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.

Every once in a while I have to snap out of the hypnotic grip of the bizarre news cycle and remind myself—and you—that there’s something even more important underway than the obvious mental and moral decline of the president: the relentless rise in the temperature of the planet. So here’s my latest occasional update from the physical world, and I fear the news is not good.

Let’s begin with the immediate past, and stay close to home, because the U.S. has been the center of some of the most extreme meteorological action on planet earth recently. Consider our winter: though it was chilly in the Northeast, if you averaged the temperature across the lower 48 it was the second-hottest winter on record. Thats because nine states had their hottest winter ever and five their second-hottest. As Andrea Thompson pointed out in Scientific American, “nowhere in the U.S. had a record cold winter this year. Nowhere even came close.”

That winter, by the way, was December, January, and February—what we call “meteorological winter” because it coincides with the coldest quarter of the year. It was outrageously hot and very dry, with severely shrunken snowpacks across the mountains of the West, which made Westerners nervous about the chances for wildfire as the summer wore on.

And then came March.

March was the single craziest month in U.S. weather history. Here’s how Seth Borenstein put it in the lede of his account for the Associated Press

March’s persistent unseasonable heat was so intense that the continental United States registered its most abnormally hot month in 132 years of records, according to federal weather data.

The federal government is still collecting weather data (though far less than it used to) and so we know the following remarkable fact according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration,

The average maximum temperature for March was especially high at 11.4 F (6.3 C) above the 20th century average and was almost a degree warmer than the average daytime high for April.

As Bob Henson points out in the Yale-based blog Eye of the Storm,

In 35 of the 48 contiguous states, the statewide average reading was among the top-ten warmest for any March. Not a single contiguous state was cooler than average.

Henson also points out that a lack of rainfall meant it’s so far been the driest year in American history

The nationally averaged precipitation total for 2026 to date is an ominous one: a mere 4.79 inches. That’s the lowest value on record for any January-to-March interval, including such notoriously dry periods as the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. The previous record low was 5.27 inches, set in Jan.-Mar. 1910.

As Henson’s colleague Jeff Masters succinctly told the AP:

Climate change is kicking our butts

And I fear it’s barely begun the beating. Because over the last two weeks, even as the world has fixed its gaze on the Middle East, meteorologists have been staring in some awe and terror at what appears to be a rapidly building El Niño. I’ve been telling you this is on the way for some months, but it’s coming into ever-clearer focus. NOAA again, in its April forecast, put the odds of a El Niño beginning this summer at better than sixty percent. More to the point, the wide array of computer models around the planet are beginning to predict a so-called “super El Niño,” when temperatures in the critical region of the Pacific shoot up far far far higher than in the past. Henson and Masters again:

For October, roughly half of the ECMWF ensemble is calling for sea surface temperatures in the main El Niño region (Niño3.4) to exceed 2.5 degrees Celsius above the seasonal average. Such values would correspond to what’s loosely referred to as a “super El Niño.” Though there’s no official definition for a “super” event, the term is often attached to El Niño when its peak anomalies reach at least +2.0°C. Since 1950, the only El Niño events that have hit this threshold for at least one three-month interval were in 1972–73, 1982–83, 1997–98, 2015–16, and 2023–24. Only one of those events, in 2015–16, pushed all the way past +2.5°C.

Here’s a useful graph of the various estimates from the computer modelling, courtesy of Zeke Hausfather

Basically it reads: a world we haven’t seen before. Because remember, El Niño comes on top of the steadily rising temperature of the earth. If these forecasts bear out, then possibly 2026 and certainly 2027 will be the hottest years ever recorded on this earth. As the atmospheric scientist Paul Roundy put it, there’s a “real potential for the strongest El Niño event in 140 years.” We don’t know, of course, exactly how this will manifest, but as Gabrielle Cannon wrote yesterday in the Guardian

A super El Niño that occurred in 2015 brought severe drought in Ethiopia, water supply shortages in Puerto Rico, and smashed records after unleashing a vicious hurricane season in the central North Pacific, according to an analysis by US federal scientists.

The cycle tends to create drought and heat across Australia, around southern and central Africa, in India and in parts of South America, including in the Amazon rainforest. Heavy precipitation, meanwhile, could hit the southern tier of the US, parts of the Middle East, and south-central Asia.

I think it’s safe to say that we can expect more weather chaos than we’ve ever seen before (the good folks at Covering Climate Now put together a useful briefing for reporters last week). Here’s my prediction, since my job is to figure out how the physical and political worlds intersect:

The havoc unleashed by a super El Niño will coincide with the havoc unleashed by Trump in the Gulf to produce a perfect storm of support for rapid action on getting off fossil fuels. Our brief vacation from thinking about climate change as a crucial fact of life on this planet will be over; the conjoined fears of the next months will combine to put us in a very new place politically.

My main fear is that this useful moment is coming very late in the game.

And by that I mean that the last few weeks have also produced a new round of research on the damage that human warming of the earth is doing to its most basic systems. For simplicity’s sake let’s concentrate on one big system, the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Current or AMOC, that system of currents (like the Gulf Stream) in the Atlantic that are the planet’s biggest heat distribution system.

The collapse of the AMOC has been a recurring nightmare in the climate literature—I first wrote about it in The End of Nature in the 1980s. But the prevailing theory was that it would take a good long while, probably more than a century. In recent years that consensus has been weakening, and the fears of a much more rapid failure of these currents—which keep Europe far warmer than it would otherwise be—have grown rapidly. We’re about a decade out from an ominous paper in Nature that warned that an anomaly in the north Atlantic—a “cold blob” in an otherwise rapidly warming global ocean—could signal that melting ice pouring off Greenland was fatally weakening the currents, by changing the salinity and hence the density of seawater. Research since them has not been comforting, with at least one prominent paper warning the collapse could come as early as the 2030s. Last year Iceland declared an AMOC collapse as a “national security risk,” since the disappearance of the current could turn the temperate country into what one of its foremost experts called “one giant glacier.” It would certainly be a civilizational event for all of Europe.

Anyway, a new paper last week in Science seemed to indicate, with data gathered from four mooring buoys along the western edge of these currents, that there is

a meridionally consistent decline in deep western overturning transport across these latitudes over the past two decades. This decline, observed at the western boundary, may serve as an effective indicator of AMOC weakening

Here’s how Alec Luhn explained the significance in New Scientist

The study’s analysis of the latest RAPID-MOCHA data shows that the flow of the AMOC is declining by about 90,000 cubic metres of water per second each year, a faster rate than what has previously been observed. That means between 2004 and 2023, the AMOC weakened by about 10 per cent.

But the uncertainty range of this change in flow is almost as large as the change itself. For this reason, Xin’s study also analyses pressure changes at three mooring arrays that have been installed since 2004 in the western Atlantic off the West Indies, the US east coast and Nova Scotia, Canada. There, it finds an even greater weakening of the AMOC, with much less uncertainty.

“It is the strongest direct observational evidence so far” that the AMOC is weakening, as models have long shown, says Stefan Rahmstorf at the University of Potsdam, Germany, who wasn’t involved in the research.

Meanwhile, another new and equally ominous paper in Nature late last month showed that a collapsing Atlantic current system would release prodigious amounts of carbon into the atmosphere, thus dramatically increasing overall global warming even as Europe froze. As William Hunter helpfully explained in (of all places) the Daily Mail

The scientists’ computer simulations revealed that halting this key current will release vast stores of carbon currently trapped deep beneath the ocean.

This would increase the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere by 47 to 83 parts per million, triggering up to 0.27°C (0.5°F) of additional warming worldwide.

'Our study shows how an AMOC collapse could flip the Southern Ocean from a carbon sink into a carbon source, releasing vast amounts of CO2 and fuelling further global warming,’ said Johan Rockström, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, 'The ocean has been our greatest ally, absorbing a quarter of human–made CO2 emissions.

The scariest piece of the puzzle in the new study may be the profound, and completely opposite, consequences for the two poles. As the authors put it,

regional temperature anomalies are pronounced: Arctic temperatures cool by ~ 7 °C (60 °N–90 °N), while Antarctic temperatures warm by ~ 6 °C (60 °S–90 °S).

A world in which the Arctic quickly cooled 12 degrees Fahrenheit just as the Antarctic warmed by ten degrees Fahrenheit would be a very very different world indeed, one capable of violent change on a scale I don’t really want to imagine. In any event, as Potsdam Institute director Johan Rockstrom explained

“The more CO₂ in our atmosphere at the stage of shutdown, the higher the likelihood of additional warming. Put simply, rising emissions today increase the risk of a stronger climate response down the line."

And that’s the one part of the equation we can do something about. We have one tool to keep carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere: the substitution of clean energy for fossil fuel. Our weapons in this fight are solar panels, wind turbines, and batteries. We need to crash them into place before these systems crash down upon us. That’s the job.

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In other energy and climate news:

+The ongoing effort of Donald Trump to lead the world off fossil fuel by showing their unreliability continues, as the Strait of Hormuz remains essentially closed (double-closed!) and the effects reverberate around the world. The European think tank Ember has the most comprehensive assessment, in a sweeping new report on how the Iran war will speed the rise of electrification, especially coming on the heels of the Ukraine war, when the world’s largest fossil fuel exporter irreparably damaged its connections to its largest customer.

One shock is an event. Two is a pattern. To the extent history persuades, it is by repetition.

The wider pattern is that fossil fuel trade has never been riskier. The world is increasingly unstable – global armed conflicts are at their highest in decades, and the weapons needed to close a chokepoint have never been cheaper. A $20,000 drone can stop a $150 million tanker dead in the water. Furthermore, in 2019, the United States became a net fossil exporter for the first time since World War II. Its incentives have changed accordingly. For the three-quarters of the world living in fossil fuel-importing countries, that means, at best, a receding guarantor at the very time maritime dangers rise. At worst, the US has moved from guarantor to disruptor. For this importing majority, decades of fossil import dependency accumulated under the Pax Americana are now a glaring strategic vulnerability.

The report points out the glaring similarities to the twin oil shocks of the 1970s, which produced an effective end to burning oil for electricity. This time, they say, the result will be much larger, because the world has, close at hand, the solutions needed to move on

A solar farm takes 18 months. A rooftop system, a couple of weeks. An EV can be bought and driven home that afternoon. This time, cutting dependency does not require permission: it can run at the speed of consumer choice, not bureaucracy. And the supply chain is ready. China already has the factory capacity to more than double 2025 sales of solar, batteries and EVs. What was once seen as “overcapacity” is now just capacity.

So—though the immediate impulse is to reach for palliatives, like new sources of fossil fuel supply—they predict the ultimate effect will be a decisive push towards clean energy.

These reflexes were built for a world without alternatives. By the time new fossil supply comes online, it will be outcompeted by cheaper electrotech. Subsidies entrench the dependency that caused the crisis. Even diversified fossil imports will always be less dependable than the sun rising.

And we can see that impulse starting to kick in around the world. For example, word comes today that France had announced a ban on gas boilers in new buildings, and would double support for heat pumps

“As long as we depend on oil and gas, we will continue to pay the price for other people’s wars,” Lecornu said in a recorded address from the prime minister’s residence. He outlined initial steps in a plan to electrify heating and transport.

The war in the Middle East “is not our war, yet it affects us very directly. Fortunately, France has an asset: electricity produced on its own soil.”

Meanwhile, according to Time, in Asia, which gets 80 percent of its oil through the Strait of Hormuz,

​​South Korea reported that registrations for electric vehicles more than doubled in March compared to the prior year, due in part to rising fuel prices and government subsidies. In Malaysia, Chinese EV company BYD’s distributor told Reuters that it observed an uptick in enquiries and customer interest in March compared with the first two months of the year. In Pakistan, electric rickshaws have been selling out, according to Bloomberg.

And Wanjira Mathai, daughter of environmental pioneer Wangari Mathai, writes in Kenya’s Daily Nation that this is becoming a “defining moment” in Africa’s energy history:

Across the Global South, the industrial-scale solar revolution is happening. In Pakistan, a country the world mostly associated with energy poverty and grid dysfunction, 32% of its electricity is now coming from solar. The transition was not built in Islamabad. It was built on rooftops, by ordinary people and small manufacturers who could no longer afford to wait for the grid.

Solar is no longer only for lighting and charging. It is powering steel mills.

In any event, Deutsche Bank is already ready to declare the winner of the war, and it’s…China. As Ishika Mookerjee reports,

As war injects extreme volatility into oil and gas markets, the global race for energy security is making China stronger, according to Jacky Tang, emerging markets chief investment officer at the private banking arm of Deutsche Bank AG.

“China is the winner in this war from an economic standpoint, from an energy mix standpoint,” he said in an interview.

The prediction feeds into a complex picture. Bruegel, a think tank, says China’s reliance on oil imports from Iran is set to pose a “severe test” for its energy strategy. At the same time, the country’s status as the world’s largest producer of clean tech puts it in a unique position to help governments now desperate to wean themselves off Middle East imports, according to the Deutsche Bank executive.

+Excellent explainer in Nature from David Ho, who walks through the math of why carbon dioxide removal technology makes no sense on a planet that is still burning massive quantities of fossil fuel

To understand why, think of CDR as a time machine. Take the proposed US direct acir capture hubs, for example. Each facility is eventually expected to extract one million tonnes of CO₂ each year.

At that rate, for every year of operation at its full potential, each hub would take the atmosphere back in time by almost 13 minutes, but in the time it took to remove those 13 minutes of CO₂, the world would have spewed another full year of CO₂ into the atmosphere.

By contrast,

If we reduced emissions to around 10% of current levels — 4 billion tonnes of CO₂ a year — a DAC plant capable of removing one million tonnes would be a time machine taking us back just over 2 hours instead of 13 minutes. At that point, it would take 4,000 facilities to reach net zero in any given year, presuming they were fully powered by renewable energy.

In other words, if we’re going to get to use the shiny new tech of the future, we better use the sturdy tech we have right now: solar, wind, batteries

+In the Guardian, Mark Hertsgaard and Kyle Pope set the ground for what could be a truly important meeting at month’s end in Santa Marta, Colombia

At the UN Cop30 climate summit last November, Saudi Arabia led a group of petrostates in vetoing calls to develop a “roadmap” to phase out fossil fuels globally; indeed, the words “fossil fuels” were not even mentioned in the final text agreed at Cop30. But the 85 countries on the losing end of that veto may soon turn the tables.

Many of those governments will gather in Colombia on 28-29 April for a conference to begin a global transition away from oil, gas and coal. Critically, the First International Conference on the Just Transition Away from Fossil Fuels will not be governed by UN rules, which require consensus, but by majority rule, thus preventing a handful of countries from sabotaging progress as petrostates did at Cop30. What’s more, the underlying terrain of this conference will no longer be principally politics, but economics: not the words that canny negotiators can keep in or out of a diplomatic text, but the implacable market forces that shape the world economy, including the potential emergence of a de facto economic superpower.

At least 85 countries at Cop30 backed developing a roadmap to phase out fossil fuels. Included among them were the global north powers Germany, the United Kingdom, France and Spain – the world’s third, sixth, seventh and 12th biggest economies. The major global south countries Brazil and Mexico, the world’s 10th and 13th biggest economies, also backed the measure.

Combine the gross national products of those 85 countries and the total is $33.3tn. That’s larger than the $30.6tn GNP of the US, the world’s biggest economy, and considerably larger than the $19.4tn GNP of China, the world’s second-biggest economy.

+At Inside Climate News, Kiley Bense has the scoop on how the natural gas industry is buying Democrats to try and influence the energy debate

Sitting on a dais at the private Fitler Club for what was billed as a discussion about “the Path to a Clean Energy Future,” former Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter played to his audience.

“We have seven, eight seasons of an incredible comedy with some really great actors. You know, ‘It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia,’” he said. “Well, it’s not actually always sunny in Philadelphia, and it’s not always windy either, right?” The crowd laughed.

Energy “has to be reliable, it has to be affordable,” he added, one theme of an argument made throughout the evening that the path to a clean energy future should be built on gas. “It has to be there when people need it. It’s not a sometime thing.”

That messaging is favored by the event’s sponsor, Natural Allies for a Clean Energy Future, a coalition formed in 2020 to “educate and inform about the central role natural gas and natural gas infrastructure play in the clean energy future and as a partner to renewables.” Natural Allies’ goal is to redefine gas as “the most affordable and reliable energy source.”

Natural Allies—whose funders include the fracking company EQT, gas utility Enbridge and Venture Global, a liquefied natural gas provider—woos left-leaning and moderate voters in blue and purple states by hiring Democratic leaders like Nutter to share their message. Nutter’s advisory firm was paid $240,000 in 2024 for his work on behalf of the group, and he sits on its leadership council with other Democratic politicians like former Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe and former Ohio Congressman Tim Ryan.

Eugene DePasquale, the current chair of the Pennsylvania Democratic Party, is the state chairman for Natural Allies. He appeared on the panel alongside Nutter.

“It’s always been focused on, ‘How do we convince Democrat officials to stay onside to support fossil fuels?’” said Charlie Spatz, a research manager at the Energy and Policy Institute, of Natural Allies’ mission. “They exclusively exist to influence Democrats, in my opinion.

+The always-reliable Dharna Noor, with an account of students at Columbia University describing new student complaints about the ethics of its in-house enerty thinktank

A thinktank at Columbia University is engaging in deceptive trade practices by hiding the extent of its financial ties to the fossil fuel industry, according to a first-of-its-kind administrative complaint filed by student activists and shared with the Guardian.

Columbia’s Center on Global Energy Policy (CGEP) describes itself as an independent organization producing research on energy policy. But that representation is “misleading”, alleges the complaint to the New York City consumer protection bureau, filed Monday by Columbia’s chapter of the youth-led environmental justice organization the Sunrise Movement.

Publicly disclosed donation documents and academic studies’ conflict-of-interest statements show that CGEP has accepted millions of dollars in funding from big oil companies, including ExxonMobil, Shell, BP, Occidental and Tellurian. By presenting its fossil fuel-funded work as neutral, CGEP is misleading the public, the students allege.

One would think that Columbia, already bruised by its accommodations to the Trump administration, might want to steer clear of too much involvement with the world’s dirtiest industry.

+A UK government study committee has found that the cost of transition to a net zero economy is less than the cost of the energy shock from the invasion of Ukraine. That seems useful to know amidst a much larger oil shock! As the Belgian energy analyst Serge de Gheldere puts it,

The money’s leaving our pocket anyway, with the difference that moving off fossil fuels is an investment, whereas dealing with our current fossil system is a cost. Quite literally: building the future instead of burning it.

This is the OpEx trap: every gas boiler, every fuel import is a recurring invoice payable to geopolitical instability. Renewables and renovation are CapEx — you pay once, the exposure disappears.

+The Trump administration has unwisely used emergency powers to keep coal plants open, as as Dan Gearino expertly explains, but Canary Media reports that the plants are, among other things, losing large sums of money

It’s difficult to predict how much more expensive power could get if the DOE forces additional fossil-fueled plants to stay open. But Gabriella Tosado, a senior associate on RMI’s carbon-free electricity team, offered an estimate using the think tank’s modeling for states where data is available.

RMI ran a ​“100% self-commitment” analysis to calculate the increase in customer costs that would come from running all coal plants at ​“maximum availability” throughout the year, using 2024 data. ​“Nationally, running coal plants more often last year would have increased customer costs by $15 billion,” or a roughly 3% increase in total annual U.S. power-sector costs, she said.

“If operators of coal plants could make more money by running coal plants more often, they would,” she said. ​“Running them more will only distort market prices and drive up costs for families and small businesses.”

+Remember Coalie, the DOE’s friendly mascot for its favorite energy source? He’s got a new friend, Fossi, who TJ Jordan at DeSmogBlog described as the “new cartoon character who wants to make kids feel sorry for fossil fuels.”

Tentatively stepping into a classroom as a new pupil, Fossi is rejected by his peers, who each represent a different form of clean energy. No one wants to sit next to the smelly, smokey fuel that has caused the planet to heat up and “become sick”.

Fossi gradually wins the admiration of his classmates, however, when he offers to use his “wealth of experience” to help them plan a shift to cleaner energy sources and solve climate change.

“In a way, I’m a hero too,” Fossi thinks to himself at the end of the story.

The book comes from a company that builds geothermal plants, but is partly owned by Chevron, which “plans to increase oil and gas production up to three percent each year until 2030.”

Let’s begin by stipulating: at the moment, the main fights that matter on climate and energy are within the Democratic party. Again, at the moment, the GOP is lost to reason.

And now let me add what I’ve learned by long observation of the politics around energy and climate: to make real change, it helps immensely to have champions. We can count on most Democrats, by this point, to say more or less the right things, but it remains fairly rare to have champions who understand the issues intimately and will use political capital to do something about them.

That’s why I’ve been grateful to watch Tom Steyer’s run for governor of California. Maybe 15 years ago he called me out of the blue to pick my brains about climate stuff; as he talked on the phone, I googled him and established he was a hedge fund billionaire, a species to which I am allergic. I tried to put him off, but he politely insisted to the point where escape would have required real rudeness on my part, and so I proposed he come for a day hike in the Adirondacks, figuring that at the very least I would get some exercise out of it. A week later we were climbing Giant Mountain via Rocky Peak Ridge, one of the harder ascents in the High Peaks, and what do you know he was keeping up with me, and what do you know he was interesting and congenial. Over time we became real friends. He’s bunked in the guestroom at my house, and vice versa (his is nicer); we’ve donated to the same causes (350.org, Third Act; his checks were larger, though perhaps not as a percentage of one’s wealth).

More to the point we’ve carried on a nonstop conversation about climate change, which he rightly understood as the most important question the planet faces. Alone, I think, among major American politicians he could identify not just James Hansen, but climate scientists like Zeke Hausfather, Bob Howarth, and Mark Jacobson (names that will come up again in a minute). He’s the real deal: he stepped away from his hedge fund because his colleagues wouldn’t divest it from fossil fuel, and he’s been working hard ever since to make progress on the energy transition. I can’t think of a more knowledgeable or committed climate champion in political life in America today.

As I said, I don’t usually want billionaires in my private life, or my public life. As a species, I think they’ve played a large role in America’s ruin, and I would like nothing more than to convert them all to millionaires. That said, I think Steyer has used his wealth and the power it confers responsibly, and I don’t think his riches are his defining characteristic. (I’d venture a guess that the same is true about the governor of Illinois, J.B. Pritzker, though I haven’t seen him close up). Steyer has supported one bill after another that would raise his taxes, and he’s fanned out across the state year after year to help with important referendum fights—which is why, among other things, he’s found widespread endorsements from labor unions. He’s been condemned for having made money in the past off fossil fuel investments, or other things he now opposes; since I think the point of activism is to try to change people’s minds, that strikes me as a good development not a bad one.

And as a governor on climate and energy issues, he’d be relentlessly focused; the Golden State is America’s leader in clean energy deployment, but it has much more to do, especially in linking that deployment to widespread prosperity. Steyer has been aggressive in taking on the utilities in California, a key next step. I don’t understand California politics very well, and its “jungle primary” system makes handicapping races hard, but he’s clearly in the running, and for my money (which is not measured by the billion) that’s a very good thing.

A good way of understanding why is to look at what’s happening in the other big blue state, New York. There the governor, Kathy Hochul, is cruising to re-election, and she’s saying the right things. "Am I the staunchest environmentalist and fighter of climate change in New York's history? Yes," she asked and answered recently. But in fact she’s busily trying to slow down and sidetrack the state’s Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act (CLCPA), the seven-year-old statute that attempts to move the Empire State off fossil fuels.

The precise arguments in this fight have grown…abstruse. For example, the governor is insisting that the global warming impact of methane be measured over a hundred year period, not the twenty year period that the state law mandates. This has turned into a debate between the aforementioned Hausfather (pro) and the aforementioned Howart and Jacobson (con). You can read their arguments for yourself, but I think Howarth and Jacobson get the better of the exchange, basically because we could break the back of the climate system in the years ahead, making much longer range planning moot. As Howarth and Jacobson put it,

Global warming over the coming few decades may cross thresholds which could accelerate the accumulation of CO2 in the atmosphere. Currently, roughly half of anthropogenic CO2 emissions are taken up by the oceans and terrestrial biosphere. This may well change in the future, due to a variety of climate feedbacks. For instance, warming in the arctic and drying in the Amazon may well reduce carbon storage in these systems. And warming of the oceans and climate-induced slowing of ocean circulation may reduce carbon storage in the oceans. The precautionary principle suggests taking all actions necessary to reduce warming as quickly as possible, and that calls for rapidly reducing methane emissions.

But if this reads as complex to you, imagine how it reads to your average hardpressed state assemblyman from somewhere in Oneida County. That’s why the debate has been turned into a shorthand about, what else, “affordability.” Basically, Hochul’s argument is that the state law makes New York abandon fracked gas too quickly, and hence people’s bills will go up, and so she wants to space out the transition. In climate terms this is a mistake, but it’s also probably a mistake about affordability. Even the state’s utility system operator concluded in a January report that the real reason for high New York energy prices was the volatile and rising cost of natural gas. If Hochul has her way New Yorkers are going to stay tied to the price of that fracked gas even as events like the war in Iran are making it doubly clear that’s going to be an economic anchor, and even as the looming El Niño seems likely to hit New York with the kind of super-expensive disasters that led to the climate law in the first place.

The real problem here, I think, is that Hochul didn’t prioritize action on energy and climate. She came to office accidentally in 2021 (Andrew Cuomo, sexual harasser), and it’s not actually clear what she’s prioritized beyond staying in that office. Instead of moving aggressively to, say, roll out heat pumps across the state, she’s played small ball too often. It’s not that the current situation is uncomplicated—here’s a good fair-to-all-sides account from Emily Pontecorvo at HeatMap. But the current dilemma is rooted in the fact that the last five years was largely wasted. Hochul sounds perpetually like the student who didn’t get the homework done. “We need more time,” she said last month, arguing for pushing back timetables by a decade.

Delay has often seemed like Hochul’s modus operandi. As Brian PJ Cronin reported recently

Last summer, a state analysis found that New York is three years behind its 2030 goal and six years behind its 2040 goal. Smaller, less-publicized climate targets in the law have fared no better. An online tracking tool created by Columbia University lists actions that have missed deadlines, from the collection and disposal of mercury thermostats to the capture of methane from landfills to energy audits of larger buildings.

In fairness to Hochul, sometimes it seems like delay is the leitmotif of the entire New York State government. Here’s Mark Dunlea, veteran Albany activist

Another example of slow action is the issue of the state power plant which powers the Capitol and State Plaza. For more than a century, the plant has polluted Sheridan Hollow, a low-income community of color, by burning coal, oil, trash, and now gas. Since 2017, climate and community groups have been calling to shut down the plant and use geothermal instead. The state finally did a study, which took two plus years to complete and then proposed a 15-to-20-year timeline. Meanwhile, the State of Michigan took 18 months – from study to completion – to convert its state Capitol to geothermal while also building a new floor.

But Hochul is definitely a big part of all this. On grounds of affordability, she delayed New York City’s landmark congestion pricing law for a year, finally yielding to immense public pressure just in time before Trump’s inauguration would have doomed it. And what do you know—it’s been, as its proponents long promised, a boon to the city’s economy, not to mention its air, not to mention its traffic safety. Again—that instinct towards delay comes because she’s not, in her heart of hearts, a climate and energy champion.

In those situations, the other option that advocates have to force action is to challenge a politician from the left electorally. It seemed like that might be starting to happen last year, when Hochul’s lieutenant governor Antonio Delgado broke with her and mounted a primary campaign, based in part on her inaction on energy and climate. But when Zohran Mamdani was elected mayor of New York, he needed help from Albany to have any hope of carrying out some of his plans, and so he endorsed Hochul (who had belatedly endorsed him), and that undercut Delgado who dropped out of the race. Got all that? One can’t blame Mamdani—he did what he had to do in service of his agenda, and one hopes he bargained effectively and will get what he needs from Hochul. But again it’s a reminder of how much easier all this is when you have a governor who deeply cares about the issues at hand.

Speaking of which, and so I can end this little essay on a much higher note, something earth-shaking happened last night in Arizona, where a team of clean energy advocates won an 8-6 majority on the board of the state’s second-largest utility, the Salt River Project. I got to help a bit in this campaign and have been following it closely—it’s a huge, huge deal, since to get the win proponents had to overcome not just the semi-feudal electoral system (votes are allotted according to how much acreage residents own) but also a huge effort from the right. That effort was led not just by the usual “business interests” but by Turning Point USA, the ultraconservative cultural army assembled by the late Charlie Kirk (and based in Arizona). Clean energy advocates were outspent 10-1—every billboard in greater Phoenix seemed to sprout a Turning Point message, all focused on, what do you know, affordability. And yet the good guys won. Reis Thibault quoted one of the victors this morning in the Times:

“Starting when we’re sworn in, S.R.P. will be the largest utility in the country with a majority vote of clean energy supporters,” said Ken Clark, who is one of the team’s newly elected candidates and will represent a swath of north-central Phoenix. “There has been a pent-up demand, especially in Arizona, for people to have their energy freedom, to have solar panels, batteries and more energy-efficient measures.”

That a David-and-Goliath win like this is possible in deeply purple Arizona, in a contest weighted in every way against the challengers, sets in stark relief that failures of a deep blue state like New York to move more quickly. When real champions appeared in Arizona, voters rallied behind them: the turnout for the SRP board elections yesterday quadrupled the previous record. And that’s despite the fact that Turning Point engaged in “ballot harvesting,” the precise tactic the MAGA right has been scaremongering about for years.

The Salt River Project—one of the largest public utilities in America—has been a center of delay and denial for many years—at one point it was charging any customers a monthly fee for daring to put solar panels on the roof. Now we’re going to have champions at work in the Valley of the Sun, which has the highest solar insolation of just about any spot in the country. I predict great progress!

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In other energy and climate news:

+The data center fight just keeps spreading. Just to give you a little example, here’s a letter from an Illinois activists to a county commission. Multiply this by about a million in your minds, and you get a sense of the speed with which this issue has developed. Meanwhile, an important (if overlong and cantankerously written) essay from AI skeptic Ed Zitron, which attempts to find out how many of these data centers are actually being funded and built. The answer is, fewer than you’d think.

Based on these data points, I’m comfortable estimating that North American data center absorption — as the IT load of data centers actually turned on and in operation — was at around 3GW for 2025, which would work out to about 3.9GW of total power.

So no one give up the fight. As usual, fostering a sense of inevitability is a huge tool of the powerful.

+Smoke from Canadian wildfires in 2023 killed 80,000 people, a new study finds.

A peer-reviewed study published in Nature estimates that smoke from Canada’s record-breaking 2023 wildfire season caused about 5,400 acute deaths and roughly 82,100 premature deaths globally. Researchers used multiple computer models and data sources to assess the health impacts of fine particulate matter (PM2.5) from the fires.

Co-author Michael Brauer of the University of British Columbia called the findings a “wake-up call” for regions unaccustomed to prolonged wildfire smoke exposure, warning that climate change will likely make such events more frequent and deadly.

+Brace yourself for an onslaught of hopeful news from around the world—if you can’t tell, I need a little boost from the news of the war. In fact, let’s begin in Lebanon, now under hideous assault from Israel with hundreds dying and entire villages being destroyed. But there is one small kernel of good news: the country has solarized faster than almost any other in recent years, meaning that at least in rural areas its residents should still have access to energy. It’s a fascinating story, well told by Camillo Stubenberg.

Ali is one of the last diesel generator operators in Baalbek, a town nestled next to ancient Roman ruins in the rural Beqaa Valley of Lebanon. Until about 2023, he operated six large 600-kilovolt-ampere diesel generators supplying backup electricity to some 2,000 households in Baalbek’s Douris neighborhood. He bought 100,000 liters of diesel a month. Today, he has just one smaller generator and his fuel purchases have declined by 96 percent.

Ali is no outlier. There used to be thirty other generator owners in his area, and now there are only four. They had built a business where the Lebanese state had failed. Now, they’re folding—but not because Lebanon’s electricity grid is back online. Rather, a revolution in solar energy has swept through rural Lebanon, making their services unnecessary.

Meanwhile, Great Britain is…not the Valley of the Sun. And yet solar installations are soaring there. Jillian Ambrose reports

Solar farms in England, Wales and Scotland generated 14.1GW of low-carbon electricity at lunchtime on Monday, surpassing the previous high of 14GW in July last year.

And that record was toppled a day later when power generation from the sun’s energy climbed to another new high of 14.4GW on Tuesday afternoon.

The electricity system operator confirmed the new high as the government approved plans for the UK’s biggest solar farm to go ahead in Lincolnshire.

Ministers said the decision to support the Springwell solar farm in Lincolnshire built on their plan to “bring stability and lower bills in an uncertain world” by increasing homegrown low-carbon energy.

Meanwhile, here’s a cheerful chart of new heat pump installations in Germany, now easily outpacing gas boilers, and doubling last year’s pace. That’s how change can start to accelerate.

Meanwhile, an equally cheerful report from Konstantsa Rangelova and her colleagues at Ember, showing that if India wants to continue down the solar-and-battery path, it should be able to meet most all of its needs, and for cheap.

Battery economics have improved sharply in the last two years. Our thought experiment shows that solar and battereis can already meet ninety percent of India’s electricity demand at a competitive levelised cost of electrcity of $56/MWh.

This thought experiment shows that national solar with battery storage could have met 90% of India’s 2024 electricity demand with 930 gigawatts (GW) of solar capacity, a fraction of the country’s enormous solar potential, and 2,560 gigawatt-hours (GWh) of battery storage capacity. Battery storage turns daytime solar into reliable electricity after sunset.

(Outside the realm of thought experiments, here’s a fine piece from Robin Whitlock on the changes in financing that would be required to let India do just that)

Meanwhile, demand across Asia for EVs just keeps growing as our ludicrous war/ceasefire? grinds on. For example, check out this rhetoric from the president of Indonesia

“We will convert all motorcycles into electric motorcycles. All cars, all trucks, all tractors must [also] be electric,” he added.

Meanwhile, the Laos government has slashed EV fees and service charges by 30pc while raising charges for fuel vehicles by the same amount, according to a statement from the prime minister’s office on 13 March. The government has also mandated that transport companies’ EV fleet share reach at least 10pc by the end of 2026. The Laos government will also simplify import procedures for EVs and is considering raising the excise tax rate for fuel vehicles.

+Even amidst that tide of good news, the fossil fuel industry keeps grinding on with its plans for expansion. A new version of the Keystone XL pipeline, for instance, which veteran climate fighters Kenny Bruno and explain would be a disaster.

A company called Bridger is testing the waters by proposing to take bitumen, the technical term for the thick gooey hydrocarbon also known as tar sands or oil sands, from Alberta and pipe it through Montana to Guernsey, Wyoming. From there, according to press reports, “spurs” would be “bolted on” to take it to refining hubs and to the Gulf Coast for export. But it’s over 700 miles from Guernsey to the hub in Cushing, Olahoma, and over 400 miles to Steele City, Nebraska, where it could connect to existing underutilized pipelines.

Four hundred (400) miles is not exactly a “spur” that you “bolt on.” In fact, that route would require a state permit from the Nebraska Public Service Commission, and the acquisition of land—through eminent domain if necessary—from hundreds of Nebraskans. The process would take years, and generate the same controversy it did back in the early 2010’s. And if South Bow fails to get the full route built before the militantly pro-oil US president is out of office, the cross-border Presidential Permit could be denied—again. That “spur,” potentially cutting across the entire state of Nebraska, is the part that “some future company” would be responsible for. To call this plan half-baked would be an insult to baking.

+Abraham Lustgarten at Pro Publica has a comprehensive report on the efforts of Leonard Leo, the far-right Supreme Court packer, to give oil companies immunity against climate change litigation.

Across the country, 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.

The effort is unfolding as courts are weighing more than 30 significant lawsuits by states, counties and municipalities accusing fossil fuel companies of misrepresenting the risks their products posed to consumers and seeking to recoup the costs of disasters and other climate impacts like wildfire losses or coastal flooding that their products helped cause. A goal of the legislation is to block these cases from going forward and prevent new ones from being filed.

+Sad news from the Antarctic, where climate-driven changes have drowned a passel of Emperor Penguin chicks and set them and other species closer to extinction

The IUCN assessment projects that the emperor penguin population will halve by the 2080s owing to sea ice loss. The current emperor penguin population is estimated at 595,000 adults, having already fallen by 10% between 2009 and 2018.

Emperors are the largest penguin species and jumped two categories, from “near threatened” to “endangered” in the new IUCN analysis.

The assessment also found the climate crisis had driven a halving of the Antarctic fur seal population since 2000, owing to a reduction in the krill that the animals rely on for food. The seal has jumped three categories from least concern to endangered in the latest red list of threatened species.

+A new Johns Hopkins study finds that climate disasters are a major cause of homelessness in the U.S.

The study found that eviction moratoria substantially blunted increases in homelessness during and after the pandemic, while displacement due to property damage and loss from disasters such as floods, fires, and storms accelerated them. The researchers estimate that without eviction moratoria, the average 11% increase in homelessness per state between 2020 and 2022 would have reached nearly 20%. Without disaster-related housing destruction, it would have been closer to 8%.

+Finally, as Holy Week recedes, and with it Pete Hegseth’s insistence that we kill for Jesus (thanks to Pope Leo for some useful pushback), a happier story from the world of religion: Nigeria’s megachurches are turning to the sun

Not only are the churches’ solar panels keeping lights on, but they’re also reducing the noise and toxic fumes caused by the gas generators. As a result, parishioners can worship with greater peace and fewer distractions.

“As stewards of creation, we have a responsibility,” said one local church administrator, Niyi Lookman. “Burning diesel every Sunday wasn’t just expensive, it was contradictory to our values.”

While we wait to see what variety of war crimes Donald Trump decides on following his 8 pm deadline tonight, I think we can assess one outcome of this stupid war already: both the emotional valence and the structural understanding of different energy sources has shifted, and for good. Meaning takes a very long time to erode, but when it does the switch can come quickly; we’re living at a hinge moment, and on the other side of the door is a different world. We tend to think about energy in hard terms—kilowatts, dollars—but in the end our visceral sense of the path forward is what matters most, because attitude informs decision without us even quite realizing it. The world between our ears has changed, decisively, in the direction of renewable power from the sun and wind

Let’s begin by understanding the deep, underpinning role that fossil fuel has played in modernity, both its reality and its psychology. What we call the Industrial Revolution means simply that we learned to control the combustion of coal, then oil, then gas, and in the process gave human life a sweeping set of new powers. Suddenly mobility—the train, the car, the plane—was easy; suddenly muscle power gave way to the genies in a barrel of petroleum, summonable at will to perform endless tasks. Fossil fuel was freedom and power, and this understanding—again, both emotional and structural—set in very deep.

Deep enough that it was able to survive the emerging problems it created. When pollution dimmed cities in the 1960s, that gave rise to the first Earth Day—and to the catalytic converters and the smokestack filters that reduced the problem enough that it never challenged hydrocarbon dominance: we could have our cake and breathe it too. The oil shocks of the 1970s threatened that dominance in the targeted U.S. but didn’t quite topple it; the Reagan program of dramatically increased drilling, and the extension of America’s military shield to the Middle East, gave us enough sense of safety that we stayed on course.

Rising fears about climate change seemed set to tarnish fossil fuel—after all, it now threatened an end to the physical future of our civilizations—but the effects of global warming have in the early stages been sporadic and local, and when the heatwave fades or the fire goes out or the flood recedes we’ve generally reverted back to the perceived and comforting inevitability of fossil fuel. It’s what we’ve known, and hence we’ve put up with a lot to keep the relationship going.

But there’s been nothing sporadic or local about the effects of this war. As tanker traffic through the Strait of Hormuz slowed and then stopped, the effects have been dramatic, immediate, and global. In Thailand farmers report they can’t find diesel to keep the pumps that irrigate rice paddies running; in Myanmar, as fertilizer prices soar, the World Food Program has warned that food production costs could double compared with last year’s harvest, in a country where a quarter of the population is already facing acute hunger. There are things we can change to cut energy use (the Thai prime minister said AC units should be set at 80 degrees, and that bureaucrats should stop wearing neckties “except for ceremonies”) but other customs are harder to rearrange: bodies are piling up at Thai temples because they’re out of fuel for cremations. In Bangladesh, the prime minister has turned off most of the lights in his office, and economic life is changing by the week.

“I used to do 15 trips a day. Now I spend hours just looking for a pump that’s open, and sometimes I go home empty,” said Sohel Sarker, 38, a ridesharing biker in Dhaka. “I don’t know from one day to the next whether I’ll find fuel.”

These anecdotes add up to much more. As a team from the Financial Times concluded after a global inventory of the shifts,

High fuel prices and shortages force consumers to buy fewer goods. Businesses invest less and governments conserve scarce resources, causing economies to experience weaker growth. The enduring disruption of an energy shock can trigger the destruction of demand, driving economies towards stagnation and recession.

But that’s the macro level. At the micro level, it’s as much about psychology as anything else. The Guardian published an excellent account of how fuel shortages are affecting daily life around the world, and I found myself thinking about the words of another Thai, Teerayut Ruenrerng, owner of a mobile grocery truck:

At about midday, I return home from my morning selling session. I’ll pass three gas stations on the way and stop at each one. Sometimes I can get fuel, sometimes I can’t. Sometimes they will only give me 300 baht or 500 baht (US$9.15 to US$15.25) worth. At lunchtime I take a break, and sleep for about an hour. I start work at midnight.

If I’m able to fill up a full tank, I can relax because I know I don’t need to search for gas for at least three days and it’s guaranteed I can go out and sell. But if I can’t find any, I start to get stressed and panic about what I’ll do if I can’t get fuel.

Here’s an interior designer in Sydney:

It’s frightening, because you don’t know how long it’s going to go on for.

I just started looking for jobs, because I don’t know whether people are even going to want to spend money on renovating right now, or are going to want a designer. I’m pretty much throwing everything at it, which I think is part of the panic setting in.

And here’s a warehouse worker in Delhi:

As I get ready for work, my eyes keep returning to the gas stove. I last ate yesterday afternoon, some lentils with chapatis. It has been more than a day. I am very hungry, but there is only enough gas left for four or five meals. I hold back, saving it for worse days. There are a couple of cucumbers and tomatoes. I will cut them, add salt, and eat that, and save one more day.

Now, just think of that for a moment. The gas stove, to an Indian, is suddenly a symbol of scarcity, deprivation, fear. The stuff that supplies it comes from somewhere distant over which he has no control—if Donald Trump gets an idea, or the Islamic Republican Guards get an idea, then the flow on which it depends can stop, and then he goes hungry, counting how many meals his canister might still contain. Multiply this by a few billion people and a few key facets of each life—dinner, commute, heat, cold—and you end up with a profoundly different mindset.

In the very short run, that may mean that countries like India lurch towards coal—fairly cheap, and fairly easily available. The forecast for May and June in India is even hotter than usual before the monsoon descends, and according to Bloomberg the country is preparing to burn more of the black rocks to keep air conditioners running. Even a few years ago, that would have been the country’s only real recourse: belt-tightening, and shifting to a different fossil fuel. But the Trumpian revelations about the undependability of fossil fuel come at a significant moment in human history, a moment when we have—again, suddenly—a very different choice. As David Fickling reports

With the LNG drought pushing up electricity prices and photovoltaics providing a cheaper, easier alternative, a boom in rooftop solar is far more likely than a return to coal. Don’t look under the ground for the solution to the LNG crisis. The answer is in the skies.

Here’s a chart worth looking at, from the thinktank Ember. It requires a bit of explaining. The old story about clean energy—that is, the story of the last five years—is that it was cheaper to operate than fossil fuel power, because the fuel (sunshine) was free, but that the upfront costs were higher because you had to build those solar panels. But now it’s so cheap to build the solar panels that from the jump it make sense to switch. That gray band at the bottom is the price of the fossil fuel system, and that orange line is solar with batteries, which provides the same reliable power. Again, this is the upfront cost—in the long run, of course, the solar system is hugely cheaper, because, again, the sun delivers the energy for free when it rises above the horizon.

Anyway, let’s think about India and stoves again. For a long time if you wanted to cook your food in India, you needed to go out and gather firewood or dung, something that took a long time (and was a chore usually assigned to women). When you burned it, you had to tend the fire carefully, and you (and your kids) breathed a lot of bad stuff. There have been many attempts to supply alternative cookstoves, but they never worked very well. But now—well, now, the government is moving quickly to boost production and import of induction cooktops. An induction cooktop—I’m simmering chowder on mine as I write—produces heat for cooking without much electricity, and that electricity can be supplied by solar panels and batteries, which are cheap. Suddenly the stuff we want from energy comes more easily, more dependably, and more affordably from the sun and wind.

This is happening, all of a sudden, everywhere and with everything. Here’s a Pakistani farmer explaining why, with a solar panel to run his irrigation pump, he no longer cares about the supply of gas from the Gulf:

“Now, I don’t care if the prices of diesel increase,” he says, proudly pointing to the sun above. “As long as there is this sun, I can grow my watermelons.”

In Europe, the online marketplace Olx reported a huge jump in inquiries about EVs—for instance, in France (up 50 percent), Portugal (up 54 percent), Romania (up 40 percent), and Poland (up 39 percent). From Jakob Steinschaden, news exported a total of 120,083 electric and hybrid vehicles in March 2026, an increase of 65 percent compared to March 2025. The Washington Post reported yesterday that shares in China’s biggest battery maker had jumped by nearly a third since the war began.

Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto said in March that his government would build 100 gigawatts of solar power in the next two years. Philippines’ state-owned pension is offering loans of up to $8,300 for members to buy and install solar power for their homes.

When Abraham Maslow first detailed the hierarchy of human needs, he put our physiological needs—food, shelter—at the bottom, and just above them our need for stability and security. There have been critiques of his theory, but the basic idea stands. What’s curious about renewable energy is that it’s always filled higher-order desires—for belonging, for esteem—better than fossil fuel; poll after poll shows that pretty much everyone understands that, all things equal, it’s better not to pollute the air. But now clean energy fills those most basic psychological requirements better too.

Think of the amount of money the fossil fuel industry has spent over the years to invest oil and gas with psychological power: who could forget, for instance, the campaign that Rebecca Leber uncovered years ago that paid cash to influencers to gush about the homeyness of cooking with gas.

“#cookingwithgas makes food taste better,” says Camille, an LA-based foodie who poses artfully with her spatula, to her 16,700 followers.

But that’s not what cooking with gas means any more. Now it means wondering about the supply. The sun already provides us with warmth, with light, and via photosynthesis our supper—we have a pretty good psychological relationship with the sun already. When it comes out, we smile. And so the idea that it will happily supply us with all the power we need won’t be a hard sell.

Security fears keep ordinary people awake at night, but also elites. Here’sFrank Elderson, a member of the board of the European Central Bank, writing earlier today in the bank’s official blog, and in the bloodless language of bureaucrats he says: More sun now

Europe cannot eliminate geopolitical risk, but it can significantly reduce its exposure to it. The most effective way to do that is by cutting reliance on imported fossil fuels and accelerating an orderly shift to home‑grown clean energy. If Europe were to meet its sustainable energy targets, the link between domestic energy prices and volatile global energy markets would weaken substantially.

Donald Trump has managed to break the two-century-old grip of fossil fuel on the human imagination. As he explained to the GOP House caucus last month, “no other president can do some of the shit I’m doing.”

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In other climate and energy news:

+I’m fairly certain most of the readers of this newsletter will be considering the Rolls Royce Black Badge Spectra as their next ride. The Wall Street Journal reports that the latest EV from the British carmaker is

utterly gorgeous, an eye-filling joy in the walkaround: The daringly raked windscreen and fastback flyline, the tapering cabin slung back behind the endless hood, the audacity of wheels and tires, all drawn in superhero proportions. If Rolls-Royce is about delivering world-apart experiences to its clients, the Spectre certainly represents. Behold, the most beautiful big car I’ve ever laid eyes on, and I’ve laid my eyes on plenty.

Weirdly, though, it only gets about 240 miles on a charge. Speaking for myself, I think I’d rather have the new QQ3, from the Chinese automaker Chery; it racked up 57,000 orders in its first few days, in part because it costs $8,500 (which means that you could buy about 65 of them for the price of one Rolls). And its range is longer by about twenty miles. Also, it comes with a

12.8″ infotainment screen. Higher-priced trims gain a 15.6″ 2.5K central touchscreen. Powered by a Qualcomm 8155 cockpit chip, the system supports +30 WeChat mini-programs, enabling drivers to sing karaoke, play games, and more.

Karaoke! Take that, Rolls!

+Rooftop solar now accounts for a full fifth of all electricity generation in Puerto Rico, a true success story on an island where electric utilities (as that energy expert Bad Bunny pointed out at halftime of the Super Bowl) have been corrupt, expensive, and slow-to-repair after every storm. As Ben Zientara reports,

The growth rate in rooftop solar capacity has outpaced all other energy sources in Puerto Rico over the last decade. According to EIA data, distributed solar installations represented 81% of all new generating capacity added to the island’s grid between 2016 and 2025.

During 2025 alone, an average of 3,850 rooftop systems were installed at homes and businesses each month, bringing the total number of active systems in the territory to 191,929 by the end of the year.

+From Collin Eaton in the Wall St. Journal, an in-depth account of the very expensive lie that Exxon told about algae as a potential source of oil for many years.

The Journal reviewed an internal presentation made in early 2020 by Exxon’s scientists and examined other documents related to Exxon’s efforts on algae. Some of the documents—none of which have been previously reported—show executives knew the $500 million algae research project wasn’t meeting its goals outside the lab, even as they continued to promote it to investors as a potential boon.

Members of Exxon’s investor-relations team and leading researchers exchanged a flurry of communications discussing algae’s low productivity outside the lab and how to highlight the program to investors in the days ahead of the presentation, the documents show.

Exxon scientists made their February 2020 presentation to T.J. Wojnar, who was the company’s vice president of corporate strategic planning and guided capital allocation and investment strategies. Among Wojnar’s responsibilities at the time were briefing the management committee on various company projects and preparing investor presentations.

The scientists explained to Wojnar that the best strains of algae, when grown in large outdoor ponds, were producing oil at roughly 6% of Exxon’s stated goal.

They further concluded that even if geneticists were able to speed oil production, it would be uneconomical. To produce 10,000 barrels of algae-based biofuel a day, they estimated Exxon would need to build 35 square miles of ponds—an area six times the size of downtown Los Angeles—that would have to process more saltwater than the entire city consumes in fresh water daily.

+Trump is shutting down most of the research stations of the US Forest Service (and “reorganizing” it in a way that will profoundly damage, among many other things, its climate science. My account in the New Yorker. Meanwhile, the Balanced Weather substack has a comprehensive accounting of the planned cuts to science funding in the year ahead, as we continue with the Pol Potification of American society. For instance:

The NASA Science appropriation — which (per the budget document) funds NASA’s Earth Science, Planetary Science, Heliophysics, Biological and Physical Sciences, and Astrophysics — has a proposed topline FY27 budget of $3.894B, a reduction of $3.356B or about 42%. This is the appropriation that funds most of NASA’s atmospheric sciences and space weather research.

Remember, if you don’t measure the warming, then you can’t feel it.

+The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change—the global scientific body that keeps humanity posted on its greatest threat—is facing huge problems after the US stopped providing any funding. The IPCC—which runs on volunteer efforts by scientists—needs a budget of about $9 million, otherwise known as 12.9 minutes of the current American cost of the war in Iran. As Bob Berwyn reports,

The $2 million gap left by the withdrawal of U.S. funding could be filled by five or six other countries each contributing less than half a million dollars, but the money is only the tip of the iceberg, said Mike Hulme, a professor of human geography at the University of Cambridge who has studied the IPCC for years.

“We may be seeing a fraying of the tacit assumptions that held the IPCC together,” Hulme said. Recent troubles point to deeper uncertainties about the health of global climate agreements, which could be facing “if not a dissolution, maybe a fragmentation or repositioning,” he said. Other signs of strain include countries “falling back on side deals and parallel initiatives when consensus breaks down,” he said, referring to non-binding agreements adjacent to the United Nations climate framework, including forest-planting initiatives and methane-reduction pledges.

At the recent Bangkok meeting, independent observers for the Earth Negotiations Bulletin said the lack of agreement on a formal timeline at this stage of an IPCC cycle was unprecedented. The Earth Negotiations Bulletin is a reporting service of the International Institute for Sustainable Development that monitors and analyzes global environmental negotiations.

+Superb video from the folks at Third Act Bay Area, who are pushing for a climate superfund bill in the California legislature. The video features survivors of the great Los Angeles fires, and it back up the main argument for the bill

The superfund would assess the biggest fossil fuel polluters in California for the harm they have caused. Those funds would enable California to respond to climate catastrophes, build climate-resilient communities with sustainable infrastructure, support workers suffering from climate-related illnesses, and begin a just transition away from fossil fuels. The biggest polluters have had an outsized role in nearly destroying our climate and have lied about their complicity. They need to pay for what they’ve done so we can pull our state back from the brink.

Meanwhile, tiny Vermont is standing up to the oil industry in defense of its own version of the law. As Karen Zraick reports,

Vermont was the first state to pass such a law, in 2024. New York is the only other state to have done so since then, and is also facing a lawsuit filed by the Trump administration. But the idea is gaining momentum across the country, with a number of other state legislatures advancing similar measures…

Jonathan Rose, who represented Vermont at the hearing, began by striking at the heart of that argument. “We don’t need to convince the court that climate change presents serious challenges to the state of Vermont,” Mr. Rose said. “The act is intended to recover some of the costs it’s going to need to adapt to climate change,” he said.

+Book alert: Just got my early copy of Climate Wayfinding, by Katherine Wilkinson, due out very soon with an extensive book tour beginning next week.

+Several of Trump’s henchmen celebrated Holy Week by convening the “God Squad” for the first time in 30 years—and after a meeting of 15 minutes decided to exempt new drilling plans in the Gulf of Mexico from the endangered species act. Jake Spring in the Washington Post

There are currently about 51 Rice’s whales left, according to the Center for Biological Diversity. The population collapsed following the 2010 Deepwater Horizon explosion at a BP-operated oil rig, which resulted in the largest-ever marine oil spill. The charcoal-colored whales — which were declared as a separate species in 2021 — have distinctive ridges on their heads and grow to about 40 feet long

+Tripti Lahiri, Krishna Pokharel, and Emma Brown offer an in-depth account of climate change’s scarier phenomena. As big glaciers melt, especially in the Himalayas, new lakes form in the valleys below—often held in place by rocks and ice, until the pressure grows too great, the dams blow out, and huge waves of water come crashing down on cities and villages below

Between 1990 and 2018, the volume of the world’s glacial lakes expanded by nearly 50%, according to the first global survey of these lakes. It was led by Daniel Shugar, a geomorphologist at the University of Calgary in Canada, and is based on an analysis of a quarter of a million NASA satellite images. It showed that the amount of water the lakes have added was about double the volume of Italy’s Lake Como.

In the Himalayas, which span Pakistan, India, Nepal, Bhutan and China, the impact of a lake burst can be particularly destructive. These lakes are often located at high altitudes, sitting above river systems that help channel burst waters far downhill. At the same time, countries have added new hydropower and other infrastructure below them.

+Whaddya know, the same banks that back the fossil fuel industry are also underwriting the surveillance industry that ICE relies on for its dirty work. Stand.earth, which has been a leader in fossil fuel divestment, has issued a new report on the wayts the banks are invested in

• Palantir, a tech company that provides custom apps and software that ICE uses to surveil and deport immigrants

• GEO Group, the world’s second-largest private prison company and ICE’s largest contractor; builds and operates detention centers for ICE

• Core Civic, one of the largest private prison companies and among ICE’s largest contractors

• General Dynamics, a weapons company that provides DHS with surveillance technology, including a system with personal information that ICE used to deport 450,000 people

+Extremely useful video from the good people at Solar United Neighbors, detailing the difference between plug-in solar, and pug in solar. You really better watch it

I am beyond heartsick at the war and America’s role in it—there was a remarkable piece of reporting in the Times this morning showing the technology we’ve been spending our money and talent on. Apparently there’s a brand new missile, from Lockheed, called PrSM, pronounced prism and short for Precision Strike Missile. It’s a short-range ballistic missile, designed to “detonate just above its target and blast small tungsten pellets outward.” And on the first day of the war, when we were blowing up that girls school in Minab, we apparently detonated one of these things just above a sports hall where there was a girls volleyball tournament underway, and 21 people died.

Ground-level and satellite images of the aftermath show the sports hall with scorch marks and a partly collapsed roof. Footage from inside the school shows blown-out windows, fire damage and splotches of blood.

So I can’t talk about the war—my analysis from its first day a month ago is I think sound, and as you’ll see in the links below it is now becoming gospel: the conflict will drive people and countries towards renewable energy. But God not at this price.

Instead, today, I’m going to talk about what technology can do when we aim not for destruction but for progress. In particular I’m going to talk about batteries. If the last three years were about solar panels and wind turbines, this year—and the next few years—are going to be just as much about the storage systems for the energy they produce.

Back when the car was invented, people understood immediately that in most ways electric vehicles were superior to their gasoline counterparts—quieter, cleaner, cheaper to run. The trouble was always the battery: it was hard to store more than about fifty miles of driving, whereas a tank full of gas was energy deeply concentrated: 20 gallons could drive you Boston to New York no problem. In 1914 Henry Ford confirmed that he was working with Thomas Edison to develop a cheap electric car. “The problem so far has been to build a storage battery of light weight which would operate for long distances without recharging,” he said—and he never figured it out. Add two degrees to the temperature of the earth.

In fact, the range of electric vehicles stayed pretty much the same throughout the century. Some people had ideas, but they didn’t get too far, at least not quickly. If you really want to feel sad, here’s the story, from Charles J. Murray, of the original lithium-ion battery.

The first iteration, developed by M. Stanley Whittingham at Exxon in 1972, didn’t get far. It was manufactured in small volumes by Exxon, appeared at an electric vehicle show in Chicago in 1977, and served briefly as a coin cell battery. But then Exxon dropped it.

But others kept beavering away—an Oxford boffin, John Goodenough, figured out some new chemistries in the 1980s, and a Sony scientist, Akira Yoshino, figured out how to make it much safer, allowing his company to launch the first commercial version in 1991. by 1996, they were partnering with Nissan on the first EV with a lithium-ion battery, good for about 124 miles of range. (In 2019, Whittingham, Goodenough, and Yoshino shared the Nobel Prize in Physics; at 97, Whittingham was its oldest recipient).

Since then, steady improvements in lithium-ion batteries have been at the heart of the energy storage revolution. They’ve gotten much much much cheaper, and much much much lighter, so now it’s not at all odd to have cars that can drive from New York to Boston and back on a single charge. David Fickling has a good metric to show the progress: the price for storing four hours of electricity is now well below $100 a megawatt, even as oil surges above the $100-a-barrel line.

In recent years those gains have been coming fast and furious, but it’s not just lithium. The Chinese (who are the masters of the battery game) have figured out how to do the same tricks with sodium: Marija Maisch was reporting in January that these salt-based batteries are nearing price and performance parity, if not for cars then for utility scale batteries.

The first commercial utility-scale battery energy storage facilities are now being constructed and commissioned, including projects at the 100 MWh scale. “This demonstrates that SIBs are on the verge of full-scale market entry. Once supply chains are established and economies of scale take effect, there is essentially nothing to prevent sodium-ion batteries from fully taking over the market, provided that existing LIB lock-ins are manageable,” a Finnish says.

Meanwhile, the possibility of a solid-state battery seems to be becoming a probability. I reported in January on the news that another Finnish team at a company with the improbable name Donut Labs had announced they’d be producing motorcycles with this kit before the first quarter of the year was out. The announcement was met with skepticism, which has continued, even as Donut has released more and more data. But the reason for the excitement is clear. As Dan Neil said last week in the Wall Street Journal, a battery like this would end once and for all the talk of “range anxiety” that still prevents some from jumping in the EV parade.

The talk of the CES 2026 in Las Vegas, in January, Donut Lab says its battery has an energy density of 400Wh per kilogram—roughly twice that of typical lithium iron phosphate (LFP) batteries in production. The Donut batt can charge to full in five minutes, says the company; has a practically unlimited lifespan (100,000 charging cycles); is unaffected by heat and cold (-30C to 100C); and contains no rare earth, precious metals or flammable liquid electrolytes. With all that, Donut Lab says it will be cheaper to produce than conventional lithium-ion batteries…

If, as a thought experiment, we plug Donut’s nominal values into the battery pack of a current-model year Tesla Model 3 RWD Long Range, for example, we get a midsize EV sedan with a nominal range of 870 miles, compared to 363 miles for the Donut-free version.

No one knows yet if Donut Labs has cracked the case—it’s released a series of engineering reports, but according to Fred Lambert at Electrek they haven’t yet proved their most consequential claims of energy density and long life. But even if the Finns don’t pull it off in 2026, similar solid-state batteries are not far off. The big Chinese firms—CATL, and BYD—have in recent weeks announced that they’ve begun testing solid-state batteries in cars that can go 800 miles on a charge. As Peter Thompson reports,

Changan Automobile said it will begin trial installations before the end of Q3 2026. With an energy density of 400 Wh/kg, the company claims its “Golden Bell” all-solid-state battery can deliver over 1,500 km (932 miles) CLTC driving range.

Chery, another leading Chinese car manufacturer, revealed its all-solid-state battery that can also achieve a range of over 1,500 km (932 miles) during its “Battery Night” event on Wednesday.

And though China has the lead, it’s not just China.

In September, Mercedes drove a modified EQS over 1,200 km (745 miles) using 106 Ah solid-state battery cells supplied by US-based Factorial Energy. Factorial launched the first commercial solid-state battery program in the US through a collaboration with Karma Automotive earlier this year.

In fact, America is not trailing China as badly in batteries as in some other technologies. Though the GOP managed to cancel most of the money in Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, significant quantities made it out the door before Trump took office, and it has bankrolled, among other things, a useful number of battery factories, enough that, as Julian Spector reported last week,

the country has made surprising strides in making those energy storage systems itself, rather than depending on imports from China.

Already, the U.S. has enough capacity to meet demand for finished grid battery enclosures. That involves connecting battery cells to power electronics, controls, and safety equipment in weatherproof steel containers that are ready to install. By the end of this year, the U.S. will also achieve self-sufficiency in a higher-value part of the supply chain: the battery cells themselves. It’s a major industrial coup that is bringing thousands of high-tech manufacturing jobs to communities across the country.

“For the first time, the United States now has the capacity to supply 100% of domestic energy storage project demand with American-built systems,” said Noah Roberts, executive director of the U.S. Energy Storage Coalition, on a Wednesday press call. ​“That is a fundamental shift from where we were just a year and a half ago, when the majority of battery storage systems were imported.”

And here’s where things start to get really interesting, because those batteries are suddenly pouring into utility electric grids, and in the process making already-valuable solar and wind farms all the more powerful. In essence, they’re turning nighttime into sunny noon.

Which is why now is the time to scroll back up to the top of this article, and look at the graph there, courtesy of Nick Fulghum at Ember. It shows California’s electric grid yesterday. The huge yellow blob in the middle represents solar generation, the absolutely dominant source of supply from about 8 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. when it drops very quickly to zero. This is a phenomenon called sunset, which used to be the main argument against solar power.

But now look at the purple blob to its right—that’s battery storage coming online as the sun goes down. Those batteries spent the afternoon soaking up sunshine—cheap cheap sunshine—and now they’re distributing it back to the grid. As Californians get home from work, turn on lights, cook dinner, start charging their EVs, and run their frozen margarita machines (I may have an idealized idea of California life), batteries are providing most of the power, outstripping imported power (much of which is renewable too), natural gas, and other sources like nuclear. (You’ll notice wind picking up too, as the onshore breezes start to blow from the Pacific).

This is entirely different from how this graph would have looked even a year or two ago. Here’s how Fulghum explained it on Linked In, with some numbers that bear looking at

At 7pm, batteries reached 12.3 GW of output, meeting 42.8% of grid demand!

To put that kind of output during peak demand hours into perspective, it's equivalent to the output from:
- 15-20 combined-cycle gas plants
- 6 Hoover dams
- More than the all-time peak demand of Portugal or Greece

And it's not just a short peak anymore. Batteries stayed above 20% of grid demand from 5.50pm to 9.35pm, almost four hours, and above

And here’s the thing: this has all happened in the blink of an eye

More than 90% of California's battery fleet was built in the last five years. Total deployment is now over 17 GW, up from just 1.3 GW in 2020.

This could happen anywhere in the U.S., and in the world—it is happening in much of the world, especially China, of course. As Ben Payton points out in Reuters, the race is on for “round-the-clock” solar power. He cites a big project in the UAE, which (assuming it escapes the current rounds of insane bombing) is

combining the solar array with a massive amount of battery capacity, the aim is to store enough power generated during daylight hours so that a minimum of 1 GW of electricity – enough to power between 500,000 and one million homes – is available 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

Across the world in Chile

On the other side of ​the world, Chile is looking to scale battery storage. The South American country has 9 GW of storage capacity in operation, construction or testing, with a further 27 GW in the development pipeline, according to the industry association ACERA.

“Chile is a very long country, ​so we rely very much on transmission to move energy from the north, where we have a lot of solar, and also from the very south, where we have a lot of wind,” says María Teresa Ruiz-Tagle, executive director of the Corporate Leaders Group for Climate Action (CLG) Chile. “So, to have battery storage projects in different ‌points of the country ⁠could also help the system.”

She adds that storage is key to tackling the problem of the electricity grid being unable to absorb solar and wind power at times of peak generation. This is a growing problem globally, including in Chile. In 2024, 19% of all solar and wind electricity generated in the country had to be curtailed.

And the technological miracles are only beginning. For instance, Christopher Mims reported last week in the Journal on a new round of “thermal batteries” that store solar power as heat instead of electricity, perfect for use in high-temperature industrial processes.

The chemistry and engineering of this novel cement battery is deliberately simple, so as to make it scalable and cost-competitive. Take quicklime, otherwise known as calcium oxide, and just add water. The result is calcium hydroxide—ancient Roman cement.

This reaction releases a great deal of heat. It’s essentially the same thing that happens when you mix a bag of cement from the hardware store today. Roman engineers exploited that heat to create a fast-setting concrete, allowing them to build the Pantheon and other marvels.

But the reaction is also reversible: Add enough heat back to cement, and you can drive out the water and produce quicklime once more. When done right, it’s possible to recharge, discharge and recharge it again, many times. Just like a battery.

The technology, from an Illinois start-up, is being tested at an Ohio appliance factory

At Whirlpool’s Kitchen-Aid factory in Ohio, the company has found the system performs “even better than expected,” says Scot Blommel, Whirlpool senior manager of global sustainability.

Meanwhile, last week in Australia researchers announced the first fast-charging “quantum battery.”

CSIRO said quantum batteries leverage unique properties of quantum mechanics such as superposition and entanglement, while contemporary batteries typically rely on chemical reactions.

“The battery the researchers engineered has a multi-layered organic microcavity and is wirelessly charged with a laser,” CSIRO said. “The team used advanced spectroscopy techniques to confirm the prototype’s charging behaviour, which showed it retained stored energy for six orders of magnitude longer than it took to charge.”

In an article authored by Quach in The Conversation, he explained a counterintuitive twist to quantum battery storage unit behavior, where the units charge faster together than if they were charging alone.

“Let’s say your quantum battery has N storage units, and each unit takes one second to charge. Collective effects mean that if all units are charged at once, each unit will take only 1∕√N seconds to charge,” Quach wrote.

Do I understand a quantum battery? I do not, really. But I get the general drift, which is that we have world-changing technical prowess coming quickly online from many directions, which could—if we devoted all our efforts to deploying it as fast as possible—give us some chance in the climate fight.

It would also give us some hope of liberating ourselves from that old energy storage medium, the barrel of oil, before more people die in the ugly wars being fought over its ownership. But of course that would challenge the power of the richest people in America, which is why our current government will keep funneling money to Lockheed instead, so it can figure out how to kill girls playing volleyball with tungsten pellets.

We have to make a huge choice about where to point our intelligence, our technology, our hopes. November 3 can’t come fast enough.

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In other energy and climate news:

+A roundup on coverage of the ways the war is driving a boom in greentech. At Bloomberg, Todd Woody finds

signs of a shift are playing out across the world. In Southeast Asia, buyers are flocking to Chinese EV giant BYD Co.’s stores, while electric rickshaws are selling out in Pakistan. A shortage of cooking oil in India is driving a run on electric stoves. From Germany to Nigeria, interest in rooftop solar is surging. And in the UK, some homeowners are taking the plunge on expensive heat pumps.

Here’s Rowan Hooper and Alec Luhn, at New Scientist, with a YouTube version making some of the same points—a fascinating conversation.

Around the world, showrooms for China’s BYD EVsare bustling as gas prices rise.

About 1,100 miles (1,770 km) away in Hanoi, Nguyen Hoang Tu Anh said his VinFast showrooms had to hire more sales staff after customer visits quadrupled, resulting in the sale of 250 EVs in the three weeks since the Iran war started. That works out to more than 80 a week, or double the average rate in 2025.

“Switching to EV will help us significantly save money,” said Lai The Manh Linh, a 41-year-old employee at a telecom company, who traded a gas-powered Toyota Vios subcompact car for a new, all-electric VinFast 5 compact crossover for his 60-70 kilometers daily commute to work.

If you want all this in more statistical detail, a new report from Ember is the place to go

This crisis will accelerate what was already underway. Asia, which imports 40% of its oil through the Strait of Hormuz, now faces the same reckoning Europe did in 2022 — but with increasingly cost-competitive electrotech alternatives available. The bull case for LNG as Asia’s transition fuel is now much weaker. And peak oil has been brought sharply forward: the International Energy Agency has already cut its 2026 demand growth forecast, and the peak it previously put at 2029 may already be here.

Similarly, from Ryan Cooper at the American Prospect,

Wherever renewables have been installed, they are turning out to be security gold. Experts tell E&E News that the Trump shock is certain to entrench China’s renewable focus, and it’s not hard to see why. When the dust clears, all nations with the slightest scrap of sense will be spending every available penny on energy security, meaning renewables. You’d have to be a complete clod, a world-historical imbecile, a man evincing such staggering stupidity that it calls his very sentience into question, to not get it.

+I like studies, and I like potatoes. New research finds that you can grow almost as many potatoes in a solar farm as if the panels weren’t there, you just have to tip them in slightly different directions at a few crucial points in the growing year. It just make me happy to think of academics out there doing this kind of stuff

“AT management during early tuber development partially mitigated yield losses, showing that dynamic light management can help balance agricultural productivity and energy generation in APV systems. Weibull-based modelling of tuber size distribution indicated a consistent shift toward smaller tubers under increasing shade, while tuber dry matter content remained stable.”

Somewhat more lyrically, Henry Carnell in Mother Jones has an excellent account of how some Oregon farmers are rallying behind solar farms, even as others continue to oppose them.

Unlike solar installations on sunnier, less-vegetated deserts or those on developed areas, agrivoltaics in temperate areas like Oregon get an efficiency boost because the vegetation cools the systems. Not all crops are suited for it; some see a yield reduction, and those that demand a lot of sun—like corn, soybeans, and cotton—are a better match for wind turbines. But other plants can actually benefit from the unique microclimate under the solar panels. Oregon State University hydrologist John Selker is researching a solar array in Corvallis, not far from Langdon’s property; he found that soil under agrivoltaics held water more efficiently, describing the panels as “miniature greenhouses.”

+A federal court in Alabama has ruled that the state’s utility can charge customers $25 a month for the privilege of putting solar panels on their own roofs.

“I am frustrated that Alabama Power solar customers like me have to pay an extra monthly fee in order to reduce our power bills,” said Mark Johnston, an Episcopal priest and retired executive director of Camp McDowell.

He added that “I want lower electricity bills and a better environment for my children and grandchildren.”

+Excellent news from Canada, where longtime climate activist Avi Lewis was elected on the first ballot to lead the country’s progressive New Democratic Party or NDP. Here’s Avi’s speech to the convention, with some great language about Canadian climate policy. His win was greeted sourly by the party leader in Alberta, who professed a desire to both reduce emissions and build pipelines; it’s about time someone called out this kind of magical thinking.

Meanwhile, Lewis’s brother-in-law Seth Klein has a fine piece about the LNG project that may be Canada’s next great carbon bomb.

While some may see the current crisis bolstering the case for Canadian-based LNG, it is equally plausible the war will serve to expedite the transition to renewables in the markets to which Canadian LNG producers hope to ship, as many are already doing. As Canada’s National Observer reported last week, two Nisga’a Nation members have just filed a lawsuit against their own government, claiming the Nation failed to adequately consult its own citizens about the purchase of PRGT, and that the project could become obsolete as other countries transition off fossil fuels.

+Book alert—Ayana Johnson’s magnificent “What If We Get It Right” is now out in paperback with book tour/dance party commencing soon. And veteran Canadian activist Maude Barlow takes on carbon markets and the like in her new Earth for Sale. Barlow led the fight against privatization of water; she’s always a voice to listen to.

+A beautiful account by Lucy Carrigan of the trial of six British protesters for breaking the windows at a big bank. I won’t spoil the (happy) ending, but do read it. Here’s a snippet:

Maggie Fay is the first defendant to take the stand. She has the look of a young Judi Dench. A sweet and kind, although worried face. She is an Admiral nurse, specializing in care for those who have dementia.

She acknowledges that she set out to purchase six center punches to “carefully crack” the windows at JP Morgan.

She mentions the link between air pollution and dementia.

In describing how she used that center punch, she makes the gesture of someone doing CPR on a patient, the firm and controlled back and forth motion of wrist against heart, the work that goes into keeping a person alive.

When the prosecution doubles down on her role in acquiring the center punches, she agrees. “I ordered them,” she says, forthrightly “I ordered six but I could only get four because they were out of stock.”

+Microsoft, whose founder Bill Gates has long pretended an interest in things climatic, is set to raise its companywide emissions 44 percent this year, by building a giant gas-fired data center in West Virginia. When people talk about the irresponsibility of the mega-rich corporations, here’s a perfect exhibit.

The research highlights how, in the rush to bring data centers online, companies like Microsoft “are essentially abandoning their pledges to protect the climate,” Rachel Kitchin, senior corporate climate campaigner at Stand.earth, said in a statement.

Microsoft has committed to reducing its carbon emissions, with a goal to become “carbon negative” and to power its data centers with carbon-free energy by 2030.

“You can’t claim to be a leader on climate and then build out massive fossil-fuel facilities that emit millions of tons of climate pollution and poison the people living next door,” Kitchin added.

+From the good folks at Mongabay, some reporting on the ongoing scandals around biomass. As Justin Catanoso writes,

Forest advocates are turning up the pressure in the Netherlands in an unprecedented way. In a possible first-of-its-kind action, the Dutch Public Prosecution Service is considering a criminal investigation against RWE, one of the Netherlands’ largest energy providers.

RWE faces allegations made by two forest advocacy groups that the company, which has collected billions of euros in Dutch biomass subsidies, misrepresented itself by claiming that hundreds of thousands of tons of wood pellets imported from Malaysia came entirely from sawmill waste.

The two advocacy groups, Comite Schone Lucht and Biofuelwatch, say their research establishes that those pellets come mostly from whole trees, contributing to Malaysian deforestation. The Public Prosecution Service, the sole authority responsible for investigating and prosecuting Dutch criminal offenses, is expected to decide how to proceed by the end of March.

+Damian Carrington reports on new satellite data showing giant methane leaks around the world—especially in the oil-and-gas country of Kazakhstan.

Super-polluting plumes were also seen in the US, the largest detected in 2025 occurring in Texas and leaking 5.5 tonnes of methane per hour, equivalent to running about a million fuel-guzzling SUVs. Venezuela (five) and Iran (three) also had multiple mega-leaks from state-owned facilities.

The Stop Methane Project also analysed super-polluting plumes from landfill sites, where rotting organic waste can release huge volumes of methane when not well managed. The worst sites ranged across the world, from Turkey to Algeria and Malaysia to the US.

+Finally, a great report on solar panels that don’t look like solar panels, from the good folks at LandArt Generator. Here’s a glimpse of some of the designs on display recently

There are lots of moments for analysis, and this isn’t one of them. My only goal this week is to make sure you bring everyone you can to Saturday’s No Kings Day protests. It’s going to be chilly in the East and hot in the West, so no one is going to be out on the street by accident; people need to want to come. So I’m going to try and provide some motivation to get you out the door, and I’m going to use every trick of emotional manipulation I can muster.

There’s anger. Since the last No Kings protest in October, the administration has invaded Venezuela and attacked Iran, it has killed Renee Good and Alex Pretti, and it has blown up the global economy. Here’s this week’s particular barb, at least for people who care about energy and climate: they’ve taken a billion taxpayer dollars (that’s about six bucks per taxpayer) and used it to buy back offshore wind leases from Total Energies, a French firm, in an effort to make sure that this wind is never captured for clean energy. “Considering that the development of offshore wind projects is not in the country’s interest, we have decided to renounce offshore wind development in the United States,” said Patrick Pouyanné, the CEO of the company, which should—if Democrats ever regain power—never be allowed to work on anything in America ever again.

All this while the price of energy is going through the roof thanks to our folly in the Persian Gulf—but it’s more important to bury wind energy than to provide affordable power to Americans. And according to yesterday’s Houston Chronicle, Total has been instructed to redirect the money they’re receiving to a Texas liquefied natural gas (LNG) plant, one more subsidy for an industry already awash in them. And by the way, exporting more gas raises prices for the same Americans who won’t be able to heat their homes or power their cars with the cheap electricity the wind farms would have provided.

Want just a touch more anger, just at the pettiness of these guys? The Trump administration, because it can, is about to remove a bike lane in DC

The National Park Service will soon start removing a protected bike lane that runs along 15th Street NW from Constitution Avenue down to the Tidal Basin and Jefferson Memorial, eliminating a popular cycling route just as crowds are expected to increase for the annual blooming of the cherry blossoms.

The work is expected to start on Monday, according to NPS. Once it’s done, it will sever one of D.C.’s longest protected bike lanes, stretching virtually uninterrupted from the Tidal Basin all the way up to Columbia Heights, and additionally serving as a vital cycling connection to the 14th Street Bridge into Virginia.

There are three Capital Bikeshare stations located along the stretch of the bike lane that will be removed. On Friday morning, the first day of spring in D.C., there were also dozens of Veo bikes and Lime scooters available in the area. According to DDOT, those Bikeshare stations are among the most used in the entire system.

An evaluation by DDOT of incidents along 15th Street after the bike lane was installed found that roadway crashes along the corridor had decreased by 46 percent — and bicycle injury crashes dropped even more, by 91 percent.

How does that compare with other world capitals? On Sunday, Parisians returned to power for a third term the socialists who—under the remarkable mayor Anne Hidalgo—have built a true bike city. Hidalgo is handing the job to Emmanuel Gregoire, who rode a bike-share cycle to his victory party. Here, just for kicks, is what a rational leader looks like

Under his predecessor’s Plan Vélo, Paris, according to the Bicycle Network

has gained over 1,000 new kilometres of dedicated cycling infrastructure including the now-famous ‘Corona pistes’ - pop-up bike lanes created during the COVID-19 pandemic that later became permanent due to overwhelming public support.

• During 2025 peak hour travel, bike riders account for 18.9% of trips, while car usage has dropped to 6.6%.

• There are 19,000 Vélib bikes in circulation, with 40% of them electric.

• These bikes are part of the Vélib’ Métropole system, which includes 1,480 storage stations to keep the streets neater and safer.

• 60,000 public bicycle racks are currently available across greater Paris.

Oh, and as Paris has become a bike city, air pollution has dropped 55 percent.

So, if you’re not angry enough to march now, then perhaps I can motivate you with just a soupçon of fear.

The World Meteorological Organization released its latest State of the Global Climate report on Monday, which for the first time attempts to track the planet’s energy imbalance. As Jonathan Watts puts it,

the Earth’s energy imbalance increased by about 11 zettajoules a year between 2005 and 2025, which is equivalent to about 18 times total human energy use. Last year it was more than double that average.

At present, humans and other life forms on the surface directly suffer only a small fraction of that energy backup because 91% is absorbed by oceans, 5% by the land, 1% warms the atmosphere, and 3% melts ice at the poles and on high mountains.

As Eric Niller explains in the Times,

One worrying result is that scientists are detecting more heat deeper in the ocean, rather than just at the surface, according to Dr. Von Schuckmann.

Below 2,000 meters, oceans store and hold heat longer than at the surface layer, which releases it to the atmosphere. That means that the effects of climate change will continue for a long time, she said.

“The more we have heat kept away from communication with the atmosphere,” Dr. Karina Von Schuckmann, an author of the report, said, “the more we are moving to time scales of committed climate change of 400 to 1,000 years.”

But we’re already seeing the heat at the surface. This week offered reports of Arctic sea ice at all time lows for the date, and of the highest March temperatures ever recorded in the U.S.—measurements so loony they’re almost beyond credulity. New record highs for March—112 degrees in California and Arizona—beat the old records by two degrees, and were just a degree shy of the all-time April record. As the indomitable Bob Henson and Jeff Masters write:

At least 14 states set their all-time statewide records for March heat from Thursday through Saturday, as compiled by weather records expert Maximiliano Herrera (@extremetemps on Bluesky). These include every state from the Rocky Mountains west to the Pacific coast except for Oregon and Washington, plus several others between the Rockies and the Mississippi River.

Beyond the crazy fire danger now building across the West (Nebraska last week had the biggest fire in its history, and one of the twenty biggest in American history; a new study today explicitly links shrinking snowpacks to growing fire danger), there’s another peril now fully in play: the winter saw precious little snowpack across the Rockies, and much of that melted in last week’s heatdome, which means the Colorado River is headed towards previously unknown states. As Mark Gongloff chronicles

Lake Powell, the main reservoir near the border between the upper and lower basins, will get just 52% of its usual inflow from snowmelt this year, the Bureau of Reclamation forecast last month.

Lake Powell can’t afford an off year. It recently stood at just 24% of its capacity, 170 feet below “full pool” and just 160 feet from going “dead pool,” when water can no longer escape from the Glen Canyon Dam. That would be a catastrophe for the lower-basin states of Arizona, California and Nevada.

More immediately, the reservoir is just 40 feet away from “minimum power pool,” below which it will be unable to move the turbines on Glen Canyon Dam’s hydropower plant, which serves seven Western states. It generates 5 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity each year, enough to power 500,000 homes. A West filling up with data centers desperately needs this power supply.

Do you trust the Trump administration to wisely navigate the endless complications of the West running out of water? I don’t—he flushed billions of gallons of water pointlessly out to sea after the Los Angeles fires to try and make some kind of political point about his ability to control a “giant faucet.” We’re in for trouble, and the weaker Trump is, the better our chances of survival.

But maybe anger and fear aren’t what sink your boat? What about a bit of hope that once we manage to drive this guy from power there’s something left to look forward to?

I’ll offer it in limited form. We’re at such a moment of inflection, with cheap clean energy widely available, that we could make astonishingly rapid change. At least as much as Paris, China (which is slightly larger) is an entirely different place today than it was even five years ago. And that should tickle some memories for Americans—remember, once it was our cities that were filthy, and then we passed some laws, and they got remarkably cleaner remarkably fast. Indeed, Ann Carlson has a new book out detailing just how fast it happened.

Which means that if we manage to force change, it could come quickly. The news about windpower this week is very bad, as noted above. But this is also the week when—over the sabotaging efforts of the Trump administration—construction work finished on Vineyard Wind off Massachusetts and Revolution Wind off Rhode Island began connecting to the grid. Together they will supply the electricity for 750,000 homes—a not insignificant percentage of the 160 million homes in America. They proved during this winter’s cold stretch in the Northeast that they’re at least as reliable as gas-fired power plants. And now there’s infrastructure in place for the ongoing buildout. As Massachusetts State Senator Michael Barrett told WGBH this week,

“Time’s passing. Trump’s gone in under three years and the winds around here have staying power. The industry will come back if we’re smart about it and set the stage.”

I don’t need to tell anyone reading this that three years is a long time—too long. One of our jobs this weekend is to help shorten that stretch—with an overwhelming win in the midterms, Trump can be effectively weakened before this year is out. But we have to do the work.

And if we do—but only if we do—then I think we’re allowed our small bits of hope. A new survey this week found that there were 400,000 acres of old growth forest in my part of the world—the Adirondack Mountains of New York—that had been “hiding in plain sight.” It’s good news in many ways.

In these undisturbed systems, carbon is pumped into the earth through root networks and the slow decomposition of leaf litter and “coarse woody debris” (fallen logs). Unlike in managed timberlands where the soil is frequently disturbed, the soil in old growth forests remains a stable, permanent reservoir.

But mostly it’s good news because these woods are majestic and noble and good companions. I’ve hiked many of the areas the research described, and marveled at the big trees, but it’s good to know just how old they are. They’re a reminder that the planet has surprises yet, and some of them are beautiful.

We earn our hope. See you Saturday.

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In other energy and climate news:

+Book alert: If you have any doubts about the power of protest to change things, pre-order The Protest Book by Annie Leonard and Andre Carrothers, who have long careers in this work and understand the what, how, and why!

+Latest data on insurance costs, in a nationwide investigation led by the good folks at Grist. As they report

A new nationwide report from the insurance price comparison firm Insurify found that the average American homeowner’s insurance bill rose 12 percent last year, reaching $2,948 per year, and will rise another 4 percent this year. This is much faster than overall inflation for the same period. (These numbers don’t include flood insurance, which most often requires a separate plan, backed by the federal government.)…

The primary culprits are the rising toll of extreme weather as the planet warms and the millions of new homes developers have built in vulnerable areas. Insured losses from natural catastrophes in the U.S. averaged $100 billion a year between 2023 and 2025, up from an annual average of around $15 billion per year a decade earlier, according to the Insurance Information Institute.

+From forest heroine Danna Smith, a fantastic essay explaining why rural communities should invest in healthy forests, not data centers.

Their enormous appetite for electricity and water accelerates resource extraction, pollution, and climate impacts. The declining forestry industry is now trying to hitch itself to this swindle, promoting the burning of trees to power data centers as a way to prop up its obsolete business model—and calling it “progress.”

Progress toward what? Much of what these AI data centers produce is inflammatory content that fuels political outrage and deepens social division. No wonder people across the country are pushing back—and winning.

In so many ways, forests are the most advanced technology the world has ever known. They regulate temperature, store carbon, support food systems, and offer psychological grounding no device can replicate. When left intact, forests are self‑maintaining, self‑renewing, and infinitely more productive than any data center.

Study after study shows that time in nature improves cognitive function and a wide range of mental and physical health markers. Research also links depression, anxiety, and attention disorders to tech overload and reduced time outdoors. Science shows what we instinctively know to be true—nature brings people together. Protecting it is one of the few remaining ways to restore health and rebuild unity in a divided time.

Equally important, forest protection is a proven economic strategy for rural communities. The outdoor recreation economy generates far more revenue and jobs than the timber industry. Conservation and recreation jobs, ecological restoration, and community‑led development create long‑term prosperity without sacrificing land, water, or health. These sectors keep wealth local, strengthen small businesses, and attract people who want to live in places defined by beauty and belonging—not destruction and noise.

+An ever-mounting series of examples shows that in serious countries the message of the Iran war is sinking home: get off fossil fuels

For example, Britain announced all new homes will be built with solar panels and heat pumps

“The Iran War has once again shown our drive for clean power is essential for our energy security so we can escape the grip of fossil fuel markets we don’t control,” U.K. Energy Secretary Ed Miliband said in a statement.

That’s important because a new Europe-wide study found that the continent has done a better job growing the supply of clean electricity than in installing the machinery—like heat pumps and EVs—to make use of it. But there’s at least one EV that’s doing great. Here’s a Polish-built model from China’s Leapmotor that sells—with a good deal of help from government subsidies—for $5,600 in Italy.

Meanwhile, there has been one fine oped after another from around the globe tryinv to make the same point. Here’s Zach Brown in the Anchorage Daily News, here’s Jason Bordoff and Erica Downs writing in Foreign Policy, here’s an account from Hannah Daly in Ireland, and here’s the great British writer George Monbiot with a particularly striking piece.

As the hydrocarbon industries and their financial backers find themselves threatened by green technologies, their grip on governments and the media has tightened. They’ve poured vast sums into climate denial and public dissuasion campaigns. Politics has become harsher, less open and less tolerant. The democratic recession is in large part driven by fossil fuel interests. The entire planet suffers from the resource curse.

Oil did not cause capitalism, but it has massively extended and empowered it. Reduce our dependency on oil, and we disrupt some of the world’s most violent and exploitative relations. We defuel dictators and war machines, coups and assassinations, invasions and nuclear threats. It’s not everything of course: there will still be water wars, land wars and mineral wars to be fought: after all, the military machine can’t just sit there rusting. But it’s a lot.

+From Anna Griffin, a sweeping account of how Alaska is teetering on the edge of being a “failed petrostate,” and how the tensions are hanging over this year’s crucial midterm elections.

Those elections pose a fundamental question for Alaskans: Will voters opt for more financial austerity in the name of preserving their annual payments and almost nonexistent state taxation, or will they accept a more politically fraught reimagining of the state’s fiscal structure?…

Brett Watson, an economist at the University of Alaska Anchorage, agreed.

“Practically speaking, we are probably at the end of our ability to continue to pay a dividend, provide the same level of state services and not broadly pay taxes,” he said.

+A lovely account in the Financial Times (and oh how I wish America had a non-rightwing business paper) of how Paris “beat the car,” which expands on my brief discussion above.

Lesson two is that banishing cars doesn’t hurt an urban economy. Retailers often worry it will deter their customers. Studies repeatedly show it doesn’t. More broadly, French Hidalgo-haters need to explain why Paris is in the global top four of business-focused rankings of cities by Oxford Economics, the Mori Memorial Foundation and Kearney.

+Meanwhile, an early accounting shows the Iran war emitted five million tons of co2 in its first two weeks, or “an Iceland.”

“Every missile strike is another downpayment on a hotter, more unstable planet, and none of it makes anyone safer,” said Patrick Bigger, a research director at the Climate and Community Institute and a co-author of the analysis.

Destroyed buildings constitute the largest element of the estimated carbon cost. Based on reports by the Iranian Red Crescent humanitarian organisation that about 20,000 civilian buildings have been damaged by the conflict, the analysis estimates the total emissions from this sector to be 2.4m tonnes of CO2 equivalent (tCO2e).

+From the (wonderfully named) Johnny Sturgeon at Inside Climate News, here’s an account of the decline of migratory freshwater fish around the world

Beneath the surface of the planet’s rivers and lakes, the historically heaving migrations of freshwater fish are thinning out. The blubbery-lipped Siamese giant carp of Asia’s Mekong River, the mottled brown goonch of India’s Ganges and the ancient-in-appearance beluga sturgeon of Europe’s Danube River are declining.

Facing existential threats along their migratory paths, an ecological collapse is taking place largely out of sight.

Declining faster than many terrestrial populations, 325 migratory freshwater fish species have been identified as candidates for urgent conservation efforts by the United Nations’ Convention on the Conservation of Migratory Species of Wild Animals (CMS). These populations—critical for river health and economic output—have already declined by over 80 percent since 1970.

Facing accelerated decline from dam construction, overfishing, pollution, climate-driven flow changes and habitat fragmentation, many species are increasingly unable to make the journeys from spawning grounds, to feeding areas, to floodplain nurseries.

+If you find yourself in the small Venn diagram of people who care about global warming and nordic ski racing, here’s my New Yorker account of last weekend’s retirement races of the great climate champion Jessie Diggins.

+The outback opal mining town of Coober Pedy in Australia set a new record, running entirely on sun, wind and batteries for five days straight last week.

“This power station has set a global benchmark for renewable hybrid power, delivering reliable electricity at a lower cost for a community in one of Australia’s most remote off-grid locations,” the LinkedIn post says this week.

Forget Mad Max. This is the future we can have if we want it.

I am (mostly) going to take a break from writing about the war for a day, because big though it is, it’s not quite the biggest thing happening on our planet. Or rather, its widespread destruction is taking place inside a larger context. Trump’s endless folly (first tariffs, now a desperately stupid war that has closed the Strait of Hormuz) has caused what everyone is beginning to understand is widespread economic damage. As the Times reported today, “this is the big one,” and “the fallout is rattling households and businesses in neighborhoods all over the globe.”

On a stable planet, though, the damage might be contained and repaired; someone as incompetent as Trump (who is now describing his war as a “short excursion” and insisting that the Strait is in “very good shape”) will eventually (please God) burn himself out. Our bigger problem, as we’re about to be reminded, is that the planet is the furthest thing from stable. The backdrop is about to become the foreground, and with that the drama will shift once more.

It’s already hot, all over the world and here in the United States. That’s been a little hidden these past months, because the country’s population and power center—the northeast corridor from Boston to DC—has had a cold winter; until the last few days of rapid-onset mud season it’s felt like an old-school winter in New England (with sublime skiing, which has kept me sane). And Minnesota, the source of much of the year’s news so far, was cold too, at least in bursts. But we’ve been the exception: in fact, it was the second-warmest winter on record in the continental U.S., and that’s because the West broke every possible record, usually by a mile.

Several cities can now claim winter 2025-26 as their warmest on record, including locations with over a century of data, like Salt Lake City (152 years of data), Tucson (130 years of data) and Rapid City, South Dakota (114 years of data).

Phoenix, Arizona, obliterated its previous record (a record that was only a year old, mind you) by almost 3 degrees, a pummeling of a record in the realm of three-month temperature data.

Albuquerque, New Mexico, clobbered its previous record warmest winter by 3 degrees, according to the Southeast Regional Climate Center. Helena, Montana, Las Vegas and Lubbock, Texas, were among the other cities record warm this winter.

I don’t want to brush by those numbers. Phoenix and Albuquerque have temperature records going back more than a century. If they were going to beat the old record for a three-month stretch, something that shouldn’t happen very often, it should be by a tenth of a degree. That’s how statistics work on a set that large—or it’s how they did work on a stable planet. Three degrees is insane. And if that’s insane, then what’s going to happen in the next week is truly bonkers. A giant heat dome is set to settle in over the Southwest, bringing new temperature records. As the Washington Post reported today, Palm Springs California is projected to reach 104 degrees on Monday; the old record for the date is 95 degrees. Again, that’s statistically bizarre in a way that makes my head hurt.

This record-breaking heat dome will contribute to worsening drought conditions across the Intermountain West.

In Utah, snowpack remains at record low levels according to Meyer. He said that it would take a foot of snow in Salt Lake City for the season to catch up with even the second-lowest seasonal snowfall total — and that a storm of that magnitude isn’t expected to come.

“The knockout punch comes in the form of Utah’s reservoirs, which are only at 40 percent of capacity right now,” Meyer said. “All this means we are likely going to see some very tangible water supply cuts and conservation efforts by the state this year.”

The weather forecast and climate outlook community in Utah was “filled with trepidation” because drought relief looked unlikely, added Meyer, stressing that much more meaningful impacts were possible for agricultural communities as water conservation efforts grow.

“Right now, every drop is going to count this year,” he said.

Across the region, New Mexico was also reporting its lowest snowpack on record and Colorado was in a similar situation.

Here’s how Daniel Swain and the good folks at Weather West described the heat dome that is forming as of this morning

In fact: the strongest mid-tropospheric ridge ever observed in the southwestern U.S. in March is expected to develop by Friday, and then will probably go on to break that new record (set this week) when it re-organizes into an even broader and stronger ridge next week.

In case you’re wondering, this heat is in no way confined to land. The oceans, which have soaked up most of the planet’s excess warmth, are crazily warm right now too.

Sea surface temperatures off the coast of Southern California have risen as much as five degrees above average for the time of year, causing a strong, Category 2 marine heat wave to develop.

These unusually warm waters will provide a boost to air temperatures near the coast, especially at night, preventing them from dropping off as much as they otherwise would.

“A strong to severe marine heatwave is ongoing off the coast of California,” wrote Colin McCarthy, a storm chaser affiliated with the University of California at Davis.

In early March, ocean temperatures reached the mid- to upper 60s at Scripps Pier in La Jolla, California.

“That’s the average ocean temperature for mid-June,” McCarthy said.

And here’s the kicker. All this is happening during a La Niña “cool phase” of the Pacific, something that will soon change. I alerted you exactly a month ago to the likelihood we were going to see an El Niño kick off sometime this summer; in the last few weeks the chances of that have grown stronger, and more to the point it looks like it could be an exceptionally strong “super” version of the warming current. The normally cautious-almost-to-a-fault climate scientist Zeke Hausfather came out with his new forecast this afternoon, and it was a doozy.

I’ve collected 11 different models that have been updated since the beginning of March. Each of these in turn features a number of ensemble members, so that we end up with 433 total ENSO forecasts…

These clearly show that a strong El Niño is indeed likely to develop later in the year. While I’d probably discount some of the higher values (much above 3C) as outliers here, the median and mean across all the models still gives an estimate around 2.5C, which would put it notably stronger than the 2023/2024 El Niño and close to if not matching what we saw back in 2015/2016.

So what does this mean for global temperatures this year and in 2027? All things being equal, the lag between peak El Niño conditions and the global surface temperature response would result in the largest impacts on 2027 temperatures (as El Niño events generally peak between November and January). It would still boost 2026, but probably not enough to set a new record this year.

However, I have to be a bit cautious here. Long time readers may remember my post in May 2023 where I deemed it unlikely that 2023 would set a new record (given this historical lag in global temperature response to El Niño) and argued that 2024 would instead. I was partially wrong – 2023 was weird, and the heat came much earlier than expected. We think the extended triple-dip La Niña event between 2020 and 2023 may have primed the system for more rapid heating, something absent this time around. But we don’t know for sure. Fool me once, and all that.

Either way, this means that 2027 looks increasingly likely to set a new record, perhaps by a sizable margin if we end up on the high end of the range of El Niño forecasts.

That Hausfather and the brasher Jim Hansen are in basic agreement here should terrify us. We’re going to see temperatures unlike any that humans have seen before, which means we’re going to see chaotic weather unlike humans have seen before. If you think this is some kind of lefty enviro fantasy, check out this source:

“Due to the increasing concentration of greenhouse gases, the climate system cannot effectively exhaust the heat released in a major El Niño event before the next El Niño comes along and pushes the baseline upward again,” Defense Department meteorologist Eric Webb said.

Therefore, a super El Niño in 2026-27 would disperse more heat than other very strong events in 1982-83, 1997-98 and 2015-16.

And were not going to know what hit us, in several ways. The substack Future Earth Catalog published an interview today with veteran Florida weatherman John Morales which was the best account I’ve seen yet of what the Trump cuts to our scientific system mean in real time.

The cuts to NOAA and the National Weather Service have been devastating. If you look at the statistics of forecast accuracy for tropical cyclone tracks and intensities from the National Hurricane Center, they were off in 2025. And anecdotally, I’m not the only meteorologist who will tell you that day-to-day forecasting has become more challenging. The weather models are flip-flopping from one solution to the next.

Think about how many times TV meteorologists in the fall of 2025 had to show you two or three models with different solutions and say, “Well, this is what this model says, but yesterday it was saying something different.” That leads to more confusion among the public — and it makes our job of saving life and property more difficult.

We’ve been missing 15 to 20 percent of our weather balloon data. And those missing balloons are upstream — out West, in the Plains, in the Intermountain West, and especially in Alaska. That’s where our weather comes from. We’re no longer able to really know what’s going on out there. And nothing provides the detail weather balloons can: every 15 feet, all the way up to 100,000 feet.

So we may not know what’s coming, but we can guess it’s going to be bad. For instance, I noted before that the western snowpack is at record low levels. Even in California, which, due to a couple of record-level atmospheric rivers off the warm Pacific saw lots of midwinter snow, the early heat in the Sierras has already led to widespread melt. I do not think it’s fear-mongering to warn that fire may be a serious danger this season in the West.

And what’s happening in the U.S. will be paralleled in places around the planet as El Niño takes us up the escalator. A new study just found that rising temperatures are already taking many humans past the point where they can live with any kind of comfort. As Todd Woody reports,

The number of days where extreme heat makes it too dangerously hot to walk the dog, sweep the porch and engage in other ordinary pursuits has doubled around the world over the past 75 years, according to new research.

Scientists determined that on average, those 65 and older experience a month a year when heat prevents them from routine activities. Parts of Asia, Africa, Australia and North America are becoming unlivable for senior citizens, the researchers said. Younger adults also are losing time as climate-driven heat restricts their lives for 50 hours a year.

Overall, more than a third of the global population resides in regions where heat severely affects daily life, according to the peer-reviewed paper published Tuesday in the journal Environmental Research: Health.

But it may be getting too hot for some key physical systems too. It seems likely that this is the year the Colorado River system may finally have to deal with the fact that it simply can’t provide the water people have been counting on. A new study last week found clear signs that the Gulf Stream is beginning to drift northward, a “clear sign” that worries about the collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Current (AMOC) are no mere phantasm.

The findings indicate that the movement of the Gulf Stream could be a “canary in the coal mine” for the AMOC’s collapse. According to their analysis of satellite data, the Gulf Stream has already been nudged northwards from the coast near Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, since the early 1990s. This is likely to be the result of the AMOC dwindling and losing its grip.

We don’t know for sure how the Iran war will play out, nor the El Niño; at the moment, though, things look ominous. All I’m saying is, the next six months could be the ultimate in teachable moments, with rapidly rising prices for oil, and rapidly rising temperatures. And what do you know, we have a midterm exam coming up on November 3.

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In other energy and climate news:

+NPR reports that across the country utilities are using spurious arguments about safety to try and block “balcony solar” bills in half the nation’s legislatures. The good news is that Virginia seems poised to pass theirs soon, and it seems likely four or five other states will do likewise—which should be enough to establish a nationwide market that really gets this technology cracking in America as it has across Europe (where—no safety problems have appeared despite millions of installations). Still—utilities are terrible.

"They don't want anyone messing with their business model," Cora Stryker of Bright Saver says. "Kicking up dust regarding safety concerns is definitely a strategy that is being used by people who don't want this for their own self-interested reasons."

NPR asked utilities mentioned in this story, as well as their trade groups, to comment on Stryker's "kicking up dust" allegation, but they did not respond beyond saying that safety and reliability are their primary concerns with plug-in solar.

+We’re starting to get a pretty good sense of which governors are rising to the occasion with solar, and which aren’t. Over at Climate-Colored Goggles, which is running a subscription drive this week, Sammy Roth tells the sad story of Gavin Newsom slashing rooftop solar incentives, something that the courts sadly upheld this week.

Newsom will be out of office in less than a year, and it’s possible his successor will be less in thrall to the utility companies — and the utility labor unions — that have made the policy landscape so inhospitable for the rooftop solar industry.

Emily Atkin, meanwhile, has a spirited interview with Tom Steyer, the longtime and merrily earnest climate advocate seeking to replace Newsom. It’s a great conversation, because Atkin asks what any sane person would when confronted with a billionaire in 2026: “Do you think it is ethical that you exist?” And Steyer handles it well, and they go on to a profound talk about the future…and the past. My favorite part is about a trip the two of them took up to the tarsands in 2014 because some of us had kicked up a fight over the KXL pipeline

Emily: I don’t know if you remember this, but I’ll give you credit here for being somebody who’s been doing this for a long time. Back in 2014, I was a 24-year-old reporter, and you went on a trip to the Canadian tar sands—

Tom:
God, I remember that so clearly.

Emily:
—to talk with Indigenous communities affected by tar sands development, because that was really the height of the Keystone XL pipeline fight—

Tom:
Which I was strongly fighting against, and which we did stop.

Emily:
—and there was an extra spot on your plane.

Tom:
Was that you?

Emily:
That was me. I was the reporter who came with you to report on it.

Tom:
My God, Emily. That was such an epic trip for me.

Emily:
It really was. It was a trip that made me fall in love with climate and environmental reporting — getting to talk to communities affected downstream by oil development.

Tom:
It was incredible. I went up there so people couldn’t say, “You’re just some jerk running your mouth who doesn’t know what he’s talking about.” And what we saw looked like the mountains of the moon.

They were creating a massive amount of runoff after mining and refining the oil, and they put it in these tailings ponds with gravel on the bottom. So it went right into the water system. All of the toxicity in that slurry went right into the water system, and it was a cancer cluster.

Every fish, every deer, every drop of water had massive amounts of toxicity in it. I was just like, my God.

Emily:
Yeah. I remember talking to people about how their way of life was being taken away from them — their hunting, their fishing — because of the pollution from those tailings ponds.

I remember someone getting teary-eyed talking about how fishing wasn’t just a source of sustenance; it was part of the culture they wanted to pass down to their kids. And they couldn’t do that anymore. It was really painful.

Tom:
It was incredibly painful. I’d gone to Alaska in 2006 to see what the land and animals and birds and fish looked like before Europeans showed up. And then we went there and saw what happened when industry arrived and devastated the people who had been living there.

Anyway, two good people in a good conversation. Meanwhile, on the other side of the continent, Kathy Hochul, the governor of New York, is doing what she can to erode New York State’s climate law—even though she faces no credible challenger in this year’s gubernatorial race. And so three state elected officials, led by the redoubtable Liz Krueger, took her on in the Daily News yesterday, using language that for fellow pols of the same party is pretty straightforward.

Right now Gov. Hochul is laying the groundwork to roll back one of New York’s best tools for lowering energy costs — our nation-leading climate law, the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act, or CLCPA — joining President Trump’s war on renewable energy that continues to drive up energy costs for everyone.

The reality is that renewable energy is the only path forward. It is well-established that new renewable power is consistently cheaper than new natural gas generation. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, renewable power will account for more than 99% of new electric generation in the U.S. in 2026. From Texas to Florida, renewables are winning on economics, not environmentalism.

The governor claims that implementing the CLCPA costs too much for New Yorkers. But here’s the truth: this administration has largely failed to implement the climate law for as long as she’s been in office. New Yorkers’ bills aren’t rising because of a law that hasn’t been implemented — they’re rising because the oil and natural gas status quo is too expensive.

Rising electricity prices are being driven principally by rising prices for fossil fuels, especially natural gas. That’s a fact recognized by administration officials themselves and the nonprofit corporation responsible for operating the bulk electricity grid, the New York Independent System Operator (NYISO).

If the administration actually wants to lower New Yorkers’ energy bills, we must not back down from our climate law…There is no doubt that we are behind on our climate targets — but when you’re behind, real leaders don’t quit, they work harder.

Meanwhile, an excellent letter to Hochul also urges her to keep the climate law intact, in particular by not imposing her own views on how methane works in the atmosphere (which is a thing you think a governor might defer to scientists on). If I was a governor and got this letter, I would say…thank you

We ask that you actively resist efforts to weaken the CLCPA. Many of us would be pleased to talk with you further about the CLCPA’s greenhouse gas accounting methodology. The views we express here are our best professional judgment and are based on a large body of peer-reviewed science. As a group, we represent some of the leading national and international thinkers in climate science and sustainability engineering.

+By law, the EPA has to name one medical doctor to its panel that sets pollution limits. Normally, it picks, say, a pulmonary specialist, who understands what particulates do to lungs. But in our brave new world, the EPA this week chose…an opthamologist, who in Maxine Joselow’s well-chosen words has

never published a peer-reviewed paper dealing with air pollution. He has coauthored a handful of peer-reviewed papers about eye diseases, as well as dozens of opinion pieces in conservative publications, many of which praised President Trump’s style of governing and foreign policies…

In videos on TikTok, Dr. Joondeph has described his recent mission trip to El Salvador and vacations to various destinations. And in a wide-ranging collection of columns, he has criticized President Joseph R. Biden Jr. for using an autopen to sign official documents, accused nurses of being biased against Mr. Trump and argued that concerns about climate change are overblown.

In another unusual move, the administration also selected two members for the air pollution panel who have worked in industries that the E.P.A. regulates. Katherine Kistler is an environmental manager at the steel manufacturer Nucor Corporation, and Sidney Marlborough was an executive at Orion Engineered Carbons LLC, a company that makes carbon black, an industrial material used to reinforce rubber in tires, at the time she was nominated. (He has since left the company.)

+The irreplaceable Antonia Juhasz, on Democracy Now, on fossil fuel and the war

I think what we’re seeing is just one of the clearest depictions yet of the frailty of a global order that is grounded in fossil fuels. All sides in this war are using fossil fuels as a weapon of war. The Iranians are, of course, retaliating against the Israelis and the Americans by targeting energy infrastructure, by blocking the Strait of Hormuz, by saying, “We’re going to drive up the price of oil, and we’re going to try to cut off supply, to make this an unbearable war for you.” The Israelis, backed by the Americans, have retaliated, directly targeting oil depots, directly targeting oil infrastructure.

+It’s good to have an accounting of the billions of dollars spent annually by the fossil fuel industry to demonize renewable power. It comes from David Hochschild, the chair of the California Energy Commission:

“You know, I just got this statistic a few weeks ago in the United States, the fossil fuel industry budget for Communications and Public Affairs is $US4 billion a year.

“The entire renewable energy industry is $US150 million okay … we’re getting outspent like 27 to one … And so we have a lot of work just to get the message out about the basic facts.”

+What do you know, the Trump administration claims that offshore wind farms were somehow a threat to our military security were…overstated. In fact, a new analysis finds that the reality is just the opposite. Peter Fairley writes:

When the Trump administration last year sought to freeze construction of offshore wind farms by citing concerns about interference with military radar and sonar, the implication was that these were new issues. But for more than a decade, the United States, Taiwan, and many European countries have successfully mitigated wind turbines’ security impacts. Some European countries are even integrating wind farms with national defense schemes.

In fact, wind farms are increasingly being tapped to extend military surveillance capabilities. “You’re changing the battlefield, but it’s a change to your advantage if you use it as a tactical lever,” says Lippert.

In 2021 Linköping, Sweden-based defense contractor Saab and Danish wind developer Ørsted demonstrated that air defense radar can be placed on a wind farm. Saab conducted a two-month test of its compact Giraffe 1X combined surface-and-air-defense radar on Ørsted’s Hornsea 1 wind farm, located 120 kilometers east of England’s Yorkshire coast. The installation extended situational awareness “beyond the radar horizon of the ground-based long-range radars,” claims Saab. The U.K. Ministry of Defence ordered 11 of Saab’s systems.

Putting surface radar on turbines is something many offshore wind operators do already to track their crew vessels and to detect unauthorized ships within their arrays. Sharing those signals, or even sharing the equipment, can give national defense forces an expanded view of ships moving within and around the turbines. It can also improve detection of low altitude cruises missiles, says Bekkering, which can evade air defense radars.

+A somewhat foreboding report from the UK, where an expert panel has concluded that war or climate shock, or some combination, could set off a real food crisis in the British isles

The first UK Food Security Report in December 2021 found the country was 54% food self-sufficient. Other rich countries such as the US, France and Australia are all food self-sufficient, meaning they grow enough food to feed their populations without imports if required.

The UK is one of the least food self-sufficient countries in Europe. The Netherlands, for example, which is densely populated, is at 80%, and Spain is at 75%.

“We’re not thinking about this adequately. We’re ducking it,” Lang said, speaking at the National Farmers’ Union conference in Birmingham.

“The default position that others can feed us is hardwired into the British state system, and indeed into the nature of how agrifood capitalism works in Britain. Others are wiser. Other countries are stockpiling,” he said. “Other countries have much more flexibility in their systems than we do. What we glorify as efficiency is now vulnerability.”

Other countries have emergency stockpiles in case of war, food contamination or climate shocks. Switzerland still has a stockpile sufficient to feed its entire population for three months and is increasing it to a year. The UK government’s advice to households is to have three days’ worth of food in their cupboards.

+Writing in the Arizona Daily Star, Rick Rappoport explains why data centers and deserts are not a perfect combo—at least if you use fracked gas to power them

TEP’s cooling processes evaporate about 200 gallons of water per megawatt-hour of energy produced. So, multiplying 19.7 million by 200 to calculate the gallons of water used in one year by TEP to produce the energy required by these two data centers results in the staggering figure of about 4 billion (with a “b”) gallons of water evaporated in the process.

Now, compare that water intensity (industry term for gobbling up water) with the water intensity for solar power — which Arizona has in beaucoup abundance. Aside from using water to occasionally clean off the solar panels, there is hardly any water consumption. Industry estimates range from 0.1 to 2.0 gallons per megawatt-hour. Using the median number results in 19.7 million gallons of water to produce the solar energy required by those two data centers.

+If you’re in Australia and record rains produce record floods, please watch out for crocodiles

The NT incident control acting commander, Shaun Gill, urged residents not to venture into flood waters after reports of people swimming.

“There are crocs absolutely everywhere … please don’t go in the water,” he told a press conference on Sunday morning. “Don’t swim in the water for two reasons. It’s because it’s a fast-flowing river, and also this is when crocs are most active.”

Gill said there were about 1,000 people in shelters after “a very difficult day” of evacuations on Saturday from Nganmarriyanga (formerly known as Palumpa), Nauiyu (the Daly River community), Katherine and Jilkminggan. Six aircraft and 18 helicopters were used in the rescues.

+Finally, in considerably better news, we’re seeing more of the remarkable technological progress that sometimes sounds almost like science fiction. At MIT, researchers have come up with extremely thin perskovite solar films that may allow “peel-and-stick” solar panels

The finished solar film generates as much electricity as an equivalent surface area of silicon cell, and the confirmed durability under realistic temperatures and humidity exceeds 10 years. The lightweight, mechanically robust solar film is easy to install—an advantage that brings the overall cost way down compared to the cost of silicon solar. For a conventional rooftop silicon system, as much as half of the total cost is often for installation. “That’s because those panels are not designed to be easily deployed through general construction,” says Swartwout. “A flexible solar panel is much more in line with how we do construction. To put it on your roof, you would just unroll it like you would unroll an asphalt shingle or a roofing membrane.”

In addition, the flexible films can be fabricated by a cost-effective mass-production method called roll-to-roll manufacturing in which material is continuously unrolled from one spool and rewound onto another. The machines operate at high speed, and the capital investment required is low. As a result, says Swartwout, “there isn’t much benefit to having centralized manufacturing, so you can think about a distributed manufacturing model.” That solves another problem with the current silicon solar technology: China now manufactures almost all solar cells, and, notes Swartwout, “many countries don’t want to have their energy supply chains totally dependent on China. With our technology, you can have regionalized manufacturing locally…more like today’s auto market.”

Meanwhile (and I wouldn’t actually mortgage my house to invest in this one, but still…) a Spanish research institute says its solar panels can…also generate energy from raindrops bouncing off the glass.

ICMS researchers created a thin film that not only protects the perovskite cell but also enables it to generate electricity from falling raindrops. The team used plasma technology to build this film, which is no thicker than 100 nanometers. In comparison, an average human hair is 80,000 nanometers thick.

This extremely thin film plays a dual role. First, it acts as an encapsulant that protects the perovskite cells’ chemistry while also increasing their light absorption. In addition to this, the layer acts like a triboelectric surface – one that can convert kinetic energy into electrical energy.

In experiments conducted at the ICMS facility, the researchers found that a single raindrop could generate a potential difference of 110 V, sufficient to power a small portable device.

I know that I just sent out an edition of this newsletter over the weekend, but hours after it was published, the U.S./Israeli force mounted another series of strikes, these on oil storage sites across the vast city of Tehran. The effect was astonishing—a cloud of truly toxic smoke—and I think it needs more notice than it’s been getting, even amidst all the other horrors of this war. This was in essence chemical warfare, even if the chemicals were the (easily anticipated) result of “normal” bombs. And it affected an almost entirely civilian population, that will be paying the price for decades to come. If we’re going to do this we should at least have to look at it. So, I’m going to offer a few images, and a few firsthand quotes gathered by reporters on the ground

.The above picture is from near the Shahran oil depot, where this tanker was apparently filling up to take gasoline across the city. It’s the sky that you should look at—that jet-black (this was daytime) horizon. Here’s Al Jazeera’s reporting this morning:

The attacks systematically targeted four major storage facilities and a distribution centre, including the Tehran refinery in the south and depots in Aghdasieh, Shahran, and Karaj. In the Shahran district, witnesses reported unrefined oil leaking directly into the streets as temperatures hovered around 13C (55F).

Ansari from Iran’s Department of Environment stated that the environment remains the silent victim of the war, noting that the incineration of vast fuel reserves has trapped the capital under a suffocating shroud of pollutants.

The medical and environmental fallout is immediate and severe. The Iranian Red Crescent Society warned that the smoke contains high concentrations of toxic hydrocarbons, sulphur, and nitrogen oxides. The organisation noted that any rainfall passing through these plumes becomes highly acidic, posing risks of skin burns and severe lung damage upon contact or inhalation.

Agence France Presse told the story like this:

“I thought my alarm clock was broken,” a driver in his fifties told AFP on condition of anonymity.

By 10.30am local time, cars still needed their headlights to drive along Valiasr Street, a main thoroughfare that runs north-south through the city.

Black smoke from the burning fuel depots mingled in the sky with heavy grey rain clouds, compounding the murky atmosphere.

And here’s the Guardian reporting on what that feels like to the people living there

Speaking to the Guardian via voice notes, Negin – not her real name – an activist and former political prisoner based in the central-east side of the city, said the situation was “apocalyptic”.

“The situation is so frightening it’s hard to describe. Smoke has covered the entire city. I have severe shortness of breath and burning in my eyes and throat, and many others feel the same. But people still have to go outside because they have no choice. Many places reopened today, but closed again because it’s impossible to stay outdoors.”

They also heard from a woman, Mehnaz, who wanted to flee after the initial strikes Saturday night.

Tehran is burning. And smoke has filled the streets. It’s impossible to drive out of the city right now and even with the windows closed, heavy smoke is making its way inside … [I am] clueless whether to stay in or brave the flames and drive out while it’s still on fire. I don’t even have a mask.”

Eventually, around noon yesterday, she decided she had to brave it and leave

“The Rey depot, you won’t believe, was still on fire and it’s insane because in the night it looked like day and in the day, it was so dark, it looked like a new moon night. So, so dark, just like our futures.”

I’m afraid she’s right about their futures. Here’s a report on how urban warfare in Fallujah, Iraq caused a higher cancer rate than in the aftermath of the Hiroshima bombing; here’s a report on how smoke from the Los Angeles wildfires will doubtless lead to widespread health problems in the years ahead.

I am aware that this is “how warfare is,” though theoretically we should try to limit the harm caused to civilian populations, especially since this is entirely a war of choice and aggression. I think we’re making no such effort: indeed, our Secretary of War Pete Hegseth has been endlessly boasting about the cruelty of his strategy. “We are punching them while they are down, which is exactly how it should be,” he said, which is the least honorable thing I think I’ve ever heard a military leader say.

This is chemical warfare, as inhumane in its way as the attacks on the girl’s school or on what may have been an unarmed warship off the Sri Lankan coast. And among other things it completely undercuts one of Trump’s rationales for his assault: that it will free Iranians to rise up against their government. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take,” he told Iranians on the night of the first attacks. Revolts, however, generally require people to take to the streets. And that requires breathing the air.

Another picture

And another

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Normally I’d offer other energy and climate news, but I’m not going to bother sharing anything else right now. The price of oil climbs higher by the hour, the argument for clean energy gets more obvious by the minute, and it is up to all of us to push hard for a new American government that’s part of the solution, not the cause of the crisis.

For what seems like the fiftieth time in my long life, the U.S., with Israel, has attacked another nation, as per usual without an honest debate in Congress and so far with the reported deaths of both Iran’s leader and eighty or so of its schoolgirls. I’m not going to pretend that I understand the workings of Trump’s brain well enough to gauge the casus belli, but I will note—because again I’ve been around a while—that Iran has the world’s second-largest reserves of natural gas and the third-biggest pool of oil (trailing only Saudi Arabia and, um, Venezuela). As oil executives helpfully explained to Politico last month, they are generously prepared to be a “stabilizing force” in Iran should the regime fall—indeed, they’d rather do it there than in Venezuela because, as executives explained, “Iran’s oil industry, despite being ravaged by years of U.S. sanctions, is still considered to be structurally sound, unlike that of Venezuela’s.”

Bob McNally, a former national security and energy adviser to former President George W. Bush who now leads the energy and geopolitics consulting firm Rapidan Energy Group, said the prospects for growing Iran’s oil production are “completely different” from Venezuela’s.

“You can imagine our industry going back there — we would get a lot more oil, a lot sooner than we will out of Venezuela,” McNally said. “That’s more conventional oil right near infrastructure, and gas as well.”

In the meantime, our attack almost guarantees that the price of oil will jump, also good news for the industry that backed the president’s reelection so fulsomely. As Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin reported this afternoon

Iran and its neighbors on the Persian Gulf are some of the largest oil and gas producers in the world and the country has long threatened to disrupt oil exports as an act of self-defense or retaliation from attack.

That may be already happening. According to data from Bloomberg, some oil tankers are pausing or turning around outside the vital Strait of Hormuz, a narrow, deep channel between Iran and Oman that connects the Persian Gulf to the Arabian Sea and thus to global markets in and bordering the Indian Ocean.

But this kind of analysis is almost too easy, because so much of the geopolitics of the last century has been about the control and the flow of oil.

What’s interesting is the lessons others are taking from it.

Let’s look for a moment at Cuba, which seems like it might well be next on the Trump hit list. The president said yesterday that he was looking for a “friendly takeover” of the island nation, and it’s clear that the tool he’s using is energy: after cutting off Venezuelan supplies, he’s also pressured Mexico to stop sending crude to Havana. As a result, he explained, “They have no money. They have no anything right now.”

Which is largely true—things in Havana have grown desperate in the last few weeks as Washington has tightened the screws they’ve been turning for decades. As the Spanish newspaper El Pais put it in a story yesterday, the entire nation is on “the verge of darkness” as energy supplies dwindle. It quotes a young anthropologist, José Maria:

He says the blackouts don’t affect him as much as others: his area is “privileged,” close to the water pump that supplies the municipality. He doesn’t have a generator, but he does have a rechargeable fan and a battery for his phone. From his apartment, on some days, he can see entire neighborhoods plunged into darkness

As it happens, I went to Cuba to do some reporting the last time the country was in such a fix, following the collapse of the Soviet Union and with it Havana’s economic lifeline. In those days the country’s biggest problem was food, and it survived in part with a fairly remarkable turn towards urban agriculture. I was endlessly impressed with the Cubans I met who were learning how to grow the food their neighbors needed, even as I was depressed by the police state they were inhabiting.

Now the overwhelming problem is energy, and it’s here that something else quite profound has been happening: an almost unbelievable surge in the production of solar power. As The Economist reported on Thursday

Mr Trump is obsessed with oil, but Cuba has been building out an alternative source of energy supply at record pace: solar panels imported from China. According to Chinese export data compiled by Ember, a think-tank, in the 12 months to April 2025 Cuba’s imports of Chinese solar panels grew by a factor of 34, faster than anywhere else in the world. The island has gone from having almost no solar power a few years ago to levels which help it cope with Mr Trump’s embargo.

The regime’s energy policy is mostly responsible for the boom. In March 2024 the government announced a plan to build two gigawatts of solar power plants by 2028. It depends heavily on China for funding and construction, as well as for the solar panels themselves. On February 11th the government claimed that its new solar plants generated almost a gigawatt of power during the lunchtime peak, enough in that moment to meet the electricity needs of a third of the country.

With their help, life of a sort stumbles on. Here’s a Reuters report from last week:

“Given the frequent outages, which pretty much stop you from doing anything, a friend offered to help me invest in panels and set everything up,” Havana resident Roberto Sarriga told Reuters.

Sarriga said that with the help of solar panels he could have internet, charge his phone so people can locate him and power a TV to keep his elderly mother entertained watching her favorite soap operas.

Most people can’t afford their own panels, of course—unless they have relatives abroad who can send them dollars. But private businesses often can, and on Thursday the government offered new tax breaks for businesses that undertake new renewable energy projects. Perhaps in response, the Trump administration said on Friday that it would allow small oil sales to private businesses.

“The strategy here is to show the Cubans and the world that the only lifeline that Cuba has left is the United States,” said Ricardo Herrero, executive director of the Cuba Study Group, a nonpartisan policy and advocacy group in Washington. “That doesn’t mean choke them off. That means leave it clear that they have become a de facto dependency of the United States.’’

But it’s not the only lifeline. China has solar panels to sell, for cheap, and once they’re up your lifeline is the sun. And unlike the oil terminals we apparently bombed at Iran’s Kharg Island complex this morning, there’s really no good way to strike at solar energy, because it’s inherently decentralized. Look at that picture at the top of this essay, of a small farmer washing off his solar panels; that’s a person set up to survive what the world has to throw at him.

That’s clearly the story from Ukraine, which has weathered Putin’s assault on its energy infrastructure by building a new, harder-to-attack infrastructure. As Paul Hockenos reports:

Wind and solar arrays with independent transmission lines are scattered over the landscape, which makes them harder to hit and easier to repair. “A coal power station [is] a large single target that a single missile could take out,” says Jeff Oatham of DTEK, Ukraine’s largest energy company and its largest private energy investor. “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.

It’s not just missiles, either. Iran, for instance, is widely regarded to have the ability to mount cyber attacks on centralized American infrastructure. As Rodney Bosch reported during the last round of U.S. strikes on the nation,

U.S. intelligence officials had warned that Iran might retaliate against American involvement by launching cyberattacks on critical infrastructure. Electrical grids, water systems and financial networks were seen as high-risk targets.

(On days like this, I’m glad I have solar panels all over the roof. )

China has obviously figured out all these lessons. It foresaw the attacks on Venezuela and Iran, two of its big suppliers of crude, and began to dramatically increase its oil stockpile. But of course it’s done something much more important: build out the un-embargoable supply of electrons that come, most easily and cheaply, from the sun and wind.

Since 2021, China has added more power capacity across all energy technologies than the US has in its history, including 543 gigawatts last year, according to figures released late last month by the country’s National Energy Administration.

None of this is about ideology. China, Cuba, the U.S., Venezuela, Iran—all suffer from democratic deficits at this point (a sad list for an American to have to compile). It’s about power, in both meanings of that word.

And it’s about survival, as the rest of us imagine rebuilding a world that might actually work for its inhabitants. We have a few humble but powerful tools—the solar panel, the windmill, the battery—that make it easier to imagine something other than our current nightmare.

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In other energy and climate news:

+We have new numbers on just how much renewable energy the Trump administration has managed to prevent in America. These numbers are only from public land, mostly national forest and BLM land in the West, where the administration has imposed what one reporter called a “blockade” on clean energy.

Over 22 gigawatts of utility-scale wind and solar projects on public lands have been canceled or are held up as a result of the order, according to Wood Mackenzie data and the Interior’s Bureau of Land Management website. That’s enough capacity to power roughly 16.5 million U.S. homes — a significant amount at any point, but especially when the country is clamoring for more low-cost electricity as energy demand and utility bills soar.

+Meanwhile, a new report from the Democrats on the Senate Budget Committee detailed the extent of the subsidies that the federal government is currently payuing the fossil fuel industry.

Within their Big, Ugly Betrayal bill, Republicans provided over $3.5 billion annually in new subsidies to major polluters like ExxonMobil, ConocoPhillips, and Coterra. This is on top of the $31 billion per year in subsidies that these fossil fuel companies were already receiving from taxpayers—for a total payout of over $34.5 billion annually. The Big, Ugly Betrayal bill opens up millions of acres of public lands in an attempt to develop and mine fossil fuels while lowering the federal return for such resource extraction.

According to the report’s calculations—an effort led by Oregon Senator Jeff Merkley—this comes at a cost to consumers that looks like this:

Analysis from economists and industry experts expect that the Big, Ugly Betrayal bill will increase household energy bills:

On average by $110 in 2026, according to the Center for American Progress;

• On average up to $280 by 2035, according to the Princeton University REPEAT Project;

• Between 9 to 18 percent nationwide, according to Energy Innovation;

• By 10 percent over the next four years in western states, according to the Clean Energy Buyers Association.

+Meet Montana Republican Senator Tim Sheehy, who while running his successful campaign to beat Jon Tester decried “goofy, subsidized green energy crap.” It turns out, according to an E&E News investigation, that his house is covered with that crap.

The Montana Republican installed rooftop solar and battery storage systems at his Bozeman home several years ago, according to property records, satellite imagery and two local renewable energy industry officials who were granted anonymity to preserve commercial relationships.

It turns out he’s not alone:

At least nine congressional Republicans have had solar panels on their homes, including Sheehy and New Jersey Rep. Jeff Van Drew, marking a contrast with their party’s growing disdain for clean energy. Several lawmakers, including Van Drew, said they installed the panels to lower their energy costs. Adding a battery system allows homeowners to tap solar energy when the sun or grid goes down.

E&E News previously reported on seven of them by reviewing home images of every Republican senator and 59 House Republicans who are in leadership or facing tough reelection races. Sheehy’s panels were discovered later because they’re on a building adjacent to his listed address. Van Drew was not included in the original search because he represents a solidly red district.

Among the nine members, just one voted against the tax overhaul that eliminated the solar subsidy — Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky. Massie, Sen. John Curtis of Utah and Rep. Ken Calvert of California all acknowledged using the now-expired tax credit to help purchase their panels.

Meanwhile, shockingly, it turns out that if you give them sufficient money, MAGA influencers will start hocking solar panels. As Kelsey Brugger, Zack Colman and Pavan Acharya report,

Environmentalists and solar power proponents have found a pair of surprise allies: Katie Miller and Kellyanne Conway.

Miller, the wife of White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, and Conway, the polling guru who led President Donald Trump’s first campaign, raised eyebrows this month when they publicly touted the clean energy source that has come under fire from the Trump administration.

According to a confidential strategy memo obtained by POLITICO, their advocacy is aligned with a campaign by members of the nation’s largest renewable energy lobby group to MAGA-fy solar power — technology that Trump once derided as “a blight on our country.”

The memo distributed earlier this month shows the American Clean Power Association launched the “American Energy First” campaign to engage Conway and conservative influencers like Miller “to amplify the benefits of solar energy” and “note the harm that could result from reckless trade policy.”

+Thanks to the good folks at the World Council of Churches for their new guide on how to help pressure banks to cut off financing to the fossil fuel industry

Meanwhile, Alastair Marsh reports on the changing tactics of activists taking on those banks—including describing the campaign that I’ve been involved in to ask Costco to cut its credit card ties with Citibank.

Alec Connon of Stop the Money Pipeline says he wants to start applying pressure on municipal governments to withhold bond deals from banks judged to have weak net-zero goals.

Lucie Pinson of Reclaim Finance says she’s now working on new ways to get European banks to sever ties with fossil-fuel clients, which includes framing the issue as one of national security and economic cost.

Because whether you believe in climate change or not, relying on imported oil and gas “undermines Europe’s strategic autonomy,” Pinson said. And it “exposes us to the goodwill of counties that are not our friends.”

+China’s foremost environmentalist Ma Jun—who I met almost thirty years ago when he was fighting what seemed like a very very lonely battle—has a new interview out in which he says that government transparency about pollution data has not only helped clean the country’s air but may be leading to more open government generally

“The environment – including climate – is the area with the biggest consensus view in [China]. It could be a test run for having more multi-stakeholder governance in our country.”

+Important piece from veteran journalist Keith Schneider about how plans for a mine on the edge of the Boundary Waters park in Minnesota could redefine public lands protection in a very grim way.

The U.S. Senate this week is poised to vote on a narrowly-cast resolution intended to clear a new pathway to eventually open a long-disputed copper mine close to the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in northeast Minnesota.

There’s a lot more, though, riding on the Senate vote, and not just for a region of the American north country adored for its towering pines, and deep, clear waters.

If it’s approved and signed by President Trump, the measure could also significantly advance the president’s goal of accelerating development of coal, oil, timber, and minerals on public lands across the U.S., and seriously diminish the government’s ability to protect America’s cleanest waters, most exquisite forests, and wildest natural landscapes.

The White House wants to achieve that result, in tandem with House and Senate Republicans, by deploying the Congressional Review Act (CRA) to eliminate specific federal environmental safeguards, like the prohibition on mining near the Boundary Waters Wilderness.

The CRA, a 30-year-old statute, gives Congress the authority to hastily review and approve resolutions to nullify federal agency rules. In the 20 years between the law’s passage and Trump’s election victory in 2016, Congress had never passed a resolution to impede environmental safeguards.

+From the indefatigable Emily Atkin, an account of how Supreme Court justice Sam Alito is sitting on a case that could end many lawsuits against oil companies—even though he owns a ton of stock in the affected companies. Meanwhile, Atkin also announced that she’s starting a video podcast with climate journalist Tracy Wholf. Apparently in our modern world most people like to look at videos instead of read text, and Atkin is (unlike some of us) young enough to make the shift. I will continue typing.

+Fascinating new numbers from Yale’s climate polling program. Despite the constant advice of political pundits to stop talking about climate, they found that the number of people who are alarmed about climate change has grown steadily to more than a quarter of the population, and that with those who are “concerned” form a clear majority. Here’s what it looks like over the last decade.

+Interesting think pieces emerging from across the pond. Ryan Smith, in Liberal Currents, contends from a European perspective that the fossil fuel industry is a key bulwark of an emerging fascism

The European Union’s present economic vulnerability to fossil fuel pressure is a pointed example of how a truly free and democratic society is not possible when the kings of oil and gas can threaten their stability, pollute their information systems, and poison their politics at a whim. Two hundred and fifty years ago, the United States was born by declaring independence from the rule of the British monarchy. Today, we must do the same with the petro-kings and the unreliable energy which has enthroned them or suffer under the boot of fossil fuel fascism and climate catastrophe.

And Belgian legal scholar Olivier de Schutter, the UN Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, writes in Time that economic growth is not the panacea that many contend

Historically, the global economy everyone is so desperate to grow, has funneled vast wealth into the hands of a few, trapped millions in insecure and poorly-paid work to boost corporate profits, relied on the plundering of natural resources and the exploitation of cheap labour in the Global South and has caused irreparable damage to the planet.

This is not a system that has gone slightly off course. It is one that is fundamentally unfit for purpose.

+The U.S. has systematically bullied small nations into ditching an effort to cut emissions from ships around the world, Fiona Harvey reports

US “bullying” over a proposed carbon levy on shipping appears to be paying off, experts have said, after Panama reversed its support for the measure.

In a leaked document seen by the Guardian, the key maritime state has co-sponsored a proposal to the International Maritime Organization that would in effect cancel the carbon levy and undermine attempts to cut greenhouse gas emissions.

The shipping industry accounts for about 3% of the world’s carbon output, a proportion likely to rise without a move to green technologies.

Scores of developing countries have been the target of “unprecedented” bullying from the US over the issue – behaviour that one expert has called “thuggery”.

+In the utterly maddening department, oligarchs including Elon Musk are asking permission to launch as many as a million satellites. Some would beam sunlight back to earth, all would turn the dark night sky into a junk-filled mess. You can join in the opposition here

+As spring training opens, the campaign that began with the Dodgers to end sportswashing of oil companies has spread to ten cities

“We love these teams,” said David Rosenstein, a Dodger Stadium protestor with Third Act SoCal. “But we don’t love the deceitful practice of sportswashing. We encourage owners and managers to end this complicity now and find new sponsors.”

Global anti-sportswashing sentiment appears to be reaching unprecedented levels: As the 25th Winter Olympics wind down, two groups of Olympians and others (here and here) have urged the International Olympic Committee to jettison fossil fuel sponsorships.

“Dodger owners Mark Walter, Billie Jean King and Magic Johnson, all of whom have publicly supported conservation or sustainability, have a massive opportunity to show a new kind of global leadership by dropping Phillips 66,” Dubin said. “The intent of our protest was to stigmatize sportswashing, but also to inspire teams to be climate leaders.”

+Finally, some quite lovely news from Africa. Working with Chinese kits, entrepreneurs in Nigeria and Kenya are building electric vans and taxis

Saglev of Nigeria has begun assembling 18-seater passenger electric vans using imported kits supplied by Chinese automaker Dongfeng Motor Corp. The Lagos-based company says it plans to make up to 2,500 vehicles a year, eventually assembling 17 electric models for Nigeria and other West African markets.

“This is a major step in Nigeria’s transition toward clean, fossil-free transportation,” said Saglev’s CEO Olu Falaye. He said the van is the first locally assembled electric vehicle of its kind for mass transit in Nigeria and sub-Saharan Africa.

“This feat is a clear signal that electric mobility in Nigeria is practical, scalable and ready for adoption,” Falaye said

There’s a similar push in Kenya, where Chinese backed Rideence Africa recently signed a $2.46 million deal with Mombasa-based Associated Vehicle Assemblers (AVA) to begin local assembly of electric taxis and minibuses from kits supplied by China’s Jiangsu Joylong Automobile and Beijing Henrey Automobile Technology.

And from Senegal, a report on the spread of electric buses and the way they’ve helped cut traffic jams dramatically in Dakar. With special lanes, transport times across the vast city have been cut in half. As one passenger explains, “that makes life much easier. And the buses have air-conditioning.”

I know it is a forlorn hope for the moment, but someday the world will work on projects like these, instead of on yet more bombing. Or so I believe. Thanks for being part of that great effort!

For a variety of reasons, I’ve found the data center debate to be difficult to get a real handle on over the last year. But I think a clearer picture is beginning to emerge, and I will do my best here to share it with you. Remember, I’m just one human brain, and I have not (illegally) digested every single book ever printed; I can’t draw you a picture of a data center licking an ice cream cone; and if you asked me to render this essay in the style of Emily Dickinson I would fail. Still, for what it’s worth:

First source of confusion: how much demand for AI will there actually be?

This depends on how useful it turns out to be, and that is still a very open question. Yes, AI executives are busy insisting it will upend everything and everyone—the AI chief at Microsoft said last week that all white-collar jobs using computers will be wiped out in the next 12 to 18 months—accountants, project managers, marketing staff. But there’s another school of thought—most ably represented by an AI researcher named Gary Marcus—that thinks the hallucination-prone large language models are good at writing certain kinds of code but not getting much better, and in fact may be at about the limit of their abilities.

There’s a second question resting on top of that one: whatever AI can do, will it make a lot of money doing it, thus justifying the enormous investments currently being made or planned for data centers? The stock market apparently thinks so—AI makes up some stupendous percentage of its gains in recent years—but there are, as you have heard, fears it might be a bubble. The most eloquent—indeed logorrheic—source of those fears is Ed Zitron, a blogger who has followed the various money trails and concluded that companies like OpenAI and Anthropic have no real prospect of making back the scads of money that they’ve spent, and that sooner or later the bubble will indeed do the thing bubbles do.

These are crucial questions for us because as long as the bubble keeps expanding, there will be insatiable demand for more electricity for more data centers, and if it pops that demand will start to drop dramatically, especially since much of it is still semi-speculative—that is to say, there are far more data centers on the drawing board (to use an old-fashioned image) than under construction.

In fact, it’s been remarkably hard to estimate how much demand for electricity is actually going to go up, precisely because there’s so much speculation here. In an interview that got pretty wonky even for him, the invaluable David Roberts last week talked to Clara Summer, a public advocate at the PJM Interconnection Board, PJM being the the largest regional transmission organization (RTO) in the United States, managing the high-voltage electric grid for 67 million people across 13 states from Delaware to Illinois. Anyway, Summer explained that any given data center might be applying for permits to build in four or five different jurisdictions

There is a big difference between a data center that has knocked on the door of a utility and said, “I am interested in being in this area,” versus a data center that has entered into a contract with a utility and put down money.

One estimate has that the number of requests for potential data centers to connect to the grid is five to ten times more than the number of actual data centers that will be built.

Obviously, however, there are plenty of data centers going up. Some are truly terrible (the picture at the top of this newsletter comes from the joint investigation by Floodlight News and the Guardian of an xAI facility in Mississippi; it has followed the path of Musk’s egregious data center in the poor part of Memphis, both using portable gas turbines that pollute the air, and all in an effort to support an artificial “intelligence” that goes on long happy rants about Hitler; it won’s surprise you that the NAACP was early in expressing concern) and some are less terrible: Google just signed up for two big solar farms in Texas to support its data centers.

The default, sadly, seems to be headed towards the Musk model. With grid providers unable to build generating capacity fast enough to keep up with demand, data centers developers are going BYOG—bring your own generation,. Here’s a long and detailed new report about how the G generally turns out to also stand for gas, in this case onsite gas turbines, with not much concern for the climate or local air pollution risks. (Or for the amount of water required—here’s a recent account from Brad Reed of a single Pennsylvania data center that will use 40 percent of the town’s excess water). Here’s a kind of worst-case scenario from John Kostyack, a DC-based consultant:

By the end of this decade, capital spending by tech, real estate, and utility companies will likely represent the largest private-sector infrastructure spending spree in world history. McKinsey, for example, estimates a whopping $6.7 trillion in capital expenditures by 2030.

Although forecasts of the scale of data center buildout vary widely, anything near this projected scale has enormous climate implications. The most obvious concern is the emissions generated in powering the massive hyperscale complexes, which are being designed to consume as much as 2 gigawatts (GWs) of power–roughly 15 times the capacity required by the entire city of Philadelphia during summer peak load. According to energy analyst Rystand’s 2025 review of industry announcements, data centers consuming up to 100 GWs of power could come online in the next 10 years.

Much of this power would come from gas-fired power plants. Researchers at Urgewald estimate that roughly 37% of the gas plant capacity proposed in the last 2 years is linked to data centers and AI infrastructure. Thanks in significant part to data centers, the US has overtaken China as the world’s largest developer of gas plants, with 125 GWs of planned new capacity, up 120% from 2024.

Faced with this level of speculative craziness, local opponents and an increasing number of national groups are calling for a moratorium on the buildout of data centers. As Jenna Ruddock wrote in December:

Confronted with similar stakes, cities and counties across the US are pulling the emergency brake. From Maryland to Missouri, at least fourteen states are home to towns or counties that have implemented moratoriums: a complete pause on data center development. In early December, over 200 groups – from faith groups in Florida and Louisiana to physicians in Texas – publicly called for a moratorium on new data center construction nationwide.

Bernie Sanders became the highest profile Democrat to join the call for a moratorium, but as Politico reported in January it’s been hard to find others who are quite as outspoken. Most temporized—for instance, Rep Jasmine Crockett, running for Senate, said AI “can bring real economic opportunity to Texas,” but “we must demand transparency, accountability, and responsible growth.”

But this is very soft ground for politicians, who haven’t found their footing yet. Late last week Sanders joined California representative Ro Khanna for conversations with AI executives; he emerged to tell a Stanford audience

Congress and the American public have “not a clue” about the scale and speed of the coming AI revolution, pressing for urgent policy action to “slow this thing down” as tech companies race to build ever-more powerful systems.

It seems to me that the call for a moratorium is sound; we should pause before remaking society, not to mention pouring far more carbon into the atmosphere. Whether that’s possible is not clear. The Trump administration, amidst its myriad corruptions, is making the case that we must keep ahead of China. What that means is unclear: the Chinese are indeed building AIs of their own, but they seem to be developing architectures that use less energy. And of course they are building out huge amounts of clean electricity, to use for transit and heating and, if they want, artificial intelligence. So far the big difference with the Chinese models is that they’re transparent and open. Which, by the way, complicates the task of American AI entrepreneurs who want to get rich via their proprietary systems.

That getting rich part, of course, now means using AI to try and game our politics, and indeed in recent weeks a new generation of AI-fueled bots seem to be infecting our political system. An AI platform apparently managed to generate 20,000 comments telling California regulators to ignore air quality concerns

Environmental and public health advocates are calling on California Attorney General Rob Bonta and Los Angeles District Attorney Nathan Hochman to investigate an AI-powered campaign that allegedly submitted public comments attributed to residents without their consent to oppose Southern California clean air standards. The extent of the AI astroturf campaign remains unknown – who funded it, whose identities were used without consent, and whether California law was broken. Watch the press conference recording here.

The call follows a Los Angeles Times investigation exposing how CiviClick, an AI-powered advocacy platform, was used to generate more than 20,000 public comments opposing standards proposed by the South Coast Air Quality Management District (SCAQMD). When staff at the AQMD followed up with a sample of people to verify comments, at least three said they had not written to the agency or had knowledge of the message.

Even so, the campaign for a data center moratorium seems to be gathering steam—one of the most recent pushes emerged in New York State where Third Act’s organizing director Michael Richardson was among the proponents. He said, quite sensibly I think:

“At a time when New York State should be leading the rapid transition to solar and wind energy generation while also ending further buildout of fossil fuel infrastructure, the permitting of data centers with massive energy needs will only feed into the fossil fuel industry’s narrative that to keep this technology running we have to put a pause on dealing with climate change for now. The pause should be the one put on the data centers – not renewable energy projects.”

Indeed, if we reach the point where we decide as a society that we actually want to build out this technology, then BYOG should be replaced by BEYONCE—Bring Your Own New Clean Energy. But in the politically charged year in which we find ourselves, I think intelligence requires us to slow down.

A real shoutout, as I close, to the 86-year-old Pennsylvania farmer who last week turned down a $15 million offer for his land from a data center developer, instead giving it to a land conservancy for $2 million. Let’s give Mervin Raudabaugh the final word:

“It was my life,” Raudabaugh told Fox 43 News of the land he has farmed for 50 years. “I told [the data center company] no, I was not interested in destroying my farms.

“That was really the bottom line,” he continued. “It wasn’t so much the economic end of it. I just didn’t want to see these two farms destroyed.”

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In other energy and climate news

+Matthew Zeitlin reports that the Supreme Court’s tariff ruling may be a help for clean energy.

“I think the biggest impact of the ruling will be for solar and batteries, because they face some of the largest tariffs, and so we’ll see the biggest cost reductions,” Oliver Kerr, North America managing director at Aurora Energy Research, told me. Some manufacturers have already made refund requests — though again, who knows how that will play out.

Solar investors responded with cautious optimism to the court’s tariff ruling. Shares in Canadian Solar, a solar manufacturing company that has been whipped around by tariffs, shot up after the decision was released.

+Amazon deforestation definitely decreasing! Rhett Ayers Butler reports that

Data released by the National Institute for Space Research (INPE) show that 1,325 square kilometers of forest clearing were detected between Aug. 1, 2025 — the start of Brazil’s deforestation year — and Jan. 31, 2026. That is down from 2,050 square kilometers during the same period a year earlier and represents the lowest figure for this interval since 2014.

Over a longer horizon, the picture is similarly positive from a conservation perspective. Alerts for the trailing 12 months totaled 3,770 square kilometers, compared with 4,245 square kilometers at this time last year, also the lowest since 2014. These figures come from INPE’s DETER system, which uses near-real-time satellite imagery primarily to guide enforcement. While less precise than annual surveys, DETER is widely regarded as a reliable indicator of short-term trends.

Much credit to the great environment minister Marina Silva

Speaking at a press conference announcing the data last week, Silva said the decline reflects coordinated government action. She noted that most high-deforestation municipalities have now joined federal initiatives aimed at curbing illegal clearing.

“Of the 81 municipalities with the highest deforestation rates, 70 have already made this commitment,” she said, referring to the Union with Municipalities program, adding that authorities are deploying resources from the Amazon Fund to support enforcement and prevention.

+Venerable ocean advocate David Helvarg writes on the great kelp forests of the West Coast

Kelp forests are a challenging cold-water realm, but for those of us who dive into these marine forests in places like Monterey in Northern California or Catalina off L.A., they are an entrancing cathe- dral of light and life. Here you’ll find orange garibaldi (like goldfish on steroids), wolf eels, leopard sharks, curious harbor seals and multicolored marine snails known as nudibranch. They are vibrant, entangling and light-shifting habitats of wonder and warning in our rapidly changing seas.

Historically, overfishing, loss of predators like sea otters, pollutionand overharvesting have posed the main threat to kelp forests. Today, it’s marine heat waves. A 2026 study carried out by scientists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and 30 other institutions around the world reports the ocean absorbed more heat in 2025 than ever before. This in turn has set off a record number of marine heat waves that can increase regional water temperatures 5-10 degrees, enough to radically alter ocean conditions.

+A story that surprised me: Romania, not long ago a backwater of Soviet-era heavy industry, is emerging as one of the world’s renewable-energy success stories. Ajit Naranjan has a nuanced account

Once the frozen fields outside Bucharest have thawed, workers will assemble the largest solar farm in Europe: one million photovoltaic panels backed by batteries to power homes after sunset. But the 760MW project in southern Romania will not hold the title for long. In the north-west, authorities have approved a bigger plant that will boast a capacity of 1GW.

The sun-lit plots of silicon and glass will join a slew of projects that have rendered the Romanian economy unrecognisable from its polluted state when communism ended. They include an onshore windfarm near the Black Sea that for several years was Europe’s biggest, a nuclear power plant by the Danube whose lifetime is being extended by 30 years, and a fast-spreading patchwork of solar panels topping homes and shops across the country.

The country has decoupled economic growth from pollution faster than anywhere else in Europe, and perhaps even the world. Its net greenhouse gas emissions intensity fell by 88% between 1990 and 2023, the latest data shows, meaning each dollar’s worth of economic activity heats the planet almost 10 times less than it did before. Emissions have plunged by 75%.

Meanwhile, in remote mountain villages of Ukraine, renewable power is keeping the lights on despite Vladimir Putin’s best efforts. Alessandra Hay in the Kyiv Independent:

Russian attacks have decreased Ukraine's electricity generation capacity to 33% of its prewar levels, according to government estimates. The severity of the damage and ensuing blackouts have exposed the weaknesses of centralized power infrastructure, accelerating the country's push toward decentralized and renewable energy sources. In 2020, green energy made up 9.2% of the total energy consumed in Ukraine, while in 2023 this rose to 22%.

+As we bid arrivederci to the Milan Olympics (and the combination of Alysa Liu and Donna Summer was something else!) here’s an account of how winter sports may proceed in the years ahead—giant tarps covering hills of snow left over from last winter to get the season started. From Jeva Lange:

Using patented tarps and siding created by a Finnish company called Snow Secure, the facilities cover the snow … and then wait. As spring turns to summer, the pile shrinks, not because it’s melting but because it’s becoming denser, reducing the air between the individual snowflakes. In combination with the pile’s reduced surface area, this makes the snow cold and insulated enough that not even a sunny day will cause significant melt-off. (Neil DeGrasse Tyson once likened the phenomenon to trying to cook an entire potato with a lighter; successfully raising the inner temperature of a dense snowball, much less a gigantic snow pile, requires more heat.)

Shockingly little snow melts during storage. Snow Secure reports a melt rate of 8% to 20% on piles that can be 50,000 cubic meters in size, or the equivalent of about 20 Olympic swimming pools. When autumn eventually returns, ski areas can uncover their piles of farmed snow and spread it across a desired slope or trail using snowcats, specialized groomers that break up and evenly distribute the surface. For Santa Caterina, the goal was to store enough to make a nearly 2-mile-long cross-country trail — no need to wait for the first significant snowfall of the season, which creeps later and later every year.

Meanwhile, here’s the matchless Mikaela Shiffrin on the sad state of skiing:

“It is something that’s very close to our heart, because it is the heart and soul of what we do,” Shiffrin told AP after racing Sunday. “I would really, really like to believe and hope that with strong voices and sort of broader policy changes within companies and governments, there is a hope for a future of our sport. But I think right now, it’s a little bit of a ... it’s a question.”

+Not the kind of headline you really like to read, from the Guardian: Excruciating tropical disease can now be transmitted in most of Europe, study finds.

Damian Carrington reports that the mosquito that transmits chikayunga loves the world we’re creating on its behalf

Higher temperatures due to the climate crisis mean infections are now possible for more than six months of the year in Spain, Greece and other southern European countries, and for two months a year in south-east England. Continuing global heating means it is only a matter of time before the disease expands further northwards, the scientists said.

The analysis is the first to fully assess the effect of temperature on the incubation time of the virus in the Asian tiger mosquito, which has invaded Europe in recent decades. The study found the minimum temperature at which infections could occur is 2.5C lower than previous, less robust, estimates, representing a “quite shocking” difference, the researchers said.

+Meg Tanaka reports on a new study that finds that half the pavement in giant Los Angeles County may be unnecessary.

Los Angeles is often described as a concrete jungle, a city shaped by asphalt, parking lots and other hardscape. Now, for the first time, researchers have mapped that concrete in detail, and they claim a lot of it doesn’t need to be there.

A new analysis finds that some 44% of Los Angeles County’s 312,000 acres of pavement may not be essential for roads, sidewalks or parking, and could be reconsidered. The report, DepaveLA, is the first parcel-level analysis to map all paved surfaces across L.A. County, and to distinguish streets, sidewalks, private properties, and other areas. The researchers divided all pavement into “core” and “non-core” uses.

A street, for example, is core. Then they paired that map with data on heat, flooding and tree canopy, creating what they intend as a new framework for understanding where removing concrete and asphalt could make the biggest difference for people’s health and the climate.

Organizers have what they call a Living Infrastructure Field Kit—check it out

+Chris Jones probably won’t win his race for secretary of agriculture in Iowa. But the former research engineer—who left his state job after pressure from the state’s corn lobby—is using his race to help highlight just how damaging the ethanol industry has become to the state’s ecological and public health. Charlie Hope D’Anieri reports

One of Jones’s most controversial arguments is that ethanol, a notorious third-rail topic in farm country, has to be phased out in order for water quality to be restored. Ethanol is shorthand for a usually corn-derived biofuel. The industry was marginal until 2005, when the Bush administration’s Environmental Protection Agency mandated oil refineries blend a minimum ratio of ethanol into U.S. gasoline. Production grew meteorically. About half of Iowa’s corn now gets made into ethanol. This means that half of the production of the most productive corn state, on untold acres of some of the highest-yielding farmland in the world, is burned in cars—an oddity that is only possible because of federal policy. In our food system, there’s abundance, there’s waste, and there’s ethanol, which is the perfect encapsulation of the horror of both.

+Thanks to fellow Vermonter Ben Cohen (yes, that Ben) for letting me know about a new film from Abby Martin about the environmental impact of the Pentagon. She’s touring the documentary now; see it if it comes by you.

And Ben also reminded me about the ongoing Free Ben and Jerry’s campaign, to convince its current owner, the ice cream giant Magnum, to sell the enterprise to socially aligned investors. Ben and Jerry’s has been an outsized player in campaigns for social and environmental justice for years; it would be as dumb to squelch that voice as it would be to remove the cherries from Cherry Garcia

+From Dana Drugmand, an important accounting of the ways the Trump administration is trying to coerce other countries into joining its anti-climate crusade

Just this week, for example, US Secretary of Energy (and former fossil fuel executive) Chris Wright rebuked the International Energy Agency for accounting for climate change in its energy outlook scenarios and threatened that the US would withdraw from the agency if it continued its climate focus. Following Wright’s remarks, the IEA omitted climate change from its list of priorities in a ministerial meeting summary document, Politico reported.

In another recent example, the Trump administration has reportedly been pressuring other countries to reject a Vanuatu-led draft UN resolution endorsing the ICJ’s landmark climate change advisory opinion. Vanuatu – a tiny Pacific Island nation threatened by rising sea levels – led the charge to get the UN General Assembly to vote on a resolution seeking the ICJ’s input on climate change. That resolution passed in 2023, and last year the court delivered its opinion in what many observers said was a landmark moment for climate justice. Now, Vanuatu is looking to take the next step by having the UNGA adopt another resolution that would welcome the opinion and start to translate it into “concrete multinational action.” The resolution would call on countries to take actions like adopting national climate action plans aligned with the goal of limiting global heating to below 1.5 degrees Celsius, phasing out fossil fuel subsidies, and creating an international registry to record climate damage claims.

“The resolution attempts to turn the ICJ’s interpretation of key legal standards into a practical roadmap for state accountability which is likely to trigger political pushback from higher income high emitting countries wary of their historical responsibility and financial liability,” Candy Ofime, climate justice researcher and legal advisor at Amnesty International, said in a statement.

Perhaps no country is pushing back more aggressively than the US, which circulated guidance to its embassies and consulates abroad saying that it “strongly objects” to Vanuatu’s proposal, as the AP reported. The US argues the resolution poses a major threat to US industry, and it is urging other countries to demand that Vanuatu withdraw the draft proposal.

+Fasika Tadesse and Akshat Rathi bring the news from Addis Ababa: Ethiopia is banning the import of fossil fuel cars, and drivers are quickly adjusting to electric vehicles:

“The Ethiopia story is fascinating,” said Colin McKerracher, head of clean transport at BloombergNEF. “What you’re seeing in places that don’t make a lot of vehicles of any type, they’re saying: ‘Well, look, if I’m going to import the cars anyway, then I’d rather import less oil. We may as well import the one that cleans up local air quality and is cheaper to buy.’”

Bethelhem Eshetie gave up driving her taxi two years ago. The rising cost of gas and the spare parts needed to keep her old car on the road meant that she couldn’t earn enough to make ends meet. “It was no longer worth it,” she said. Six months later, though, she was back on the road, this time in a brand new BenBen E-Star, an electric vehicle made by the Chinese carmaker Chang’an.

Unlike the second and third-hand vehicles that make up most of the traffic in Addis Ababa, the EV is new, reliable, and relatively affordable to run. “I like the car’s comfort, its air conditioning system,” she said. “And not having to go to the repair shop regularly.”

The stupidity of Trump’s decision to try and kill off the EV industry is so obvious that even the rightwing Free Press is noticing. Michael Dunne’s account contains an interesting nugget: car dealers systematically undermine EVs because since they have so few moving parts they don’t provide much in the way of service and repair income. Dunne also explains why this is a big deal beyond, you know, destroying the climate:

America needs to be good at manufacturing EVs because we need to be good at building the batteries and high-efficiency motors that power them. In the future, these technologies will power everything that matters.

Meanwhile, Ford—though it wrote off billions in EV investments earlier this year—is still planning to make a cheap electric truck for the American market, and more details emerged this week. From Mack Hogan:

The company is launching its moonshot EV platform with what’s effectively a battery-powered equivalent to the massively popular Ford Maverick. Truck fans may bluster at calling such a vehicle a “truck,” as the Maverick’s car-based platform and softer shape is less brutish than traditional F-150s and Rangers. But the Maverick’s popularity speaks for itself.

Expect the UEV truck to blur the line further, as Ford says ultra-slippery aerodynamics were crucial to this program.

As one example, Ford points to the truck’s mirrors, which use the same motor for power folding as they do for adjustment. This allowed them to reduce the size of the mirror by over 20%.

That alone is good for 1.5 miles of range, Ford claims.

+From the good folks at As You Sow, new data showing how much more money you could be making if you invested in clean energy

As of January 26, 2026, the Clean200—measured on a sustainable revenue-weighted basis—generated a total return (gross, USD) of 282.9% since its July 1, 2016 inception, compared with 111.0% for the MSCI ACWI/Energy Index of fossil fuel companies.

To put it in another way, $10,000 invested in the Clean200 on July 1, 2016 would have grown to $38,290 by January 26, 2026, versus $21,100 for the MSCI ACWI/Energy fossil fuel benchmark.

Over the same period, the Clean200 also outpaced the broader MSCI ACWI, which returned 221.3%.

+And finally, as another nor’easter shows up in New England (and man what a beautiful stretch of winter it’s been). new numbers are making it clear just how well the wind farms that Trump wants to shutter performed during this winter’s coldest weeks. From Maria Gallucci:

The data from January shows that the nation’s two operating utility-scale offshore wind farms — South Fork Wind and Vineyard Wind — performed as well as gas-fired power plants and better than coal-fired facilities, including during last month’s Winter Storm Fern, experts said at the event.

The 132-megawatt South Fork Wind farm, which delivers power to Long Island, New York, had a ​“capacity factor” of 52% last month. The metric reflects how much electricity the project actually generated compared with the maximum amount it could generate in a given period. That puts South Fork Wind on par with New York state’s most efficient gas plants.

“The wind capacity in the Northeast is absolutely amazing, particularly over the winter,” said Mikkel Mæhlisen, vice president of the Americas Generation division for Ørsted, which jointly owns South Fork Wind with Skyborn Renewables.

It’s kind of unbelievable that this is what the government is trying to put a moratorium on!

America’s abandonment of the “endangerment finding” undergirding national climate policy is not the most important thing that happened last week. That decision was an act of gross stupidity, but it was also perfectly predictable given the people making it, and since America’s not doing anything good on climate anyway it won’t have deep immediate effect. (As is often the case, humorist Alexandra Petri had the best response). What will matter more, I think, for America and for policy going forward, is the news that we’re likely to see another El Niño soon; take this as your first warning that not only the temperature but the politics of the planet are likely to change dramatically, and soon.

We’re still in a La Niña phase in the Pacific right now—the cooler part of the cycle that meant that 2025’s global temperature was “only” the second or third highest ever, trailing 2023, the last big El Niño year. But that hot phase seems to be returning, and somewhat faster than expected. In the last few weeks, big Kelvin waves have been moving eastward across the Pacific, driving warmer water before them; these can sometimes peter out, but strong westerly wind bursts across the region—counter to the usually dominant trade winds—seem to indicate this one is for real; the best guess of the various forecasters is that sometime between June and September the world will enter an El Niño cycle.

When that happens, prepare for bedlam. Each El Niño event in recent decades has gotten steadily worse, because each one drives the temperature to a new record. That’s because each is super-imposed on a higher baseline temperature that comes with the steady warming of the planet. As James Hansen and his team pointed out in a paper last week, the expected low temperature at the close of the La Niña this spring is expected to be about 1.4 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial temperatures, which is higher than the maximum from the last El Niños. We are ever further into the great overheating.

We get fires and floods all the time now, but we get lots more of them when the temperature tilts sharply up. As Eric Niiler reported in the Times, the Pacific warm current “brings the potential for extreme rainfall, powerful storms and drought across some areas of the globe.”

So let me make a few predictions about what this next El Niño will mean, assuming it appears.

1. The idea that “global warming is over” as a political issue will quickly disappear. It’s mostly in this country that it’s taken hold, but our mediasphere is strong enough that the notion seeps in around the world. Here, for instance, is the truly shameful editorial in the new Bezosified Washington Post, saluting the end of the endangerment findings because regulating greenhouse gas emissions carries only “modest benefits.” Big new global temperature records will remind the world the peril we’re actually in, and even in our rotten domestic politics it will lift those governors—maybe particularly J.B. Pritzker and Gavin Newsom—who have solid claims to significant climate progress.

   If you want a sense of how close we’re dancing to the brink, check out this new study from some of the heavy hitters in climate research, documenting the approach (or in too many cases the passing) of various tipping points in the earth’s climate system.

   Prof William Ripple, at Oregon State University, who led the analysis, said: “The [great Atlantic currents are] already showing signs of weakening, and this could increase the risk of Amazon dieback. Carbon released by an Amazon dieback would further amplify global warming and interact with other feedback loops. We need to act quickly on our rapidly dwindling opportunities to prevent dangerous and unmanageable climate outcomes.”

2. The impact of this new warming surge will be especially profound because this El Niño will probably provide the final proof that global warming is actually accelerating sickeningly from its previously merely alarming pace. Hansen and his team have an important new paper making this case. They have long believed that the planet is more sensitive to greenhouse gases than other researchers—basically, they’ve held, based in part on models of ancient climates, that doubling the amount of co2 in the atmosphere will increase temperatures 4 degrees Celsius, not the three or so that is closer to the existing consensus. They’ve made a bold set of temperature predictions that the temperature will rise to 1.7 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial temperatures in this El Niño cycle, and that that will mean we’re due to hit a two-degree Celsius rise, long viewed as the mark to avoid, by the 2030s, about fifteen years ahead of standard predictions.

   They think that global warming began to accelerate viciously about 2015, and that it will become evident to everyone in the next few years, and they even engaged in a bit of good-natured trash-talking aimed at other climatologists who they said were beginning to arrive at a “befuddled recognition that something was wrong with the models, which did not reproduce the rapid warming of the past several years.” Here’s their guess of the political impact, with which I agree:

   Realistic understanding of the climate situation, and public recognition of that, is the essential first step toward successfully addressing climate change. Progress in climate science during the next 5-10 years is needed for the development of effective energy and climate policy because the pressure for policy action will grow along with climate impacts as global temperature approaches +2°C.
   
   The current flippant attitude – 1.5°C isn’t so bad, we can deal with 3°C – of people who should know better will dissolve, if we can improve understanding of the danger of passing the point of no return.

   I will note that Hansen remains a bit apart from other climate researchers, but that they are starting to converge a little on his numbers. (An interesting Washington Post article on parts of the debate can be found here). Here’s reliable climate scientist Zeke Hausfather’s predictions for the next two years—he’s got extremely wide error bars, but Hansen’s predictions fit within them. And Hausfather underscores the seriousness of the numbers

   The fun part about making these short term forecasts is that we won’t have to wait that long to see how well they play out. The less fun part is that we are all forecasting a future rate of warming well above the ~0.2C per decade that has characterized the post-1970 period.

3. In fact, I’ll make one more speculative prediction myself. The heating is going to be so big and so obvious that it will lead, for the first time, to a real global discussion of solar geoengineering as a response. I think that is tragic and also increasingly likely, because the cost of letting the temperature continue to rise will be so large that the side-effects that could come from pouring sulfur into the atmosphere will start to seem more more evenly matched with the weather carnage on display. It’s probably time for those who care about the planet to start figuring out what their response to this debate will look like. There are some good reasons to fight it tooth and nail, but it’s also the moment to start insisting that if it’s ever going to be even considered it be accompanied by an iron-clad commitment to drive down fossil fuel emissions to zero. If we’re going to bet the future of the planet, the reason can’t be to make sure Exxon’s business model remains intact.

James Hansen, by the way, remains a fascinating part of this story. I’ve been talking with him for almost forty years (my profile of him, from the 1980s for Outside magazine, is apparently so old it can’t be found digitally). I volunteer on the board of the nonprofit that supports his research (contributions to fund it can be sent here). I would say: if you’d bet against him over the years, you’d have gone broke.

One way of summing up this moment is to say that the endangerment finding, and the politics of climate, are puny in the face of physics. We’re going to see that physics in action again in the next 24 months, and it will drive many changes. Some of them will be political.

Our job is to make sure that we use that sad opening to force as much change as we can.

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In other energy and climate news:

+From DeSmog Blog and Rolling Stone, an important investigation into the trillions of gallons of toxic wastewater that the fossil fuel industry is gifting the future. From Justin Nobel

A cache of government documents dating back nearly a century casts serious doubt on the safety of the oil and gas industry’s most common method for disposing of its annual trillion gallons of toxic wastewater: injecting it deep underground.

Despite knowing by the early 1970s that injection wells were at best a makeshift solution, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) never followed its own determination that they should be “a temporary means of disposal,” used only until “a more environmentally acceptable means of disposal [becomes] available.”

The documents include scientific research, internal communications, and talks given at a December 1971 industry and government symposium. And they come from multiple federal agencies, including the EPA, the U.S. Department of Energy, and the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS).

The documents show there may be little scientific merit to industry and government claims that injection wells are a safe means of disposal — putting drinking water and other mineral resources in communities across the country at risk of contamination, and jeopardizing local economies and public health.

+Good news from Africa, which is emerging as the fastest growing solar market on earth. Allan Olingo chronicles the surge:

Historically, South Africa dominated solar imports in Africa, at one point accounting for roughly half of all panels shipped to the continent. The latest data show its share has slipped below a third as demand surged elsewhere. Last year, 20 African nations set new annual records for solar imports, as 25 countries imported a total of at least 100 megawatts of capacity.

+Know your toadies. Excellent account of Interior Secretary Doug Burgum in the American Prospect. Hannah Story Brown and Toni Augilar Rosenthal write:

In March, Burgum told oil and gas executives that he sees them as “the customer.” In August, his Interior Department claimed that renewable projects are “environmentally damaging,” and repeatedly insisted that coal—a highly polluting fuel that is far, far more expensive to use to generate electricity than renewables—is the miracle solution to the country’s affordability crisis.

Again borrowing Trump’s favored communication style of strangely capitalized tweets accompanying AI-generated images, Burgum introduced a lump of coal named Coalie as the new “spokesperson” of “Beautiful, Clean Coal” for the Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement. He has played a central role in opening new public lands to coal mining and preventing coal plants from closing, passing on the costs to communities in the form of more expensive electricity bills and increased air pollution. While the administration pushes coal, it has also made it easier for miners to be sickened and killed by black lung disease, and harder for afflicted miners to access health care.

Perhaps worst of all, Burgum has led Interior in a historic sabotage of renewable-energy development, including by requiring that all solar and wind projects be personally approved by Burgum himself, and rescinding the designated study areas for offshore wind. These orders were followed by cancellations or stop-work orders on a slate of wind energy projects. He has also propagated baseless claims and conspiracies about wind farms, including that they inexplicably present a profound national-security risk. In doing so, Burgum has threatened thousands of jobs nationwide, undermined the long-term stability of the nation’s power grid, wasted billions of dollars in delays and red tape, and contributed to skyrocketing electric bills nationwide.

+The 21 million people who live in Sao Paulo—making it the biggest city in the Americas—are battling both prolonged drought and occasional violent flood, even before the El Niño gets underway. Fabiano Maisonnave reports:

Water in the region’s largest reservoir network is hovering at 32%, the lowest since the region endured its worst water crisis in 2014 and 2015, and is due to dip lower as the dry season approaches. Meanwhile, the Brazilian city has been battered in recent weeks by intense storms that have killed four people, including an elderly couple whose car was swept away by rushing water.

“What’s behind all of this is climate change, derived not only from global warming and greenhouse gas emissions, but also from land use change,” said Marcelo Seluchi, a meteorologist from Brazil’s National Center for Monitoring and Early Warning of Natural Disasters, also known as Cemaden.

The federal agency’s data shows that precipitation levels have been falling since the 1960s in much of Brazil, coinciding with widespread deforestation in the central area and in the Amazon. “A forested area evaporates four times more water than pasture,” said Seluchi. “This moisture is a fundamental input for causing rain, along with that which comes from the ocean.”

On the other hand, rising temperatures allow the atmosphere to hold more moisture. That saturated air releases far greater amounts of water in a short time when it rains, producing intense downpours and flash flooding, he said.

+Bob Howarth, the pioneering Cornell chemist largely responsible for our understanding of the threat of methane in this country, has an important new paper explaining the failure of Kathy Hochul’s New York State energy efforts, an effort he’s gotten to watch up close as a member of a key Empire State advisory panel.

New York is far from being a climate leader, with a little less than one third of our electricity from renewable sources. Eighteen states are doing better, with renewables producing more than half the power in twelve, including Vermont, Maine, and California. Globally, seventeen countries produce more of their electricity from renewables than does NY, including Germany, the UK, Australia, and China

+If you’re enjoying the Olympics (all hail Johannes Klaebo, greatest winter Olympian of all time, with his total of nine gold medals so far), you may also notice the backdrop of dead trees. As in the western U.S., Italy’s Dolomites have been suffering a plague of bark beetles as temperatures rise. The website MountainsForEverybody has details

A 2024 Annals of Forest Science study reports that milder winters and longer warm seasons now allow 3-4 beetle generations annually, up from 1-2 historically, fueled by climate change.

+Hmm. A new aluminum smelter is going up in Oklahoma, not West Virginia, because wind energy produces cheaper electricity than coal. Maria Gallucci:

For clean energy advocates, the decision to build in Oklahoma and not the Bluegrass State felt like an indictment of Kentucky’s power system. Coal-fired power plants supplied 67% of the state’s electricity generation in 2024, and gas plants generated another 26%. Hydroelectric dams provided most of the rest, though dozens of solar projects are in development, including ones atop old mining sites.

“Kentucky needs to learn from this and understand that our infrastructure, too, is an economic development tool,” said Elisa Owen, a Louisville-based senior energy organizer with the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal Campaign. ​“We cannot remain invested in 19^th-century energy if we want to attract 21^st-century business. It’s just as simple as that.”

Meanwhile, the Financial Times reports that the same shift is underway in China, where aluminum smelters are relocating from coal country to the renewables-southwest.

China’s aluminium industry has embarked on a green long march, moving millions of tonnes of production from the northern coal country, its stronghold for seven decades, to pockets of the south and west rich in renewable energy.

The country’s output of electrolytic aluminium, the sector’s main product, reached 43.8mn tonnes in 2024, accounting for about 60 per cent of the world’s total production, according to local industry data. However, following a spree of relocations in recent years, 13mn tonnes of that capacity — about 30 per cent — now comes from new smelters in areas with clean energy and low-development costs in Yunnan, Sichuan, Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia.

The years-long multibillion-dollar relocation project is helping decarbonise one of the world’s dirtiest industries. Analysts believe the aluminium sector’s success will serve as a blueprint for Beijing to direct more aggressive production caps and capacity swapping in other industries.

In fact, the economics of coal are so stupid that the Trump administration now is resorting to using the Pentagon to start buying up supplies for its use.

The anticipated order would direct the Defense Department to enter into agreements with coal plants to purchase electricity.

Lauren Herzer Risi, director of the Environmental Security Program at the Stimson Center, a Washington, D.C. think tank that analyzes issues related to global peace, noted that the order runs counter to the agency’s recommendations, which favor on-site microgrids with distributed energy solutions rather than centralized external power production.

Research by the National Laboratory of the Rockies, formerly the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, found that solar power combined with battery storage can enhance energy security at military bases, at “little to no added cost,” in the event of power outages.

+Veteran readers of this newsletter know that I like blimps. And obviously I’m a big fan of windpower. So now a Chinese company has invented what is essentially a combination blimp and wind turbine, designed to catch those steady higher-altitude breezes.

The enormous S2000 Stratosphere Airborne Wind Energy System (SAWES) flew at an altitude of 2,000 metres in southwest China’s Sichuan Province, generating electricity and successfully connecting to the power grid - a world first for a high-altitude wind power device.

The aircraft-like structure functions as an “airborne power station” and combines an airship platform with wind turbines to capture stronger, more stable winds high above the ground.

I trust that you, like me, would enjoy looking at a picture of this machine

On the other end of the size spectrum, Boston’s housing authority is figuring out how to install window-based heat pumps in city-owned apartments.

It’s a new type of heat pump that’s compact, hangs over a windowsill and plugs into a standard 120 volt outlet — no HVAC technician or electrician required.

The units aren’t widely available to the public yet, but the Boston Housing Authority is piloting them in the Hassan Apartments, a 100-unit complex in Mattapan for seniors and disabled adults. The 50-year-old building is one of many older structures across the Northeast with an energy-gobbling heating system and no air conditioning — factors that make it a prime candidate for a climate retrofit.

“It’s really exciting for us because we feel like it could be the tip of an iceberg of converting many thousands of units,” said Kenzie Bok, administrator of the Boston Housing Authority.

+Doyne Farmer—whose analysis of learning curves helped people understand the sudden surge in renewable energy even as it was in its infancy—is proposing a new method for simulating the world’s economy. Damian Carrington reports that he’s driven by his concern about climate change

“It’s an area where the failure of economic models is seen most dramatically,” he says. “I think the models we have are completely inadequate and even misleading. For example, the track record for these models in saying what renewable energy was going to do is genuinely terrible. They consistently predicted that it would be very slow to roll out and the cost would come down very slowly.” In reality, costs have plunged and the rollout has been rapid.

Driven by this, Farmer’s team’s first step towards a complexity model of the entire world economy is tackling the energy sector. The model encompasses all 30,000 companies and their 160,000 oil rigs, power stations and other assets, based on a rich, 25-year-long dataset of how they have operated.

“We’re literally modelling the decision-making of all the energy companies in the world,” he says, each represented by a separate digital agent in the model. “We can simulate the whole energy system of the world to see how much energy each company delivers and at what price.”

The model is still in development, but should be much better at laying out the best path to a green energy future than today’s economic models. That could be transformative – a data-led study by Farmer and colleagues in 2022 found that a rapid transition to clean energy could save the world trillions of dollars.

+Energy influencer Bad Bunny did an excellent job of reminding the world that Puerto Rico’s electric has never recovered from a series of hurricanes (and management scandals). The folks at the Solutions Project have a new video out about one solution, community solar microgrids.

When lights go out across the island, Casa Pueblo’s solar microgrids keep running. Instead of relying on a crumbling centralized grid that leaves 3.2 million people in the dark for an average of 27 hours a year, these systems bring renewable power generation directly to communities.

The results speak for themselves: 80% reduction in electricity bills, zero power outages, and neighbors supporting neighbors during emergencies. From local businesses staying open during blackouts to families finally having peace of mind during hurricane season, this is what energy independence looks like.

Last month, Casa Pueblo demonstrated how their interconnected solar microgrids can transform Puerto Rico’s landscape. In front of special guests and community members, electrical engineer and researcher Maximiliano Ferrari gave a live demonstration of the orchestrator, an innovative technology that breaks with the current model of unidirectional transmission and allows multidirectional dynamics of energy exchange between communities. This demonstration proved that microgrids can support each other in times of emergency or massive blackouts to ensure that community energy needs are met.

“We are proposing to scale up and evolve from independent solar installations, which number more than 175,000 throughout the country, to energy communities of homes with and without solar panels. We already know that individual systems offer a good quality of life. With the microgrid ecosystem, we would have a good coexistence,” said Casa Pueblo’s executive director, Arturo Massol Deyá.

+Wildfires raging in Patagonia claimed some of the world’s oldest trees. Meanwhile Jeva Lange reports that wildfire is spreading in the eastern United States as temperatures rise, and that researchers are worried.

Though the Eastern U.S. is finally exiting a three-week block of sub-freezing temperatures, the hot, dry days of summer are still far from most people’s minds. But the wildland-urban interface — that is, the high-fire-risk communities that abut tracts of undeveloped land — is more extensive in the East than in the West, with up to 72% of the land in some states qualifying as WUI. The region is also much more densely populated, meaning practically every wildfire that ignites has the potential to threaten human property and life.

It’s this density combined with the prevalent WUI that most significantly distinguishes Eastern fires from those in the comparatively rural West. One fire manager warned Smithwick that a worst-case-scenario wildfire could run across the entirety of New Jersey in just 48 hours.

+Cynthia Kaufman, the author of the just-published Solidarity Economics, has a nifty essay on how to manage the political transition to cleaner energy—it’s well worth reading, and not just for the Californians its mostly aimed at.

Navigating the bumps and difficult spots in the transition requires us to be very thoughtful about how our work sits at the intersection of affordability, sustainability, and democracy. It requires that we maintain as much solidarity as possible among those who are fighting for a world that works for us all. And it requires that we be proactive in dealing with the political machinations of an industry that will stop at nothing to protect its ability to profit.

Solidarity means we are all in this together, we look for solutions that serve a multiplicity of needs, and use our intersectional lenses to make sure no one is left behind. We need to always be sure that we propose solutions that don’t benefit one part of society while causing another to suffer.

+Good possible news from Indonesia, where a surge in EVs means that the government may not need to turn over millions of acres of forest for biofuels plantations. David Fickling has the story:

The switch in Southeast Asia has been less celebrated, but is becoming breathtakingly rapid. EVs in Thailand are already cheaper than the fossil-powered equivalent, and made up about a fifth of the market last year. In Singapore, they accounted for a Chinese-style 45%, and 32% in Vietnam.

The pivot in Indonesia, the fourth-most populous country with 285 million people, has been even more dramatic. In 2020, less than one in every 350 cars sold was electric. In December, that number stood at more than one in three.

A recognition of the transformation underway could give the nation cleaner air, a less-ravaged environment, stronger fiscal and current accounts, and more jobs — all while reducing the risk of catastrophic climate disasters, like the floods that claimed the lives of 1,201 people in Sumatra last month. It’s a good bargain.

There are, increasingly, moments in our political life that defeat me, in that I don’t know how to respond. At all. When the president of the United States tweets out a picture of the Obamas as apes, it’s as if my cognitive mind slips a gear—I just found myself feeling incredibly sad, at the fact that America has gone into reverse. We’re working hard at Third Act to win November’s elections, because that’s the next big point of leverage, but sometimes, amidst all that work, one has to wonder if things can ever be right again.

Which is why I am so grateful that we’re having a stretch of true old-school winter in the northeast. It was twelve below zero when I went out to walk the dog this morning—the snow underfoot so dry it squeaks like styrofoam when you walk on it, the air so cold that when you breathe in the sides of your nostrils stick together a little. That this coincides with the start of the winter Olympics makes it even better—for a few short moments one can almost imagine that the world is spinning normally on its axis. This is the world that I remember.

I want to take a few short moments to talk about winter, precisely because we can no longer take it for granted—it is, by all accounts, in the process of more or less disappearing. And so I want to explain why I savor it. It is probably an indulgence, but I at least need the occasional indulgence to stay in the fight.

Many people, I am aware, endure winter rather than enjoy it. The weatherman on tv consoles viewers when a “blast of Arctic air” is on the horizon. Driving definitely gets more difficult when it snows. Because I ran a homeless shelter in the basement of my church (and indeed lived on the streets at a few points as a young reporter) I know how hard winter can be for people without good shelter. Shout out to Zohran Mamdani and the New York City Housing Authority for getting new electric heat pumps installed at a bunch of public housing units in the Rockaways. The new machines cut energy use 87 percent, half the cost of energy, and make homes comfortable.

“Regardless of whether or not we’re in a historic cold snap like we are now, families deserve to be warm in the winter. No one should ever have to see their breath in their apartments,” the Queens Borough president Donovan Richards said.

But if you’re not struggling to keep a house heated, I want to say a few words on behalf of this season. For my money, deep cold is far easier to deal with than deep heat—you just add another layer. And in return, you get the extraordinary bonus of being able to slide across the surface of the earth. If you think about it in slightly different terms, winter is not the season when it gets colder, it’s the season when friction releases its tight grip on the planet.

That’s what the entire winter Olympics celebrates, the giddy fact of slipperiness. If you went off a ski jump and just landed on dirt, you’d…stick. Figure skaters can revolve in dizzying pirouettes that ballerinas can only dream about, because ice. Downhill skiers hit 100 mph (sending good thoughts Lindsay Vonn’s way); here’s what that would look like without snow. But you needn’t be a great athlete to experience it, as the crowds at any alpine ski hill make clear. I can remember, many decades ago, cross country skiing through the Oslomarkka, the forest above the Norwegian capital. I’d watch very old men who would hobble across the parking lot, and need some help getting their skis on their feet—and then they’d glide gracefully off into the woods. (When I talked with them, they were likely to be veterans of the resistance, with wild stories of skiing off to recover arms caches airdropped by the Allies. “The Germans had the cities,” one told me. “But they weren’t such good skiers.”)

Looked at one way, then, winter is a moment of both silliness and elegance, a banana peel slipped under the assumptions of an ever-more-efficient economy, and a stretch when even the clumsy (like me) can acquire a bit of fluency.

If one tries to figure out what the point of everything is, it’s surprising to me how much human pleasure is derived simply from ways of moving across our planet: sailing, hang-gliding, canoeing, biking, motorcycling, roller-skating, running. Winter creates a whole other set of ways to be in motion. Speed skating: you’re going faster on a flat surface without gears than other form of locomotion, and when you cross over and push off on the corners you almost giggle at the force. I’ve gone down the Olympic bobsled run at Lake Placid, and mostly what I remember is the vibrating noise, speed made audible. Lie down on the luge and you’re pretty much in the hands of Isaac Newton and Lord Kelvin. (I closed my eyes).

And of course winter comes with quieter pleasures too—indeed, the quietest place I’ve ever found myself is in a windless snowfall, the flakes muffling all sound. On cold nights like the ones we’ve had this past week, the. moisture is precipitated out of the sky and the stars just hang there, no twinkle or shimmer. Last week, when the full moon came out on the snow, Vermont was so bright it looked enchanted.

So does it get me heated that we’re losing winter? It does. I know that this year the West has been all but snowless, with record temperatures: a warm dry January left the region with the lowest snowpack in decades. As Amy Graff reported yesterday

Salt Lake City recorded a tenth of an inch of snow in January — a paltry amount there, compared with the nearly 13 inches the popular winter recreation destination records on average during the month.

“It’s embarrassing for a state that claims the world’s best snow,” said Jonathon Meyer, the assistant state climatologist at the Utah Climate Center.

“It was ice pellets that came down,” Mr. Meyer said. “You could make a claim that even though we did have measurable snow, residents of Salt Lake wouldn’t call it snow.”

Our eastern cold comes from a “stretched polar vortex” that owes a lot to record melt of Arctic sea ice.

MIT’s Judah Cohen co-authored a July 2025 study that found more stretched polar vortex events linked to severe winter weather bursts in the central and eastern US over the past decade. Cohen said part of the reason is that dramatically low sea ice in the Barents and Kara seas in the Arctic helps set up a pattern of waves that end up causing US cold bursts. A warmer Arctic is causing sea ice in that region to shrink faster than other places, studies have found.

Arctic sea ice is at a record low extent for this time of year, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center.

In any event, there’s. no question that we’re seeing ever less cold weather on average. Here in Vermont, Burlington has warmed faster than almost any city in the country, with 25 fewer days below freezing; on average, the coldest night of the year is ten degrees warmer than it was before the 1970s. Around the world the same. Here’s a chart of parts of the planet that were experiencing record heat this January (8.5 percent) and parts that were experiencing record cold (0.1 percent)

The last colder-than-average month on planet earth was in February of 1985, which means that no one under the age of forty has ever known one. What’s happening, right now?

Australia is reeling from a record heat wave that has pushed temperatures past 120 degrees Fahrenheit, or about 49 Celsius, in some areas, leading to fires and power outages. In central Africa, brutal heat has shattered records in recent days, with countries north of the Equator hitting temperatures above 101 degrees Fahrenheit.

All of this, of course, is the work of the fossil fuel industry, and so it was good to see a Norwegian skier handing the IOC’s head of sustainability a massive petition as the games began, asking that they consider the appropriateness of letting oil and gas companies sponsor these sports.

The petition asks the IOC and the International Ski and Snowboard Federation, FIS, to publish a report evaluating the appropriateness of fossil fuel marketing before next season. Nikolai Schirmer, a filmmaker and two-time European Skier of the Year, spoke exclusively with The Associated Press outside the hotel, and said the IOC informed him that it would not allow media to witness their meeting.

“It seems like the Olympics aren’t ready to be the positive force for change that they have the potential to be,” Schirmer told the AP afterward. “So I just hope this can be a little nudge in the right direction, but we will see.”

“The show goes on while the things you depend on to do your job — winter — is disappearing in front of your very eyes,” he said. “Not dealing with the climate crisis and not having skiing be a force for change just felt insane. We’re on the front lines.”

(Here’s a link so you can sign)

Lots of other winter Olympians have been hard at work trying to preserve winter too. Sammy Roth has a nifty profile of a Candian-Italian women’s hockey player who’s been deeply involved with Eco-Athletes

The nonprofit works with athletes around the world to promote climate action and sustainability. Jacqui Pierri is one of 260 EcoAthletes Champions, along with MLB pitcher Brent Suter and WNBA star Napheesa Collier. They use their platforms to advocate for a safer planet — although Pierri, with her unique combination of climate chops and world-class hockey talent, offers an especially informed perspective.

“If you play a sport outdoors, this is dramatically impacting the future of your sport,” she said. “Hockey we play indoors, but most hockey players fall in love with this sport playing outdoors as a kid. Especially if you’re a Canadian.”

In America, nordic skiers like Gus Schumacher and (world-leading) Jessie Diggins have been at the forefront of the climate fight, working with groups like Protect Our Winters. (Much gratitude and respect to Diggins, too, for speaking out about the atrocities in her home state of Minnesota: “I want to make sure you know who I’m racing for when I get to the start line at the Olympics,” she wrote on her Instagram. “I’m racing for [the] American people who stand for love, for acceptance, for compassion, honesty and respect for others. I do not stand for hate or violence or discrimination.”)

The rapid retreat of winter means that all that whimsy and serendipity and grace will keep disappearing—higher up the mountain, further north, for ever-shorter stretches of a vanishing season. (Or of course on Saudi Arabia’s planned manmade snow resort). As Laura Millan and Hayley Warren explained this week, “all the cities that staged the Winter Games since 1950 have heated up in the years since by an average of 2.7C (4.9F), according to scientists at Climate Central. That’s well above 1.4C, the warming average for the entire planet.”

Rocky Anderson was mayor of Salt Lake City the last time it hosted the Olympics in 2002. "I don't think we're going to see a Winter Olympic Games in Utah in 2034," he said recently.

So we keep up the climate fight, in the hopes of saving some of the world we were born into. And when we do get a lucky stretch of cold and snow, we savor it for all it’s worth. I’m headed out right now for some gliding through the forest.

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In other energy and climate news:

+Sporting stars are also helping out with other climate crises: Morocco has seen record floods in recent days, and soccer great Achraf Hakimi is organizing relief efforts.

These violent floods resulted from heavy rainfall that struck the north of the Kingdom of Morocco in recent days. The city of Larache was especially hard hit, with at least 50,000 out of its 120,000 residents evacuated according to authorities.

When we talk about unprecedented rainfall, here’s today’s update on the situation:

The four provinces were hit by flooding since Jan. 28, as water levels continued to rise in the Loukkos River after the Oued El Makhazine Dam reached 156% of its capacity for the first time, causing it to overflow, according to official data.

The reporter said rescue teams are using helicopters, military trucks, speedboats, drones, and specialized relief equipment to evacuate residents from affected areas.

+The LNG industry is starting to admit the future doesn’t look so bright, even as the Trump administration underwrites its pell-mell expansion. From Priscila Azevedo Rocha:

The current arrangement, where 90% of LNG is sold to utilities under long-term contracts, risks running into difficulties because many companies and countries have made net-zero commitments, according to the CEO of industry leader Trafigura.

“If they have made those commitments, signing a 20-year contract or a 25-year contract that starts in 2030 is inherently problematic,” Holtum said. “And it doesn’t necessarily make a lot of sense to be doing that.”

+One sign that sanity hasn’t entirely deserted America: a pro wrestling crowd chanting “Fuck Ice” last week. Another comes from this annual sustainability report from, of all places, NASCAR. At one level, the car-racing enterprise seems to represent our MAGA moment: roaring consumption of fossil fuel, mostly in deep-red states. But it’s also a big company with real responsibilities, and those don’t get shed overnight. The report has sections on helping veterans, aiding with hurricane recovery, and though it certainly doesn’t call it DEI, it talks about the special “employee resource groups” for Black, Hispanic, Asian, gay and women’s communities. And on the environment, it details “exciting progress” in “cutting emissions.”

In 2023, NASCAR set a goal to achieve net zero operating emissions by 2035. Simply put, this goal applies to the fuel and electricity we consume in our operations at NASCAR-owned racetracks and league offices. Over the next 10 years, we need to reduce the energy we consume as a business and significantly increase our use of cleaner, more renewable energy sources

Now, there’s more talk of biofuels than seems entirely sustainable to me, but there’s also this news:

Through the ABB NASCAR Electrification Partnership, NASCAR’s first electric race car, the ABB NASCAR EV Prototype, was launched in July 2024. Built by NASCAR engineers in collaboration with Chevrolet, Ford, and Toyota. It features: a 78-kWh liquid-cooled battery with a powertrain that produces 1,000 kW at peak power, regenerative braking and three STARD UHP 6-Phase motors, Goodyear tires made from more sustainable materials, and Crossover Utility Vehicle body made of BComp, a plant-based flax composite

In 2025, Chevrolet and Ford also introduced electric NASCAR prototypes, each with 78 kWh batteries. The Chevy Blazer EV.R NASCAR prototype delivers over 1,300 horsepower from three 6-phase electric motors that instantly rev up to 15,000 rpm. The Ford Mustang Mach-E NASCAR prototype is a 100% electric racer and features three motors

No need to read more into this than you want—but it’s also worth noting that the NFL didn’t blink when the White House came after Bad Bunny. Some people can evidently imagine a different future.

+Along the same lines, Trump’s pollster this week discovered that whaddya know, MAGA voters like solar power.

It found that 51 percent of respondents support utility-scale solar—large power plants that feed electricity into the grid—while 30 percent oppose it.

Support jumps to 70 percent if the panels are domestically produced and free of Chinese components

+And further along the same lines, Canadian prime minister Mark Carney made it clearer than ever where he sees the future last week. After signing a trade deal that allows in some Chinese EVs, he has now announced a sweeping set of steps designed to make Canada a part of the EV game going forward. As Ian Austen and Jack Ewing report, it seems pretty clear that Carney can imagine a different future too, and doesn’t want it foreclosed by wasting the next three years.

“Canada is an auto nation, the auto industry is central to our story,” Mr. Carney said. “The auto industry is the core pillar of the Canadian economy.”

Mr. Trump has inflicted significant pain on Canada’s auto industry, which exports about 90 percent of its vehicles to the United States, imposing a 25 percent tariff on Canadian vehicles. Mr. Trump has said he does not want cars sold in the United States to be made in Canada and wants to drastically increase domestic production.

But Mr. Trump’s dismantling of the trade policies that have knitted together the North American auto industry has led to a sense of urgency for Canada to look for alternative markets and strategies.

Canada’s plan aligns the country with a shift to electric vehicles that is well underway in Europe and China. But Mr. Trump and Republicans in Congress are doubling down on vehicles powered by fossil fuels, eliminating incentives that encouraged people to buy electric vehicles.

Canada is a relatively small market for U.S. automakers, but it is a major supplier of components and finished vehicles. The biggest danger for U.S. automakers may be that they are becoming increasingly isolated from foreign markets and disconnected from technological trends sweeping the rest of the world.

Oh, and to round out the news about electric cars, a new satellite study of southern California finds that the air is definitely clearer where more EVs are on the road. Michelle Lewis has the story

The headline number is modest but measurable: for every 200 ZEVs added in a neighborhood, NO2 levels fell by about 1.1% between 2019 and 2023.

The study, just published in The Lancet Planetary Health and partly funded by the National Institutes of Health, adds rare real-world evidence to a claim that’s often taken for granted – that EVs don’t just cut carbon over time, they also improve local air quality right now.

+Academics: a new-to-America group—the Climate Justice Universities Union—is forming here. You can sign up

+It seems like I’ve been writing about sodium-ion batteries since this newsletter started, first as a glimmer in the eye of researchers, and increasingly as a reality. This week comes news that CATL, the Chinese concern that is the world’s biggest battery maker by far, is placing big bets on the technology. As Christopher Arcus points out

Sodium is the sixth most abundant element on Earth. Sodium-ion cathodes combine sodium and other abundant elements. The electrolyte contains sodium carbonate and a solvent. One type of sodium cathode, Prussian blue, contains sodium, iron, and nitrogen. In general, other sodium-ion cathodes consist of abundant materials like manganese. CATL uses a Prussian blue analog for the cathode. Layered oxides are another sodium cathode used for highest energy density. Sodium is two orders of magnitude more abundant and proportionally less expensive than lithium.

Meanwhile, the beat goes on for plug-in or balcony solar, which is getting closer to approval in many state legislatures across the country. Here’s the news from the Green Mountain State

Plug-in” solar units, sometimes referred to as “balcony solar,” since the panels are often hung off apartment or other home balconies, got a unanimous thumbs up from the Vermont State Senate last Thursday, Jan. 29. The bill, known as S.202, will modify provisions for residential solar generation and connection to home electrical circuits. It will eliminate the need for permits or a solar user obtaining a state “certificate of public good” before operating it. Instead, all a customer of an electric utility would need to do is fill out a basic notification form that they have installed such a device and plan to use it.

And more good news from the Old Dominion, which is steadily expanding the use of community solar.

On a plot of land along Route 58 in Suffolk, about 9,000 solar panels sat soaking up the sun on a recent afternoon.

“What we have in front of us here is much like what you might see on your neighbor’s house who’s got solar, but many, many more panels,” said Brandon Smithwood, vice president of policy for Atlanta-based solar developer Dimension Energy.

The property is about 20 acres, “much smaller than the big utility-scale projects we see here and elsewhere that can be thousands or more.”

This Suffolk site is one of Virginia’s first shared, or community, solar projects. The industry’s slowly building after lawmakers launched a pilot program several years ago.

+Fascinating—a new study finds that racial gaps in the use of rooftop solar is not due to differences in demand.

Racial patterns in consumer demand cannot explain the gaps in installation we observe: indeed, Americans of color are as or more pro-solar than White Americans. This is a simple finding but an important one, as it shifts the responsibility for racial solar inequality away from Americans of color and toward the supply side of the market.

+Damian Carrington has a fine essay in the Guardian about the flawed economic models that continue to mislead policy makers the world around. Those models focus on the average damage to GDP (itself a flawed number) and don’t account for the damage that increasingly comes from weather extremes.

Tipping points, such as the collapse of critical Atlantic currents or the Greenland ice sheet, would have global consequences for society. Some are thought to be at, or very close to, their tipping points but the timing is difficult to predict. Combined extreme weather disasters could wipe out national economies, the researchers, from the University of Exeter and financial thinktank Carbon Tracker Initiative, said.

Their report concludes governments, regulators and financial managers must pay far more attention to these high impact but lower likelihood risks, because avoiding irreversible outcomes by cutting carbon emissions is far cheaper than trying to cope with them.

“We’re not dealing with manageable economic adjustments,” said Dr Jesse Abrams, at the University of Exeter. “The climate scientists we surveyed were unambiguous: current economic models can’t capture what matters most – the cascading failures and compounding shocks that define climate risk in a warmer world – and could undermine the very foundations of economic growth.”

“For financial institutions and policymakers, it’s a fundamental misreading of the risks we face,” he said. “We are thinking about something like a 2008 [crash], but one we can’t recover from as well. Once we have ecosystem breakdown or climate breakdown, we can’t bail out the Earth like we did the banks.”

Mark Campanale, CEO of Carbon Tracker, said: “The net result of flawed economic advice is widespread complacency amongst investors and policymakers. There’s a tendency in certain government departments to trivialise the impacts of climate on the economy so as to avoid making difficult choices today. This is a big problem – the consequences of delay are catastrophic.”

Hetal Patel, at Phoenix Group, which manages about £300bn of long-term investments for its customers, said: “Underestimating physical risk doesn’t just distort investment decisions, it underplays the real‑world consequences that will ultimately affect society as a whole.”

+Roger Hallam, one of the founders of Extinction Rebellion in the UK, has a new book called Suicide: The Political and Legal Implications of Creating Endless Mass Death. Hallam, a veteran campaigner, spent much of last year in a British jail on dumb charges of conspiring to block traffic, after a dumb trial in front of a dumb judge. Happily he is now out, and back on the stump. Here’s a little taste:

The historian Arnold Toynbee once said “Civilizations are not murdered; they commit suicide.” That’s where we are now. This system - this neoliberal, capitalist machine - isn’t just extracting resources and exploiting the poor, as previous systems have done. It’s actively destroying the future of everyone, including the rich and powerful.

It’s a mass death project we need to stop.

The prisons we are building are not just physical cells like the one I’m sitting in now. They are mental and moral prisons created by a system that has lost the ability to think clearly, to reason, to act in defence of life itself. And it is this inability to think - the very thing that should define us as rational beings - that lies at the heart of the disaster we are entering.

+From the great Louisiana environmental leader Roishetta Ozane, a short video about the pipeline explosion in the Bayou State last week.

And the hideous Drax company, cutting down American forests to pour carbon into the British air, has a new whistleblower, who according to the Financial Times is suggesting the company has not been forthright about the source of its wood

+Finally, this is not new, but it is new to me, since my grandson is now nearly two and has reached the age where songs are a big part of his life. There is, eternally, Raffi (a devoted environmentalist, by the way), but there’s also Laurie Berkner, and her masterpiece Chipmunk at the Gas Pump, which is, as its title promises, about a chipmunk running a service station who eventually changes his ways. Anyway, if it doesn’t make you dance, nothing will

He was a very good worker
Who was fiercely independent
He made a fine living as a gas station attendant
But Harry loved the Earth
So he called all of his relations
They helped him turned that pump
Into electric charging stations

The past stretch of days—say, since the murder of Renee Good—has been marked by brutality, but also by a dishonesty so deep and stupid that it’s begun to finally turn on the liars. Following the execution of Alex Pretti, for instance, various White House officials were quick to start just plain lying: he was an “assassin” and a “domestic terrorist” who "wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement."

As many videos emerged in the course of the day, those lies were shown for what they were. Pretti was, at worst, trying to help a woman who was being unnecessarily gassed; for his pains he was executed once he’d been disarmed; the only “weapon” he’d “brandished” was a cellphone. Oh, and instead of being a domestic terrorist he was a VA nurse who treated former soldiers with compassion and dignity.

Politicians, it goes without saying, have sometimes engaged in dishonesty, often with hideous consequences. The Gulf of Tonkin “attacks” that gave America an excuse for war in Vietnam were at least in part fabrications; the “weapons of mass destruction” weren’t in Iraq and there was no compelling reason to think they were. Hell, we had a president—Richard Nixon—known as Tricky Dick for the smears and fibs that marked his whole career, from his first congressional race to the last days of Watergate. But the presidents who told those lies generally attempted to manufacture cover stories or cloud them in enough shadows that they might pass for mistakes. By now, however, we’ve reached a point where the president and his party just recite up-is-down lies constantly. Consider this reckoning of his first term:

When The Washington Post Fact Checker team first started cataloguing President Donald Trump’s false or misleading claims, we recorded 492 suspect claims in the first 100 days of his presidency. On Nov. 2 alone, the day before the 2020 vote, Trump made 503 false or misleading claims as he barnstormed across the country in a desperate effort to win reelection. This astonishing jump in falsehoods is the story of Trump’s tumultuous reign.

By the end of his term, Trump had accumulated 30,573 untruths during his presidency — averaging about 21 erroneous claims a day. What is especially striking is how the tsunami of untruths kept rising the longer he served as president and became increasingly unmoored from the truth. Trump averaged about six claims a day in his first year as president, 16 claims day in his second year, 22 claims day in this third year — and 39 claims a day in his final year.

Put another way, it took him 27 months to reach 10,000 claims and an additional 14 months to reach 20,000. He then exceeded the 30,000 mark less than five months later.

The second term, obviously, is far worse than the first. At this point, it would be far easier for the Post to assign a reporter to list the true things the president says—a list as short as his…temper. (And of course the second-term Post wouldn’t do this, since its owner has castrated one of America’s great papers in an effort to curry favor with the fibber-in-chief). Every lie he tells is then repeated by his satraps in the administration and Congress—the closest they come to shame is when they lie and say that they haven’t heard his latest lies so they don’t have to publicly swallow them. Here at home we’ve gotten so used to this that the lies often barely register—but when Trump went to Davos and gave a speech literally filled with whoppers, European leaders were astonished. He was telling them things that they knew to be absurd—that China has no wind farms, say—and expecting them to go along.

Where the GOP learned to lie as a matter of course is an interesting question, and I’m afraid I’ve had a front row seat. I think it’s the climate fight, more than anything else, that taught them to regard reality as optional. And I think this because I remember the start of it all. When Jim Hansen first testified before the Senate that global warming was real, it caused a society-wide stir; running for the White House, the sitting vice-president George Herbert Walker Bush said he would combat the greenhouse effect with “the White House effect.” He made no attempt to deny it, or pretend it wasn’t a problem; it was reality, he wanted to lead the world, he had to at least pretend to deal with it.

And of course he could have—he could have resurrected Jimmy Carter’s plans (only eight years old) for a rapid solar research and development program, for instance. He seemed like he might; during the campaign he promised to convene a "global conference on the environment at the White House" during his first year in office. That didn’t happen, and it’s fairly easy to figure out why.

At about this same time—1989-1990—the fossil fuel industry was making a fateful decision. They were well aware that global warming was real; as a series of archival documents and whistleblowers have now laid out in excruciating detail, the big oil companies had conducted their own research programs, and reached conclusions just like Hansen’s. (Indeed, Exxon’s internal estimates of how hot the world would be by 2020 turned out to be even more accurate than NASA’s). We know that the executives of these companies believed their scientists—Exxon, for instance, began building drilling rigs higher to compensate for the rise in sea level they knew was coming, and plotting which corners of the Arctic to lease for drilling once it had inevitably melted.

But they decided, across the industry, that the price of telling the truth would be too high. Inevitably it would mean having to leave at least some of their reserves of coal, gas, and oil in the ground, and those reserves were valued in the tens of trillions of dollars. And so they started forming the coalitions and councils, hiring the veterans of the fights over tobacco and asbestos and even DDT—they started lying.

Their lies were, at first, made concessions to some notion of plausibility. The science was “uncertain.” It was mostly China’s fault. Climate always fluctuates. Computer models are “unreliable.” And so on—these were never good-faith objections, they were always the arguments from selfishness. And as time went on they became more and more outlandish. Before the 1990s were over, the CEO of Exxon was telling a key crowd of Chinese leaders that the earth was cooling and that it would make no difference if we waited a quarter century to start phasing out fossil fuels. Again, his scientists had assured him that this was nonsense years before.

It took a while for this to filter down through the entire GOP ecosystem. George W. Bush actually ran for president in 2000 promising to officially establish that carbon dioxide was a pollutant and to regulate its emissions. Shortly after taking office, however, his vice-president—oil-patch CEO Dick Cheney—held a series of private meetings with his industry brethren, and before long W announced that he had made a mistake and that co2 was not in fact a problem.

That was the signal for the rest of the Republican party—save for a few iconoclasts like John McCain—to fall in line, and by the time he ran for president even McCain had pretty much given up talking about global warming. The biggest donors by far to GOP campaign funds were the Koch brothers and the vast network they had assembled of rightwing billionaires—and the Koch brothers were the biggest oil and gas barons in America, owners of an unrivaled fleet of pipelines and refineries. The efforts of this group of oil-adjacent cronies became ever more extreme—eventually they were funding groups to put up billboards equating climate scientists with Charles Manson.

And eventually, inevitably, it produced a president who felt no compunction about just saying that climate change wasn’t real, and using all the power he could muster to kill off both the scientific effort that had alerted us to the crisis, and the policy effort to do something about it. His crew assisted in this cover-up in all the usual ways—we learned this week, for instance, that a federal judge had ruled that the Department of Energy’s effort to produce a report pooh-poohing climate danger had violated all manner of federal law.

Judge William Young of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts said the Energy Department did not deny that it had failed to hold open meetings or assemble a balance of viewpoints, as the law requires, when it created the panel, known as the Climate Working Group.

“These violations are now established as a matter of law,” wrote Judge Young, who was nominated to the bench by Ronald Reagan. He said the Climate Working Group was, in fact, a federal advisory committee designed to inform policy, and not, as the Energy Department claimed, merely “assembled to exchange facts or information.”

What makes this campaign of deception all the more remarkable is that it’s happened even as the actual facts of global warming have become painfully clear. Back in 1988 it was still pretty much theory; now it’s flood and fire, storm and sea level rise. We live on a planet losing the ice at its poles, and the vast coral reefs in between, where tens of millions of humans are already on the move because their homes can no longer support them. It’s also remarkable because in 1988 the solutions were hard—solar power was still the most expensive energy on earth. Now it’s the cheapest. Most of the world has recognized these truths, coming together if fitfully to try and least talk about it. But whenever America is in the hands of Republicans it just walks away.

Perhaps, given this long history, I can offer a few hard-earned ideas about how to try and deal with Trump’s many assaults on the truth. They won’t do all that we might hope, but they’re nonetheless important.

1. Don’t give up.

   Telling the the truth repeatedly actually can work. Because more than 80 percent of Americans saw the video of Alex Pretti’s execution, the lies backfired. And at least in part because 95 percent of Americans live in counties that have had a federally declared disaster since 2011, it’s hard to convince most people that there’s not something afoot. Indeed, polling demonstrates that public concern and understanding of climate change has held relatively stable for the last thirty years, with about two-thirds of Americans acknowledging that we’ve got trouble. And since it’s clear that about one-third of America is beyond the reach of fact or feeling, that’s not bad.

2. More than ever we need to support independent media.

   Throughout Trump’s second term, it’s been as much Substackers, Youtubers, and others of this breed who’ve been keeping things straight as it has the ‘legacy media.’ (As one small example, check out this epic—in both content and length—rant about renewable energy’s benefits that appeared on YouTube over the weekend). That legacy media is increasingly craven and corrupted (see, for instance, CBS News), or just simply out of business—we now have big cities in America without daily newspapers. The administration clearly recognizes this trend—that’s why they’re trying to prosecute Don Lemon, Georgia Fort, and others covering the Minnesota debacle. Many of these independent journalists have a point of view—I certainly do. And I can tell you that, though I continue to work for and love brave institutions like the New Yorker, I’m also very grateful for things like Substack that are increasingly taking up the slack. (Tips on how to support Lemon and Fort here)

3. Even on days when one despairs (and that’s an awful lot of days) it’s good to remind oneself that the truth has real value in and of itself. I’ve written more words than anyone else on the climate crisis—one motivation was to try and spur action, but another was simply to record and spread this news. It always has seemed to me that the worst fate would be to walk over this cliff without knowing it was there. Dignity demands understanding.

I have no idea if I’ll live to see the day when the truth regains a strong footing in our culture, but I do have a certain amount of faith it will happen eventually, if only because reality reality ultimately trumps (not Trumps) political reality. Physics and chemistry are functional truth, despite their liberal bias. I remember the week after Hurricane Sandy hit New York shutting down the financial district, and the cover of Business Week magazine was simply a big block of text: “It’s Global Warming Stupid.” Eventually that message will get through; our job is to see if we can make that happen before the damage is any worse than it has to be.

Oh, and word on the street is that ICE is going after Springfield Ohio this week—home of the biggest lie of the last election campaign. Haitians are not eating cats and dogs. ICE is killing good people. The last three years are the hottest on record. Pass it on.

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In other climate and energy news:

+Somewhat remarkably, New York’s new congestion pricing law is speeding up travel not just in downtown Manhattan where the law applies, but throughout the metropolitan area, right down to the side streets of Jersey suburbs. As the aptly named David Zipper reports

As they expected, the researchers determined that the $9 charge has sped up vehicle journeys into Manhattan, nudging some people who would otherwise drive at peak times to instead ride transit, drive earlier or later, or forgo the trip entirely. Because traffic thinned, those still opting to enter Manhattan by car saved roughly 83,000 hours per week, averaging around three minutes per journey, according to the NBER paper.

But drivers who never ventured into the toll zone also saved time: As a group, this cohort, including those traveling within Bergen County or from the Bronx to Brooklyn, racked up savings exceeding 461,000 hours per week. An average journey became just eight seconds faster, but because there were over 100 times more of them than Manhattan-bound trips, their aggregated savings were more than five times greater.

+Canada’s Mark Carney, emerging as an intellectual leader of the free world, followed his deal with China to allow EVs into Canada with plans for trade talks with India, which the veteran energy reporter Mitchell Beer described as “the other electrostate.”

Now India is “electrifying faster and using fewer fossil fuels per capita than China did when it was at similar levels of economic development,” Bloomberg says, citing analysis by the UK’s Ember energy think tank. “It’s a sign that clean electricity could be the most direct way to boost growth for other developing economies, too.”

Canada’s decision to encourage EVs, even Chinese ones, has of course drawn Trump’s fury, but there were more signs last week that our president’s attempt to stall the electric vehicle revolution is only working in the US. Sales are up sharply across not only Europe, but also Turkey, Brazil, Mexico. Arit Naranjan reports that

For decades, climate progress has largely come from cleaning up the power sector. Burn gas instead of coal, or replace power plants with wind turbines or solar panels, and you can slash the amount of planet-heating gas spewed into the atmosphere for little cost.

Now, early signs suggest transportation may be on the brink of delivering similar wins. EVs have quickly gained ground in markets outside Europe and North America, avoiding a rise in fuel-burning vehicles and “leapfrogging” the development path that richer countries have taken in transport.

“Five years ago you might have thought [transportation] is really going to be a bottleneck [for climate progress],” says William Lamb, a scientist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. “But now with the widescale adoption of EVs, it’s looking a little bit easier.”

Even in the U.S. the wall looks a little less impregnable all the time. Here’s a review of a Chinese EV in that radical rag the Wall Street Journal, from a writer who managed to borrow one for a few weeks and drive it in suburban Jersey (where the roads are clearer thanks to congestion pricing, see above). As the author Joanna Stern says,

My dearest Xiaomi SU7 Max,

It’s been about a month since we were last together. Now, every time I climb back into my Ford Mustang Mach-E, I can’t stop thinking about you—your long range, your modular interior, your absurdly large infotainment screen.

At night, I miss your adjustable color lighting. On weekends, the kids talk about your wireless karaoke mics, walkie-talkies and yes, that back-seat minifridge.

Please come back to America…for me.

She raves on for many paragraphs, and quotes Ford’s CEO Jim Farley as saying “There’s no real competition from Tesla, GM or Ford with what we’ve seen from China.” Ford is trying to build a cheap EV of its own, retooling a production line to produce an electric pickup for about $30,000. But Stern predicts this technology will reach America when Xiomi or BYD or Geely build a plant here, something that even Trump has said he will welcome. Here’s how she ends her piece

“You absolutely will get a car like the Xiaomi SU7 here—no question,” Michael Dunne, chief executive of auto-consulting firm Dunne Insights, told me.

“Chinese manufacturers are prepared and poised to pounce as soon as the door opens—and that door opens not through imports, but through manufacturing here,” he said, adding that it could happen in the next two years. Geely has even said as much, though Xiaomi said it has no current U.S. plans.

I will wait for you, Xiaomi. We shall be together again one day.

I don’t think this kind of demand can be suppressed forever. As one straw in the wind, super-centrist economics pundit Noah Smith wrote a long column over the weekend saying the time had come to let the cars into the U.S.

First of all, if the U.S. keeps driving combustion cars while the rest of the world switches to EVs, American automotive technology will be orphaned from the rest of the world. Currently, GM and Ford both make almost a fifth of their revenue from overseas sales; if they only make gasoline cars that the world has no interest in buying, those export markets will be cut off, and the U.S. companies will be confined to their home market. This is known as “Galapagos syndrome”, because it’s as if the U.S. car industry lived on an isolated island.

Second of all, the U.S.’ turn away from EVs will make it a lot harder for the country to develop an indigenous Electric Tech Stack. Batteries and electric motors are the key to lots of future technologies, including all-important military hardware like drones. Currently, the U.S. can’t build many batteries or motors; if this situation continues, American military power will wither.

On top of that, lots of physical technologies — transportation, electronics, robots, and others — are converging on a standardized package of components that includes batteries and electric motors. A country that has no electric supply chain will lose an increasing number of manufacturing industries as more and more devices switch to the Electric Tech Stack. By providing the single biggest source of demand for batteries and electric motors, EVs allow producers of those components to attain large scale, thus driving down costs for a bunch of other manufacturing industries.

Joe Biden did his best to protect American automakers—and more importantly union jobs—by providing the money for our own rapid transition to EVs. But the business community really wanted more tax cuts instead, and the auto industry chieftains were happy to stand in the Oval Office as Trump officially rolled back automobile mileage standards. For their pains they also got to listen to him describe how Somali immigrants have “destroyed our country.” And they just stood there smiling, a phalanx of stupid greed.

+Funny little piece from Zach Fox Loehle about renewable energy’s biggest drawback: no explosions

Among the many flaws of renewable energy (such as the way solar panels look from my mountain house and wind turbines from my beach house), there is one that doesn’t get enough attention: its utter lack of major explosions. Those explosions are the thing that makes energy important and dangerous and mildly erotic. Simply put, renewables don’t go boom.

+Important report from Jessye Waxman and Ben Cushing at the Sierra Club on how public pension funds should respond to the climate emergency.

Only eight of the 30 funds evaluated earned a “strong” or “developing” score for their climate-solutions investing strategy, and even the more advanced systems often lack measurable targets or comprehensive definitions. Most funds still rely on portfolio-emissions metrics rather than approaches that drive real-economy decarbonization, and transparency into climate-solutions holdings remains limited. These findings highlight the gap between growing recognition of climate risks and the decisive investment strategies needed to address them.

+Longtime readers know that the author of this newsletter has a fatal weakness for blimps. Here’s a piece about a Canadian entrepreneur combining airships and solar power—SolarShips he calls his company—to ferry freight to remote parts of Africa. Andrew Seale writes

Solar Ship’s aircraft are currently in test mode. To date, the company has completed test flights of 14 different airships, narrowing them down to two core designs that are now being scaled up. All of them are designed to unlock access to the world’s most extreme environments – from delivering cargo and aid to transporting critical minerals from remote, politically volatile environments.

The next step, Mr. Godsall says, is regulatory approval and a series of demonstration missions intended to prove that solar airships can operate reliably at scale.

The first is an ambitious round-the-world flight planned for 2027, using the Tsorocopter – a solar-powered airship designed to carry up to 12 tonnes at low speed with a high degree of control. If successful, Solar Ship plans to begin operating the aircraft in Africa later that year.

“Africa’s our first target,” he says. “Everything we do there, we can put into a virtual aerospace environment and switch it to Amazon, the Arctic, Rockies, Australia, Indonesia – we’re building up a capability to operate in multiple places.”

I’m afraid that if you keep reading The Crucial Years, you will be subjected to reports on how these test flights go.

+In the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Mariana Walter et al write that collaboration with local social movements makes conservation work far more effective—even in the face of the violent repression such efforts often confront.

Our analysis shows that by contesting environmentally harmful activities in their territories—many of which are highly biodiverse—socio-environmental mobilizations make substantial contributions to biodiversity conservation. Yet, socio-environmental mobilizations are often portrayed by states and corporations as subversive or obstructive actors

+The reason that the fight against fossil fuel is so intense, so difficult—and so winnable—is that so few players are involved. As Liam Gilliver reports

An increasingly concentrated group of fossil fuel giants is dominating global emissions and “actively sabotaging” climate action to weaken government ambition.

New analysis from Carbon Majors’ dataset found that just 32 companies were responsible for 50 per cent of the world’s CO2 emissions in 2024, down from 36 a year earlier.

Carbon Majors found that 17 of the top 20 emitters in 2024 were firms controlled by nations that went on to block this roadmap. This includes Saudi Arabia, Russia, China, India, Iraq, Iran, and Qatar.

“Each year, global emissions become increasingly concentrated among a shrinking group of high-emitting producers, while overall production continues to grow,” says Emmet Connaire, a senior analyst at Influence Map, which hosts the Carbon Majors platform.

“Simultaneously, these heavy emitters continue to use lobbying to obstruct a transition that the scientific community has known for decades is essential.”

+Good news from southeastern Montana, where the Cheyenne tribe is using a combination of buffalo restoration and solar panels to reclaim important forms of sovereignty on their land. Illana Newman has a firsthand account:

Brandon Small’s pickup squeezes down a narrow dirt road lined with trees and bushes as we drive down the hillside towards the buffalo. We’re on the Northern Cheyenne Reservation in southeastern Montana, a landscape full of yellow grasses and hillsides lined with small pine trees. Small runs the buffalo restoration program here on the Northern Cheyenne Reservation.

Here on the reservation, where food and energy sovereignty are inextricably linked, a new solar installation is helping the tribe become more self-sufficient.

The buffalo pasture we’re traversing is huge—15,244 acres, to be exact—and Small said they’re working on expanding even further. Small drove us out here from nearby Lame Deer, Montana, to check on the water infrastructure and give us a tour of the buffalo habitat and the brand new solar installation that will allow them to grow their buffalo operation.

The buffalo enclosure has no transmission lines crossing it, meaning there’s no way to get electricity out to the land unless the electricity is completely off the grid.

Last year, in partnership with Indigenized Energy, a native led nonprofit focused on energy sovereignty, the Northern Cheyenne buffalo program received a solar array that will allow Small to expand the herd and processing capacity of the facility. The 36kW solar array and 57.6kW battery was funded by the Honnold Foundation and Empowered By Light and constructed by Freedom Forever and Jinko Solar in collaboration with Indigenized Energy.

Cody Two Bears, the founder of Indigenized Energy, sees energy sovereignty as inextricable from food sovereignty. “ We need energy sovereignty to flourish because that’s what’s gonna support all the other initiatives that are so important to tribal people moving forward,” Two Bears said in a Daily Yonder interview.

Note just in passing the Honnold Foundation as one of the players here. If you wonder why Alex was climbing a 101-story skyscraper in Taipei not long ago, there’s part of your answer.

+If you’re not yet reading Julian Brave Noisecat you should be. A canny veteran of the climate fight, he’s also a superb reporter and writer, as this essay about a Chilcotin River canyon makes clear.

I know Farwell Canyon is the best fishing spot, because the first time I fished there it was just the third time I stuck a dipnet in a river in my entire life. Running my net along slimy rocks, through whirlpools, and off the calm ends of back eddies where salmon choose to swim because they need breaks and prefer the path of least resistance, I caught dozens. Alongside my friend Chief Willie Sellars of the Williams Lake First Nation, his dad Darrel, and Darrel’s buddy who lives in the cabin behind Darrel’s house on the SugarCane Indian Reserve, we must have hauled at least 100 sockeye and half a dozen chinooks out of Farwell Canyon that day. Maybe even more.

The hardest part? Getting those slimy swimmers into trash-bag-lined burlap sacks and hauling them up a canyon trail cut through sagebrush in sprints of 20 fish per trip, a weight of about 100 pounds. Then into the big ice chest in the back of the truck. The view from the top of the trail is breathtaking. Dune-drifted badlands punctuated by pinnacles that tower over our pale blue river like a great natural cathedral. With one of my burlap sacks emptied of fish but still full of slime, I pause to take in the beauty of Farwell Canyon, of our way of life, of Creation.

That afternoon, Willie, Darrel, Darrel’s buddy, and I rolled through the Williams Lake First Nation handing out fish. A dozen salmon into this smoke house, a dozen into the next, another dozen for drying, a dozen for a freezer here, another dozen over there. Fillets, fish eggs, fish heads, red fish, oily fish, fish appreciated. I don’t know how many people we fed. But it must have been hundreds. One fish makes at least half a dozen generous portions. Many more, if it’s one of those chinooks real fishermen call “hogs,” because king salmon are known to rival the heft of a pig. I’ve seen photographic evidence. Real fishermen love photographic evidence.

+Kate Yoder, in Grist, has the lowdown on the Interior Department’s new mascot, an animated lump of coal known as…Coalie. Here he is in action with Interior Chief Doug Burgum, who introduced him with the powerful slogan “Mine, Baby, Mine!”

Someday we will look back on all of this and laugh? Or cry? Or both?

+According to Brian Roewe, it looks like New York’s new Catholic archbishop is a climate hawk!

Ronald Hicks led the Joliet, Illinois, suburban diocese outside Chicago for the last five years. There he oversaw a number of efforts to embed ecological concern deeper into Catholic life, including joining the Vatican’s premier initiative to live out Francis’ call to care for God’s creation.

That background has New York Catholics who are involved in Laudato Si’ ministries hopeful their new archbishop will not only support their work but help to root it even deeper into one of the country’s largest dioceses that counts 2.5 million Catholics and nearly 300 parishes.

“We’re excited that he’s coming,” said Nancy Lorence, founding member of the Metro New York Catholic Climate Movement, a chapter of the global Laudato Si’ Movement. “We’re hopeful that we’ll be able to do more and that there will be more of a promotion of Laudato Si’ in the parishes.”

+Francesca Paris reports on the ways that some cold-weather states are lowering the price of heat pumps.

This winter Massachusetts and Minnesota are requiring most of the major utilities in those states to offer discounted rates to people heating with electricity; Colorado is on the way to doing the same. These are states where lawmakers, mostly Democrats, have set targets to reduce planet-warming emissions, and the new rates are supposed to help them do that — especially at a time when rising electricity rates are in conflict with the goal of moving away from fossil fuels. But they’re also an attempt to fairly distribute the costs of keeping up the grid.

The discounts range from roughly 4 to 7 cents per kilowatt-hour and apply to all electricity used in the winter. (The typical household uses just shy of 1,000 kilowatt-hours per month, though heating uses more. So a 7 cent discount could amount to hundreds of dollars over the winter.)

A discount can make a heat pump go from a bad investment to a good idea.

Under the existing gas and electric rates set by National Grid, one of Massachusetts’ largest utilities, only around 40 percent of all households would save money by switching to a heat pump. Some people could lose hundreds of dollars each month, because their electric bill would go up more than their gas bill would fall.

But with National Grid’s new discounted rate, which applies from November through April, the share who would save would shoot up to nearly two-thirds.

+Your regular update on the state of balcony or plug-in solar: in the wake of everyone’s advocacy post Sun Day, we’re now at almost two dozen states with legislation pending to legalize this simplest form of solar power. As Todd Woody explains, a breakthrough in just one or two big states would be enough to firmly establish a market and quickly bring the price down.

“The impact of California passing legislation would be huge and will get manufacturers to come into the market,” said Kevin Chou, cofounder and executive director of Bright Saver, a Bay Area nonprofit that sells do-it-yourself plug-in solar systems and has pushed to legalize the technology.

+In Science, Joshua Lappen and Emily Grubert describe one of the (welcome!) problems that the energy transition may entail: it seems likely that as fossil fuel goes out of style we’ll start encountering systems that struggle to maintain the remnants of the old system

The fossil-fueled systems that currently supply about 80% of global energy consumption are complex, high-hazard networks of networks. These systems have developed through decades-long processes of accretion and adjustment, gradually producing complex interdependencies that often developed opportunistically and with limited coordination or documentation. The resultant networks of networks rely on their near-universal coverage and the foundational expectation of long-term demand growth to support economies of scale. As demand for fossil fuels stagnates or declines, these economies of scale will invert, leaving shrinking user bases to carry growing liabilities, and infrastructure designed for expansion to instead weather contraction.

If America’s Department of Energy wasn’t officially committed to the idea that “there is no energy transition” we could begin, you know, planning.

+Whistleblower ad executives are warning that the industry is now fueling both hatred and high temperatures. TJ Jordan writes

A group of senior advertising executives has released an anonymous memo warning that “a vacuum of responsible leadership” means the ad industry is morally failing itself and society.

“We know our industry is funding hate, legitimising environmental destructive companies, and working at the frontline of a US-led rollback on diversity, equity and inclusion” (known as DEI), they said in the memo, while “paying little more than lip service to solving critical issues” that include “spreading hateful content” and “helping polluting industries such as oil and gas rebuff public scrutiny.”

Many of the advertising and public relations industry’s headquarters and biggest clients are located in the United States.

The insiders called for an “honest conversation with industry’s power holders” such as agency leaders, the industry press, and advertising trade bodies, which they say are “failing to make a material stand on any of the issues that would give our industry a moral justification for existing alongside a commercial one.”

Harriet Kingaby, co-chair of the industry group Conscious Advertising Network, said that the memo is “a warning shot to both the C-Suite and investors in the advertising industry as well as the brands that use them.

+Movement thoughts. As the people of Minneapolis chart new paths in nonviolent resistance, Paul Cohen and former Weatherman leader Mark Rudd note that the award-winning film One Battle After Another runs some risk of glamorizing political violence

When the film played in theaters, audiences cheered for those fighting the forces trampling human dignity. But emulating the movie’s violent resisters would be a trap, confirming the justifications President Trump and his enablers give for brutalizing ordinary Americans and shredding the law.

In the movie, Leonardo DiCaprio’s lead character is part The Dude (complete with ratty bathrobe), and part follower of the 1960’s-era radical group, the Weathermen. But one of us, Mark, cofounded the Weathermen after helping lead successful student protests at Columbia—and now sees the group’s embrace of violence as a destructive trap.

+Some good news to end on. In Puerto Rico, where the grid fails each time a storm comes, often with life-altering consequences, solar and batteries are combining to produce an ever-growing virtual power plant. As Victoria Foote describes:

Today, solar panels are installed on the rooftops of some 175,000 households; of those, approximately 160,000 also have storage. The pilot program has since become a pillar of the island’s energy system and is the first operational virtual power plant (VPP) in Latin America and the Caribbean, helping to deliver electricity to three million residents.

And here’s a nifty story from Norway, where I’ve ridden the converted electric ferries that carry commuters across Oslo’s harbor. Now comes word that an electric hydrofoil has completed the longest open-sea journey, reaching Oslo from the west coast of Sweden across 160 miles of bouncy sea.

Already proven in Stockholm’s public transport system, Candela P-12 holds the record as the fastest electric passenger vessel in operation, with a service speed of 25 knots, and has exceeded 30 knots during trials, with a range of up to 40 nautical miles at cruising speed on a single charge.

The mission was to reach Oslo, where several electric high-speed ferries are already in service. The contrast between these conventional electric vessels and Candela P-12 is striking. Oslo’s fastest electric passenger ferry, m/s Baronen, operates a fixed 10-nautical-mile route and relies on swapping a deck-mounted battery container with several megawatt-hours of capacity at the end of each trip. The automated battery-swapping system alone has cost hundreds of millions of Norwegian kroner. While several swap stations have been completed, the system has faced delays and cost overruns, and deployment of additional stations has been delayed—limiting route flexibility.

By contrast, Candela P-12’s efficiency allows it to charge from standard, easily deployable automotive DC fast chargers. During the journey to Oslo, the vessel charged using a portable 360 kW Skagerak Energi Move DC charger connected to a mobile battery system, towed behind a Ford F-150 Lightning electric pickup.

You really should watch the video!

Any resistance needs to celebrate its victories, and the weekend’s retreat by the administration is a big one: should the forces of decency ever regain the upper hand in DC, we need a monument to the people of Minneapolis on the National Mall, and busts of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in the capitol.

And it’s not just the Trump administration that those brave people faced down, it’s the pundit class too, who insisted over and over that progressives should avoid talking about immigration because it wasn’t politically popular. The other subject we’ve been told to sideline is “climate change,” for fear of offending voters more interested in “affordability.” (Former energy secretary Jennifer Granholm told an industry audience Monday that “on Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs, climate does not rise as much as how much I'm paying for my electricity bill,” which is one of those things that sounds clever until you meet someone who lost their home to a wildfire.)

I actually have no problem with the advice to focus on electric bills—as I wrote a couple of weeks ago, I think affordability, especially of electricity, is an issue that helps both elect Democrats and reduce carbon emissions, since anyone interested in the cost of power is going to be building sun and wind. But I also don’t think that talking about global warming is a mistake—most Americans, polls show, understand the nature of the crisis, and want action to stem it. It isn’t the single most salient issue because all of us live in this particular moment (and in this particular moment the fact that federal agents are executing citizens who dare to take cellphone pictures of them is definitely the most salient issue) but it is nonetheless a net plus for politicians, especially in blue states.

As we were reminded this morning, when Drew Warshaw, a candidate for New York state comptroller with a long record of building clean energy in the private sector, released a true bombshell report. In it he called for the state to divest its vast pension funds from fossil fuels—and provided the data to show that the failure of the incumbent to do that over the last two decades had cost taxpayers fifteen billion dollars in foregone returns. Billion with a b. That’s $750 for every woman, man, and child in the Empire State, all because the longstanding (as in, way too long) state treasurer, Thomas DiNapoli, has ignored the counsel of one expert after another and kept the state invested in Big Oil. (Oh, and since cowardice often consorts with incompetence, another report also finds that DiNapoli has cost the state more than $50 billion by underperforming index funds and giving huge contracts to various advisors).

A bit of backstory here. Fifteen years ago, some of us launched a fossil fuel divestment campaign. At the beginning the argument was mostly moral: it was wrong to try and make a profit off the end of the world, and if we could convince institutions to sell that stock it would tarnish Big Fossil’s social license.

But it didn’t take long for another argument to emerge: the pension funds, college endowments and others who joined the movement reported that they were making money as a result, and for a very simple reason: anything that they put the money into was generating better returns than coal, gas, and oil. And that in turn was for an even simpler reason: fossil fuel is a faltering industry, because an alternative—the trinity of sun, wind, and batteries—now produces the same product, just cleaner and cheaper. That’s why 95 percent of new generating capacity around the world last year came from renewables; fossil fuel only has a good year any more if something goes very wrong (the invasion of Ukraine, say).

Anyway, this became the largest anti-corporate effort of its kind in history, with funds representing $41 trillion in investments joining in. Its had powerful effects—when Peabody Coal filed for bankruptcy, for instance, its legal documents listed divestment as a reason. But it also protected the fiscal integrity of the funds that did the right thing—they had more money to pay pensions, provide scholarships, or whatever else. That’s why pension funds in states and entire countries joined in.

Which brings us back to New York. Advocates have put in tens of thousands of person-hours explaining to DiNapoli that he should join pension funds in dozens of other places in divesting from fossil fuels, and he has dragged his feet at every turn, with half-measures, occasional strongly-worded letters, and the rest: he is the Chuck Schumer of finance. As Warshaw’s report puts it

When an investment, and in this case a whole sector of investments, fails to perform over a long period of time and show no realistic signs of turning around, investment managers need to act. Each market cycle over the last two decades has left in its wake less value for fossil fuel companies and less value for fossil fuel investors. This value erosion and strong headwind threats are at the heart of the divestment argument. Why continue to invest in an industry that is now only 2.8% of the market with no plausible strategy to turn things around and a corporate culture that simply that denies the problem even exists? Investment managers need to focus their time on maximizing risk-adjusted returns, not engaging in politically- driven wishful thinking for an industry in permanent decline.

DiNapoli is not alone in his cowardice, of course. For a brief moment—when they were scared by the emergence of Greta’s worldwide movement before the pandemic—lots of financial leaders said they were going to take steps to address climate change. Blackrock, for instance, the biggest investor in the world, which bas the power should it choose to use it, to make vast change fast. (Blackrock’s wealth is roughly twice the continent of Africa’s). Here’s what Larry Fink, CEO of Blackrock, said in 2020:

Climate change has become a defining factor in companies’ long-term prospects. Last September, when millions of people took to the streets to demand action on climate change, many of them emphasized the significant and lasting impact that it will have on economic growth and prosperity – a risk that markets to date have been slower to reflect. But awareness is rapidly changing, and I believe we are on the edge of a fundamental reshaping of finance.

The evidence on climate risk is compelling investors to reassess core assumptions about modern finance. Research from a wide range of organizations – including the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the BlackRock Investment Institute, and many others, including new studies from McKinsey on the socioeconomic implications of physical climate risk – is deepening our understanding of how climate risk will impact both our physical world and the global system that finances economic growth.

Will cities, for example, be able to afford their infrastructure needs as climate risk reshapes the market for municipal bonds? What will happen to the 30-year mortgage – a key building block of finance – if lenders can’t estimate the impact of climate risk over such a long timeline, and if there is no viable market for flood or fire insurance in impacted areas? What happens to inflation, and in turn interest rates, if the cost of food climbs from drought and flooding? How can we model economic growth if emerging markets see their productivity decline due to extreme heat and other climate impacts?

Investors are increasingly reckoning with these questions and recognizing that climate risk is investment risk

But then what happened? Big Oil pushed back, in the form of red state treasurers promising to pull their money from Blackrock. Suddenly Fink turned tail and ran. By now he’s part of Trump’s inner circle. As Pilita Clark explained in that radical journal the Financial Times over the weekend, DiNapoli and Fink’s failure of courage is endemic across too much of the American elite landscape.

This failure is not due to a shortage of scientific understanding or technological breakthroughs. It is because we lack the political changes needed to put financial systems and economies on to paths that avoid burning fossil fuels. Achieving those changes is inordinately difficult.

Public support from large businesses is important. Ultimately, staying quiet at a time like this is self-defeating. It undermines the global institutions needed to address a growing global climate problem that poses serious financial threats.

David Gelles, in the Times, has another sad account of this collective failure of nerve on Wall Street, and it’s well worth reading. As he writes,

Republican legislatures around the country introduced more than 100 bills to penalize financial companies that supported E.S.G. practices. Republican state treasurers around the country began pulling money out.

This is the company DiNapoli keeps, and the people he apparently listens to—again, he’s a lot more like Chuck Schumer than he should be. So it’s very good news that insurgent candidate Warshaw is talking about bringing New York State’s financial might to bear—in part because it amplifies the message being sent by Mark Levine, new comptroller of the city of New York. Levine’s predecessor Brad Lander, who already led the divestment from fossil fuel companies, late in his tenure called for the city to ditch Blackrock, and Levine seems to be interested in following through.

Together, the pension funds of New York City and New York state control far more resources than the funds of the various red states combined. If they manage to put effective pressure on the oil industry and the finance industry, it will have enormous impact—it will aid enormously in the climate fight and it will undercut Trump. And it will encourage other blue state leaders to do likewise: always remember, most of the nation’s economy is in places that voted against Trump. It’s a weapon that needs to be used.

And New York can do so without putting anyone’s pension at risk—under the Empire State’s laws, the comptroller has to pay pensions in full no matter what happens to his investment portfolio, so there’s no danger Warshaw will do anything except save taxpayers large sums of money. (And Warshaw is not alone; the other Dem in the primary, Raj Goyle, has called for divestment too, though not with the same depth of analysis). This is a no-brainer, except if you’re stuck in your ways.

I helped found an organization devoted to elder action on behalf of climate and democracy; obviously I don’t think age disqualifies one from office. But DiNapoli is 71 and he represents the greatest danger of long tenure in office: a stultification of ideas, an inability to see new facts, a stubborn attachment to old ideas. It’s time for him, finally, to get out of the way, or to be voted out.

The climate fight, even in this country, is very far from over. The basic premise of that battle—that we must move swiftly away from the moral and financial sinkhole of Big Oil—is still clear and powerful.

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+Donald Trump, over and over again, has told European leaders they must stop building windpower. Not working so well. Ten European nations announced yesterday a plan to build a giant “clean energy reservoir” in the North Sea, with enough wind to power 143 million homes. Which is about two-thirds of all the homes in Europe.

The German chancellor, Friedrich Merz, has said he wants the North Sea to become the “largest reservoir of clean energy worldwide”, as he announced plans to accelerate efforts to link up offshore wind power projects with Europe.

The UK and nine other European countries have agreed to accelerate the rollout of offshore windfarms in the 2030s and build a power grid in the North Sea, in a landmark pact to turn the ageing oil basin into a “clean energy reservoir”.

They will build windfarms at sea that directly connect to various countries through high-voltage subsea cables, under plans that are expected to provide 100 gigawatts (GW) of offshore wind power, or enough electricity capacity to power 143m homes.

+The UK joined those other European nations, but it also emerged today that the Keir Starmer government suppressed a report from their scientific authorities about the dangers of climate change.

When the government was forced to release the report after a freedom of information request, it published an abridged version that outlined a “realistic possibility” that the decline of forests and glacier-fed rivers would lead to “global competition for food” beginning in the 2030s.

But a full, internal version of the report, seen by The Times, goes further, suggesting that the degradation of rainforests in the Congo and the drying up of rivers fed by the Himalayas could drive people to flee to Europe, leading to “more polarised and populist politics in the UK” and putting “additional pressure on already strained national infrastructure”.

The internal version also warned that collapsing ecosystems could motivate acts of eco-terrorism in Britain, as well as drawing Nato into conflicts over remaining breadbaskets in Russia and Ukraine.

Described as a “reasonable worst-case scenario”, the report said that many ecosystems around the world were so stressed that they could soon pass a tipping point, after which they would inexorably degrade no matter what humans did to protect them. Forests in Canada and Russia might pass a tipping point by 2030, as might glaciers in the Himalayas that fed rivers on which two billion people depended, the report suggested.

+Meanwhile, a new study in Nature adds to the sense of danger. It argues that we’ve underestimated the rate of permafrost thaw and wildfire, and that we’ve got even less margin than we imagined to hold temperatures in check. To be specific, 25 percent less margin.

Here, we expand a compact Earth system model (OSCAR v3.0) enabling initial estimates of the impacts of abrupt thaw and wildfire, together with gradual thaw, on remaining carbon budgets consistent with the temperature goals of the Paris Agreement. Our model suggests that including permafrost thaw and fire-related carbon emissions reduces the remaining allowable carbon budgets from 2025 onward by 25 % ± 12 % for avoiding 1.5 °C and 17 % ± 7 % for avoiding 2.0 °C, relative to simulations without these processes. Accounting for these additional emissions is critical for setting emissions reduction targets aligned with the Paris Agreement.

+A new study finds that indigenous-owned energy is heavily concentrated in the renewable sector. Mitchell Beer has the story:

Calgary-based Indigenous Energy Monitor (IEM) identified [pdf] 523 projects with some degree of Indigenous ownership across five categories: oil and gas, carbon capture and storage, power and utilities, mining and critical minerals, and chemicals and fuels. Some 452 of the projects were in power and utilities, and 75% of those were renewable energy developments, with energy storage accounting for another 11% and transmission lines 6.6%.

Out of that total, 189 were in operation in 2025, 32 were under construction, 173 were in development, and 58 had been shelved or cancelled. IEM said most of them were half- to majority-owned by Indigenous partners.

The oil and gas sector reported 18 projects in operation, three under construction, seven in development, and five cancelled or shelved. The majority of the projects were pipelines, and most of them featured only minority Indigenous ownership. While the 33 fossil projects involved 89 unique owners, the 452 power and utility projects had 363, suggesting both a wider ownership base for renewables and greater opportunity for successful project developers to branch out and scale.

“Indigenous equity ownership growth is being driven by how projects are conceived, procured, financed, and risk-assessed,” the preliminary report states, with procurement requirements, rising energy demand, Indigenous leadership, and better access to funding among the factors behind the trend. Continuing obstacles include access to capital, capacity constraints, lack of market transparency, and ownership risks.

+Here’s a shocker. According to newly released emails, the “scientific panel” that the Department of Energy convened to cast doubt on climate science was entirely a political hatchet job—oh, and it ignored all the requirements for open meetings. God this is a pitiful administration.

+A new paper in Nature argues for replacing temperature targets like 1.5 C with clean energy targets

We argue that the main focus of climate action in 2026 and beyond should be on accelerating the clean-energy revolution. And the rate at which clean energy displaces fossil fuels in the global economy should become the key measure of climate progress. Here we describe how such progress can be tracked and incentivized using a metric we call the clean-energy shift. Unlike chasing intangible temperature targets, cleaning up the energy sector is a more-focused battle that the world can win.

To fulfil this mandate, the world needs one clear number with which to measure climate progress during a transition that ends the use of fossil fuels. We think the most promising metric is one we term the ‘clean-energy shift’. Building on a concept initially proposed by Bloomberg New Energy Finance founder Michael Liebreich (see go.nature.com/3zr5y1), we define it as the growth rate in clean-energy generation minus the growth rate in total energy demand for a given time interval.

This metric emphasizes that clean-energy supply must expand faster than overall energy demand for decarbonization. When the percentage growth of clean-energy supply exceeds the growth in total energy use, fossil fuels get squeezed out of the system. By contrast, simply measuring clean energy share is insufficient, because fossil fuels might also rise overall to meet extra demand.

But if we’re going to have temperature targets, another new paper argues that they need to be more rigorous, not less. As Inside Climate news explains

Scientists studying climate tipping points say the world should aim to limit warming to about 1 degree Celsius, warning that the 1.5-degree target enshrined in international climate agreements won’t protect coral reefs, polar ice sheets and other vital Earth systems from irreversible change.

“We have absolute justification to push for a lower number, because one degree is a temperature that is safe,” said Melanie McField, director of the nonprofit Healthy Reefs for Healthy People Initiative.

In the last 12,000 years, the time in which human civilizations developed, the global temperature “very rarely, if ever, crossed plus or minus one degree,” she said Monday during a webinar focusing on governance strategies for achieving global climate targets. For coral reefs, the current warming of 1.2 degrees Celsius is already in the red zone, she added.

+Keep building batteries, because a new study finds that power outages do more damage than statistics usually show. As Leslie Kaufman writes,

The report finds that current insurance metrics focus too narrowly on physical property damage while ignoring the “non-linear compounding losses” that occur when the grid stays down, such as food and medicine spoilage, as well as transportation disruptions that can extend well beyond the outage area. Traditional estimating tools like the Value of Lost Load (VoLL) fail to capture the reality of a multi-hour blackout beyond a given time window or narrow geography, the authors say.

This gap may be massive: In the aftermath of Hurricanes Sandy and Harvey, one study found that business interruption losses were 800% to 900% higher than actual property damages. Even if business interruptions added just 30% to 50% to direct totals, the RMI authors noted, it would imply at least an additional $35 billion per year that are not captured in US disaster-loss calculations.

+Africans may actually have installed two and a half times as much solar as official documents show. Patrick Jowett reports:

In the report, AFSIA CEO, John van Zuylen, wrote that the latest data collected changes prior perceptions that Africa was one of the least attractive solar regions and highlights that the continent has a much bigger market share than once thought.

“Africa now appears to be experiencing one of the fastest growths on the globe and therefore becoming a key market to tap into for all types of industry stakeholders,” van Zuylen wrote. “The next few years will show if this growth is only temporary or is based on strong foundations that make solar the unavoidable way forward to electrify the African continent.”

+Chinese long-haul truckers seem to have definitively decided electric is the way to go. As Jo Borrás reports:

In December alone, ~45,300 new [electric trucks] were registered, capturing 54% of the entire new heavy-duty truck market for the month and showing a 198% year-over-year increase YoY and a 62% month-over-month jump from November.

The charging infrastructure to support this scale of electrification is also advancing, with both high-speed charging and battery swap station networks for heavy trucks coming online to address downtime concerns.

China also introduced this week the world’s largest compressed-air energy storage system

The plant, with 2,400 megawatt hours of capacity, can generate 600 megawatts of power and meet the annual demand of 600,000 households, according to a statement from Harbin Electric Corp., which participated in construction of the project.

Such facilities represent the most cost‑effective, long-duration solution to storing energy, according to BloombergNEF. They work by pumping compressed air into underground caverns at night, for release during the day to spin turbines and produce electricity.

China’s energy storage sector has seen explosive growth, driven by the country’s rapid deployment of renewable energy. The government has set a target of over 180 gigawatts of new capacity by 2027, fostering a boom in battery storage and alternative technologies such as compressed air.

Meanwhile, in Europe, new data shows that EV sales have overtaken petrol cars for the first time. Here’s Holly Lempriere:

ACEA figures show Volkswagen continued to claim the largest market share in the EU, accounting for 26.7% of new registrations in December, up from 25.6% a year earlier.

It was followed by Stellantis, Renault, Hyundai, Toyota and BMW.

EV giant Tesla saw its market share drop from 3.5% in December 2024 to 2.2% in December 2025. Over the course of 2025, the brand saw its market share in the EU fall 37.9% from 2024, following controversy around its owner, Elon Musk.

Meanwhile, Chinese EV brand BYD tripled its market share from 0.7% in December 2024 to 1.9% in December 2025.

+Well, here’s a sweet-smelling note on which to end: a new battery technology is emerging that relies on…lavender. As Aman Tripathi reports:

While lavender is globally prized for its fragrance, its agricultural residue—totaling approximately 1,000–1,500 tons annually—has long been an underutilized byproduct.

Scientists have now successfully converted this flower waste into hard carbon (HC) for use as a high-performance battery anode.

The natural microstructures of the plant tissues are preserved during the conversion process, which significantly enhances electrolyte penetration by allowing for faster movement of ions and increases sodium diffusivity to improve the overall speed and efficiency of the battery.

Let us stipulate that President Trump’s spiraling descent into madness is, and should be, our main preoccupation. His attempt to coerce Europe into handing him Greenland in place of a Nobel Prize has, for the moment, been thwarted, but it will be back soon; meanwhile, he and his goons continue trying to goad the good people of Minneapolis into violence that they can use to justify some deeper form of martial law. (This week they’re kidnapping five year olds). So far it’s not working—I’m watching in awe as the residents of the Twin Cities write a new chapter in the long history of peaceful resistance. Seventy years after the Montgomery bus boycott and 95 years after the salt march, they’re showing themselves the (cold-weather) equals of King and Gandhi. How can you help? See below

Anyway I’m spending most of my time on those topics: Third Act is doing all we can think of to oppose the ongoing assault on our democracy. But it’s always worth remembering that in the background the great story of our time—the planet’s steeply rising temperature—grinds on. And so too the one serious counteroffensive: the accelerating turn to clean renewable energy. I’ve long thought that the most important piece in that puzzle would turn out to be India, the largest country on our planet. As I said way back in 2019:

India is the most interesting country right now because, in energy terms, it’s about where China was 15 years ago. The question is whether it’s going to go through its own coal phase or make the leapfrog. I think even two or three years ago I would have said pessimistically that it was going to go through its coal phase head on. But the costs have changed so fast.

I have a feeling I was crossing my fingers when I said that, but as it turns out my intuition was right. A new report this morning from the European think tank Ember attempts to get at precisely my point: can India start to jump past fossil fuels straight to renewables. Almost certainly so!

It indeed shows India—at the same GDP per capita as China in 2011—taking a very different tack in its energy development, with coal use plateauing, and solar power taking off.

There are several reasons for this, but the most important by far is that when China was at a similar stage of development coal was cheap and solar and wind were still expensive. Now that’s flipped—indeed, it’s actually cheaper to build a new solar farm in India than to simply keep buying the coal for an existing coal-fired power plant. Think about that for a minute.

And then think about the fact that India currently spends five percent of its GDP importing fossil fuels—that’s a lot of money. Oh, and you’re deeply exposed to price shocks. Oh, and what if Donald Trump decides he doesn’t like you because you’re not white and cuts off your supply. The sun is not just cheap, it’s dependable.

If this continues—if it accelerates—then India has a real chance to clean up the foul air in its cities. China did, after all—fifteen years ago you couldn’t see across the street in Beijing, and now…you can. Here’s Sam Matey-Coste reporting yesterday, on what he described as a “beautiful winter morning, not a cloud in the bright blue sky”:

China has seen a massive decrease in air pollution since 2013. Deadly particulate matter (PM2.5) pollution has declined by 41% in China as a whole between 2013 and 2022, which if sustained statistically gives the average Chinese resident an extra 2 years of life. In particular, Beijing experienced a 54.1% decline in pollution in just nine years, which if sustained equates to the average Beijing resident living 3.9 years longer!

And India isn’t just buying Chinese solar technology, they’re increasingly building it themselves. Indeed, in many ways they’re better positioned than Beijing to make the transition into an electro-state because there’s so much less to transition

As China faces the painful task of writing down its coal fleet, India can emerge with far fewer scars.

Overall, India is on a very different development pathway from China, industrialising on modern renewables, put to work through electrification. Leaning into this offers multiple advantages: manufacturing opportunities, energy sovereignty and faster scaling of electricity supply. As the fastest-growing major economy and the world’s most populous nation, India’s choices carry powerful demonstration effects. It is showing other emerging economies that electrotech can power industrial growth, not just follow it.

I don’t want to sugarcoat this, because there’s much to dislike about India. Narendra Modi is a chauvinist like Trump in many ways, using Hinduism to divide his country. And he hates dissent: just a few years ago the government forbade India’s leading youth climate activist from traveling overseas, and charged her with sedition. (This kind of thing continues.) But India is not rich enough to indulge itself in Trumpian fantasy, and Modi was somewhat chastened in his last election. Though his government has close ties to the coal lobby and has announced plans to build a hundred gigawatts more of coal-fired power in the next decade, that seems increasingly unlikely. In fact, just the opposite is happening. Ember estimates that by 2031, over a third of India’s installed coal capacity could be operating at under 40% utilisation, undermining the economic case for building more. You don’t have to pay people to go mine the sun. Bottom line, according to Ember:

In all likelihood, India will reach $20,000 GDP per capita without coal generation ever exceeding the levels China was burning at $5,000.

As I said last week, if Gandhi were alive today he’d be putting up solar panels.

And bottom line: if Europe and China and India are all headed towards renewables, where does that leave America? It leaves it as a flailing state, whose leaders try to intimidate reason. The head of the European Central Bank, Christine Lagarde, walked out of the Davos session where the commerce secretary urged Europe to return to burning coal. And here’s our president in Davos trying to talk about energy, to a room full of leaders every last one of whom knows he is lying

‘China makes almost all of the windmills, and yet I haven’t been able to find any windfarms in China. Did you ever think of that? It’s a good way of looking. You know, they’re smart. China is very smart. They make them. They sell them for a fortune. They sell them to the stupid people that buy them, but they don’t use them themselves.’

As the Guardian restrainedly explained, “This claim is incorrect. China has more wind capacity than any other country and twice as much capacity under construction as the rest of the world combined.”

And not only that—China doesn’t make almost all of the windmills. The latest data I can find is from 2022, but as of that year Ørsted was the world’s biggest supplier of offshore wind farms. And Ørsted is headquartered in…Denmark. Remember them?

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In other energy and climate news:

+Oof. A new study in Nature shows that droughts in the Amazon are becoming more common, and that they are giving us glimpses into what the authors call a “hypertropical future.”

Under a hypertropical climate, temperature and moisture conditions during typical dry season months will more frequently exceed identified drought mortality thresholds, elevating the risk of forest dieback. Present-day hot droughts are harbingers of this emerging climate, offering a window for studying tropical forests under expected extreme future conditions

We want to avoid this at all costs—the Amazon, along with the Arctic and the Antarctic, are non-negotiable parts of a working climate system.

+If Europeans are wondering how they can get out from under the thumb of Donald Trump, the answer is: build your own power supply. A new analysis shows that after the Ukraine invasion countries turned away from Putin and towards Biden for their natural gas, only to find Biden replaced with Putin’s best bud.

In part due to the war in Ukraine and the imposition of sanctions on Russian pipeline gas, European countries have become dependent on shipments of US liquified natural gas (LNG), according to a paper co-authored by the Clingendael Institute, in The Hague, the Ecologic Institute, in Berlin, and the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs.

The development is fraught with risk at a time when Trump has shifted “towards a more explicitly interest-driven, protectionist and ideologically charged approach”, the paper says.

The US president has most recently threatened to use tariffs on trade with European allies in order get their agreement on his acquisition of Greenland, which is part of Denmark, an EU member state and Nato ally.

Trump’s controversial national security strategy paper published in November explicitly stated that the White House was seeking US energy dominance, which “when and where necessary – enables us to project power”.

+Big flooding in New Zealand, driven by record ocean heat. And much worse in Mozambique, where the death toll is already above a hundred souls.

The National Disasters Management Institute (INGD) said more than 645,000 people have been affected since the start of the rainy season, with 91,310 currently sheltering in 68 active accommodation centres.

A further 99 people have been injured and thousands of homes, classrooms and health units have been damaged or destroyed.

INGD deputy chairperson Gabriel Monteiro said the scale of rainfall – up to 250 millimetres in 24 hours – overwhelmed infrastructure and exceeded forecasts.

He blamed a tropical depression from the Indian Ocean and water surges from neighbouring countries’ dam releases for worsening the crisis.

More than 3,000 kilometres of roads are impassable, and the start of the school year may be delayed in flood-hit provinces.

Mozambique, just for reference, is one of the ten poorest countries on earth, and the average resident produces about 1/42nd as much co2 as the average American.

+The Amish—who are America’s most sophisticated users of technology, judging each innovation by whether or not it helps the community—seem to be breaking hard for e-bikes. This fine article in the car magazine Jalopnik quotes an old friend of mine

David Kline, the bishop of an Old Order church near Mount Hope, Ohio, explains that it’s not technology itself that the Amish are opposed to, but the destructive effects they believe it would have on their communities. As he told Forbes:

“We’re fairly open to technology. We use modern medicine. We go to the dentist. We donate blood. The car was really the first piece of technology that the Amish said: ‘Whoa. What will it do to the community?’ And as we know, Henry Ford’s Model T destroyed thousands of small communities.”

That’s why the Amish horse and buggy is still a common sight in some rural areas. But as Kline says, they don’t shun technology entirely, contrary to the stereotype. Some work for modern businesses in roles that align with their beliefs. For example, Janus Motorcycles employs Amish craftsmen to build frames and gas tanks. So does Keim Lumber in Charm, Ohio, where hundreds of e-bikes plug in to recharge while their owners work inside, reports Ideastream Public Media:

Abe Troyer is Amish. He works at Keim Lumber as the executive director of sales. He said his eBike gives him more time with family because his commute is 45 minutes shorter.

“[It’s] basically 10 miles a day, but I do a lot more than just work,” Troyer added. “I go different places at different times. So, in the last year and a half, I put 3,400 miles on my bike.”

Somewhat less compelling: the Indian Defense Review (for some reason) reports on the next generation of induction cooktops for the really rich. Apparently they’re buried in stone countertops and you can’t even tell

A kitchen counter that doubles as a stove. No visible burners, no glass cooktop, no demarcation. Just a slab of stone that heats when a pot touches down and cools when it’s lifted. This is not a prototype. It is being sold, installed and increasingly adopted in newly built or renovated kitchens across Europe and North America.

+Thanks to Nature for a roundup of just how much damage Donald Trump managed to do to American science in the course of a year.

More than 7,800 research grants terminated or frozen. Some 25,000 scientists and personnel gone from agencies that oversee research. Proposed budget cuts of 35% — amounting to US$32 billion.

These are just a few of the ways in which Donald Trump has downsized and disrupted US science since returning to the White House last January. As his administration seeks to reshape US research and development, it has substantially scaled back and restricted what science the country pursues and the workforce that runs the federal scientific enterprise.

+Tell me this isn’t cool. New window glass not only generates electricity, it also darkens in the sun to cool homes.

Peidong Yang reports in Nature Materials that his team has created a cesium-based perovskite solar window that turns opaque and produces electricity when heated, but without methylamine. That allows the windows to switch back and forth repeatedly without a drop in performance. "It's an attractive idea that you would have the solar cell capability and the smart window at the same time," says Michael McGehee, a materials scientist at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, who studies both perovskite solar cells and smart windows.

+A big new report from the reliable folks at Carbon Tracker indicates that Brazil could save a quarter trillion dollars in fuel costs, and $75 billion in climate damages, by switching to EVs.

Brazil is well positioned to lead the EV transition, with a low-carbon electricity grid, abundant battery mineral resources, and a strong domestic automotive industry. Electricity is already significantly cheaper than petrol, making EVs cost-competitive for consumers – and consumer demand for battery electric vehicles (BEVs) is expected to soar as fuel savings are realised. Brazil’s adoption of flex-fuel (a mix of ethanol and petrol) over the past decades has lowered oil imports but not eliminated fossil fuel dependence in transport; electrification remains the best path to long-term energy security, lower costs, and full decarbonisation.

+The indomitable Antonia Juhasz makes an excellent case that though the tv show Landsman is an unconcealed attempt at fossil fuel propaganda, it also shows the deeply unsafe reality of oil production.

As “Landman” unfolds, a slew of gruesome oil field deaths mount from fiery explosions, stacks of loose pipes, hydrogen sulfide poisoning and suicide. Incidents like these are detangled by Tommy Norris (Thornton), a grizzled, bitter, chain-smoking oil fixer. He spends a good deal of the show cleaning up oil field disasters or trying to persuade those he loves and cares about the most, including his son, to run from a business that is likely to kill them. The job, he says, has left him “a divorced alcoholic with $500,000 in debt, and I’m one of the lucky ones.”

+Update on one of my fave statistics: a boatload of solar panels is no longer worth 100 boatloads of coal. Now it’s 120, not to mention 57 of LNG. If you’d like that in graphic form:

+Much kerfluffle in the battery world over a new solid-state model from a company called Donut Lab that—well, let Fred Lambert explain

Donut Lab lit the EV and energy storage industry on fire last week with its announcement of a 400 Wh/kg solid-state battery cell that can last for 100 years. At face value, if true, we are looking at the single most disruptive announcement in the history of the electric vehicle industry and energy storage as a whole.

We aren’t just talking about a better motorcycle battery. If the claims of a 5-minute charge, 100,000-cycle life, and ~400 Wh/kg energy density are accurate and scalable, as Donut Lab claims, this is the holy grail of energy storage.

Now, we have interviewed Donut Lab’s CEO and investigated the technology. At this point, it looks like either this battery changes the world within the next 3 months, or it will make the CEO look like a fool.

If this is real, the internal combustion engine didn’t just die today; it was buried 100 feet deep, and every other battery is not far behind. But, and this is a massive “but”, extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof, and Donut Lab has yet to release that proof.

I promise I’ll report back when more is known.

+We’re getting the numbers on the damage that Trumpism is doing to electricity prices. From the Guardian

The average household electricity bill in the US was 6.7% more expensive in 2025 compared with the previous year, according to a Guardian analysis of data from the Energy Information Administration (EIA), the Department of Energy’s statistical arm. The increases meant that, on average, US households paid nearly $116 more across 2025 than they did in 2024.

Remember, electric bills will be to the ‘26 elections what eggs were last time round.

+Gotta close with some more good news from the real world. India is earth’s most populous country, but Nigeria holds the honor for the African continent, and it’s the planet’s sixth-biggest nation . And it’s seeing its own massive solar boom. As Emele Onu and Antony Sguazzin report:

When night falls in Akanu in southeast Nigeria, the streets are lit. That’s something people in the rural settlement of 100,000 haven’t seen since 2020, when access to the national grid in the area broke down and was never repaired.

For Mercy Kalu, who runs a roadside restaurant, shop and bar, business is booming. “Our people go to bed early, like fowl, when there is no light,” she says. Now “people go to their farms in the day and come here in the night to pick up their soap, cream, sachet water and soft drinks. What I used to sell in a week, I can sell in three days.”

After decades of having to retire at dusk or rely on noisy, smelly and expensive diesel generators, local communities are able to take the energy supply into their own hands, thanks to the availability of cheap solar panels and battery storage.

This change is truly remarkable. Nigeria’s pitiful grid, mostly based on natural gas, only supplies four gigawatts of electricity; its huge fleet of small diesel generators, which every shopowner needs, produces 75 gigawatts, but it’s expensive, unreliable, and dangerous.

Husk Power Systems is the world’s biggest operator of solar minigrids, which harness the sun to power small communities that either are not connected to the grid or rely on erratic state power supply. The company runs about 70 such systems across Nigeria and is raising $400 million to expand there as well as in India. “When we stepped into a village, we could smell a waft of diesel hanging in the air,” recalls Manoj Sinha, Husk’s co-founder and chief executive officer. Now you “can drink chilled beer after a hot afternoon, you can process rice that doesn’t smell like diesel when it’s heated.”

I spend a lot of time writing and organizing about solar power, and that’s mostly because it’s the biggest tool we have to slow the pace of global warming, which in turn is the biggest crisis the world has ever faced. The scale of that crisis requires big solar (and wind) installations—so let’s cheer for the news that solar last year supplied more power to the Texas grid than coal for the first time, and that new plans have been announced for a 21-gigawatt solar and battery project in California, much of it on land that’s been ruined by over-irrigation, and that coal generation has now fallen in India and China for the first time in a half-century. These are the kind of developments that could start to shave tenths of a degree off how hot the planet eventually gets.

But that’s not the only reason to love solar, and today’s newsletter is about some of the others. It’s being written in the grim shadow of Renee Good’s execution in Minneapolis, and the threat this morning of the president to invoke the “Insurrection Act” in one of America’s friendliest states. It’s written with thoughts of Greenlanders who may soon face American invasion, and of Iranians trying to stand up to their murderous government. It’s being written as wildfires rage across Australia, Argentina, and South Africa, and as news comes that the number of Americans with severely overdue utility debt rose almost four percent in the first six months of the Trump presidency. It’s being written, in other words, in a world that seems less stable and normal than any in my seven decades.

We are living through the darkest moment I can remember, and in that moment one of the few bright lights—literal and metaphorical—comes from small-scale solar.

The day before yesterday Rupert Mayer spent two hours at my house. A founder of Brightsaver, he’s one of those Californians (by way of Austria) who made some money in computers and then tried to figure out how to help the world. His solution, with his colleagues, was to try and bring Euro-style “balcony solar” to America. Veteran readers of this newsletter know all about this plug-in solar; I’ve been writing about it for a long time. But just in case you’ve tuned it out: plug-in solar is what it sounds like, a small solar installation that doesn’t require extensive cash outlay or extensive wiring, and that can nonetheless produce a reasonable amount of power. Millions upon millions of Europeans—primarily apartment dwellers with a balcony railing—have installed them over the past few years; they’re not exactly legal in the U.S., except for the state of Utah which passed the enabling legislation last March.

It took Mayer—with me, doing a little holding and carrying—about ten minutes to install the system, which has two 400 watt solar panels. An Allen wrench comes in the small plastic bag of hardware—think Ikea, but easier. Now the panels are sitting on the ground outside our house, feeding the sun’s power into a small battery, about the size of a boombox turned on its end. The battery in turn feeds a small but steady amount of the power into the household grid through…a plug. That’s plugged into the wall. Via a plug. Plug and play. That’s it. Here we are, exhausted and sweaty from our labors…

Strictly speaking I may be violating the law, though I called friends at our local utility and they said “no problem.” And strictly speaking I don’t really need it, because our house is already covered in conventional rooftop solar panels, installed at various times over the last quarter century. If you have a roof, those kind of systems are the way to go, and we’re fighting hard (see below) to make them more affordable. But plug-in solar, though almost at the bottom of the solar chain (I guess solar-powered lanterns and the like are the very bottom) are not toys. They do important work. And so I’m glad to have this addition to what is becoming my own little solar museum, because it lets me say firsthand a few things.

1. Small-scale, easy-to-install solar produces good power; Mayer has been installing similar systems around the Bay Area, and he says that for some apartments they’re providing most of the power supply. As appliances get more efficient, their value just keeps increasing.

2. They’re affordable. In Europe, where lots of providers compete to offer such systems, mine would cost just over a thousand dollars; without the battery, just feeding power straight into the house, the panels would run you about $300. Utah is so far the only legit market in the country; there this system would run about $2,000 at the moment, though that should come down fast as more players enter the market. The “payback” time would depend on how pricey electricity is where you live.

3. But “payback time” is not the only consideration. You now have an easy-to-assemble (and easily portable) power supply that doesn’t rely on anything. As long as the sun comes up you can use it. If the refineries shut down and you can’t get gas for your generator, if the government turns off the power, if a hurricane wipes out everything—well, you’ve got power. Here’s an unboxing video off Instagram from a Jamaican selling pretty much the same system to people in the wake of Hurricane Melissa. (And here’s an article from Hiroko Tabuchi in the Times explaining how lucky solar owners were in the vast swathes of Jamaica where…ten percent of utility customers are still without power almost three months later.)

4. A guy I’ve known a long time, and a founder of the Urban Solar Energy Association, George Mokray, has long talked about ‘solar as civil defense,’ and I think this is part of what he means. (You can find more of his thinking here). A flashlight, a radio (remember those?), an internet router, a cellphone—I could power those many times over with the little system installed here yesterday. And around the world that would bring hundreds of millions of people much closer to the modern age. I’ve been in many African villages where less current than I’m generating from these panels literally moves people into a new reality. Here’s a report from this week on how fast the economics are changing across Africa as cheap solar panels let people charge e-bikes and e-scooters, and imagine an auto industry that will never require gas.

5. But Mokray has also taken to describing solar as “swadeshi,” which holds deep meaning for me. Swadeshi, or self-sufficiency, was the Gandhian idea that India could make its own goods, and that in doing so it reclaimed not just economic power but a kind of moral agency from its British rulers. Gandhi famously spun on his charkha, or small spinning wheel, each day for an hour, usually beginning at 4 a.m. It was, among other things, a stark visual contrast to the massive British cloth mills that had put so many Indians out of work. Just as with making salt, making khadi, or homespun cloth, was an act of dissent and insubordination; the spinning wheel was the center of the first Indian independence flag, and in stylized form still is. In an age when our brutish ruler gasses on and and about “energy dominance,” it is an important act of defiance to make your own power. You don’t need to make all your own power—the grid could be a beautiful symbol of human sharing, and it offers huge possibilities for things like “virtual power plants”—but you should make some of your power if you can. Think of it like a vegetable garden—a hedge against trouble, and a reminder of your connection to the natural world. And think of it as a gentle fist, raised against the tyrants of our time, from Trump to Exxon.

So, the question is how to make it easier for all to partake in this revolution. In the wake of Sun Day, there are now bills in more than a dozen state legislatures to fully legalize plug-in solar. (Scott Wiener, powerhouse California state senator, introduced one of the latest). I spent the noon hour today participating in a press conference for the bill introduced by New York state assemblywoman Emily Gallagher and State Senator Liz Krueger, which we think has a real chance of passing fast. Here’s a good article about the bill in Maine, with a fitting quote from State sen. Nicole Grohoski: “It’s about giving a person on a third floor apartment the same power to lower their electricity bill as a homeowner who has a south-facing roof.” In Vermont, the only hold-up seems to be some debate on whether a “qualified electrician” should handle the installation—having done this yesterday, I can assure everyone there’s literally nothing for a “qualified electrician” to do. (It would be like requiring a mechanic to fill up your gas tank).

If you want to help these bills pass, and if you want to join in the larger task of making rooftop solar less bureaucratic and expensive, you can join the Simplify Solar campaign we’re running at Third Act. Across the country we have enthusiastic volunteers in touch with state houses and city halls to find out the existing regs and to share model legislation, using economic arguments as often as ecological ones (New study: solar and storage could save Massachusetts ratepayers $313 million a year). a\And remember, Utah is so far the only place to okay plug-in solar, so it’s as much a red-state project as a blue-state one. (“It can open hearts and minds,” says Mayer. “The people being told that the environmentalists want to take your truck away, we can show them no, the solar panel is very benign. And anyway, why should the government have a say in my backyard?”) Here, for instance, is how Third Act Oregon is approaching it, and some great radio with Third Act activists in Connecticut, and here, as a template, is the testimony offered by Third Act Maine in an effort to get the bill through the legislature in Augusta

The state of Utah was the first to legalize up to 1,200 watts of plug-in solar, and the legislation passed with strong bipartisan support. Similar bills are being considered in Vermont, New Hampshire, New York and Pennsylvania. Market research predicts if five states pass plug-in solar bills, within five years the price of a 1,200-watt system will drop as low as $600. The cost today is under $3,000 compared to a rooftop system which costs between $25,000 to $40,000.

The opportunity to take some control over power generation and to save significant money on electric bills will appeal to many Mainers, as will the DIY aspect of plug in solar. It’s as simple as placing a few panels in a sunny location — like a patio or shed roof — and plugging it into an outdoor outlet. Add battery storage and Mainers can power critical appliances when the power goes out during a storm.

Other good people are hard at work on the same thing. Solar United Neighbors, for instance, offers a big virtual event about plug-in solar next Thursday. The pioneers at CleanTechnica have a GoFundMe up and running to support their educational efforts (including an Electric Home Show in Hawaii this spring).

None of this in any way reduces the need for political change and engagement. The Trump administration is trying to make all this work harder. As Nicolas Rivero writes in the Washington Post, total battery installations are expected to drop ten percent this year thanks to tariffs and restrictions. And if we had a different kind of government, all it would get much easier—in Australia, where there is government support for installing batteries alongside your solar panels, demand is pretty much literally through the roof. As Energy Source and Distribution magazine writes:

Nationwide, the Cheaper Home Batteries Program has helped more than 190,000 households and small businesses cut their power bills, with around three-quarters of installations in the suburbs and regions.

Last month, the government announced changes to ensure that more Australian households can benefit from the program, with a funding boost to $7.2 billion over four years.

These changes are expected to see more than 2 million Australians install a battery by 2030, delivering around 40GWh of capacity, doubling initial estimates of 1 million batteries and increasing the expected capacity by almost four times.

There’s absolutely no reason that couldn’t be the U.S., or any other nation. Right now it’s China that’s doing most of the work. Check out Michael Lydick’s fascinating reporting from this year’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, where he looks at the same kind of home systems I’ve been describing, almost all of them coming from the East.

I came away from CES with the impression of two countries with very different priorities. On our side, it’s “drill, baby, drill.” China, meanwhile, has nearly 650 gigawatts of installed solar capacity and adds more solar energy each year than the rest of the world combined.

I don’t think China is eating our lunch, per se. I think they made their own lunch. The nation invested in the kitchen, hired better chefs, refined its recipe year after year, and turned its offerings into something people like me genuinely crave. It really pains me to see the US fall so far behind.

So we’ll fight at the ballot box to reboot our nation. But we can also start to make it happen on the ground, one or two panels at a time.

If you know how to put a plug in a socket, you can be part of this revolution. People look at Gandhi and he seems—and was—a small man. But with the millions of people he inspired, he led what is now the largest country on earth to victory over tyranny. If he was here today, I have no doubt his ashram would be roofed with solar panels, and that he’d be showing everyone how to set up their own systems. On a dark dark day like today, solar is one form of liberation.

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In other energy and climate news:

+Here’s one of the most harrowing sequences I’ve come across. Last week the Aussie writer Alex Kelly evacuated with her family after huge forest fires ravaged their mountain community. They ended up in the Wye River valley, where they immediately had to evacuate in the face of record flooding. She said, in a line that could be the motto for our age:

“I’m feeling very angry. And what I’m feeling most angry about is we’re not putting an end to the fossil fuel industry.”

+First little signs of the Trump bump: his love for coal power, and for data centers, helped drive up America’s carbon emissions 2.4 percent last year, even as India and China were declinging. And more to come:

“We aren’t yet seeing the direct effects of these policy changes in US emissions,” Gaffney and his coauthor Ben King wrote. “That could change in the coming year or two, particularly if data center electricity demand continues to surge and the grid responds with more output from existing fossil generators instead of new, clean resources.”

+A new database of buildings across Europe shows lots of capacity for rooftop solar.

The results show that potential capacity could reach 2.3 TWp (1,822 GWp residential, 519 GWp non-residential), with an annual output of 2,750 TWh based on current PV technology. This corresponds to approximately 40% of electricity demand in a 100% renewable scenario for 2050

+Those radicals at the Bloomberg energy desk estimate that the heating of the country has already cost Americans a trillion dollars in what Mark Gongloff calls a “stealth heat tax.”

There’s the big-ticket stuff, of course, like the property losses and higher insurance premiums that come with supercharged natural disasters. But a deeper look shows that climate change is steadily draining wealth in ways that aren’t as obvious, like the hidden charges car dealers add to pad out the cost of a sale, except these are permanent. Call it a stealth heat tax.

Temperature changes alone cut US incomes by 12%, on average, between 2000 and 2019, according to a study published in December by Derek Lemoine, an economics professor at the University of Arizona. Lemoine has previously estimated average long-term losses during that period of 1%, but that was based only on localized impacts of hotter weather. His latest research is the first effort to account for how temperature changes in one part of the US can affect people in entirely different parts. The difference is drastic.

“You might think, ‘It’s hotter where I live, and that’s hurting me in some way.’ But that’s only a tiny share of the damages,” Lemoine told me in a phone interview. “Most of the damages are from everywhere getting hotter together all at once.”

For an example of how this might work, consider corn. Say hot weather causes a bad harvest in Iowa, which results in higher corn prices across the country, not only at grocery stores but for every industry that uses corn. And that’s a lot more stuff than you’d think, from aspirin to sheetrock. Maybe some corn farmers enjoy a boost in income, but the rest of us lose money — including those of us in places that didn’t get as hot as Iowa.

In other words, we’re all in this together. Some parts of the country might stay relatively shielded from extreme heat and climate disasters, but no one escapes untouched. Everybody pays a heat tax. Extreme heat not only disrupts harvests but affects workers’ health and productivity across a variety of industries. Many of the pathways by which local heat affects the welfare of the rest of the country are still a mystery, Lemoine noted, and need more research. For now, we can at least see the results in the data.

+Attention college students: another “boot camp” day of virtual training for young people interested in keeping campus landscapes toxin-free! A good place to cut your organizing teeth!

+We carefully measure the atmospheric temperature, and as you know 2023, 2024, and 2025 have been the three hottest years on record. But forces like the El Niño and La Niña currents in the Pacific can send those numbers a little up and down every year; a much more stable record comes from the heat content of the ocean, and it builds inexorably, year after year. The latest, from Michael Mann et al, in Advances in Atmospheric Science

Global ocean warming continued unabated in 2025 in response to increased greenhouse gas concentrations and recent reductions in sulfate aerosols, reflecting the long-term accumulation of heat within the climate system, with conditions evolving toward La Niña during the year. In 2025, global upper 2000 m ocean heat content (OHC) increased by ∼23 ± 8 ZJ relative to 2024 according to IAP/CAS estimates. CIGAR-RT, and Copernicus Marine data confirm the continued ocean heat gain. Regionally, about 33% of the global ocean area ranked among its historical (1958–2025) top three warmest conditions, while about 57% fell within the top five, including the tropical and South Atlantic Ocean, Mediterranean Sea, North Indian Ocean, and Southern Oceans, underscoring the broad ocean warming across basins.

Here’s what it looks like:

This kind of graph helps you understand the new predictions from the world’s association of financial actuaries: planetary insolvency

“Planetary Solvency is threatened, and we urgently need a recovery plan. An actuarial review of key climate change assumptions shows we may have seriously underestimated the rate of warming as well as the related economic impacts. Unless we rapidly change course, climate damages will start to impact growth and future prosperity. The parallels between the risk management failure of the Global Financial Crisis and inaction on the major systemic risk posed by climate change are clear. Both feature an over reliance on benign risk model results and a failure to understand systemic risk.”

+If you’re going to graze sheep, then for heaven’s sake do it between solar panels. Amelia Hill in the Guardian describes a growing UK trend

On a blustery Lincolnshire morning, Hannah Thorogood paused between two ranks of solar panels. Her sheep nosedived into the grass under their shelter and began to graze.

“When I first started out, 18 acres and 20 sheep was as much as I could afford,” said the first-generation farmer. “Now, because I can graze this land for free, I have 250 acres and over 200 sheep. Solar grazing has given me a massive leg-up.”

Across the UK, a growing number of farmers are discovering that the free grazing opportunities offered by some solar panel sites are a toe-hold in an industry where land is often unaffordable or unobtainable.

Dr Liz Genever, a farmer in south-east Lincolnshire, has been able to triple her sheep numbers thanks to free solar grazing.

“If I could increase my flock to the full potential offered by the local solar site, I could potentially increase my income from sheep from £20,000 to £60,000,” she said. “There’s been a massive acceleration in the last five years in solar grazing. “It’s a really important opportunity for sheep farmers.”

This may have been the worst week in recent American political history—from the oil-soaked invasion of Venezuela and the threats against half a dozen other nations, to the debut of Elon Musk’s new child pornography tool, to the murder of Rene Good, whose last kind words were ‘I’m not mad at you.’ I hope and trust you’ve been out in the street—our small Vermont town had a half-mile of mourners carrying candles.

The midterm elections are not yet looming over us, but they’re very much in mind—along with street protest, we also badly need to beat MAGA for control of Congress, which would give the forces of relative reason at least a small foothold in our political life. Those midterm contests should turn on revulsion at fascism, but chances are they will be decided, at least in part, on what we’re now calling ‘affordability.’ And energy may well be at the heart of that: what eggs were to 2024, electricity may be to 2026. So it’s going to be crucial for candidates to be able to talk effectively about this topic. I imagine I’ll be revisiting this many times this year, so consider this a first primer—and consider forwarding it to you local good-hearted candidate. (And should you decide to become a candidate yourself, Run for Something is a great resource, and remember that Lead Locally has an upcoming virtual training session for potential climate-focused candidates).

I think the most basic message is: keep it simple. Energy and utility policy is intricate and abstruse, a matter of PUCs (public utility commissions) and ISOs (independent system operators) and RTOs (regional transmission organizations). We need to repair incentives for utilities, so that they’re spurred to save energy instead of build infrastructure; we need to move to a “connect and manage” system that forces fast interconnections. But you don’t actually need to explain all of that every time you give a speech. Instead, you need to establish a few things.

1. The Trump administration and the GOP Congress are dramatically increasing demand for electricity, mostly because they’re approving every data center any of their billionaire buddies suggest. You might point out that the biggest fruits to date of all this electricity are a lot of weird child porn on X, and a hard job market for entry-level workers seeing their prospects crimped by AI. And you could point out the absurd pollution it’s producing—black neighborhoods of Memphis, for instance, get to breathe the smog from Musk’s jet engines powering Grok. But the basic bottom line is: a sudden, Republican-led spike in demand for power.

2. At the same time, the Trump administration and the GOP Congress are systematically blocking the cheapest forms of electricity to meet this new demand. They’ve shut down wind farms that were sending power back to shore and they’ve prevented big solar farms from being built. There’s no secret why—they’ve said over and over again that it’s in service to the oil industry. For America as a whole this is a treasonous gift to the Chinese, who are now assuming world leadership in energy technology. But in each Congressional district what it means is: no cheap energy for us, thank you Republicans

3. When you increase demand and decrease supply, prices go up. Electricity prices increased something like ten percent last year. This is the Republican tax—the gratuity that you get to add to your electric bill to help the oil barons who in turn pass on a small amount in campaign donations to the GOP. (If you really want to piss people off, point out that the rates paid by data centers have gone up far far less than the rates paid by, um, people)

4. And that rise in rates compounds over time, because we just keep paying. If you want your voters to understand what they’re missing, you need to point to Australia. a country of 40 million people who—beginning in June, right at the start of the general election season—will be getting three free hours of electricity every afternoon. There is not a voter in America who can’t understand three free hours of electricity a day—time to run your washing machine, cool your house with the AC, fill your storage battery. “Friends, if we had leadership like Australia’s, we’d be getting free power. Instead, you get to give the fossil fuel industry a big gift. When I’m elected that will end.”

I’m not claiming that this is everything you need to know about energy to govern effectively. But what I know is that Republicans have won too many elections in recent years reciting simple lies: crime is out of control, immigrants will take your job, climate change is a scam. It’s time to win elections by telling simple truths—clean energy is cheap and abundant, and comes with lots of jobs attached.

Oh, and no one is going to need to invade Venezuela to grab their share of sunlight. I think people are growing tired of the violence that surrounds every aspect of Trumpism, including the conquest of foreign countries. So say that too.

I think it’s a winning message.

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In other energy and climate news:

+Hannah Ritchie and Pablo Rosado with some data on how much land we need for solar power—if we took just the acreage the world currently uses to grow “biofuels” like ethanol and covered them with solar panels, we could produce twenty three times more energy, which would be enough to power every car and truck on the planet four times over.

The reason these comparisons are even more stark than biofuels versus solar is that most of the energy consumed in a petrol car is wasted; either as heat (if you put your hand over the bonnet, you will often notice that it’s extremely warm after driving) or from friction when braking. An electric car is much more efficient without a combustion engine, and thanks to regenerative braking (which uses braking energy to recharge the battery). That means that driving one mile in an electric car uses just one-third of the energy of driving one mile in a combustion engine car.

Put these two efficiencies together, and we find that you could drive 70 times as many miles in a solar-powered electric car as you could in one running on biofuels from the same amount of land.

+So the EPA is going to stop calculating how much damage pollution does to people, and instead only add up how much regulations cost polluters. Maxine Joselow, in the Times, calls the shift “seismic.”

“The idea that E.P.A. would not consider the public health benefits of its regulations is anathema to the very mission of E.P.A.,” said Richard Revesz, the faculty director of the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University School of Law.

“If you’re only considering the costs to industry and you’re ignoring the benefits, then you can’t justify any regulations that protect public health, which is the very reason that E.P.A. was set up,” said Mr. Revesz, who led the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs under President Joseph R. Biden Jr.

+Following up on my last newsletter about Greenland, Andy Revkin helpfully interviews a bunch of scientists who have worked there over the years, and who—not surprisingly—think taking it over is a crummy idea for a long list of reasons. As the veteran polar scientist Eric Rignot observes

A takeover by the USA could put an end to many international scientific studies in Greenland, which would be dramatic. We need to leave Greenland to the greenlanders. We need to respect them and work with them. We need to find a way to cooperate with them on the terms of their choosing. They have all the reasons in the world to be scared by the USA. The USA has not taken care of its own indigenous people, the condition of American indians is absolutely terrible. Until we show the world that we can take care of our own people, we should not pretend that we can take care of greenlanders.

Greenlanders will protect the environment in Greenland, they care about it deeply, they have done so for many generations. No other nation will do that job better than them. This is their home. Leaving Greenland to greenlanders is the best way to protect Greenland and the best way to show greenlanders the respect that they so much deserve

+Good news from New York where the first interview with the city’s brand new comptroller indicates that he’s serious about taking on the financial industry’s biggest players for their egregious climate stance. Mark Levine succeeds Brad Lander in the post, and he told Responsible Investor he will hold “every asset manager to extremely high standards on climate.” The point in question: should the city take its huge pension funds out of Blackrock, which has been a climate backslider for years (the result of red state treasurers applying the kind of pressure Levine is now considering).

+Interesting new paper from the International Journal of Astrobiology arguing that perhaps one reason we don’t find many other signs of intelligent life in the universe is that planets might need to develop coal in order to industrialize, and that coal is relatively difficult to create in massive quantities. Except, sadly, on our planet.

Central to our argument is the host of highly contingent taphonomic factors, involving plate tectonics and climate, that were required to convert the tropical lycopsid swamp forests of the Pangean supercontinent to the massive coal deposits of the Carboniferous period.

+A cogent argument from Chris Hatch, who points out that oil prices barely moved during Trump’s attack on Venezuela, probably because more and more players are realizing that we’re not going to need as much oil as we used to think.

The big reason is electric vehicles. More than half the new vehicles sold in China were EVs last year, and by the end of the year, the figure had risen to almost 60 per cent. “The rapid adoption of electric vehicles in China has been a major driver of China’s shrinking oil footprint,” according to the European Centre for Economic Policy Research.

It’s a shift that’s not limited only to cars, but extends from buses to two and three-wheelers and heavy trucks. And it’s a trend that’s unmistakable across Asia and the rest of the world.

Meanwhile, Tina Casey writes at Clean Technica that oil execs are skittish because they know that another big round of improvements in solar cells seems likely as perskovite cells get closer and closer to commercialization. She quotes Biden’s energy secretary, Jennifer Granholm

“Utility scale perovskites are here!” Granholm posted on LinkedIn last week.

“I had the pleasure of visiting Tandem PV this week and their solar panels are at 29% efficiency today and will be over 30% within weeks — which means they are 30% more efficient than the average solar panel,” Granholm elaborated.

“That means less land necessary for solar installations, and lots of LCOE savings,” she added, with LCOE being shorthand for levelized cost of energy, a calculation that enables costs to be compared across different energy resources.

If you caught that thing about “less land,” that’s just as significant as the 30% efficiency improvement. Less land translates into lower costs for site acquisition, preparation, and maintenance, and it also provides farmers with more opportunities for agrivoltaic projects, in which solar panels are combined with farming in integrated systems.

+In the morbid contest for which climate side-effects killed the most people last year, heatwaves appear to have outdone fires and floods. According to World Weather Attribution,

Among all extremes, heatwaves stood out as the most lethal. In Europe alone, one study estimated that 24,400 people died during a single summer heatwave between June and August, across 854 cities representing nearly 30 per cent of the continent’s population.

In many parts of the Global South, however, comparable mortality data does not exist, the report noted, masking the full scale of heat-related deaths.

Continued greenhouse gas emissions meant that what might otherwise have been a relatively cooler year instead became an extremely warm one, fuelling prolonged heatwaves, droughts, storms and floods across the world.

+Forget the petrodollar. Aaron Foyer predicts the rapid rise of the electroyuan

Being a technology supplier gives China enormous leverage, especially with countries that are developing and looking to energize on a budget. Projects that are financed by Chinese banks, built by Chinese companies or assembled using Chinese parts could receive favorable financial terms in exchange for using renminbi in the agreements.

A perfect example of this occurred in 2023, when a Chinese developer built a 500-megawatt solar farm in Uzbekistan and stipulated the power contracts be settled in yuan. But Uzbekistan is just one of many countries striking these sorts of deals with Beijing.

The rise of an electroyuan would completely reshape global financial architecture and geopolitics.

For one, it would increase the yuan’s share in international payments, something that’s already been growing for over a decade and brings a certain inertia with it. Countries that become economically tethered to Chinese power projects might start invoicing in yuan by default. Over time, swaths of Asia, the Middle East and Africa could start conducting their commerce and trade in yuan, further eroding the trade dominance the dollar has enjoyed for decades.

An international yuan trading world would also hand Beijing incredible geopolitical leverage and weaken U.S. influence. Just as the widespread use of the dollar gave the U.S. the ability to hit bad-boy nations with financial sanctions to compel their governments into taking specific actions, China could pull the same Don Corleone moves.

Along somewhat the same lines, Bloomberg’s Mark Gongloff argues that the smart money around the world is pouring into green tech, despite Trump’s best efforts

Global green-debt issuance hit a record $947 billion last year, according to Bloomberg Intelligence, as the obvious need for cheap, quickly built energy supply in the AI age mostly outweighed the bluster from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Issuance could hit $1.6 trillion next year, one analyst told Bloomberg News. The AI bubble might need to keep inflating for that prediction to come true. But even if the mad scramble to build data centers happens to cool, continuing demand for electrification and cheap power in developing markets should put a solid floor under cleantech for the foreseeable future.

Globally, solar and wind-power growth in the first nine months of 2025 was more than enough to meet the increase in the world’s power demand during the same period, the think tank Ember noted recently. As renewable-energy market share grows, it economically outperforms fossil fuels, driving demand for still more renewable power. “The direction of travel is unmistakable: Clean power is scaling, markets are shifting and the electricity system is becoming the center of economic strategy — from AI growth to energy security,” Ember analysts wrote.

+A new study of a small Antarctic glacier found that its retreat was the fastest ever measured, which may be an ominous sign for much larger chunks of ice. Laura Paddison reports:

Hektoria is a relatively small glacier by Antarctic standards, and its partial demise won’t cost the planet much in terms of sea level rise, one expert said.

However, “it’s a smaller cousin to some truly gigantic — I mean size of the island of Britain — glaciers in Antarctica that could conceivably go through the same process, as this whole evolution of the ice sheets on Earth evolves with global warming,” a glaciologist added.

Rob Larter, a marine geophysicist at the British Antarctic Survey, who was not involved in the research, said the new findings “raise the bar on our understanding of how fast Antarctic glaciers may retreat.”

These glaciers, especially the cavities beneath their ice shelves and tongues, are some of the most inaccessible environments on Earth, he told CNN, but knowing more about them is crucial to better project how they’ll respond to climate change. The research raises fears that ice loss from Antarctica, which contributes to sea-level rise, “could occur more rapidly than projected,” he said.

+Remember when all the billionaires were going to leave New York if Mamdani got elected? That didn’t happen—but a new survey shows that half of all Americans are thinking about moving because of climate change. That won’t happen on that scale either (among other things, it’s hard to sell a home where the insurance prices are rising fast) but I’m sure it will increasingly be a factor in where Americans live. The problem is, where to go?

For those considering a move to another state, more than half of respondents wanted to avoid disaster-prone states like Florida and California and preferred to move to what they perceived as low-risk states, including Vermont, New Hampshire, Delaware, and Connecticut.

In truth, Vermont has had devastating floods year after year, and it’s putting a huge strain on a small state. It’s where I live, so I know that story—but I imagine it’s much the same everywhere. Maybe we should stop raising the temperature so we can stay put.

+Fight sportswashing! The battle against the LA Dogers sponsorship by the oil industry is going national, as the World Series champions look forward to next year’s schedule. Here’s the sign-up form for how to get involved around the country, with a demonstration set for late February

+The richest 0.1% of the world’s population used up their share of the planet’s annual carbon budget just three days into 2026, a new Oxfam study found. The richest one percent took an entire ten days to reach the same mark, leaving them just 355 days this year for wrecking the planet

+Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island has been the most outspoken critic of the oil industry in Congress for many years now. In a recent interview he did not hold back.

The fossil fuel industry is essentially running the United States government from the inside. It's a desperate industry. They know that clean renewable energy is cheaper. They know that they only compete by virtue of massive subsidies from being allowed to pollute for free, which nobody should be allowed to do. And they prop all of that up with enormous amounts of political corruption and leverage and a huge climate denial fraud campaign.

+The first fully recyclable giant wind turbine blade has been unveiled in China, all 361 feet of it.

Electrek reported that the company has designed a “special degradation solution.”

Compared with previous recycling attempts that required intense heat or high pressure — often damaging the fibers they sought to save — this new chemical process operates at ambient temperature and pressure. It chemically dissolves the glue holding the blade together.

The high-value carbon fiber can be recovered, cleaned, and reused in everything from new turbines to car parts.

When President Trump first started fantasizing about seizing Greenland for the U.S., it sounded farcical—a little Gilbert and Sullivan, or maybe The Mouse that Roared. In the wake of America’s attack on Caracas, however, it now seems as likely as not that we’ll soon be landing troops in Nuuk, a truly hideous prospect that we should all try to head off. Here’s my small effort:

First off, I think it’s a very real possibility.

Here’s Stephen Miller on Monday, talking with Jake Tapper:

TAPPER: Can you rule out the US is going to take Greenland by force?

MILLER: Greenland should be part of the US. By what right does Denmark assert control over Greenland? The US is the power of NATO

TAPPER: So force is on the table?

MILLER: Nobody is gonna fight the US militarily over future of Greenland

And here’s our leader himself, speaking to a press gaggle on Air Force One while a beaming Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-Obsequious) grinned by his side:

Trump: We need Greenland. Right now, Greenland is covered with Russian and Chinese ships.

Reporter: What would the justification be for a claim to Greenland?

Trump: The EU needs us to have it.

None of this makes any actual sense—Greenland is not covered with Chinese and Russian ships, the EU does not want us to have it (European leaders united today to say “Greenland belongs to its people. It is for Denmark and Greenland, and them only, to decide on matters concerning Denmark and Greenland,” which seems pretty clear), and Denmark asserts control over Greenland in pretty much the same way Washington asserts control over, say, Alaska or Vermont.

In fact, though, Denmark has been slowly loosening that control over the decades—not because it wants to sell it to America, but because it recognizes that the people who live there, most of whom are Inuit, should have the greatest say in how it’s managed. Greenlanders have exercised that say in ways that would be uncongenial to the White House: for instance, civil partnerships for gay people have been standard since 1996, and gay marriage legal since 2016 when the island’s parliament approved it by a 28-0 vote. Under the Kinguaassiorsinnaajunnaarsagaaneq pillugu inatsit law, sex changes have been allowed since 1976. In other words, Trump’s claim that Greenlanders “want to be with us” is palpable nonsense—a poll last January found that 85 percent of the population opposed the idea.

Discerning Trump’s “real” reason for wanting Greenland is a pointless exercise; he’s a sad, ancient baby, and babies just want. He seems to think that the point of a ruler is to acquire more territory, and that he more or less owns by divine right the land masses adjacent to our country. (MAGA bloggers this week were busily talking about “vassal states” across the hemisphere). There are minerals there, but hard to get at. Oh, and there’s petroleum in and around Greenland as well, and that usually sings a siren song to this child of the oil-driven 20^th century.

Really, however, there’s only one truly vital strategic asset in Greenland, one thing that could change the world. And that’s the ice that covers almost all its landmass.

I’ve been up on this ice sheet—I’ve hiked up glaciers from the tideline, climbing and climbing till the sea disappears behind you and all you can see in every direction is white. It is uncannily beautiful.

I helped organize a trip there in 2018 so that two very fine poets could record a piece from atop this ice sheet. Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner came from her home in the Marshall Islands, which is already slipping under a rising sea (and which has long known about U.S. imperialism; part of the atoll is still radioactive and off limits, thanks to U.S. bomb testing in the 1950s); Aka Niviana is a native Greenlander whose home has begun to melt, a melt that if it continues will guarantee the submersion of Polynesia, and much else.

They stood there on that ice, in a chill summer wind, and recited their long and majestic poem for a camera; my job was to stand just outside its range with a pair of sleeping bags that they could wrap themselves in between takes. “Rise: From One Island to Another,” as their work was called, has won both prizes and large audiences on YouTube; it will, I think, be one of the documents of this global warming era that someday people will look at in a kind of outraged awe, one more proof that we knew exactly what was coming and did nothing about it.

We were camped above the Eagle Glacier—Jason Box, the American-born climatologist now living in Denmark who helped lead the trip had named it that because of its shape when he first visited five years earlier, “but now the head and the wings of the bird have melted away. I don’t know what we should call it now, but the eagle is dead.” And that’s true of so much of the island; we watched as one iceberg after another came crashing off the head of glaciers, each one raising the level of the ocean by some infinitesimal amount.

Greenland holds 23 feet of sea level rise, should we eventually melt it all. That will take a while, but we’re doing our best. It’s been losing mass steadily for the last quarter-century—it lost 105 billion tons of ice (billion with a b) in 2025, and the ice was melting well into September, unusual in a place where winter usually descends in late August. The people of Greenland, by the way, recognize all this: they passed a law in 2021 banning all new oil exploration and drilling—the government described it as “a natural step” because Greenland “takes the climate crisis seriously.” (More than two-thirds of their power comes from renewables, mostly hydro).

I found those Greenlanders I met to be hardy, thrifty people very much in tune with their place. I spent a memorable afternoon with Box planting trees outside the former American air base in Narsarsuaq in an effort to, among other things, soak up some carbon dioxide. And I spent an equally pleasant afternoon drinking beer with him and the rest of our party at a microbrewery in Saqqannguaq (one of several in the country) which brews “with the purest drinking water on earth, coming from the Greenlandic ice cap” and hence “free of toxins, chemicals and micro plastics.” Highly recommend the IPA, reminder of yet another imperial adventure.

Obviously seizing Greenland would be a terrible idea because it would break up NATO and put America at loggerheads with the liberal democracies of Europe (though that may be the single biggest incentive for the administration). Obviously it would be a gross example of modern colonization, obliterating the rights of the people who live there. Obviously it would raise tensions around the world even higher, and send the strongest possible signal that Beijing should just go grab Taiwan. Lots of people are talking about those things, though there’s not the slightest sign that anyone in power is listening. (Stephen Miller’s wife has tweeted out a map of Greenland decked out in red and white stripes).

But in a rational world what we’d mostly be talking about is all that ice. That’s what, for the other 8 billion people on the planet, actually matters about this island. It could easily add a foot or more to the level of the ocean before the century is out, all by itself (the Antarctic, much bigger but slower to melt, will eventually add much more). A foot is a lot—on a typical beach on, say, the Jersey shore, which slopes up at about one degree, that brings the ocean about 90 feet inland.

And the fresh water pouring off Greenland seems already to be disrupting the great conveyor belt currents that bring warm water north from the equator, maintaining the climates of the surrounding continents. That too could raise—by significant amounts—the level of the sea, especially along the coast of the southeast U.S. (and also plunge Europe into the deep freeze even as the rest of the planet warms).

The stakes are so enormous that they make the Trumpian greed for this land seem all the punier and more puerile. Here’s how Jetnil-Kijiner and Niviana put it in their poem:

We demand that the world see beyond

SUVs, ACs, their pre-package convenience

Their oil-slicked dreams, beyond the belief

That tomorrow will never happen

And yet there’s a generosity to their witness – a recognition that whoever started the trouble, we’re now in it together.

Let me bring my home to yours

Let’s watch as Miami, New York,

Shanghai, Amsterdam, London

Rio de Janeiro and Osaka

Try to breathe underwater …

None of us is immune.

Life in all forms demands

The same respect we all give to money …

So each and every one of us

Has to decide

If we

Will

Rise

Share

In other energy and climate news:

+A new study shows that climate change is likely to trap many humans on the farm who would otherwise in the normal course of things move on to other jobs.

Climate change is reshaping agriculture worldwide, but its consequences for development are most severe where productivity is low, trade is costly, and many workers remain tied to farming. The emerging evidence suggests that warming can slow – or even reverse – the movement of labour out of agriculture, exacerbating the ‘food problem’ just as economies would benefit most by diversifying away from agriculture.

Empirical evidence from India provides a clear illustration. Liu et al. (2023) exploit long-run variation in temperature trends across districts and show that each 1°C increase in mean decadal temperature reduces the non-agricultural employment share by 8.2%. The effects are strongest in remote areas with weak road networks – settings where households are more reliant on local food production and the food-problem mechanism is likely to bind most tightly

+My old friend Winona LaDuke offers everyone a reminder of the time that Venezuela came to the aid of lots of Americans

It was right after Hurricane Katrina and U.S. refinery capacity was down. Oil prices skyrocketed, it was a hard winter, and the oil companies were making huge profits while many Americans experienced real hardships. Congress asked if they would give the American people a break on pricing.

That didn’t happen. However, Venezuela’s CITGO Petroleum donated about $400 million in fuel support for American families. No American corporations did the same. This fuel donation over a couple of critical years was provided in 25 states and to 240 native American communities.

Most of the tribal nations in Minnesota and the Dakotas received support, as did many low-income people in the region. We were grateful. That was a donation in a time of need

+Check out Hurd, a new app designed to help workers make their companies more climate-conscious

And if you’re a little more ambitious, check out Lead Locally’s Run for Climate which helps climate champions seek state and local offices across the country. They’re very much the real deal; I enjoy digging in to help their candidates every fall, and a lot of them win, and go on to do great things. And they’re about to launch a free six-part training series

+Nice little piece from some guy named McKibben in the Christian magazine Sojourners touting e-bikes

THERE ARE A few things that seem like magic to me. One is ice—when water freezes, suddenly you can glide across the surface of the earth. The fastest I’ve ever gone on my own unmodified power was on a pair of speed skates across a newly frozen lake. I didn’t even realize how fast I was flying till I fell and slid for what seemed like half a mile.

Almost as good: a bicycle. Yes, there’s some machinery intervening, with chains and gears and such, but basically you’re working just hard enough to overcome friction. With a rigid frame doing the work of holding you upright, you cover distance far more efficiently than you do when walking—more efficiently than most fish in the water or birds in the air. As a physiologist once explained to Scientific American, bicycles “turn humans into this hyperefficient terrestrial locomotor because they make being on land more like swimming.”

But the relatively new invention—the e-bike—goes one better. It’s an ordinary bicycle, until you need a bit more power and flick a switch. And then its small electric motor efficiently adds power to your pedal stroke, as much as you need. Essentially, it’s a bicycle without hills, which means that almost anyone—older, injured, overweight, out of shape—can ride one. If you work the kind of job where arriving with a ruddy glow might be a problem, it’s a bicycle without sweat. And if you need to haul something—kids, gallons of milk—it’s got the power.

+And here’s an account of Third Act’s supervolunteer Lani Ritter Hall—truly one of the finest organizers I’ve ever met—in the Guardian. She talks eloquently about the ways that activism can help overcome loneliness

When Lani Ritter Hall’s beloved husband of more than 40 years, Gus, died in 2022, she felt a bit unmoored. Taking care of him had been the thing that got her out of bed in the morning, and with him gone, the 76-year-old felt she’d lost her purpose.

That is, until she found organizing.

Shortly after Gus’s death, she came across an op-ed about a new group called Third Act, focused on mobilizing older adults to protect democracy and confront the climate crisis, and figured she might as well reach out. Though the former public school educator had never been involved in any political organizing or activism before, she soon found herself serving as a volunteer coordinator at Third Act, setting up more than 120 Zoom calls over the course of 10 months to welcome people who were new to the organization and help them figure out how to plug in.

At a stage of life when many people find themselves increasingly lonely, isolated and aimless, Ritter Hall began to feel more connected than ever, both to her sense of purpose and to other people. “It’s been the biggest joy of my life,” she said.

+Heatmap News is pretty invaluable, with day to day updates on energy policy. Alexander Kauffman has a typically fine piece today, that I doubt would have been reported much of anywhere else, but which will affect, sadly, millions of Americans

Low-income households in the United States pay roughly 30% more for energy per square foot than households who haven’t faced trouble paying for electricity and heat in the past, federal data shows. Part of the problem is that the national efficiency standards for one of the most affordable types of housing in the nation, manufactured homes, haven’t been updated since 1994. Congress finally passed a law in 2007 directing the Department of Energy to raise standards for insulation, and in 2022, the Biden administration proposed new rules to increase insulation and reduce air leaks.

But the regulations had yet to take effect when President Donald Trump returned to office last year. Now the House of Representatives is prepared to vote on legislation to nullify the rules outright, preserving the standards set more than three decades ago. The House Committee on Rules is set to vote on advancing the bill as early as Tuesday night, with a full floor vote likely later in the week. “You’re just locking in higher bills for years to come if you give manufacturers this green light to build the homes with minimal insulation,” Mark Kresowik, senior policy director of the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy, told me.

+I had a great talk with the wonderful people at Solar United Neighbors this morning, finding out what they were planning for the year ahead. (Think plug-in solar!). And they sent over this truly fine video about their work—it will cheer you up, I think, as will this short video from California State Senator Scott Wiener, who is introducing bills to make heat pump and balcony solar installation easier in the Golden State. (Wiener, who has done more than any legislator in the country to make it easier to build affordable housing, is running for Nancy Pelosi’s House seat as she retires; America should be so lucky).

In fact, let’s finish off with two reminders of just how much joyful room there is for clean energy to keep expanding.

From China, the first offshore open-sea floating solar plant has come online. . And it has a fish farm underneath.

HG14 is expected to generate about 1.78 TWh annually, meeting roughly 60% of electricity demand in Kenli district, avoiding 1.34 million tons of CO₂ emissions and saving more than 500,000 tonnes of coal. The project also integrates aquaculture under a “PV-above, farming-below” model, enabling dual use of marine space and additional revenue streams.

And in Waukegan, Illinois, which seems a long ways from China, but where rational solar policy developed under Governor Pritzker is playing out, there’s this: a Superfund site, badly polluted with industrial waste in the 1950s and 1960s, is the new site of a solar farm. As Kari Lydersen reports,

The 9.1-megawatt Yeoman Solar Project, which went online last month, can provide energy for about 1,000 households, as well as the Waukegan school district, which owns the land.

The school district bought the site in the 1950s hoping to build a new high school. But the land proved too swampy, and from 1958 to 1969 it was used as a dump for industrial and municipal waste. The highly contaminated Yeoman Creek Landfill was finally cleaned up 20 years ago, and now the district receives lease payments from CleanCapital, the national solar-investment company that owns and operates the solar farm.

Such brownfields are attractive locations for solar installations because of ​“existing electrical infrastructure, lower-cost land, and community acceptance,” noted Paul Curran, CleanCapital’s chief development officer. Incentives from the state initiative Illinois Solar for All helped make the project financially viable, even given extra costs incurred from building on a Superfund site.

We can do this, people! It doesn’t have to look flashy and dramatic; it can just look…normal