on his way out before recovering in the fifth set to defeat Roman Safiullin. “I felt at times really dizzy and just really tired and walking around like a zombie almost,” Ruud said.

As Bob Henson reports, there’s nothing natural about the heat

“This is an unprecedented event with a one in 1,000 chance of happening at this time of year in the climate of 1979 to 2025,” climate scientist Christophe Cassou told Le Monde, referring to the heat wave in France. “It would have been virtually impossible in the preindustrial era.”

Many European schools were built in a much cooler era, and are paying the price. As Chico Harlan and Leontine Gallois write

Traditionally in Europe, schools were built to withstand cold, not heat, and air-conditioning was rarely necessary. But now the temperature extremes once associated with summer vacation are pushing into the academic year, creating stifling conditions and leading to criticism that Europe’s schools have been slow to contend with the shifting patterns of climate change.

This week, as May heat records tumbled across England and parts of France, a French teachers union shared an internal survey showing that temperatures had eclipsed 82 degrees Fahrenheit in 90 percent of middle and high schools. They accused some administrative districts of putting off investments to reduce heat exposure.

Meanwhile, as Joe Lo writes from the UK

In my neighbourhood, people are struggling to cope. The fish and chip shop has shut. My child’s teachers are battling to keep them in front of the air conditioner. And my evening football match was conducted at walking pace, with red-faced players hogging the shady side of the pitch.

And remember: this is May.

Meanwhile, a new report from the World Meteorological Organization on what to expect globally in the next five years. Not just that we’ll shatter global temperature records but also that

an overheating Arctic will warm nearly 3 degrees Fahrenheit (1.66 degrees Celsius) between now and 2030 and a dangerous drought with potential wildfires for the Amazon, a crucial part of Earth’s natural defenses to lessen human-caused climate change.

+Not surprising, but nonetheless grim: a new study finds that air pollution devastates young lungs. Gary Fuller describes the research:

They found that breathing more air pollution during pregnancy, infancy and early childhood can slow lung development all the way up to early adulthood. The greatest impact was during adolescence, which is the time when lung growth accelerates.

An earlier study found that air pollution was reducing the growth of children’s lungs in east London. Here, the average nine-year-old’s lungs were between 90 and 100 millilitres smaller than they should be. This is approximately the volume of two hen’s eggs.

+Interesting data from UMass Amherst finds that most big solar projects in the U.S. don’t meet much opposition at all

The study, published in the journal Energy Research & Social Science, looked at 686 utility-scale solar projects that came online between January 2022 and November 2023. Researchers found that 56% of the projects fell into “no” or “low” conflict categories, while just 19% experienced high levels of conflict.

Larger solar projects were more likely to generate opposition, but one finding stood out: The political makeup of the surrounding community didn’t appear to make much difference. The study found no statistically significant link between the share of Democratic voters near projects and levels of opposition.

+And finally, good news from China about the return of bike culture.

When I first visited China many decades ago, it was predominartly a bike country. Even in Beijing, great waves of bicyclists silently crossed the city. In subsequent visits, it was painful to watch the rise of car traffic, and with it great traffic jams, not to mention crazy quantities of air pollution. When I’d meet with mayors, I’d say: don’t copy Houston. Copy Copenhagen. I think I had exactly zero influence, but now officials are making a concerted effort to push cycling. As the folks at the Dutch Cycle Network report

When the master plan for the brand new District of Tongzhou was being developed, the directive from the Beijing Mayor—who had just returned from a trip to the Netherlands—was clear: it must put cycling front and centre. At its spine: a 2.7 km corridor connecting its commercial and residential hubs.

In order to fulfil this vision of a world-class sustainable infrastructure project, they went to the Dutch Cycling Embassy; selecting the engineers at Haskoning (including Jasper Homrighausen and Wim van der Wijk) for their extensive experience with regional doorfiets (“non-stop cycling”) routes, to partner with a Beijing-based consultant.

Designed using best practice and principles straight out of the CROW Manual for Bicycle Traffic, the route features a five-metre width for safety, underpasses for directness, shade trees for comfort, and a series of bespoke light fixtures (inscribed with the words “all roads are connected”) for attractiveness.”

I’ll leave you with a picture of the new Beijing “cycle highway,” and a reminder to write your public comments to the Trump administration about the folly of scilencing, especially if we even want to compete with the Chinese…

But sometimes, the combatants in that fierce battle can forget that most people aren’t engaged in it at all, and that there are ways to open their minds to new possibilities. It’s why, for instance, Sun Day last year featured not just great art and music, but also many people opening their doors—front, and driver’s side—to let others see their heat pumps or their solar arrays or their EVs, demystifying and then in some good sense remystifying the choices suddenly available to everyone. That’s one reason that there was such a surge of legislative action in Sun Day’s wake, and why we’re now closing in on ten states that will let their citizens employ plug-in solar units. (New York’s legislature is oh so close at this writing—if you’re in the Empire State, remind your Rep or Senator to pass the SUNNY Act).

In a small essay a couple of weeks ago on the trouble that Honda is having coping with the changing American politics around EVs, I thought Zachary Shahan made this point about imagination pretty well:

I actually see a lot of ads for electric vehicles. Many or perhaps even most of the car ads I see are for EVs, and not just on the internet where they are tracking my activity. I see ads for all kinds of electric vehicles on TV. However, they all seem to follow a similar formula — run a normal car ad, and maybe show the car plugged in for a second or two. I don’t recall ever seeing an auto ad highlight in an eye-opening or funny way how convenient home charging is, or how nice it is to never have to visit a gas station. I never see an ad highlight the unusual, fun, and useful benefit of instant torque. I don’t see them showing how much more relaxing and enjoyable one-pedal driving is. I don’t even see them making a point of the HUGE potential fuel savings!

That strikes me as a fairly important idea. Something like 16 million new cars will be sold in the U.S. this year, and the percentage of them that run on gas really matters; among other things, it’s key to breaking the political power of the fossil fuel industry. And this should be a great moment, with gas prices going Strait up. And yet if you watch a baseball game, the car ads are mostly the same as they always have been, with chevroned squads of cars tracking across a desert or bounding up a snowy road. (I have dear friends whose house in Castle Valley Utah is closest to the butte where carmakers helicopter in their latest models for those ads, which always struck me as particularly funny—displaying automobiles in pretty much the one place on our continent you can’t actually drive them).

What if, instead, you had an ad where somebody just looked at the camera and explained that they’d had theirs for a year and never visited a gas station because the gas station was in their garage. What if you had, say, a mechanic who was sad that EVs never needed fixing because they had so few moving parts? (Yes, I’m old enough to remember the Maytag repairman ads, which debuted in 1967, describing the sorry life of a man whose job it was to repair an appliance that refused to break. Those ads were good enough that I can remember them sixty years later). You could do worse than having this telegenic Stanford professor simply explain that driving an EV would save you somewhere between $20k and $40k over the life of a car.

In an ideal world, of course, you’d also be seeing ads reminding you to take the train, and pitching the virtues of an e-bike. And it’s not as if consumer choices alone are going to bend the curves that need bending steeply enough. But it’s more about changing peoples’s cognitive map (to borrow a phrase from Kim Stanley Robinson’s commencement talk), because that map is now outdated. In a world where ads made fun of gas guzzlers, it would be easier to elect politicians who upheld mandates.

Which, I suspect, is the reason we don’t see such ads. Most of the big EV makers also produce gas cars; they’re disinclined to cannibalize their sales. (And they know that car dealers generally hate EVs, precisely because they’re low-maintenance, to the point that they actively sabotage sales). It is a genuine stroke of bad luck that the main guy who just made EVs turned out to be a Nazi-saluting nutjob whose obituary will feature prominently the fact that he managed to kill a few million people in a weekend by shutting down USAID.

So we’re probably not going to see a slew of great ads. Instead, we’ll fight ongoing battles to ban Big Oil’s pitches (Amsterdam just put city-owned buildings and vehicles off limits, and Miranda Green argues the idea should spread). We’ll need Laura Ranzato to keep up her fight at Clean Creatives, pressuring ad agencies to stop collaborating with fossil fuel. But there are always glimmers. Here’s a brand new electric truck, no larger than a Mini-Cooper but which through some design legerdemain not only carries eight people but also your stuff. I’d watch an ad about that. Here’s the first electric Ferrari, designed by Jony Ive of iPhone fame and revealed this week to the, um, masses. But hey, the simple fact that the badge most associated with speed now comes in silent electric, with the Apple seal of cool, is something.

Politics is the place where the lack of imagination is most important, of course. The Canadian analyst Seth Klein, whose substack Emergency Measures crosses the 49th parallel in style, had some observations on this topic last week, timely in the face of sad retrograde action like Kathy Hochul’s in New York or (again in Klein’s telling) Mark Carney’s north of the border. As he points out,

even when governments are prepared to spend billions of dollars, these expenditures almost always take the form of tax credits, loan guarantees or even more wonky ideas like “carbon contracts for difference” – all efforts to incentivize private sector actors to make climate-oriented investments – rather than a willingness to spend big on public infrastructure.

This, in a way, was Joe Biden’s failure—the IRA was the right policy, but hidden behind such a welter of obscurities that the public never connected it with much of anything. Not surprisingly, Klein praises Kim Stanley Robinson, but also Molly Crabapple, whose 2019 animated portrayal of a working future—narrated by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez—helped build the support for a Green New Deal that eventually got the IRA passed, albeit in badly amputated form. (Klein’s brother-in-law Avi Lewis wrote the script for that video; he is the newly crowned head of Canada’s left-wing party the NDP, not to mention the husband of Seth’s sister Naomi, who’s always had the deep imaginative gift for figuring out what the moment demands).

Climate communications guru Jamie Henn and former Rhode Island state rep Aaron Regunberg, writing in Jacobin, says making this kind of connection is absolutely necessary.

Fox News and the Koch network and the fossil fuel industry, flush with war profiteering cash that can be funneled into lobbying campaigns to further rig the game against renewables, will keep spreading disinformation and polarizing against climate action. And in the absence of a potent social demand for that action, the political will for real decarbonization — in the face of obstacles, trade-offs, and entrenched opposition interests — risks collapsing.

There are lots of important questions and debates we can and should be having about how to rebuild an explicit popular climate discourse over time. But the argument that we shouldn’t be trying to do that at all contradicts the polling data and is an argument for accepting climate catastrophe — something all of us should resist.

And here in fact is a government official making the case—David Hochschild, California’s energy czar, speaking on David Fenton’s podcast. It’s powerful stuff—after all, his state is using 60 percent less natural gas to make electricity than it was three years ago. (Oh, and for Californians, Leah Stokes making the correct case not to cut back on the state’s “demand-side grid support program.” Gavin Newsom is going to be running for a president with a lot of enviros asking questions).

More of this please. As Klein says,

Dire as things are, we all need to be alive to the hopeful trends: China looks to have peaked its GHG emissions, years ahead of schedule, and is producing a coal-power plant’s worth of solar panels every day; Europe is driving down emissions much faster than Canada; in Norway, 97 per cent of new vehicle sales are now zero-emission; in the UK, emissions are now lower than at any time since the start of the industrial revolution in the late 1800’s; Pakistan, Vietnam, and the Philippines are all cancelling plans to import LNG, turning instead to solar; and around the world, the adoption of renewable energy is exploding.

These, of course, are the stories I try to tell here, and for just the reason that Klein describes: we need to

bust open our collective imagination, so we can resolve to meet the emergencies we face, and mobilize around solutions as big as the crises we confront.

I confess that I, like the Pope (and that’s a fun phrase to write) have great faith in the powers of the particularly human imagination. Climate change, to me, has always seemed like a test of whether or not the big brain was a sound adaptation: obviously it can get us in a lot of trouble, but can it get us out of that trouble? The longer I live, the more I’m convinced that the answer to that question has mostly to do with the size of the heart that brain is attached to. In the end, “imagination” is about enlarging that heart.

We are ruled for the moment by a man with no discernible heart at all. (I mean, he skipped his own son’s wedding last weekend, doubtless annoyed at the thought of two hours where the focus was not on him). As a result, his “imagination” is confined to building every-bigger memorials to himself. May our revulsion take the form of building monuments to something much bigger: a working human future.

The day may come when imagination is no longer so necessary in this fight. David Roberts interviewed my old friend Pier Lafarge on his podcast last week, and they argued that the rapid spread of batteries may someday reduce electricity to the status of “cheap, abundant, and boring.” But getting there is going to mean more imagination, not less. It’s our job now.

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In other energy and climate news:

+The climate world lost a key figure last week with the death of Rafe Pomerance, deputy assistant secretary of state for environment and development from 1993 to 1999 and an author of the Kyoto Accords. There have been many good obituaries, but I’d rather quote from his last essay, published a month ago from his Florida home, which argues that policy makers should set an “upper limit” on sea level rise in order to guide their planning.

Last week, the Upper Limit Project submitted a recommendation to the United Nations as part of its global consultation on a forthcoming Declaration on Sea Level Rise. The goal of that declaration is to strengthen international cooperation around one of the most immediate and irreversible consequences of climate change.

Our message was simple: The world needs a clear, measurable “upper limit” on sea-level rise to protect our communities and economies.

For years, global climate efforts have rallied around the goal of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, as outlined in the Paris Agreement. That benchmark has helped focus policy and stimulate investment. But when it comes to communicating the necessary urgency, temperature rise alone misses the mark. It does not tell people what climate change will mean for their homes, their communities or their coastlines.

Sea-level rise does.

It translates abstract warming into visible, lived consequences: flooded streets, collapsed homes and infrastructure, eroding shorelines, disappearing wetlands and forced migration. Without a defined upper limit, we are navigating toward increasingly dangerous outcomes without a shared understanding of where the danger lies — or how to avoid it.

We measure what we value. If we value the survival of coastal communities, we must define the limits of what they can endure.

Establishing an upper limit on sea-level rise — a metric set to achieve the lowest possible rate of increase — would complement existing temperature goals and provide a tangible benchmark to guide decisions. It would help governments, businesses and communities better assess risk, plan infrastructure, and determine when adaptation is no longer enough and relocation becomes necessary.

+If you have a balcony solar system in Europe, you can now go to Lidl and put down 299 euros for a battery that will titrate the flow of electrons from your panel and supply your home through the night. This is not much money. Meanwhile, in Germany a virtual power plant comprised of hooked-together home batteries in just one company’s network this spring surpassed a gigawatt, making it as big as a nuclear power plant.

This allows us to use electricity exactly when it is available in abundance or feed it back into the grid when prices are high and supply is scarce," says Philipp Schröder, CEO and Co-Founder of 1KOMMA5°. "While politics continue to debate the construction of new gas-fired power plants as a reserve for times with little wind and sun, we at 1KOMMA5° see the enormous, existing potential in millions of private households."

+A state of emergency declared in Utah after their “no-pack” (as opposed to snow pack) winter.

“For much of the state,” AccuWeather Senior Meteorologist Tom Kines explained, “It’s been since October that they had a month of precipitation above the historical average.”

The forecast isn’t good. While the weather pattern over the summer might lead to more numerous thundershowers, especially during July and into August, it probably won’t be enough to end the drought since the rainfall deficit is large, Kines said

+The invaluable Jeff Masters reports on the latest findings in hurricane research, just as this year’s Atlantic season officially gets underway. In essence, we’re likely to see a bifurcation between years with little hurricane activity (as more wind shear in a warmer world knocks the tops off storms) and years with skeins of monstrous storms.

A 2025 study led by Avantika Gori of Rice University, Sensitivity of tropical cyclone risk across the US to changes in storm climatology and socioeconomic growth, looked at how damages from wind, rainfall, and storm surge would change under a moderate global warming scenario. The study found that the fraction of increased hurricane damages because of climate change would grow by the end of the century to be roughly equal to the increased damages from higher exposure (assuming a 2% annual growth in GDP). The combined increased costs for hurricane damage for the future (2070-2100) period compared to the historical (1980-2005) period would be truly extraordinary, if no additional adaptation measures are taken: a 633% increase, the paper said.

Gori’s prediction is by no means a worst-case outcome, because the study assumed a moderate global warming scenario. Even in a best-case scenario — which I’ll explore in a future post — development is going to continue in flood-prone places. And there are at least four ways that hurricane scientists are very confident that climate change will make hurricanes worse:

• The strongest hurricanes will get stronger.

• Hurricanes will rapidly intensify more quickly and more often.

• Hurricanes will dump more rain.

• Storm surge damage will rise because of rising sea levels.

+As northeastern governors falter in their efforts to bolster clean energy, they’re increasingly allowing new natural gas pipelines to be built—the kind of penny wise and pound idiotic step that will leave ratepayers stuck for decades to come. Enbridge’s Project Beacon would expand the size of existing pipelines in New England, for instance, as Miriam Wasser reports

" New England's energy challenges are not going be solved by increasing the supply of fossil fuels," said Caitlin Peale Sloan of the Conservation Law Foundation. "We fundamentally need to be looking at decreasing peak need for gas overall, and we need to be really carefully reckoning with the cost that these resources put on to customers and people who have to breathe air when fuels are being burned."

Opposition is forming to the plans as well. In New York, the once-rejected Constitution Pipeline is back on the books, and if you want to send a letter protesting the idea, here’s the address. If you’d rather hike, there’s plans for a 113-mile “Women’s Water Walk” later this summer but I am reliably informed that men will be welcome as well. As the organizers say

The pipeline would cut through 125 miles of forests, wetlands, wild habitats and rural farm communities and provide a corridor of power for AI data centers, fracked gas power plants and deafening compressor stations.

We refuse to allow these projects that put profit over life. We choose thriving communities, rich soil, productive farms, abundant fish, waterfalls, wildlife, clean water, healthy air, a stable climate, and the rich biodiversity of our forests.

+Coal plants not only fill the air with co2, they also fill the air with pollution that makes solar panels less effective. A new study spearheaded by Rui Song attempts to quantify the damage

A global, facility-level dataset shows that aerosols reduced global PV generation by 5.8% in 2023 (111 TWh). From 2017 to 2023, annual aerosol-induced PV energy losses from existing systems were, on average, equivalent to one-third of the energy added by new PV installations. In China, aerosols caused the largest PV energy losses worldwide, reducing national PV generation by 7.7% in 2023.

+From the excellent minds at the Pacific Northwest’s Sightline Institute, an argument that the climate solution “hiding in plain sight” is…apartments.

Erecting an abundance of apartment buildings, along with duplexes and other so-called middle housing, in cities and towns across America, is an impressively effective way to trim emissions of greenhouse gases. That’s largely because apartments are overwhelmingly more electrically powered than standalone houses, they use less land and building materials, and their residents require less transportation energy to go about their daily lives. Helpfully, too, there’s already a growing movement fighting for and winning the right to build more of these much-needed apartment homes: the pro-housing movement.

Climate leaders, dispirited by watching so many of their dreams dashed, could log gratifying victories for the climate in the immediate future by joining this swelling, bipartisan pro-homes progress. Indeed, they can reap large emissions reductions by shifting even slivers of their time and money toward pro-homes advocacy.

+Those radicals at the Wall Street Journal have decreed that the best and cheapest car deal in America is…used EVs.

With rising oil prices and more used EVs coming off leases every month, the total cost of ownership equation has flipped. A recent analysis by researchers at the University of Michigan found this holds true across a variety of vehicle types, U.S. cities and charging patterns.

“The reason why we’re seeing sales of used EVs grow so much is that they hit the right price points,” says Kevin Roberts, director of economic and market intelligence at the car-search site CarGurus.

“In an expensive, affordability-constrained environment, used EVs represent the best value for consumers now,” says Roberts.

+Speaking of cheap, as Jan Rosenow explains, Spain’s massive buildout of sun and windpower is producing some of the cheapest electricity in Europe for its citizens.

In a wholesale electricity market, the price in any given hour is set by the most expensive plant that needs to run to meet demand. For most of Europe, for most of the last decade, that has been a gas plant. The merit-order link from gas prices to power prices is the reason European households got an electricity bill shock when Russian pipeline gas collapsed in 2022.

What has quietly happened in Spain is that gas now sets the price far less often. In 2022, gas was the marginal plant in roughly 55% of all hours. In 2024 it had fallen to 27%. By the first four months of 2026, it was just 9%.

+The good folks at Faith in Place have been handing out test equipment to more than a hundred Chicago households, so they can monitor the air inside their homes—and if you ever wanted a reason to spend $60 on an induction hot plate, here’s what they found.

The majority of Chicago households are unknowingly living with and breathing unhealthy pollution (especially Carbon Monoxide and Nitrogen Dioxide) inside their homes that in some cases far exceeds health-protective standards for outdoor air.

They listed five key findings:

1. Carbon monoxide found in 8 in 10 homes; half of the homes exceeded outdoor standard.

2. ​It’s not the food. It’s the fuel. Stove use increased indoor pollution within minutes—quickly exceeding levels set for outdoor air quality standards.​

3. In some homes, pollution was detected beyond the kitchen after stove use.​

4. Kitchen ventilation was often limited or weak.​

5. Testing changed how residents understood their homes.

+Climate activism—a potent force among the young for the last decade—is producing a remarkable set of leaders. Will Lawrence, co-founder of the Sunrise Movement that brought us the Green New Deal, is in a tight congressional primary in Michigan, and this week won the endorsement of fellow climate champ Bernie Sanders.

“Will is running an energizing, people-powered campaign and building a strong grassroots coalition that is prepared to stand up to Big Money interests,” Sanders said. “Will is exactly the kind of leader we need in Congress, and I’m proud to support his campaign.”

This is how it’s supposed to work, us old guys pushing forward the next generation.

+Finally, since we’ve been talking about imagination, here’s a quite wonderful stop motion animation from Sophie Davis and Luke Fatora, entitled Light.

One way to think about the climate crisis is that we are systematically reducing the margin on which we live on this planet. There were always places where humans couldn’t live: the Antarctic, the centers of the great deserts, the high mountains. But now we’re systematically adding to that list, as places become dangerously combustible, or overrun by rising seas, or just plain too hot. We’re shrinking the board on which we play the sublime game of being human. I was thinking of this today because I read a truly remarkable piece in the New York Times, the kind of reporting that justifies a subscription despite all the endless disappointments. It was written by Peter Goodman, with powerful photographs from Finbarr O’Reilly.

The two of them traveled widely in recent weeks across Somalia, and what they found—well, you need to read the whole thing. But climate change and war are making life there almost impossible, and now that the U.S. has shut down the U.S. Agency for International Development the “almost” is disappearing.

For nine days, they trudged across the parched soil of southern Somalia, taking turns carrying their 3-year-old daughter on their shoulders. Abdullahi Abdi Abdirahman, his wife and their seven children sought escape from a landscape drained of life.

Another drought had killed their goats and sheep, turning their life savings to dust. So they pressed on for 140 miles toward Dollow, a dusty outpost on the Ethiopian border. They were drawn by the same things that had already attracted more than 100,000 other people: International relief organizations were clustered there, offering food, water and health care.

Yet when they arrived in late January at a camp on the fringes of town, they were horrified to learn that aid groups had abandoned the area. President Trump had dismantled the U.S. Agency for International Development, or U.S.A.I.D., eliminating Somalia’s primary source of assistance. From London to Berlin, governments had reduced funding for humanitarian aid. Relief organizations had been forced to choose where to focus their remaining money.

Let me get my anger out of the way first. Elon Musk, in particular, shut down US AID—boasted about “feeding it to the woodchipper” in the first weekend of his DOGE assault on the federal government. That is to say, the richest man in the world did this, under the auspices of our government. His cruelty and his self-regard—and his abject racism—know no bounds.

And then the most piggish and self-involved man in the world, Donald Trump, started a war in Iran, and now the price of fertilizer is through the roof, making life much harder for the people who grow food in Africa (and those who eat it). And an El Niño is now bearing down on the planet, riding on the highest temperatures in human history, which were caused mostly by us in the western world. All of it taken together is too much

Drought ravaged the most recent harvest. Some 6.5 million people — roughly one third of the population — were suffering hunger at levels deemed an emergency, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization warned in February. That included more than 1.8 million children under 5 facing acute malnutrition.

Those numbers have almost certainly increased given the war. Yet the World Food Program, the largest source of aid in Somalia, has only enough funding to support 300,000 people a month through July, a fraction of the nearly 2 million people a month it was reaching in early 2025.

Humanitarian relief organizations now contemplate a surreal hierarchy of suffering.

“There are different categories of starvation,” said Hameed Nuru, the World Food Program’s Somalia director. “We are only able to reach those who are really on the verge of, if you don’t give them something now, they will not be there tomorrow.”

In some areas, children are still getting food, but not pregnant mothers. “Literally, it’s who dies first,” he said, “and who dies next.”

Somalia is, of course, a particularly apt place to do this reporting. Trump has referred to its citizens as “garbage people,” and he and Stephen Miller dispatched ICE to Minneapolis to hunt Somalis. As it happens, it’s on the fairly short list of places I’ve never been, but one of my closest colleagues is Somali, and she is as fine a human being as I know, so I thought of her as I read and re-read this piece. But as Goodman points out in his reporting, Somalia is by no means unique.

Indeed, the news this week of a new Ebola outbreak elsewhere in Africa reminds us of another way we keep shrinking the world: there are places it’s too dangerous to go because we’ve unleashed diabolical illnesses. As Kat Lay reports:

The Global Preparedness Monitoring Board (GPMB) said in a report published on Monday that “as infectious disease outbreaks become more frequent they are also becoming more damaging”, warning that pandemic risk is outpacing investments in preparedness and “the world is not yet meaningfully safer”.

Disease outbreaks are becoming more likely due to the climate crisis and armed conflict, while collective action is being undermined by geopolitical fragmentation and commercial self-interest, the report said.

In fact, it’s more or less Musk again—he made a joke at a presidential cabinet meeting about “accidentally” cutting Ebola funding, but insisted it had been restored, something that—and this will shock you—seems not to be entirely true.

In Geneva, Prof Matthew Kavanagh, director of the Georgetown University Center for Global Health Policy & Politics, said aid cuts may have played a role in leaving the world “playing catch-up against a very dangerous pathogen”.

He said: “Because early tests looked for the wrong strain of Ebola, we got false negatives and lost weeks of response time. By the time the alarm was raised, the virus had already moved along major transport routes and crossed borders.

“This crisis didn’t happen in a vacuum. When you pull billions out of the WHO and dismantle frontline USAID programmes, you gut the exact surveillance system meant to catch these viruses early. We are seeing the direct, deadly consequences of treating global health security as an optional expense.”

That margin is thinner all the time. Consider this report from Laura Paddison about the heatwave that shook India last week: there was a day when all the fifty hottest cities on our planet were in that country.

On April 27, average peak temperatures across all 50 Indian cities on the list hit 112.5 degrees Fahrenheit.

Top of AQI’s list was the city of Banda in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, which has a harsh, sub-tropical climate which often delivers brutal summers.

Even before what are typically hottest summer months, the heat has ratcheted up. On April 27, temperatures in Banda reached 115.16 degrees, according to AQI, the highest temperature recorded anywhere on the planet that day. The coolest Banda got, in the early hours of that morning, was 94.5 degrees…

Experts have warned heat in India is becoming so extreme, it may “cross the survivability limit” for healthy humans by 2050.

Across the border in Pakistan, as Asad Mumtaz Rid reports, it’s at least as bad.

In southern Pakistan throughout April and May, temperatures have risen far above seasonal norms. In Sindh, daytime temperatures have frequently crossed 44C to 46C, forcing residents indoors during peak afternoon hours and severely affecting outdoor labourers, transport workers and farming communities.

The impact has been particularly severe in Karachi’s coastal settlements, where prolonged electricity outages and water shortages have compounded the effects of extreme heat. In Ibrahim Hyderi, one of the city’s largest fishing communities, residents say survival is becoming increasingly difficult.

Abdul Sattar, a fisherman with more than three decades of experience, recalled how one of his colleagues collapsed from heat exhaustion during the recent heatwave. “We gave him lemon water and rushed him to a doctor,” he said. “He regained consciousness after receiving intravenous fluids.”

There are things we can and must do to make a short-term difference. One is to provide cooling—air-conditioning—to much of the planet. As a study last week from the Rocky Mountain Institute described,

Between now and 2030, the increase in electricity demand for air conditioning systems alone will exceed that for data centers, one of the fastest-growing energy uses globally. By 2050, cooling electricity demand is expected to match the combined annual electricity consumption of the United States, China, India, Germany, and Japan today.

That’s not optional—at this point, it’s medicine. In those kinds of heatwaves cool air is as important to the human body as water, or food. But, obviously it will drive up demand for energy, which is why, as the RMI experts point out, we need to

Reduce energy use and emissions through super-efficient technologies, improved system design, and better refrigerant management, while scaling next-gen, innovative solutions that lower life-cycle costs and emissions.

All of this is possible—new heat pumps are far far more efficient at cooling air than old AC units, and we can paint roofs, plant trees, and do lots more.

But at the most basic level we have no more important task than converting absolutely everything we can, right away, to sun and wind and batteries, so that we stop pouring carbon into the air and making the problem ever worse. And the horrible part is that we can do this, which makes the fact that we’re not doing it as fast as we can deeply and profoundly immoral. Hell, no one is even asking Americans to do with less, because that is clearly impossible. We’re just asking them to do with slightly different, and save money in the process. Here, for instance, is the latest update from Biden’s key energy deployment expert, Jigar Shah, talking about a new method for coaxing more juice through existing transmission lines, which experts call

reconductoring with advanced conductors. Reconductoring replaces the wire on an existing line with advanced conductor technology that carries 50 to 110 percent more current through the same towers, on the same right-of-way, in 18 to 36 months. No new permitting. No land acquisition. Montana-Dakota Utilities reconductored a 15-mile 230 kV line, increased ampacity by 77 percent, finished a full year ahead of schedule, and came in 40 percent under cost estimate. The Berkeley and GridLab 2035 study found a national reconductoring program could quadruple the rate of transmission capacity expansion at only 20 percent higher total system cost — saving $85 billion by 2035 and $180 billion by 2050.

But we have to do it. We have to force our leaders, state by state at the moment since DC is such a disaster area, to actually make these relatively small changes.

A way to look at the work we’re doing together is that we’re trying to build some margin back in. Every gas car that becomes an EV buys us back an inch or two, every furnace that becomes a heat pump, every solar panel and wind turbine that sprouts takes the tiniest bit of pressure off the system.

We were born onto a world with lots of margin, especially those of us who are older. The size of the game board was expanding back then, as we learned new ways to grow and store food and the like. But through short-sightedness and greed we began to shrink that buffer, and now greed and short-sightedness have become the cornerstones of government policy, along with pure and undiluted racism. It’s not like anyone is fooled. Goodman again:

As he sat beneath the shade of a mango tree, its branches sloping toward the river dividing Somalia from Ethiopia, Adan Bare Ali, deputy mayor of Dollow, said his community was suffering from troubles that had been concocted far away. The drought was worsened by climate change — primarily the result of industrial polluters in larger, more powerful nations. The war was the handiwork of foreign actors.

“The situation has become unbearable,” he said. “The American regime is led by a person who really doesn’t care about anything happening outside his gates. The Americans are not honoring their commitment to the world.”

He is right, and we are very very wrong.

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In other energy and climate news:

+Two of the country’s really great environmentalists, Vanessa Fajans-Turner and Ayana Johnson, teamed up for a crackerjack essay about the ways that NY Governor Hochul is undercutting the state’s climate law.

The proposed changes would extend the deadline for greenhouse gas regulations from 2024 to 2028. It would also replace the binding 2030 emissions target with a softer 2040 commitment and adopt a methane accounting method that makes fossil-fuel emissions look smaller without actually reducing them. The 2050 target remains, but the deal weakens the pressure to act now, allowing dangerous greenhouse gas pollution to amass in the intervening quarter-century.New York is one of 10 states with binding, economy-wide climate targets, alongside California, Colorado, Maryland, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island. All face similar affordability pressures, strained grids, and federal headwinds. None has walked back its targets. If lawmakers, who are deliberating now, agree to water down the law with the imminent budget vote, New York would be first.

+Corbin Hiar reports that a small company that wants to inject sun-reflecting particles into the atmosphere has revealed a bit more of what they have in mind

Stardust Solutions has raised $75 million since 2023 from investors who are betting that global warming could get so out of control that governments might decide to pay the Israeli-U.S. startup to spray millions of tons of sunlight-reflecting aerosols into the stratosphere. Its plans were so guarded that it required scientists to sign nondisclosure agreements before they could study its potentially planet-altering technologies.

On Thursday, the company revealed the makeup of its proprietary particles. They are made of what’s known as amorphous silica and are 0.5 microns in size — only visible with a microscope. The startup also shared information about the systems it could use to disperse the spherical silica particles some 11 miles above the ground and monitor them as they fall back to the Earth…

“This announcement is a clear example of why self governance led by for-profit entities does not work,” said Shuchi Talati, the executive director of the Alliance for Just Deliberation on Solar Geoengineering, a nonprofit that seeks to include marginalized countries and communities in debates over sunlight-reflecting technologies.

Stardust, she said, “cannot create their own principles and then applaud themselves for following them. They cannot define safety according to their own standards and then self-certify that they meet them. The field requires coordinated, legitimate, and independent research governance.”

+Perhaps you’re in the mood for listening to some guys talking about the El Niño that appears poised to come crashing out of the Pacific in the months ahead. Here’s the estimable David Wallace-Wells and, um, me, on KQED’s Forum the other day. David, anyway, was great—and I got in a pitch for California gubernatorial candidate Tom Steyer; the primary is two weeks out now.

Meanwhile, the crucially important meteorologist Jeff Masters has a new account of the rapid heating of the water in the Gulf of Mexico and why that matters.

In 2012, the temperature of the Gulf of Mexico began rising along a shocking upward trajectory.

Climate change is causing oceans worldwide to warm. But that year, summertime sea surface temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico began heating up at about twice the rate seen in the global oceans. The trend has continued into the 2020s, with sea surface temperatures hitting record highs in both 2024 and 2025. The shift has huge implications for the hurricanes that form in the Gulf – and the people who live along its shores and on the islands that dot its waters.

Hurricanes are heat engines that take heat energy out of the ocean and convert it to the kinetic energy of wind. The maximum intensity that a hurricane can reach increases by about 5-7% per degree Celsius of sea surface temperature increase. So the rise of about half a degree per decade in Gulf sea surface temperatures per decade since 2012 may be causing a 3% per decade increase in the winds of the strongest hurricanes. Because stronger winds cause more destruction, this equates to about a 30% increase in hurricane damage per decade for these strongest storms.

+Some good news. A big new study found that Americans are littering less, with a 34 percent reduction in trash along roadsides. Now if we could just stop tossing carbon into the air…

+New Mexico Attorney General Raùl Torrez, in the Santa Fe newspaper, calls on the state’s Oil Conservation Commission to hold drillers responsible for cleaning up their messes.

Across New Mexico, there are already hundreds of abandoned wells, with thousands more at risk. Some leak methane or contaminate groundwater, threatening public health and the land our communities depend on. When companies fail to clean them up, the cost does not disappear. It falls on the public.

That is not fair to New Mexico families.

The rules under consideration would move New Mexico closer to a simple standard: Companies should set aside funds that reflect the real cost of cleanup so they can plan ahead and follow through on their responsibilities.

In other words, if you drill it, you clean it.

It’s amazing that this even has to be said, but I’m glad someone is saying it.

+Finally, I’d like you to meet Burrito, who according to Warren van der Sandt, has become the crucial employee at a big solar farm in Tennessee. Apparently the 9.5 megawatt facility owned by Volkswagen brought in 65 sheep to keep the vegetation trimmed between the panels, and they were doing a good job, but they became the object of carnivorous affection for local coyotes. Enter Burrito, who when he came on board quickly began to patrol the perimeter of the site (which powers the production of VW’s EVs)

If unfamiliar animals approached, he reacted immediately. Donkeys naturally protect herd animals from threats. It’s in their nature, despite their “dozy” reputation.

Burrito acts as a scout, clearing “paddocks” for safety before the sheep enter to feed. Workers said the donkey even inspected areas before the sheep moved through them.

Once a stray without a home, he is now the most essential “worker” on the property.

Those of us who came up in a different age still occasionally harbor the belief that facts, truth, science matters; that it hasn’t all just vanished into a tweeting flash of nonsense. In service of this delusion, I’m dedicating this newsletter to the topic of wind, because I think it distills the corruption and irrationality of our sad moment into its purest essence—190-proof Trumpism, the stuff that blinds you if you guzzle it.

My rant is occasioned by the news that the administration has stopped all approvals on wind farms across the country. As Katherine Krawczyk explains, for 15 years wind farms have applied to the Defense Department where

they’re supposed to undergo a ​“timely, transparent, and repeatable process to evaluate potential impacts” to national security and military operations. It’s a routine that has spanned presidencies, including the first Trump administration, and that typically revolves around making sure turbines don’t interfere with radars or federal airspace.

This has always been routine, until last summer when it became…impossible. Pete Hegseth’s DOD simply stopped replying, and didn’t explain why till last month when it sent a letter to developers saying it was “reevaluating how it reviews wind projects national security impacts.” Somewhere between 165 and 250 big projects are in limbo, and that’s obviously the point: not only does it screw up their financing, it means they may not get done in time to qualify for what tax credits are left from the Biden IRA.

To say that the national security grounds are bogus is to give them too much credit. As those radicals at the Financial Times explained, the security review used to take a “few days” to complete. These installations are on private land, far away from military bases. The government has used the same argument to try and block offshore wind farms, and the courts have overruled their objections. I imagine that in time judges will find in favor of these blocked onshore projects too, but the damage will have been done: no one in their right mind would invest in new wind power now, not when the president has declared quite frankly that his “goal is to not let any windmill be built.”

That this is stupid goes without saying. Those blocked projects constitute, the FT says, about 30 gigawatts of cheap clean energy at a time when we desperately need it. But it also goes without saying that the blockage serves two purposes. One is to artificially increase demand for fossil fuel (and the other Trump-favored power sources, like the expensive array of nuclear reactors whose development the government is currently generously funding). The other is to serve his febrile rage at the wind farm built off his Scottish golf course all those years ago. A policy that feeds both his appetite for corruption and supplies his narcissistic hunger—well, that’s a twofer that can’t be missed. Hegseth may have no idea how to win the war in Iran, but he knows how to win favor from dear leader.

Of course, it means indulging in a huge number of lies, from Trump’s claim that windpower is the most expensive energy on earth (actually, second-cheapest, right behind solar) to his claim that it causes cancer (one death in five on this planet comes from breathing the combustion byproducts of fossil fuel) to his claim that though the Chinese build and sell wind turbines they don’t actually use them. If he glances out the window of Qatar Force One on this week’s trip to China he’ll be forced to recant that one: the Chinese actually lead the world in producing not just wind turbines but wind energy. As Keith Bradsher reported last week

Across China, hilltops are dotted with wind turbines, and long rows of them span many miles in western deserts. Ultrahigh-voltage power lines carry electricity thousands of miles to the energy-hungry factories along China’s coast.

Last year, China installed three times as much wind power capacity as the rest of the world combined, even as its turbine exports jumped. The global industry’s center of gravity has shifted decisively: All of the world’s six largest wind turbine manufacturers are Chinese, displacing once-dominant European firms and companies like General Electric.

In fact, perhaps his Chinese hosts could arrange a field trip to their newest wind turbine, installed this week off the shore from Yangjiang. It’s, what do you know, the largest single-unit floating wind platform ever installed on planet earth, a single windmill that will supply enough power for 24,000 homes. As Adriana Buljan reports at that must-read site OffShoreWindBiz,

The project incorporates several new technologies, including a novel mooring system, an active ballast system, a smart monitoring system, and a 66 kV dynamic subsea cable, the developer said.

The floater is secured by nine suction anchors, using a combination of anchor chains and high-performance polyester mooring lines, marking the first application of such polyester cables in China’s offshore wind sector.

It’s not just China, of course. A few weeks ago, the world’s largest offshore wind farm, Hornsea 3 in the North Sea, sent its first power back to the UK. When it’s fully finished at the end of next year, reports Evelyn Hart, it will “generate enough power to meet the average daily needs of a population larger than Greater Manchester, Liverpool, and Leeds combined.” Earlier today the sovereign wealth fund of Abu Dhabi announced a big investment in the project, reflecting what the fund’s head called its “approach of investing alongside experienced partners in high-quality infrastructure assets that support energy transition and deliver long-term value.”

What might the Trump administration offer them as an alternative? Well, the administration has ordered the restart of fossil fuel drilling operations off Santa Barbara despite local and state opposition. Yesterday an old platform in the area caught fire and burned—26 people were evacuated, and thankfully none were killed, though two were injured. Here’s what America’s technological prowess looks like today

I think that sometimes wind gets shorter shrift than it should when we talk about renewable energy. It’s not quite as simple as a photovoltaic array—there’s still a moving part, that windmill blade. But of course this is just another form of solar energy (the wind rises when the sun heats the earth more in some places than others) and it is a miracle. In fact, it’s a perfectly complementary miracle. Along a coast, for instance, because it takes a while for the sun to heat the air molecules that produce the breeze, wind tends to build in power later in the afternoon, as the photovoltaic effect begins to ebb. And the farther north you go, the stronger the wind gets, which is useful since Greece has more sunshine than Norway. And wind speeds tend to be higher in the winter than the summer, thanks to sharper temperature gradients.

If you want an in-depth technical explanation of this miracle, Mark Jacobson provides one in this 2021 study. Among many other things, he points out that

In some locations, e.g. Europe, wind energy output follows heat load remarkably well on a diurnal basis. This is not only due to the day versus night wind speed peaks just discussed, but also due to the fact that low temperatures, which create heat loads, often occur behind cold fronts, where pressure gradients are strong, thus winds are fast. Low temperatures over land also often occur in the presence of strong temperature gradients, which produce strong pressure gradients and strong winds.

One irony of Trump’s anti-wind crusade is that this miracle was born here. Humans have long used wind, of course—to push boats, to grind grain. But we first put it to use to produce electricity on an industrial scale in the early 1940s at Grandpa’s Knob, about fifty miles south of my home in the Vermont mountains above the town of Castleton. An MIT grad named Palmer Putnam (and I was at MIT last week, and saw many impressive young people following in his wake) convinced the local utility to give him a shot at harnessing the Vermont winds (blowing eight miles an hour in Castleton when I drove by this afternoon). Vannevar Bush—more irony here—was in charge of the nation’s scientific enterprises during World War II, and he thought it would be a good idea to see if we could produce power this way; Putnam’s design used two blades, each 66 feet long and weighing eight tons. It worked just fine from 1942 to 1943, when a shaft bearing failed, and wartime shortages meant no one could scroung the part until 1945.

A study that year found that a block of six similar turbines similar to the prototype, producing 9 MW, could be installed in Vermont for around US$190 per kilowatt. But in those days it was cheaper to get power other ways, and so the project was never replicated. In 2012 a new project was proposed for the area, but like all Vermont wind projects in recent years, local opposition doomed it, reminding us that Trump is not the only person who doesn’t like to look at windmills.

I do, though. I’ve always thought they were remarkably beautiful, Calder mobiles come to life. And they keep getting better. The first big American installation was on Altamont Pass, near Livermore California—6,700 small turbines lined either side of I-580. They produced lots of clean electrons, but because of their size and where they were sited, their fast-moving blades were a bit of a bird Cuisinart. To be clear, wind turbines never come within an order of magnitude of avian destruction compared with tall buildings and power lines, not to mention domestic cats, not to mention the effects of climate change now setting off a generalized extinction crisis on this earth. But if bird mortality is not a reason to delay the move to clean energy, it’s also not something to be simply ignored. So here’s some good news: a recent “repowering project” on the pass replaced 569 of the old small turbines with just 23 newer and bigger ones, while still generating the same amount of electricity. Oh, and

Fewer turbines, spaced further apart, and equipped with modern bird-detection technology such as IndentiFlight, should reduce bird mortality in the Altamont Pass going forward.

“Brookfield Renewables has designed the [Mulqueeney Ranch] site and implemented state of the art technology to mitigate impacts to local and migratory avian species,” according to the MCE staff report.

“Turbines will be equipped with individual AI paired cameras to detect the presence of avian species which would trigger feathering/shut-off of specific turbines.”

And as Justin Gerdes reports, this kind of repowering could happen at every wind farm across the country.

“By replacing aging turbines with modern technology at existing sites, the United States could more than double its current onshore wind capacity and electricity generation without requiring new land,” write the authors of a Stanford University study published in March.

The study finds that repowering could increase the U.S.’ onshore wind nameplate generating capacity from 153 gigawatts (GW) (as of 2024) to 314 GW at existing wind farms.

“Repowering is a key, yet overlooked, strategy to accelerate the transition to a sustainable energy future in the United States,” the authors conclude.

Data from the energy consultancy Wood Mackenzie confirms the near-term repowering opportunity in the U.S.

“The repowering market remains strong, as Wood Mackenzie projects that 18 projects will drive 2.5 GW of capacity additions in the next three years,” according to a December 2025 WoodMac press release.

I’ve been getting a lot of mileage out of my line that though sunlight must travel 93 million miles to reach the earth, none of those miles go through the Strait of Hormuz. Similarly, there is no drone on earth that can shoot the breeze. This is where the planet desperately wants to go. Our job is to change our nation’s politics so the wind can blow free.

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In other energy and climate news:

+It’s not too late to run for something in the upcoming elections, and Lead Locally is great at training up candidates. Here’s the application form!

+The world is a big place, so no one noticed for a while when a climate-weakened rock wall slid into an Alaskan fjord last summer, triggering a…300-foot tall wave. (Cruise ships frequent these fjords, and several were actually nearby, but thank heaven none sailed in that day). Now scientists have scoured the area. As Christian Elliott explains,

The Tracy Arm landslide was preceded by an unusually rapid retreat of the South Sawyer Glacier, leaving the rock slope that ultimately collapsed bare and unsupported. That same rearrangement of land elements is increasingly occurring throughout Alaskan fjords and around the world. As glaciers retreat and thawing permafrost lubricates slopes, these giant landslides may become more frequent.

+The great Jacqui Patterson continues her work chronicling Big Oil’s outreach to Black America. Her first Fossil-Fueled Foolery report came when she was still at the NAACP; now at the helm of the Shirley Chisholm Legacy Project she published round three this spring, with a video contest coming. As she documents

The fossil fuel industry has learned to weaponize the language of our own movements and take heartless advantage of the vulnerability wrought by the extractive economy for which they are primary purveyors. By co-opting the nomenclature and even the values of civil rights, equity, and economic justice, these corporations attempt to manufacture consent for their continued violence against our communities

+That inspired EV salesman Donald Trump is running up some big numbers for his friends in China by blockading the Strait of Hormuz

China exported more electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles than gas or diesel cars for the first time in April. Automakers expanded aggressively overseas, the China Passenger Car Association said Monday.

New-energy vehicles made up 52.7% of China’s 769,000 total auto exports in April. NEV exports more than doubled from a year earlier, reaching 406,000 units.

+Gary Ferguson is one the country’s great authorities on one of the country’s great trees, the Ponderosa Pine, and he has a fine essay in the Times summarizing the threat to those forests, and with it the western landscape

After about 26 years of exceptionally high heat and drought, hundreds of millions of these trees in lands stretching from New Mexico and Colorado to the southern Sierra Nevada of California have died. And in many places, something even more startling is happening: The trees aren’t coming back.

Ecologists warn that in just 25 years, more than 70 percent of the Southwestern needle leaf evergreen forests, which include ponderosa pines, may be replaced by grass in what might qualify as the first significant post-climate change landscape in America.

One of the biggest consequences is the loss of shade. Without the forest canopy overhead, snow can evaporate quickly instead of trickling into rivers, streams and aquifers. In the mountainous parts of the West, where roughly 70 percent of freshwater runoff originates as snowpack, that’s a huge deal, a sign of a catastrophic feedback loop beginning to form.

+I keep saying that if the last few years were about solar panels and wind turbines, batteries will be the star in the next couple. A new report from Australia says that the boom in home batteries is so intense that it’s pulled the country back within striking distance of its goal to run on 82% renewables by 2030.

Carl Binning, Clean Energy Regulator, says the surge in rooftop installs and home batteries, boosted by the federal rebate, has stunned everyone, including the industry itself, and offered a new avenue to that 82 per cent target.

The Australian Energy Market Operator’s Integrated System Plan assumes another 28 gigawatts of large scale renewables is needed to meet the federal target, a little under 10 GW of additional rooftop solar, and about 5 gigawatt hours (GWh) of home storage.

Binning says home battery storage is already at 11 GWh, and heading for 40 GWh, eight times the ISP assumptions. And the record 441 megawatts (MW) of rooftop solar applications in the month of April points to an annual run rate of around 4 GW. Even if it were 3 GW, that still would beat the ISP assumptions.

+Every once in a while, one’s happy for the work that goes into a book. Here’s a video clip from a member of the British Columbia legislative assembly, lightheartedly convening a book group to study my last volume, Here Comes the Sun. It turns out that one of constitutents, Tannis Wightman, sent a copy of the volume to every member of the legislature, not to mention every member of Canada’s parliament.

+A dedicated group of activists walked fifty miles across New Jersey to the State Capitol last week, to push for passage of the Make Polluters Pay climate superfund bill. As Zach Blackburn reports:

“We’ve seen this playbook before. Big corporations rake in record profits, then walk away and stick working people with the bill,” said Nedia Morsy, the director of Make the Road New Jersey. “Working families shouldn’t be the ones shouldering the cost of climate change.”

The advocates join a growing chorus of New Jerseyans who seek to see the bill passed before this year’s state budget. In March, three Budget Committee senators — Renee Burgess (D-Irvington), Gordon Johnson (D-Englewood), and Patrick Diegnan (D-South Plainfield) — said the committee should pass the Polluters Pay Act first.

Meanwhile, across the border in New York Cathy Becker outlines three new bills to try and cope with the climate insurance crisis. My favorites:

S186A: Insure Our Communities Act. This bill would prevent property insurers from furthering the climate crisis by insuring and investing in new oil, gas and coal projects. Instead, insurers would be required to invest in building our communities under the state Community Reinvestment Act.

and, much like similar legislation (SB 1166) in Hawaii,

S8585: Recovery for climate disaster losses. This bill would allow the New York Attorney General, private insurers doing business in the state, and the New York Property Insurance Underwriting Association to seek damages from fossil fuel corporations in cases of climate-related disasters.

+Important piece from Australian researcher Tamara Krawchenko, attempting to measure the carbon impact of warfare.

This isn’t a minor oversight. Militaries are significant contributors to greenhouse gas emissions. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has generated an estimated 311 million tonnes of what’s known as CO₂ equivalent, comparable to the combined annual emissions of Belgium, New Zealand, Austria and Portugal. CO₂ equivalent is the metric used to compare the warming impact of various greenhouse gases to carbon dioxide.

Recently published research calculated that the first 15 months of Israel’s war in Gaza generated more than 33 million tonnes of CO₂ equivalent, comparable to the combined 2023 annual emissions of Costa Rica and Slovenia.

+I suppose it was inevitable. There are enough solar panels in Chile now that thieves have begun to steal them. Antonia Mufarech reports that

In this narrow strip of the Andes, exceptionally sunny conditions, market-based electricity pricing and a favorable investment climate have fueled a swift photovoltaic build-out, from just 3% of total installed capacity in 2015 to a third of the system today, according to government data. Following a pattern in other places like California and the UK, this solar boom has brought crime along with it. But here the trend is turbocharged by more remote expanses and entrenched organized crime, posing risks for Chile’s critical infrastructure, with potential consequences for grid reliability and foreign investment.

“The theft of cables, panels or electronic equipment can temporarily shut down entire solar parks and cause significant economic losses,” said Erwin Plett, chief executive officer of renewable energy advisory Low Carbon Chile SpA, adding that it also drives up security and insurance costs. “Chile remains one of the most attractive renewable markets in the region, but maintaining that leadership requires ensuring the security of energy infrastructure.”

+Finally, just a heads up that our friend the sun not only supplies light, and warmth, and via photosynthesis our supper, and now all the power you could ever need. It also happily offers entertainment. A big coronal mass ejection on Sunday should reach the northern U.S. tonight in the form of northern lights. Enjoy!

Our world seems to me to be moving very very fast these days—often that’s because of the feral energy of the Trump White House, feverishly trying to do the wrong thing on as many fronts as possible. In the last few cycles have come the news that that the White House is evicting bison herds from federal lands in Montana (a favor to ranchers, an insult to tribal leaders), approving fruit-flavored vapes (a favor to the big-donor vapor lobby, an insult to public health) and insisting that the Pope wants Iran to have a nuclear weapon (an insult to Catholics, a favor to his easily bruised ego). If the strategy is designed to wear us down, it’s definitely working on me.

But something else is moving fast too, and far more productively—that’s the ascension of new technologies. I don’t mean AI, which so far has had little impact on me and a generally dispiriting one on my fellow Americans, to judge from the polling; I mean the surging changes in clean tech, which are rewriting what’s possible in the course of months, even days.

Consider, for instance, the news from California. As I’ve noted before, the Golden State is suddenly supplying huge amounts of night-time energy from big grid-based batteries; basically, at night its running on stored sunshine. But the reporter Claire Barber, in an interview with grid expert Ed Smeloff, put a number on this yesterday: California’s new batteries, installed over the last 36 months or so, are the equivalent of a dozen new nuclear power plants. If California had installed a dozen nukes in a couple of years, you’d know about it—indeed, the fate of its single reactor, at Diablo Canyon, has inspired thousands of articles, documentaries, protests and counter protests over the same stretch of time. But batteries are…metal boxes that pose no great threat. They just…work. Smeloff:

The most remarkable change in the California energy market has been the very rapid addition of grid-connected batteries and the use of those batteries to provide peak demand capacity. California is transitioning fairly quickly from using primarily natural gas resources to now using batteries. The batteries are [used] during the peak period, which is in the evening, typically around seven o’clock, producing as much as 40 percent of the peak capacity requirements. That’s a pretty remarkable achievement in a short period of time.

Bottom line, from Stanford’s Mark Jacobson on Tuesday: California using 61% less natural gas this year to generate electricity than it did three years ago.

There’s also the sudden advent of a slightly smaller class of batteries, ones that as Elizabeth Ouzts observes are

designed to fill specific community needs and — due to their size — relatively quick and low-cost to build.

The Blue Ridge Power Agency, which serves a string of nonprofit utilities in central and western Virginia, is set to go live this summer with a collection of five batteries of about 5 megawatts each. The systems will help two rural electric co-ops and the city of Salem’s utility save money by storing power when it is cheap and abundant. They can then rely on that saved-up power when high demand on the grid spikes prices.

All in all, the projects are predicted to save the member utilities $100 million over the batteries’ 20-year lifespan, addressing long-held local concerns over rising costs.

And now move down one more order of magnitude, and consider the report, out this morning, from the Rewiring America think tank, about how solar, battery, and heat pump technology have advanced so quickly that a few policy shifts could allow the electrification of almost every home in America, turning them into useful and affordable parts of a national energy infrastructure. (Good coverage from Catherine Boudreau here). Consider, say, what we could require of data centers. If some must be built, then force them to supply their own electricity—by buying heat pumps and solar panels for surrounding homes. It’s cheaper than building new supplies, and much much faster.

Hyperscalers are driving more than $100 billion per year into energy generation and infrastructure investment. Directing even a portion of that spending toward distributed energy resources could mobilize tens of billions of dollars for household energy upgrades. Hyperscaler investment in home energy upgrades would make such upgrades affordable for an additional 19 million households (increasing affordability from 30 to 58 percent of eligible households) — unlocking average lifetime savings of $9,400 per household

Again—all this stuff is available right now. There are plenty of heat pumps and batteries; if Google wants a data center, it should be handing them out to the neighbors. And once they have, then all these homes can be easily knit together into virtual power plants (VPPs); as a new report from the good people at Pew points out,

Fully leveraging these existing and future Distributed Energy Resources through VPPs, including providing appropriate compensation for DER owners, could deliver power during peak demand at 40%-60% of the cost of traditional solutions.

And if you’re thinking—’yeah, but policy changes come too slowly to matter in a polarized America,’ well, your cynicism is justified. But not entirely. The last few weeks have seen something remarkable, with legislative action happening at a speed I can’t quite recall. Everyone who participated in Sun Day last fall (and that’s many of you) helped launch a nationwide campaign for, among other things, balcony or plug-in solar. And that’s already bearing fruit: just eight months later it’s passed legislatures in Virginia, Maine, Colorado, and Maryland. It’s through the Senate and the House in New Hampshire, and the Senate in New York, New Jersey, and Vermont, through the House (and late last night the Senate) in Connecticut and through committee in Massachusetts (in the latter two, its part of important larger omnibus solar bills). It’s also before committees in California, Illinois, and DC. This is a reminder that activism can (and must) move as fast as technology—before the spring is out, and despite serious opposition from utilities, we’ll have enough states to establish a firm American market for a technology that has swept through Europe in recent years. (Here’s a great account from my colleagues at Third Act Upstate NY on the kind of organizing that is producing these wins).

Meanwhile, the fossil fuel alternatives are…slow to appear. Dan Gearino has an excellent account of plans for a truly massive gas-fired power plant in Ohio, announced in March by the always classy Howard Lutnick as AC/DC’s Back in Black blared from the speakers. “We’re operating in Trump time,” he told the crowd ahead of the ceremonial groundbreaking. But Trump time sometimes means fantasy time.

“The whole thing doesn’t add up,” said Ric O’Connell, executive director of GridLab, a nonprofit that provides technical expertise on the electricity grid to policymakers and advocates.

O’Connell thinks the power plant’s high costs will make the project difficult to justify outside of a moment in which the Trump administration is seeking attention for big projects. Due to inflation on key components, the project would cost $3,586 per kilowatt, two to three times the cost of a combined-cycle gas plant two years ago.

“They’re just smiling and waving for the cameras, and then, as soon as Trump’s out of power, the [power plant is] going to get scaled way down or killed,” O’Connell said.

The clean energy build-out, of course, can’t come fast enough, because the climate crisis is pushing on inexorably. April saw the atmospheric level of co2 average 431 parts per million for the first time at the monitoring station in Mauna Loa (but don’t worry—Trump’s new budget zeroes out funding for the facility). A new report put a very human face on those statistics: as Oliver Milman reports, it found that the time may be coming to start thinking of the painful necessity to move people out of New Orleans, because climate change is in danger of putting it past a ‘point of no return.’

Southern Louisiana is facing 3-7 metres of sea-level rise and the loss of three-quarters of its remaining coastal wetlands, which will cause the shoreline “to migrate as much as 100km (62 miles) inland”, thereby stranding New Orleans and Baton Rouge, according to the study, which compared today’s rising global temperatures with a period of similar heat 125,000 years ago that caused a rise in sea level.

This scenario makes the region the “most physically vulnerable coastal zone in the world”, the researchers state, and requires immediate action to prepare a smooth transition for people away from New Orleans, which has a population of about 360,000 people, to safer ground.

The way to avoid this—or a thousand follow-on horrors—is to move with desperate urgency to rebuild our energy system. That won’t end global warming—too late for that. But not too late to shave tenths of a degree off how hot the planet gets, and every tenth of a degree we raise the temperature moves a hundred million souls from a safe climate zone to a perilous one. Maybe New Orleans is in that next increment. Maybe your house. Someone’s house, that’s for sure. So speed, speed, speed.

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In other energy and climate news:

+Superb account from David Wallace-Wells of the meaning—political and scientific—of the fast-brewing El Niño. It’s very smart—and also, he’s a beautifully fluid writer.

An awful lot depends on the actual size of El Niño and the particular scale and distribution of suffering it might unleash. In general, I tend to think climate people overestimate the political impact of discrete disasters — and that we process even mind-bending catastrophes largely by normalizing them, as we’ve done in recent years with wildfires in Los Angeles and Maui, mass heat deaths in the Pacific Northwest and on the Hajj, and flooding events in places like Spain and Brazil beyond what has been observed, in those places, for decades. But coming during a Donald Trump presidency, this one even more nakedly hostile to climate concern than the last, and on the heels of a war that has illustrated unmistakably the dangers of fossil-fuel dependence and driven up the price of food and energy, I do think a pattern of unmistakable global climate disruptions could do a lot to dislodge our seeming complacency. What comes next, as ever, would be as much a matter of political economy as climate.

+Cuba is installing solar power as fast as any place on earth, because it literally has no choice—the U.S. has cut off virtually all its supply of oil, and Marco Rubio was last week seen posing with the general in charge of the U.S. Southern Command in front of a map of the island. As the FT reports

Thanks to Chinese technology, the Caribbean island has 34 solar parks in operation with a capacity of almost 1.2GW, a 350 per cent increase on 2024, enabling Cuba to more than quadruple its proportion of solar-powered generation to around 9 per cent of its total by the end of last year. Cuba plans to have built 92 solar parks with just over 2GW of capacity by 2028.

“In the last 12 months alone, the government successfully installed 1GW of that — so they’re halfway to the target,” said Euan Graham, senior analyst at energy think-tank Ember. “A gigawatt is a very significant amount in the system and getting to 2GW would be pretty transformative.”

+In the Guardian, Alexander Hurst calls for top American officials to be sanctioned for their support of fossil fuel expansion, much as America has sanctioned top leaders in countries like Russia and Iran.

It’s time to apply the same logic to a different caste of oligarchs, American this time, who seem inextricable from the apparatus of the Trump administration. They include Silicon Valley tech barons and fossil fuel industry executives whose names lurk deeper in Trump’s shadow, along with the apparatchiks who carry out an overall anti-environmental policy that should be rightly viewed as ecocide.

The foul men – they are mainly men – burning the planet should have access to as little of it as possible. Trump’s own name should not adorn the gates of his golf courses in Scotland and Ireland, and his minion Lee Zeldin, who leads the ironically named Environment Protection Agency (EPA), should not be flown to Munich to lecture Europe about its destructive policies. No billionaire in Trump’s orbit should be able to ski in the Alps, nibble vintage jamón in Mallorca, be served champagne at the Cheval Blanc, or splash out upwards of €100,000 a week for luxury villas in the Algarve or the Côte d’Azur if they are complicit in an active ecocide that threatens the very existence of all these places.

+If you’re spending part of the summer in Maine (maybe campaigning to beat Susan Collins), check out a show at the Shaw Institute in Blue Hills: FOREVER OURS, Microplastics and PFAS, Where Science Meets Art. Fifteen New England artists have contributed; check out the life-size seal made from unrecycleable plastics.

Meanwhile, old sustainability hand Jim Merkel has a new documentary, Saving Walden’s World, which will air soon on PBS. It profiles women in Kerala, Slovenia, and Cuba, and argues that small-scale solar is the ultimate tool of decolonialization and resistance. “The homestead is a tactical site of resistance,” he says. “When we harvest the sun for energy and the soil for sustenance, we strip power from the systems that use scarcity as a weapon.”

And here’s a good project: MobilizeGreen is connecting underrepresented students with summer jobs in green careers.

+If you’ve wondered about the practicality of space-based solar power, Mark Gongloff has done the math.

The most recent payload (for which we have disclosed pricing) that SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy system took to geostationary transfer orbit (GTO), where spacecraft go to reach GEO, was the GOES-19 weather satellite in June 2024. That trip cost $152.5 million, or $30,500 per kilogram1. At that rate, Overview Energy’s space-solar system would cost more than $4,100 per megawatt-hour, roughly 45 times as much as solar and storage on the ground.

But let’s say Elon Musk, now 158 billion theoretical dollars richer, gets generous and prices a Falcon Heavy ride to GTO at $4,000 per kilogram.2 That still leaves space solar’s energy cost at $540 per megawatt-hour, about six times as expensive as earthbound solar and battery storage.

Meanwhile here on earth public school systems are learning to pair the solar panels on their roofs with other energy upgrades to dramatically reduce costs. Kaleigh Harrison describes one such project in Montgomery County, Maryland

The solar installations sit within a $23 million energy savings performance contract (ESPC) covering 25 schools. Rather than focusing only on generation, the program integrates multiple upgrades, including advanced energy management systems and LED lighting retrofits.

This combined approach reflects a shift in how public sector entities are tackling energy use. By addressing both demand and supply, districts can improve building performance while stabilizing energy expenses. MCPS estimates the broader initiative will deliver more than 5.9 million kWh in annual energy savings.

(By the way, this definitely beats building a school on an abandoned fracking site contaminated with radioactive waste, as Saul Elbein reports from Texas).

+Maybe hold off on your plans for a western mountain climbing expedition this summer. Jeva Lange reports that guides at places like Mt. Rainier are bracing for a very difficult season, after record low snowfalls and record high spring temperatures have left snowfields and glaciers crumbly and brittle.

Think of a mountain like a scoop of Rocky Road in an ice cream cone. Fresh out of the freezer, the scoop holds its shape because everything is frozen in place — but as it starts to melt, marshmallows and nuts begin to slough down the sides.

Except on a mountain, it’s not marshmallows and nuts but avalanches and rockfall. In addition to being a life-or-death hazard in the moment — and top-of-mind for the risk-averse concessioners guiding otherwise oblivious novice clients — the debris on a warming mountain can close routes to the peak, crowding the ones that remain. “When you have a bunch of people on a route, it doesn’t make things safer,” Zimmerman said. “It makes things more dangerous because people knock stuff onto each other, and because it slows things down.”

I’ve climbed Rainier twice—you go up in the middle of the night to minimize the time spent climbing down melting snowfields in the heat of the day. But the time may be coming when you need to ascend at night in the winter.

+Continuing with last week’s discussion of the disappointing performance by some state level Democrats, Kate Yoder brings news of shortsighted policy in Maryland, Rhode Island, and elsewhere where blue governors have decided to bleed energy efficiency programs to temporarily lower the price of electricity or gas. This is the ultimate in false economy.

Focusing on immediate savings misses the bigger picture, since it would hurt affordability in the long-term. An analysis from ACEEE found that the proposed legislation in Maryland would increase costs for the state’s electricity customers by a net $592 million.

“Unfortunately, cutting energy efficiency programs — it’s like trading in your car for one that gets worse gas mileage at a time when gas prices are going up, and it won’t do anything to address those real cost drivers that will only get worse,” Kevin Trombley at energy think tank CERES said. “Energy efficiency is one of the only options customers have to insulate themselves from the volatility coming from things like natural gas or an aging grid susceptible to extreme weather.”

+Two Emilys—Sanders, at ExxonKnews and Atkin at Heated—have grim accounts of the way our new, politicized Department of Justice has swooped in to try and stop discovery in a Minnesota case charging Exxon with consumer fraud. As Atkin puts it,

The DOJ’s complaint is an incredible piece of rage bait for anyone following these cases closely. It is, in essence, an exercise in the propagandistic practice of repeating something false over and over and over in the hopes that eventually, people will start to believe it.

The falsehood that the DOJ’s complaint is built on is that Minnesota’s lawsuit is a covert plot to set national energy policy. In paragraph after paragraph, the DOJ claims Minnesota’s lawsuit is seeking to “regulate global greenhouse gas emissions,” which falls under federal authority, and therefore must be dismissed. I thought about listing all the times here, but I will spare you. You can just read the complaint.

What’s more important to sear into your brain is that this just… isn’t true. Remember when I told you what (Minnesota AG Keith) Ellison’s lawsuit is seeking? Reimbursement for climate-related costs, the return of profits tied to deception, a court-ordered public education campaign.

Meanwhile, from New Mexico, another lawsuit challenging Big Oil, this time to pay for the costs of abandoned wells. As Nicholas Gilmore reports,

The complaint centers around what are called “asset retirement obligations” in the energy industry. The ARO represents the legal and financial obligations to plug and remediate a well, which can involve sealing the well and various levels of costly remediation.

The 74-page lawsuit points to the 2021 sale of 670 “aging” and “low-producing” wells in Lea County from Exxon Mobil’s subsidiary XTO Holdings to Empire’s subsidiary Empire New Mexico. The lawsuit notes the companies’ financial records show a valuation of a little more than $6 million for the AROs of the wells, which are an average age of 63 years old.

Rogers and Horton cite state data, however, in their argument that a “conservative estimate” of the asset retirement obligations for the wells is actually almost $200 million. The discrepancy, they say, points to the companies’ intentions to skirt the ARO liability for the wells altogether.

+Andrew Moseman has gone inside the California “skunkworks” where Ford is trying to build its $30k EV. The building is a century old, originally used to churn out Model A’s. But now

EVDC represents a full embrace of the frictionless workplace: no corner offices, just open rows of computers amid a makeshift garage brimming with 3D printers, spools of wiring, and racks of gear. Coders are a short stroll from the visual designers tinkering with clay models. Electrical engineers are around the corner from the “lab car,” a rectangular steel frame meant to suggest the general shape of a vehicle, with a complete mockup of the future car’s electrical system strung along the skeleton so that workers can test any part of it. This is about process; the closest thing to the shape of a car is a wooden one with test car seats inside, set up in the fabrication shop. The shepherds of our tour met any question about the specifics of the forthcoming truck with a quick you’ll find out next year, though a prototype dressed up in that zebra camouflage just happened to sneak by as we moved between building.

+Is it a good idea to dam the Bering Strait to try and preserve the great currents of the Atlantic? Probably not, but as Raymond Zhong points out, it’s the kind of thing you start thinking about when you’re truly desperate

If the AMOC is strong, then closing the strait would cause less fresh water to flow out of the Arctic Ocean and into the Atlantic, they found. That would help keep the North Atlantic salty and the AMOC stable. But if the AMOC is already near collapse, then closing the strait would have the opposite effect, destabilizing the AMOC further. The timing, in other words, is key.

At the moment, though, scientists don’t know exactly how close the AMOC is to collapsing, said Aixue Hu, a climate scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo. Some projections suggest it could happen before the end of this century. But “the uncertainty is very, very large,” Dr. Hu said. That makes it hard to be sure whether damming the Bering Strait would help or hurt the AMOC, said Dr. Hu, who wasn’t involved in Mr. Soons’s study.

+In Australia, a push for a big tax on gas exporters and on windfall profits. In Canada, a call (from Galith Levy, proprietor of the Climate Prize) for much faster pathways to commercialize clean energy innovation. From Britain’s prestigious medical journal The Lancet a demand for a crackdown on fossil fuel propaganda. (Disinformation campaigns are life-threatening and pose a grave danger to both public health and the global climate. The tactics used mirror those used by the tobacco industry, which, for decades, spread doubt about the harmful effects of smoking.”)

I think you can sense a quickening of the global demand for action. The ever-falling price of clean energy, the ruinous insanity of the Iran war, the rising pace of climate disaster: we’re at the start of the next, decisive cycle in energy and climate politics. Stay tuned!

+Oh, and Disneyland is going to convert its kiddy car ride to EVs. As Pierce Sharpe reports:

The Anaheim theme park plans to replace the gasoline-powered cars on its classic Autopia attraction with fully electric vehicles — ending nearly 70 years of exhaust fumes in Tomorrowland as California regulators continue cracking down on emissions statewide

.

Many of the people who’ve been working for years on climate issues assembled this week in Santa Marta, Colombia for a conference on how to get off fossil fuels. Sponsored by the Colombians and the Dutch, it was an outgrowth of December’s unhappy COP negotiations in Brazil: the fifty or so nations that actually wanted to move decisively past coal, gas and oil scheduled a meeting of their own. By all accounts it was a kinder, gentler version of the regular climate talks, in part because fossil fuel lobbyists (who have become the largest “country” at the regular negotiations) were not welcome. The wonderful Irish diplomat Mary Robinson put it well: “COPs are more formal, negotiators have their lines and they will not cross them and it’s so different here,” she said, adding that participants “have felt more human together.”

By lucky accident, the gathering took on extra meaning because it coincided with Donald Trump’s absurd misadventure in Iran. All of a sudden there was a new reason, past the destruction of the planet, for getting off fossil fuel: gas is too damn expensive, assuming you can get it all. What we’ve done in the Strait of Hormuz is one of those accidents that changes history: as the head of the International Energy Agency, the venerable Fatih Birol, said last week:

“The vase is broken, the damage is done – it will be very difficult to put the pieces back together. This will have permanent consequences for the global energy markets for years to come.”

The pieces of that broken vase are scattered across the planet, especially in Asia and Africa, where fuel prices are soaring and fertilizer made with fossil fuel is suddenly either unavailable or ruinously expensive. As Reuters reported this week

Agricultural bodies, including the International Grains Council, are already cutting their forecasts for the next harvests. And the United Nations, which is trying to ​negotiate shipping access for fertiliser through the Gulf, has sounded ⁠the alarm over food security in developing nations.

In 2022, after the invasion of Ukraine, high fertiliser costs contributed to exacerbated hunger in poor, import-dependent countries, and analysts say regions like East Africa are again vulnerable.

Australia may offer an early indication of the impact on production of global staples.

In the bread-basket state of Western Australia, one industry group now expects the wheat planting area to drop by 14% ​as growers shift away from the fertiliser-intensive, low-margin grain.

But the good news, of course, is that these countries are rapidly putting together a new and sturdier vase, this time based on energy from the sun and wind that doesn’t need importing. The Santa Marta conference focused on the financing needed to make this switch work—a very real problem, but in the face of the desperation caused by events in the Mideast those who can are going ahead. As Wing Kuang reported, “Chinese EV manufacturers reported an 82.6 percent rise in month-on-month sales in March.” As the business pages of the India Times reported yesterday,

Increasing penetration of ⁠EVs, especially ⁠two- and three-wheelers, and rapid deployment of Battery Electric Solar Systems across Southeast Asia and South Asia is now viewed as guaranteed by those in the industry.

The optimism was palpable at this week's Asia Battery Raw Materials & Recycling Conference in Hanoi, where much of the discussion among delegates was more how the region was going to source sufficient raw materials to make batteries, rather than how to increase demand from current levels.

That all this counts as irony is the one delicious lining to all the pain and suffering. Donald Trump, purchased underling of the fossil fuel industry, has managed through his own colossal incompetence and ego to nip the hand that feeds his bank account. Yes, at the moment the industry is soaring: BP reported the kind of grotesque returns yesterday that should have any rational government reaching for a windfall profits tax.

Maja Darlington, a climate campaigner for Greenpeace UK, said the war had been “an entirely predictable disaster for everyone except the oil industry. BP’s profits are booming, with Trump’s bombs bringing billions for them and bigger bills for us.”

But those billions are in the here and now; in the slightly longer term the opposite is happening. Big Oil’s only real growth strategy has been exporting liquefied natural gas to Asia. Bloomberg checked in the other day on how that’s going

The near-closure of the Strait of Hormuz and the serious damage sustained by Qatar’s LNG export plant has sent prices higher and buyers scrambling for alternatives. Gas’s reputation as a reliable and affordable energy source has taken a serious hit, and plans for its speedy adoption in Asia’s developing nations have been derailed, with potentially long-lasting consequences.

“Every day this is extended, prices elevate, the market tightens and demand destruction happens,” said Masanori Odaka, an analyst at Rystad Energy. “The longer this lasts, the more structural it becomes.”

Bloomberg News spoke to more than two dozen executives, traders and analysts across Asia, who painted a picture of a region that had been thought of as the future of LNG, but is now rapidly losing faith in the super-chilled fuel. Most requested anonymity because they weren’t authorized to speak to media.

Importers in India and Bangladesh are already rethinking whether to keep the fuel as a center piece in future strategies. Countries like Vietnam and the Philippines that were expected to become large growth markets, are looking alternatives. A planned gas power project in Vietnam is looking to switch to wind and solar plus batteries. In Thailand policymakers are pushing for more renewables.

This is an appropriate reaction. Cheap renewable energy had already begun to fuel the remarkable energy transition I’ve been chronicling over the last four years in these pages. Now it’s been supercharged by events, and responsible leaders around the world are drawing the obvious conclusions. As Selwin Hart, the UN’s envoy to the Santa Marta talks, put it in his address to the gathering:

“Renewables offer something fossil fuels never did: stability and sovereignty. There are no embargoes, price shocks or tariffs.”

But that’s not been the reaction, of course, in this country, where energy policy just keeps getting stupider. Read, for instance, Elizabeth Kolbert’s masterful takedown of EPA commissioner Lee Zeldin

In a little more than a year, Zeldin has transformed the E.P.A. from an agency devoted to protecting human health and the environment into one that, more or less openly, sides with polluters…The E.P.A. has not only abandoned its own efforts to rein in greenhouse-gas emissions; it has stepped in to prevent states from taking action. It has come out officially, if astonishingly, as pro-coal.

But here’s what’s astonishing. The person that Zeldin very nearly beat for governor of New York, Kathy Hochul, has been embarked on an environmental demolition project of her own. At the precise moment that gas prices are soaring, and as a new and supercharged El Niño brings climate concerns back to the center of public consciousness, Hochul is doing her very best to sink New York’s landmark climate law and stick the Empire State with more expensive gas. She’s not showing the policy-making chops of her peers in far poorer places like Pakistan or Bangladesh.

The background here is long, and like all things in New York politics opaque. Suffice it to say that New Yorkers passed a reasonably ambitious climate law, and that the governor has not done much to enact it. If you want some background, the redoubtable David Roberts interviewed the equally redoubtable Pete Sikora, who explains

The governor just took everything that the Climate Action Council came up with—her own appointees—and ignored it. That’s the capsule summary. They didn’t do the policies, they didn’t do the regulations, they didn’t do the things that would have implemented the law. They did a few things here and there, but by and large, nothing that would have implemented the law correctly was done. Little bits and pieces. For example, the state passed ending oil and gas in all new construction. That’s fantastic. That’s really good.

As you pointed out, distributed solar is a real bright spot. The numbers are moving there. It’s good. The CHPE project is about to connect. That’s a big transmission project from Canadian hydropower to New York City. Very cool too. There’s good things happening. But by and large, the long list of things in the climate plan was not done—90% of it not done. The centerpiece was Cap and Invest. The governor pulled that back at the last second the same way she did on congestion pricing. It’s in this weird limbo where it’s paused now.

If you want a comprehensive list of the opportunities she’s missed, try here. Most political pros I’ve talked to—and I talked to some more this week because I was in New York this week to lobby on the state’s solar laws—seem baffled by what Hochul’s up to. She’s not in a tough election fight—after Trump pushed Elise Stefanik out of the GOP primary she faces only a Zeldin-lite Long Island pol, and in a year when an onion bialy could win in blue New York. My guess is that she’s about a year behind on her talking points; in the wake of Kamala Harris’s loss, a certain kind of moderate Dem decided that “affordability” was the new watchword and brought the idea that talking about climate was a mistake. (Not everyone went along—J.B. Pritzker in Illinois, for instance, has kept up the state’s clean energy momentum).

In New York’s case this may have been magnified by the sudden rise of Zohran Mamdani, who talked about affordability—but with a particular set of policies attached to it that made it more than rhetorical. For Hochul, an all-out push for wind and solar and batteries would have been wise since they are in fact affordable, but it was easier to go with the fracked gas lobby. So she’s fast-tracking new pipelines—in essence building the very infrastructure that New Yorkers rejected when they shut down fracking in the state. It’s all a tragic muddle, benefiting only Big Oil. Indeed, as Colin Kinniburgh reported last month,

A national industry group, led by some of the country’s largest pipeline builders and a slew of other gas interests, has recently entered the fray, tapping former state politicians to help advance Gov. Kathy Hochul’s “all of the above” energy strategy. Top of their agenda: pressing pause on the state’s climate targets.

New Yorkers can do a couple of things. One is press their state legislators to resist Hochul’s gutting of the climate law. The other is to lobby those same legislators to pass the ASAP and SUNNY laws, which would at least speed up solar permitting and allow balcony solar in the state.

And all of us can do a better job of demanding real action from our blue state leaders. Because this drift is not confined to New York—in Hawaii, for instance, Democratic governor Josh Green has called for a huge new liquefied natural gas project to supply the state’s electricity, ignoring the fact that the Aloha State is bathed in sunlight and washed by the steady trade winds that make it so delightful. Again, this is exactly the opposite tack that leaders across the rest of the world are taking, and in both states it will saddle residents with gas projects for decades to come.

I wrote about “climate-hushing” last week, and decisions like this are the inevitable result—on purely political grounds alone they surrender the high ground on what will be the most important issue of our century. And they surrender the gift that cheap renewables provide to both planet and consumer. They are exactly the opposite of what scientists told the Santa Marta conference was required—an end to new fossil fuel expansion. The next time a climate disaster strikes these states their governors will mouth the usual pieties, but they won’t mean much.

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In other energy and climate news:

+Extreme heat is threatening the global agriculture system, according to a new report jointly produced by the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization and the World Meteorological Organization. As Fiona Harvey reports,

Farmers could find it impossible to work safely for as many as 250 days of the year – more than two-thirds of the time – in already hot regions including much of India and south Asia, tropical sub-Saharan Africa and swathes of Central and South America.

Livestock are already experiencing an increase in mortality rates, as heat stress begins for common species at about 25C. Extreme heat reduces yields from dairy cows and cuts the fat and protein content of milk. Pigs and chickens are unable to sweat and, as temperatures rise, face digestive tract breakdowns, organ failure and cardiovascular shock.

Yields begin to decline at temperatures above 30C for most agricultural crops, with damage including weakened cell walls and the production of toxins. The yields of maize in some areas have declined by about 10%. Wheat has fallen by nearly as much, and is projected to decline further as temperatures rise to more than 1.5C above preindustrial levels.

Meanwhile, the FT has a comprehensive report on the ways that the cattle industry is “eating its own tail.” As Stephanie Walton writes

The US cattle and beef industry is in a bad way. The megadrought currently plaguing the western states has been going on for 22 years, with no signs of abating. The quality of grazing land has declined, raising feed costs and driving the cattle herd to its lowest numbers since 1951. Meatpackers are paying high prices for live cattle, which would normally cause ranchers to increase herd sizes — but that’s not happening. Costs are passed on to consumers, but meatpacking plants are also closing…

We are in this situation for two reasons: rising temperatures and groundwater depletion. Rising temperatures are the result of greenhouse gas emissions — a not insubstantial amount of which comes from cattle. Methane emitted from cattle has roughly 80 times the warming potential of CO₂ over a 20-year period.

+Many thanks to Congressmen Jamie Raskin and Jared Huffman for pushing back hard on the Trump deal to send a billion dollars in taxpayer money to buy back offshore wind leases. They’ve openen an investigation into the company in question, Total Energies, as Emily Pontecorvo reports:

“We’re going to get every document, every email, every last receipt on this deal, and every person who had a hand in this is going to answer for it,” Huffman said in a press release. “What I have to say to TotalEnergies is this: Consider yourself on notice, we’re coming for you.”

The move comes just a day after the Trump administration announced two additional identical settlements resulting in the cancellation of two more offshore wind leases.

+Just noting for the record: Energy Secretary Chris Wright said last week in Congressional testimony that he was “pretty confident coal will lead the world in global electricity production when I die." Also last week: new global data shows that renewables had overtaken coal to become the largest source of electricity production.

+Project Drawdown has been investigating a question I know is on your minds: which kind of chocolate is worse for the atmosphere? It is, of course, complicated—cacao usually leads to deforestation. But the best answer is fairly clear.

Rather than cutting down trees to plant cacao, growers can plant the crop in the shaded understory of forests—a practice known as agroforestry. Planting cacao and other trees on degraded croplands can improve carbon sequestration while improving local incomes and food security. In Ecuador, for example, the Third Millenium Alliance is paying farmers to protect existing cloud forests and restore adjacent forests with native trees including cacao.

+The remarkable organizer Luisa Neubauer wrote last week from Germany to report that they’d had much bigger than expected turnout for protests demanding faster climate action from the government. Agence France Presse covered the demonstrations, quoting Neubauer:

“I’m surprised that the federal government thinks it can get away with its lame excuses and its obstruction of the energy transition,” she said. “No one here is buying that.”

The organisers, who included groups like Greenpeace and WWF, said about 24,000 people demonstrated in Berlin, 30,000 in Cologne, 15,000 in Hamburg and 12,000 in Munich.

+The Bureau of Investigative Journalism has a fascinating story about the links between UK pension funds and American fossil fuel projects.

Sixty local government pension funds have invested a total of £8bn into funds paying for the rapid construction of gas infrastructure on the Gulf Coast of the US. Residents say these terminals are already causing health problems in their communities. Experts say they represent one of the biggest threats to the future of the planet.

Over 7 million school staff, civil servants and other public sector workers either save with, or receive their pension from, local government pension schemes. Our revelations have sparked concerns among local councillors, who have urged fund managers to divest from fossil fuels.

While the companies behind these projects are enjoying a boost from the war in Iran, they could tumble in value as the world switches to renewable forms of energy. Councillor Andrew Scopes, who sits on an advisory panel for West Yorkshire Pension Fund, said: “We will still be paying benefits out in 60 years’ time. We need to be looking beyond the possible short-term gains, at the long-term risk.”

In sweeter news from the UK, researchers are finding that new solar farms are attracting lots of birds. As Warren van der Sandt writes:

Where diesel-chugging tractors once dominated, solar arrays now stand sentinel. Many people in the region have raised concerns about this shift. They naturally fear for the future of their rural and agricultural heritage.

New data has unmasked a startling silver lining: these industrial sites are becoming accidental havens. Birds are now flocking to solar panel arrays in the English countryside. And a few unexpected visitors have been found.

+New research from Brazil confirms that women are often the most at risk in extreme weather events

“The burden of domestic and care functions – looking after children, elderly relatives and people with disabilities – places women in a position of additional vulnerability during forced displacements,” Silvia Sander, protection officer at the UN High Commission on Refugees, says.

“This multiple responsibility means women tend to prioritise the safety of others, which can delay their own escape and increase exposure to risks.”

The pattern repeats with brutal consistency, says the expert. “Factors such as poverty, race, informal work and single motherhood interact with the effects of climate change and create layers of interconnected vulnerability,” Sander says.

+Lovely news from the Amazon, where solar projects are replacing expensive, dirty and noisy diesel generators in thousands of small settlements. As Fabiano Maisonnave writes:

“We used to depend on diesel and lamps,” said Waldemir da Silva, a leader in the Três Unidos Indigenous community of about 40 families at the mouth of the Cuieiras River, located about 45 miles (72 kilometers) from Manaus, the capital of Amazonas state, and accessible only by boat. “Today we have electricity 24 hours a day, without noise or smoke.”

Meanwhile, Sam Matey-Costa, reporting this week from Africa, describes a battery factory emerging in Uganda. To get a sense of what those batteries might be used for, check out his remarkable account of the Zipline drone program that brings lifesaving medicines instantly to every corner of Rwanda

First, we went to “mission control,” a room of screens and maps. One huge wall map showed all flight routes from this base, and one screen showed live tracking of all the drones currently in the air. This one Zipline base sends drones to over 1,000 health center drop points, hospitals and clinics across the western half of Rwanda. Their longest regularly supply flight is to Mibilizi, near the Congolese border. Before Zipline, it had taken seven to eight hours for someone to drive to Mibilizi to resupply their medical center. (And then, of course, that person had to drive seven to eight hours back). Now, Zipline drones have cut resupply time to Mibilizi, from order to delivery, to just 45 minutes. Less for everywhere else.

+About half of American children live in places getting failing grades for air pollution.

“Clean air is not something we can take for granted. It takes work,” Harold Wimmer, the American Lung Association’s president, said in announcing the latest findings. “For decades, people in the U.S. have breathed cleaner air thanks to the Clean Air Act. Unfortunately, that progress is now at risk due to extreme heat and wildfires, fueled by climate change, and policy changes that are making the problem worse.”

+From Hayley Smith, an excellent account of the absurd $400 million greenwashing deal between Saudi Aramco and FIFA for sponsorship of the soccer World Cup.

The soccer organization has touted its sustainability goals — including reaching net-zero emissions by 2040. But some experts say its deal with Aramco compromises that position. The oil company consistently ranks among the top greenhouse gas emitters in the world, responsible for 4.28% of global carbon dioxide emissions in 2024, more than any other company, according to the independent Carbon Majors database. (2025 data were not yet available).

“Having Saudi Aramco as a major worldwide sponsor of this FIFA World Cup completely undermines any credibility FIFA has, or could have had, around sustainability claims,” said Madeleine Orr, an assistant professor of sport ecology at the University of Toronto.

If this annoys you, join in the ongoing efforts against sportswashing—protests are planned for all the World Cup venues, and you can sign up here

Tanya Aldred has a fine account of how sports can help in the climate fight. And I’ll note that later this month I’ll get to both speak at the half of the home opener for the Vermont Green Football Club (our local very socially conscious soccer team that also happens to be national champion) and interview the recently retired xc ski great Jessie Diggins onstage at a big conference sponsored by Outside magazine in Denver. Diggins is the prototype athlete activist, working hard with the estimable Protect Our Winters group to argue for climate action.

+If you find yourself in New Haven, check out the new Rachel Carson exhibit at the Beinecke Library

Meanwhile, from the great Brown University researcher Timmons Roberts and colleagues, an important new book on the sprawling global effort of the fossil fuel industry to disrupt climate action. This is a truly important new global assessment:

People burning fossil fuels causes climate change, a scientific fact that has been clear for decades. And climate policy is broadly popular, with as many as 89% of people around the world wanting more climate action from their leaders. So why haven’t those leaders taken appropriate action? Because at every step, the fossil fuel, agriculture, and other high-carbon industries and their enablers have made it “exponentially more difficult” to enact policies to keep the climate, and the public, safe

+Rivian’s EV factory in Illinois will run on…recycled EV batteries. Patrick George reports:

In the Rivian project, the batteries will come from either its test vehicles or from vehicles that have viable batteries but can no longer drive. Those batteries get sent off to Redwood, which integrates them into power storage units.

Both companies declined to specify the cost of this project. The setup is expected to initially provide 10 megawatt-hours of energy, equivalent to about 1,000 home-energy battery storage units linked together, Redwood’s Straubel said.

“These batteries are already built,” he said. “We need to integrate them and connect them together, but that can happen quite fast. They don’t have to get imported from some other place.”

+And now get out to your local May Day demonstration!

I woke up this Earth Day morning in Santa Barbara, California—which is appropriate, since the offshore oil spill here in 1969 was one of the galvanizing events for the first Earth Day 56 years ago. People got mad, they squawked, and government began to listen. We should never forget what they accomplished—in 18 months Congress had adopted the suite of laws (Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, EPA, etc) that the Trump administration is still trying to gut. And within five years those laws had begun to work. The air is far cleaner than it was, thanks to them. You can swim in far more lakes and rivers, thanks to them. Because they got loud.

We face a more complicated moment today, of course. The ecological crisis of our time is not caused by something going wrong—an engine spewing small amounts of carbon monoxide into the air—and not easily fixed by adding a catalytic converter to the tailpipe. Global warming is the result of things going as they’re supposed to: a “clean-burning” engine emits just water vapor, and lots and lots and lots of carbon dioxide. But that co2 traps heat, and is now warming the planet disastrously. To fix it we have to replace an energy system that runs on fossil fuels with another that runs primarily on the sun. And we have to do it fast.

I flew here yesterday, and for my carbon sins got a clear-sky view of pretty much the entire western United States. It was, as always, majestic—to fly above the Grand Canyon is to glimpse deep time. But it was also almost unbelievably sad. I’ve been telling you that this was the hottest winter, by far, in the history of the West. But to see it is different. I flew over peaks where I’ve glissaded down snowfields in June and there was not an inch of snow to be seen. Lake Mead from above looked like a bathtub with the plug open. Sere brown and tawny withered gold as far as you could see, and with it the scary promise of what will come this summer, the smoke that will rise and the flames that will burn orange against the night.

Temperatures are higher than they’ve ever been, even before El Niño breaks above our heads this summer. And yet we’re talking very little about climate change in our national conversation. There are many reasons for that—the most obvious is that the constant psychic assault from the president leaves so little room to think about anything else. But there’s also been a concerted effort among Democrats and some of their environmental allies to stay away from the topic on the grounds that it will distract from or undercut messages about “affordability” which are supposed to be the ticket to electoral success in the fall.

I’m committed to that electoral success—my calendar for the months ahead is mostly red districts, where Third Act is busy trying to move the needle with older voters. And I understand the concerns, but I think they’re basically wrong, and that talking straightforwardly about the climate crisis is both politically useful, and an excellent way to take on affordability. And I also think that human beings just need to be discussing the single biggest thing happening on planet earth, especially since we’re causing it.

The so-called “climate hushing” among Democrats is a product of political consultants looking at polling data. As Claire Barber explained in an excellent essay last month

The Searchlight Institute, a Democratic think tank run by veteran Democratic political strategist Adam Jentleson that opened its doors in 2025, made waves with its focus on shifting Democratic messaging away from progressive causes, like climate and LGBTQ issues. The think tank is pointed in its stance on climate messaging. A report released in the fall reads, “The First Rule About Solving Climate Change: Don’t Say Climate Change.”

“While battleground voters overwhelmingly agree climate change is a problem, addressing it is not a priority for them,” the report said. Similar to the American Mind Survey, Searchlight found that a majority of Americans believe that climate change is a problem, but rank it below other key issues, like affordability. Searchlight also found high partisan (Democratic) association with the terms “climate” and “climate change” and suggested jettisoning mentions of both altogether.

The phenomenon really dates, I think, from the 2024 presidential campaign, and Kamala Harris’s abbreviated run for the White House. Climate campaigners were perfectly happy to shut up during that run for an obvious reason: Joe Biden had given them, in the Inflation Reduction Act, most of what DC could provide: a massive infusion of funds for the energy transition we require. The job was to pull Harris across the finish line so that her administration could continue the work well underway with the IRA. We failed at that: her message, on the politics of joy and the dangers of Trump ran aground on frustrations with inflation. Climate played no discernible part in the election; I’m not sure any issue played a part in the election, save a kind of general kvetchy grumpiness, and a sense that normal people were being squeezed.

In the wake of their defeat, Democrats have seized on “bread and butter issues,” and left supposed culture war clashes behind. That’s come at a real cost. Corporations, feeling only pressure from the right, have backslid dramatically on their climate commitments. (The big tech guys, who just a couple of years ago were noisily pledging they’d go net zero, are currently planning gas-fired data centers that Wired reports today will produce more emissions than mid-sized European countries). And journalists are, not surprisingly, wandering away from the whole area: the wonderful Amy Westervelt yesterday described a dour meeting of environmental reporters where, among other things, she learned that not just the Washington Post but also Reuters was laying off its climate desk.

Meanwhile, funders of climate journalism are largely folding, too, opting to back comms projects instead or simply stay away from anything as "controversial" as climate and journalism altogether. The cowardice is breathtaking.

As the media watchdogs at FAIR make clear, this decline in coverage is very real

Our research has found that online news coverage of climate change has been trending down. A search of the term “climate change” in Media Cloud’s US–National dataset, which indexes 248 online outlets, found that there was almost 32% less climate coverage in 2025 than 2024.

This trend is similar in TV news. A recent Media Matters (3/4/26) study found that climate coverage on major US commercial broadcast TV networks was down 35% in 2025.

In fact, they even put the decline on a chart. Powerpoint time!

What’s interesting about all this is that it’s not being driven by some change in the basic underlying politics of climate. New polling data makes clear that Americans are as concerned about climate change as they ever have been. Gallup last week reported that

Americans’ concern about global warming or climate change remains elevated compared with what it had been prior to 2017. At least four in 10 U.S. adults have expressed “a great deal” of concern about the matter throughout the past decade (except for a 39% reading in 2023). Between 2009 and 2016, worry was typically in the low-to-mid 30% range but dropped to as low as 25% in 2011.

Currently, 44% of U.S. adults worry a great deal about global warming or climate change, among the highest in the full trend since 1989, along with 46% measured in 2020 and 45% in 2017.

And another series of Earth Day polls made the numbers even clearer. Americans, in increasing numbers, think that our environment is getting worse, and that government should be doing much more about it. Gallup again:

Americans’ assessments of the environment are particularly bleak ahead of Earth Day, as a record-low 35% offer a positive rating of the environment’s quality and two-thirds say it is worsening.

More than three in five U.S. adults, 63%, think the government is not doing enough to protect the environment, and most believe environmental protection should be prioritized over economic growth (58%) and development of U.S. energy sources (57%).

The key data point here, for political thinkers, is that the increase in worry about the environment is being driven by independent voters, precisely the people who will determine how the midterms go.

And it doesn’t surprise me a bit. It’s not as if the president or his oil-soaked cabinet has made some convincing new case about the climate. He just blusters on about the “green new scam” and insists, as he did last week, that the “planet is cooling.” By this point, Americans have decided he’s an idiot—his approval ratings are now droppinginto the mid and even low 30s. If they think he’s got tariffs wrong, and the war wrong, and immigration wrong, and pretty much everything else wrong, why would they think he had the science of climate right?

So, especially as the climate disasters of this hot summer start to mount, and as the El Niño starts to scare people anew, I’d spend some time if I were campaigning making fun of the president on this score. I’d show that clip of him insisting the planet is cooling. It makes Republicans, who have supported him down the line in Congress on energy issues, look like idiots too.

But of course I’d couple it with a full-on assault about affordability, leaning not into the price of eggs, but the price of gas, utilities, and insurance. The first is tied to the war, but they are all three also about the folly of continuing to rely on our current energy system. All you have to say is: a quick move to clean energy drives down prices. If I were preparing ads for congresspeople, I’d definitely have one about how a solarized Australia will, in June, start providing electricity free for three hours every afternoon to all its citizens. Talk about affordability!

One problem with keeping quiet about climate is that it leads people to think that they’re alone in their fears. Here’s an interesting survey from last month fronm the folks at EcoAmerica.

Most Americans are concerned about climate change, but they don’t think most others share that concern. That quiet misunderstanding is one of the biggest barriers to climate action in the United States… The findings point to a striking paradox: while many Americans trust the information they encounter and are concerned about climate change, they believe others are far less concerned and less able to recognize accurate information.

I think some politicians are starting to recognize the possibilities here. Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, venerable campaigner for climate action (with a particular focus on insurance) this winter tweeted out a memorable thread

There’s a thing out there called a “climate husher.” Anyone who cares about what fossil fuel pollution is doing to Earth’s natural systems needs to ignore these so-called “climate hushers” – people who think Dems should stop talking about climate.

In an electorate focused on costs, 65% say climate change is raising their costs. Climate-driven hikes in home insurance are the top economic issue in many places. By 74-10, voters want companies to pay for the harm their pollution causes.

{Poll-chasing analysts] ignore the ‘leadership lack loop.’ When leaders don’t talk about something, enthusiasm falls among voters. In politics, you can often make your own wind, or you can make your own doldrums.

Last, they ignore that this is a fight in which there are real and dangerous villains. Our climate peril didn’t “happen,” it was done — by fraud and corruption.

The fossil fuel climate denial fraud operation and the fossil fuel dark money corruption operation are villainous. It’s evil stuff. Villains need to be fought. Plus, it’s a better story with villains. And true.

I’m pretty sure he’s right. Look, at Third Act we too are focusing a lot of our messaging on the Republican attack on democracy. But we can talk about a couple of things at once. And you can only have a working democracy on a working planet.

Happy Earth Day, all!

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In other energy and climate news:

+From the UK, good news: Ed Milliband, the energy secretary (and quite possibly the heir to embattled prime minister Keir Starmer) is using the Iran crisis to double down on renewables policy. As Heather Stewart reports,

The energy secretary is set to announce a package of new policies in a speech on Tuesday in response to an expected energy crisis prompted by Donald Trump’s war with Iran.

These will include speeding up the warm homes plan to encourage the rapid take-up of solar panels and electric vehicles; expanding the use of solar on public land; and delinking gas and electricity prices, to cut consumers’ bills.

“As we face the second global energy shock in less than five years, the lesson for our country is clear; the era of fossil fuel security is over, and the era of clean energy security must come of age,” he is expected to say.

Meanwhile, some low-income British households will apparently get free plug-in solar units to take the edge off their power bills

And here in the U.S., the surge towards approving plug-in or balcony solar continues apace. This has been a big focus for Third Act, which has helped make sure 28 states are considering it this spring. And though state legislatures are usually slow to act, more and more are stepping up to the plate. The New York State Senate passed it unanimously yesterday—on to the Assembly! I’ll report more on this later, but it’s very good news.

+My old friends at 350.org have put out a nifty report on the cost of fossil fuel reliance. They use a reasonable figure for the damage that carbon is doing, add in the obvious health costs of breathing in pollution, and conclude that every human being is paying the equivalent of $1,400 a year to keep this smoky machine rattling along. As they point out, that’s a reminder that we have the resources to help the poorest people in the world make the energy transition. We should, they write:

Redirect public finance from fossil fuel expansion to a fast and fair energy transition. National and international public finance (through export credit agencies, development finance institutions, public pension fund investments and multilateral development banks) continues to underwrite new oil, gas, and coal infrastructure. Redirecting these flows toward just transition, climate resilience and inclusive green industrialization is among the highest-leverage policy interventions available.

Fast-track investment in renewables for broad-based prosperity and energy security. Simplify permitting, de-risk with guarantees, and prioritize the needs of communities, local businesses and families living in energy poverty

+As I’ve been writing, we’ve moved very rapidly into the era of the big battery. They’re powering California after sundown, but they’re coming everywhere, as evidenced by the news that New England has a new champion contender, as Julian Spector reports:

Canary Media recently covered the inauguration of the 175-megawatt Cross Town battery in Gorham, Maine, which was the largest in New England when it began operating in late November. But that trophy has already passed to a 250-megawatt facility in Medway, Massachusetts, southwest of Boston and about 10 miles from the Patriots’ Gillette Stadium.

The Medway battery came online fully Feb. 25, according to developer VC Renewables, a subsidiary of global energy trader Vitol.

“To be fair, I don’t expect Medway to hold that title for very long, either,” said Tom Bitting, managing director at Advantage Capital, which supported the project with a $158 million tax equity deal. ​“There are other batteries being developed in New England that are bigger, but I think it is all just a sign that we need all of it, and there’s huge demand for it.”

For instance, Jupiter Power, a heavyweight in Texas’ booming grid storage market, is developing the 700-megawatt/2.8-gigawatt-hour Trimount battery plant at a former oil-storage site in Everett, Massachusetts, just north of Boston. Jupiter aims to finish the project in 2028 or 2029. Trimount is slated to be among the largest stand-alone batteries in the whole country

By the way, if you want to help shepherd Massachusetts into the clean energy future, here’s where to register your comment against the proposed Constitution pipeline, an effort to extend the writ of fracked gas for another couple of unnecessary decades.

+Heatwaves around the world are already breaching human survival limits, especially for older humans, new research has found. As Graham Readfearn explains,

Scientists re-examined six extreme heatwaves between 2003 and 2024 and found that when temperature, humidity and the body’s ability to stay cool were accounted for, all were potentially deadly for older people.

The absolute limit for humans to survive had been assumed to be a six-hour exposure to a wet bulb temperature of 35C – a measure that accounts for temperature and humidity but has rarely been observed on the planet at that level.

Heatwaves in Mecca (Saudi Arabia, 2024), Bangkok (Thailand, 2024), Phoenix (United States, 2023), Mount Isa (Australia, 2019), Larkana (Pakistan, 2015) and Seville (Spain, 2003) had seen thousands of deaths despite none approaching that wet bulb limit, the research found.

But when scientists applied a new model of human survivability that takes into account the body’s ability to function and stay cool depending on age, they found all six events had seen non-survivable periods for older people who could not find shade.

Prof. Sarah Perkins-Kirkpatrick, the study’s lead author at the Australian National University, said the results were shocking.

“My first thought was ‘Oh shit’ – I really didn’t expect to see that, especially when you zoom in to individual cities,” she said.

+The indefatigable Emily Pontecorvo has gotten hold of some new documents to show that the Trump administration got nothing back for the $1 billion in taxpayer money it paid a French company to surrender its wind lease rights off the Atlantic seaboard. The administration claimed that the company would have to invest in oil and gas, but Pontecorvo says that’s not true (which is, in fact, a small win for the atmosphere, even if it’s another loss for truth in government, not to mention basic competence). As Kit Kennedy at NRDC says,

“The irony of handing a billion dollars to this developer at a time when Americans are struggling to pay their electricity bills and struggling to keep afloat,” she said. “To be clear, this billion dollars is coming from us taxpayers, and the net result of these agreements will be to increase electricity bills for Americans.”

Meanwhile, what is Big Oil doing with some of the $30 million an hour in extra profit they’re earning from the war in Iran? Investing it in new farflung oil plays, at least according to Collin Eaton at the Journal:

The surge in energy prices is providing the oil industry with a windfall of cash that is expected to help it venture into territories previously out of reach or abandoned years ago. The influx comes after many drillers cut spending on exploration to return more cash to shareholders.

“Never underestimate the romance of upstream people looking at opportunities. They say, ‘Boy, wouldn’t it be great if we could do this or that,’” said Edward Chow, a nonresident senior associate at the Center for Strategic & International Studies and a former Chevron executive. “Now, you’ve got the cash to do it.”

Romance is…one word for it

+Regular readers will know that one continuing minor drama is the development of the next generation of solar panels, so-called “perovskite” solar panels. A new step last week, as Kelly Pickerel reports that

Perovskite-silicon solar technology company Tandem PV has begun demonstration manufacturing in Fremont, California. In a 65,000-ft² facility, Tandem PV is producing tandem perovskite-silicon solar panels. The line can accommodate 40 MW of annual capacity.

“This factory marks the shift from impressive R&D results to repeatable manufacturing at a commercially meaningful scale,” said Tandem PV CEO Scott Wharton. “People have talked for years about the promise of perovskites. This is what it looks like to deliver. It is an important milestone in restoring American leadership in solar manufacturing through the kind of breakthrough engineering Silicon Valley is known for.”

Tandem PV’s proprietary technology combines a thin perovskite light-absorbing layer with a conventional silicon solar cell. By capturing more of the solar spectrum than silicon alone, tandem panels generate more electricity from the same footprint.

+Yet more data confirms something this newsletter has been insisting on from the start: of all the ways to make electricity, burning trees is the worst possible idea. As the hardworking Fiona Harvey explains

The findings cast doubt on plans by several governments, including the UK, to offer subsidies or other financial support for carbon capture attached to wood-burning power.

Bio-energy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) has been touted as a clean way of producing baseload power, substituting for gas and coal, which could even result in “negative emissions” as when replacement forests are grown they take up CO2 from the air.

But such systems could take 150 years to be “carbon negative”, researchers from the US, UK and China have found, in part because of the long time it takes to regrow forests, and because of the damage done when existing savannah, pasture or cropland is converted to grow biomass for burning.

+Pete Hegseth may have decreed that climate change is “crap,” but the military is continuing to prepare for it at least on one front, as chronicled in a new report from Amanda Kolson Hurley

The Defense Department is still engaged on one front of the climate fight: steeling its bases against the effects of a warming atmosphere, such as higher seas, fiercer storms and deadlier fires. A new flood wall is rising at the US Naval Academy in Maryland; a low-lying Air Force runway is being elevated in Virginia; and projects are underway to reduce wildfire risk around various military sites in Hawaii.

Work that was previously described as confronting the climate threat is now touted for ensuring “resilience” and “readiness.” The semantics are a nod to necessity: At stake are hundreds of billions of dollars of assets and the ability to launch missions quickly and smoothly.

“Ultimately, the military is a very pragmatic institution,” said John Conger, a past director of the nonprofit Center for Climate and Security and a senior Defense Department official during the Obama administration. “It wants to maintain mission capability. Whether we’re going to call it ‘climate,’ not ‘climate,’ whatever — if I can’t get to the base because the road is flooded, that’s a problem.”

+Thank heaven for Greenpeace, which erected a small replica windfarm on Donald Trump’s Scottish golf course. Anything to annoy the man!

Greenpeace said golfers arriving at Trump Turnberry in Ayrshire were greeted by the sight of prop wind turbines installed on the course’s 4th green, along with a sign reading “Choose wind, dump Trump”.

+And finally, from Molly Schen, a truly beautiful project that will give you something to relax with on Earth Day. Songbird Antiphons is a song cycle for unaccompanied voices, drawing on birdsong as a lens on climate change. The music by Benedict Sheehan, with texts by Talia Sheehan and Charles Anthony Silvestri, performed by Skylark, conducted by Matthew Guard. Here’s the Spotify link. I pretty much promise you’ll enjoy it!

In all honesty, you can probably skip this one. It’s entirely possible I’m writing it as therapy for myself. I try hard to stay focused on what we can still do to ward off the worst, but every once in a while I’m reminded of why we’re here, on a planet rapidly overheating. (And oh by the way, there’s a new study on the collapse of the Atlantic currents I discussed last week, and it leads the great expert on that system to now predict there’s a fifty percent chance they’ll collapse this century). When I started writing about the climate crisis in the 1980s I was in my twenties, and I didn’t fully comprehend that there could be a force on this planet so steeped in greed and power that it would sacrifice the earth and its inhabitants for its own narrow interests. But there is, and it’s Big Oil.

Over time their evil came into ever-sharper focus. During the 1990s it was clear they were organizing opposition to action on global warming—the CEO of Exxon famously insisted that the planet was cooling. Right after the 2000 election the heads of the oil companies held secret meetings with new vice-president Dick Cheney and soon thereafter George W. Bush reneged on his promise to treat carbon dioxide as a pollutant. And Big Oil mobilized to defeat the cap-and-trade proposals at the end of that decade and to scuttle the Copenhagen climate talks. What we didn’t know then was just exactly how vile all this greedy maneuvering really was: it wasn’t until 2015 that reporters delving into archives and interviewing whistleblowers proved that the Exxons of the world had known everything there was to know about climate change back in the ‘80s and simply chosen to lie about it. It’s never far from my mind what a different planet we’d live on had they simply fessed up at the start and gotten to work on the problem.

I’m thinking of all this because we’ve had a couple of new developments this week to remind us just how deep this evil runs.

The first, of course, is the simple fact that they are profiting in truly incredible fashion from the Iran war being waged by President Trump, the man they worked so hard to put in power. As Damian Carrington reported yesterday,

The world’s top 100 oil and gas companies banked more than $30m every hour in unearned profit in the first month of the US-Israeli war in Iran, according to exclusive analysis for the Guardian. Saudi Aramco, Gazprom and ExxonMobil are among the biggest beneficiaries of the bonanza, meaning key opponents of climate action continue to prosper.

They didn’t do anything new, or work any harder, to earn that extra $30 million an hour, which is coming straight from our pockets—they just sat back and watched as their handpicked President blew up a girl’s school. This is the very definition of a windfall profit, and I’m glad to see at least a few people—here’s the great Canadian analyst Seth Klein—making that case:

The windfall from spikes in the price of oil also overwhelmingly go to the wealthy, producing a hidden redistribution from lower-income households to the super-rich. A study by University of Massachusetts Amherst economists Isabella Weber and Gregor Semieniuk found that the price shock triggered by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine resulted in 2022 net income of publicly listed oil and gas companies reaching “$916bn globally – a figure more than three times that of the preceding years (even excluding 2020). The US was the single largest beneficiary: US-headquartered companies captured $281bn.” Moreover, within the US, they found, “50% of all fossil fuel profit claims accrued to the wealthiest 1% of individuals. The bottom 50% of the population – 66 million households – received 1%.”

If you wonder what the oil companies think we should be doing instead of taxing them, here’s a Chevron executive named Andy Walz

“People should drive less. They should try to conserve energy.”

To which one can only say yes. And also, go jump in a lake.

The second reminder of Big Oil’s perfidy comes in a truly remarkable piece of reporting from Jodi Kantor and Adam Liptak at the New York Times. They are Supreme Court reporters (not an easy job, since the place is cloaked in secrecy) and they set out to understand how the Roberts Court has systematically replaced open argument about crucial questions with a “shadow docket” where big cases can be decided on the fly, without opinions. They trace the development to February of 2016, when, without argument,

By a 5-to-4 vote along partisan lines, the order halted President Barack Obama’s Clean Power Plan, his signature environmental policy. They acted before any other court had addressed the plan’s lawfulness. The decision consisted of only legal boilerplate, without a word of reasoning.

The two reporters obtained the internal memos from the five days that the justices were at work on this momentous and unprecedented step and they reveal that it was a tender solicitation for the oil companies that drove them.

At a critical moment for the country and the court, the papers show, he acted as a bulldozer in pushing to stop Mr. Obama’s plan to address the global climate crisis.

When colleagues warned the chief justice that he was proposing an unprecedented move, he was dismissive. “I recognize that the posture of this stay request is not typical,” he wrote. But he argued that the Obama plan, which aimed to regulate coal-fired plants, was “the most expensive regulation ever imposed on the power sector,” and too big, costly and consequential for the court not to act immediately.

In centuries past, the court would have weighed arguments over many months, but here Roberts demanded they act immediately

The chief justice contended that the court had to act immediately because the energy industry “must make changes to business plans today.”

“Absent a stay, the Clean Power Plan will cause (and is causing) substantial and irreversible reordering of the domestic power sector before this court has an opportunity to review its legality,” he wrote.

His offensive caught the other justices by surprise—Ruth Bader Ginsburg, for instance, was in Italy for a talk “billed as a conversation with the notorious RBG.” In the memos they exchanged they questioned the speed and the unorthodox procedure, but none of them seem to have raised the question of whether, say, global warming presented as “irreversible a reordering” of the planet as whatever might happen to the poor oil companies. (David Sirota adds some useful detail on the pivotal vote of Anthony Kennedy, also the author of Citizens United). It was no wonder this was the case Roberts chose—he was the perfect product of the rightwing reordering of the judiciary, a reordering underwritten above all by the Koch Brothers, who were in turn the country’s biggest oil and gas barons. But the damage done by his lickspittle acquiescence to Big Oil has harmed more than the atmosphere. As Kantor and Liptak report:

That night marks the birth, many legal experts believe, of the court’s modern “shadow docket,” the secretive track that the Supreme Court has since used to make many major decisions, including granting President Trump more than 20 key victories on issues from immigration to agency power.

And it marks the end of any sense that the federal judiciary is a fair arbiter instead of a politically engaged player in our national life. It may be the most cynical thing a chief justice has ever done. (And no Democrat should think twice about Supreme Court reform if they regain power).

But of course the judiciary can only act like this with the collaboration of the Congress, which approves their nominations. And Congress, too, is enmeshed in the same oil spill that stains the other branches, as we were reminded this week, when Wyoming Rep. Harriet Hageman finally introduced a long-awaited bill that would grant the industry immunity from lawsuits over the damage caused by climate change. This follows a spate of similar state laws passed in recent months, which a landmark Pro Publica investigation show were engineered by rightwing judicial activist Leonard Leo (the same guy who built the Roberts Court through the Federalist Society), using billions in a donation from a conservative businessman named Barre Seid who had bankrolled not only the fight for more DDT but also the Heartland Institute (The most outré of the climate denying thinktanks, famous above all for a series of billboards claiming that climate scientists were like Charles Manson.)

Anyway, as useful as those state laws are, the Holy Grail for the oil industry would be a federal grant of immunity, which would effectively eviscerate all the “climate superfund” laws passed in recent years by states like New York and Vermont, as well as the various lawsuits working their way through the courts. The oil industry began pushing for this immunity grant as soon as the president they’d elected took office—here’s a Wall Street Journal account form March 2025 outlining a White House meeting where they made the case. But now—with the GOP looking increasingly likely to lose control of Congress after the midterms—they’re making their play. And its actually a pincers move, since the Supreme Court is also about to consider a case from Colorado that would toss out many of the lawsuits.

Here’s what’s at stake: if this law passes and stands, then the oil industry will never be held accountable for the fact that they knowingly destroyed the planet’s climate system. Just as important, the law would remove the one source of real leverage to force the oil industry into some kind of grand bargain to wind down their business. This is precisely the tool that finally forced the tobacco industry to the table, and the oil industry is determined that they’ll get away with their much larger crimes. (Philip Morris killed people one smoker at a time; Exxon’s smoke can take out an entire planet). Here’s how former California insurance commissioner Davy Jones put it recently:

Putting any industry above the law — especially one responsible for creating many of the greenhouse gas emissions that have helped fuel climate-related destruction of homes, businesses and whole communities — would be beyond dangerous. If Big Oil gets its wish, it would be an injustice with lasting and cascading harm.

We need to continue this line of attack: there are “Polluter Pays” superfund bills up in a number of legislatures—you can get in the fight here; there’s a powerful new bill advancing through the Hawaii legislature that would empower insurance companies to sue Big Oil for compensation for the mounting climate claims from events like the Lahaina wildfires or the massive flooding of the last month. I’ve gone to jail to get the message across, and I probably will again.

But one reason I spend increasing amounts of my time pushing the rise of alternative energy is because I’ve come to fully understand the degree of corruption that the oil industry has produced in our system. Though I will fight hard for the Democratic majorities that might overturn grants of immunity, and for new laws to hold the oil industry accountable, I’m not sure we’ll win those fights in time.

The only sets of laws the oil industry lacks the cash to completely corrupt are the laws of physics, and the law of markets which indicates that in the end a cheaper and better product should win out. Obviously they’re trying hard to end-run that latter law, even as they lie about the first—but in this case their greed may actually be handing them a serious defeat. It’s by now obvious to almost anyone that Trump’s maniacal attack on Iran is hastening the move towards alternative energy, primarily wind and sun. (There are myriad examples: here’s Raphael Rashid talking about the renewables revolution suddenly underway in South Korea; here’s Tim McDonnell with a fine account of how China’s finding itself in the catbird seat as buyers from places like Egypt flock to its clean-energy offerings). For decades Big Oil’s final riposte in any debate was: ‘well, you can’t do without us if you want hot showers and cold beer.’But now we can.

I work on solar energy because it will help limit the damage from climate change, and because it’s potentially liberating, empowering local communities instead of vast multinationals. But there are days when I work on solar energy just because it’s the sharpest stick with which to poke Exxon and Chevron and the rest, companies that I despise. Companies that if I’m honest I hate, though I try hard not to hate. They are the vampires of our world, sucking the life from the earth we were lucky to be born on. And we all know what sunlight does to vampires.

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In other energy and climate news:

+When the Trump administration crashed the American EV market, automakers were left with lots of capacity to build batteries—which they’re now churning out for all kinds of other purposes.

Ford, for example, announced that it would transition its factory space in Kentucky to build Battery Energy Storage Systems (BESS) packs in December. The keys to its second plant in Tennessee would be handed over to Ford’s partner in the battery space, SK On.

GM said that its Ultium Cells plant in Nashville would also move towards building BESS solutions. It will spend around $70 million to retool and retrain workers so as not to flush away its $2.3 billion partnership with LG Energy Solution.

There’s no denying that this is a smart move for automakers. Even though EV demand may have shifted in the near-term, automakers have already built out the factory capacity and signed sourcing contracts for critical minerals. Moreover, energy demand is rising and storage has become more critical infrastructure than ever. Big Auto has a choice: Write-down those costs, or make the most of what they have and pivot.

+A pretty depressing story from public radio reporters Julie Bourdin, Tommy Trenchard, and Maya Miskir on the apparent failure of much of the “Great Green Wall” effort to build a cordon of trees to stop deserts spreading in Africa. The project has been plagued by funding troubles, and by the droughts that come as the planet warms: They visited many sites along the route, including one in Djibouti:

But within a few years, the water supply began to dwindle. The dam had been thwarted by persistent drought, then sprung leaks. The solar pump extracting the groundwater broke. It didn’t help that the borehole had brought new settlers to the valley, increasing strain on the remaining supply. Eventually, the water dried up altogether.

Today, a water truck paid for by the government still comes once a week from the capital to fill up the tanks, but without the pumped supply, there’s barely enough to give the livestock, let alone to irrigate Guelleh’s field. The crops withered and died. Before long, the farm reverted to desert.

As if droughts and heatwaves weren’t by themselves enough, a new study finds that climate change is making these hot/dry extremes much more likely to combine—and much more likely to be found in poor countries that of course have done nothing to cause the trouble.

The simulations show that the dominant driver behind the increase in compound hot-dry events is the rising global temperature, amplified by land-atmosphere feedbacks. These changes are driven primarily by human greenhouse gas emissions rather than by natural variability. The AWI-team also found a linear relationship between global temperature rise and the fraction of the population exposed to heightened compound hot-dry extremes. “If current climate policies stay the same, nearly one third of the global population could face more frequent and severe hot-dry conditions by the end of the century”, says Di Cai. That would be nearly 2.6 billion people. To put this into perspective: based on current global average per-capita emissions, the lifetime carbon emissions of about 3.4 people would be enough to expose one additional person to heightened compound hot-dry extremes by the end of the century.

+New study finds that thawing permafrost may release carbon many times faster than anticipated.

Experiments conducted by researchers at the University of Leeds, and published in the AGU journal Earth’s Future, show that when permafrost thaws, it becomes 25 to 100 times more permeable. This change allows significantly greater amounts of climate-forcing gases to escape into the atmosphere.

Permafrost, soil that has remained frozen for long periods and spans vast regions of the Arctic, has long acted as a natural barrier that limits the release of greenhouse gases. As global temperatures rise, however, this frozen layer is beginning to thaw.

Across the planet, permafrost is estimated to hold about 1700 billion tons of carbon, roughly three times the amount currently present in the atmosphere.

+A fascinating (and somewhat ominous) new study helps explain why a huge percentage of Antarctic sea ice suddenly vanished last decade. Warm water had been building up under a surface cap of colder water, until persistent winds blew that cap away, allowing the hot stuff below to surge to the surface. As Matt Simon writes,

“What we witnessed was basically this very violent release of all that pent up heat from below that we linked to the sea ice decline,” Wilson said.

This bluster was likely driven at least in part by climate change: As the planet warms, the atmosphere develops temperature gradients, which strengthen winds and change their patterns. Scientists, though, are still working out how much of this shift might be due to “natural variability,” or what might happen anyway if humans hadn’t released so much carbon since the Industrial Revolution.

Either way, the system shifted around 2016. Beyond bringing up warm waters, all that wind may have broken up the ice, both by pushing blocks together and by creating waves. “Recent research has shown that both atmospheric and oceanic warming is likely contributing to the sudden change in Antarctic sea-ice extent since 2016, and this paper helps to further develop the point that deeper ocean warmth is a significant player,” said Zachary Labe, a climate scientist at the research group Climate Central who studies Antarctic ice but wasn’t involved in the paper.

+Maybe you saw pictures of Justin Trudeau and Katy Perry at Coachella. Or maybe you saw pictures of the dust clouds that wiped out much of the music festival’s first weekend. As Tony Briscoe writes,

Wind-driven dust is an overlooked environmental hazard — and one that carries a hefty price tag. A recent study estimated that dust storms cost more than $154 billion in the U.S. in 2017 alone. The evaluation puts dust events on par with natural disasters in terms of economic costs, eclipsing, for example, the 2017 wildfire season but shy of that year’s hurricane season, according to Irene Feng, the lead author of the 2024 study, who researched dust at the University of Texas at El Paso.

“Dust is kind of a big deal,” said Feng, now a post-graduate student at George Mason University. “The fact that it was even comparable to hurricanes ... was a huge surprise to me.”

+Amid record drought, record wildfires have swept across the nation’s grasslands this spring, with the biggest fire burning more than half a million acres in Nebraska. As Gabrielle Cannon reports

“There is a changing wildfire dynamic in this region,” Dr Dirac Twidwell, a rangeland ecologist at the University of Nebraska, said, describing how a cycle of extreme conditions can create more catastrophes. Stronger summer storms seed the grasses that cure by winter. If there’s no protective snow cover, that browned vegetation ramps up fire risks – especially when the winds begin to blow.

This year, those conditions converged to create the perfect storm in Nebraska. After parts of the state were pummeled with rains last summer, winter was the second warmest on record and the fourth driest.

“The probability of ignition just goes through the roof,” Twidwell added. “The deck has been stacked.”

This is one reason that more and more farmers would like to offset some of the natural risk of their profession by putting up solar panels. In many places, of course, local opposition—often fueled by fossil fuel industry disinformation—has limited solar development, but the Associated Press reports that farmers are starting to fight back effectively

One farmer, who helped gather signatures for the referendum in Richland County, Ohio, found that when the debate over solar projects was framed as a property rights issue, people in the community were more receptive.

Another farmer also focuses on property rights when speaking on the issue. His farm is his retirement plan, and he should have the right to use it to support his family, he said.

“There’s families that are relying on this and looking for this,” he said. “And it’s been taken away, this opportunity.”

Meanwhile, here’s a weird twist to an old story. Farmers were lured to dry places like the Plains with the promise (absurd) that “rain follows the plow.” But there’s at least some sign that in certain places rain may follow the solar panel. Efosa Udinmwen reports from the UAE, where water is very valuable (especially as the Iran war threatens desalinization plants) that

A modelling study led by climate scientist Oliver Branch at the University of Hohenheim found dark solar panels absorb more heat than the surrounding reflective desert sand.

This temperature difference drives updrafts that can lead to rain, potentially providing water for tens of thousands of people.

The researchers modeled solar panels as nearly black surfaces that absorb 95% of incoming sunlight.

When solar farms exceeded 15 square kilometers, the increased heat contrasted sharply with the reflective sand around them, increasing the updrafts that drive cloud formation, but it needs a source of atmospheric moisture.

However, the model showed that moist, high-altitude winds from the Persian Gulf would suffice.

A 20 square kilometer solar field would increase rainfall by nearly 600,000 cubic meters under the right conditions, equivalent to 1cm of rain falling across an area the size of Manhattan.

+Finally, the huge surge for balcony solar that began on Sun Day continues to crest. Lining up behind Maine and Virginia (and of course pioneer Utah), the Colorado legislature has now passed the law, and it merely awaits the signature of Gov Jared Polis. All of you who helped make Sun Day a success own these wins—and there will be a bunch more of them in the weeks ahead.